By this stage in the presidential campaign, much has been made of the severely conservative politics of Ron DeSantis. Voters have also become well acquainted with what a clumsy campaigner he is. But those two facts have perhaps eclipsed a third essential characteristic of the Florida governor: the astonishing sweep of his (apparently legal) corruption. DeSantis has demonstrated a prolific ability to use the power of government to raise money and reap other perks while working to shield that behavior from public view.

“I could sell golf for $50k this morning,” one DeSantis aide wrote to others in 2019, in an email obtained by The Washington Post and published over the weekend. It was part of a broader strategy: Once DeSantis took office, his aides made a list of 40 lobbyists with a goal of raising millions for the governor’s political-action committee and other funds. For the golf scheme, the idea was to get a lobbyist to shell out, using his client’s cash, to play a round with DeSantis and his wife, Casey. Experts told the Post that the arrangement was legal under Florida law. DeSantis was aware of the plan and updated on its progress.

[David A. Graham: The queasy liberal schadenfreude of watching Trump wreck DeSantis]

“It’s about getting your phone calls returned and having the ability to make asks,” one lobbyist told the Post. “You want to engender access and goodwill with the governor.” A DeSantis campaign spokesperson, meanwhile, told the paper that “donors never have and never will dictate policy for Ron DeSantis—just ask Disney.”

But everyone already understood that most big donations are about buying access, even if it’s admirably blunt for one of the participants to say so on the record, albeit anonymously. During the 2016 GOP presidential primary, Donald Trump was even more transparent, explaining his past donations to Democrats including Hillary Clinton. “Hillary Clinton, I said be at my wedding, and she came to my wedding,” he said at one debate. “She had no choice, because I gave to a foundation.” This frankness gave Trump credibility with some voters when he promised to “drain the swamp” of unethical behavior in Washington, though it should really have served as a warning about how he would operate in office.

DeSantis has promised to be a president like Trump but without the drama, and he has apparently learned from the former president how to use his office for personal benefit. As NBC News uncovered this spring, some members of the state administration hit up lobbyists for donations to DeSantis’s presidential campaign. Once again, this is probably legal—as long as the staffers weren’t using state resources or time on the clock to make the requests. Yet it’s also extremely sketchy. As one lobbyist pointed out, DeSantis will remain governor even if he doesn’t become president, so lobbyists have to maintain their access, especially because DeSantis has proved he’s willing to punish any perceived disloyalty.

Don’t cry for the poor lobbyists, who are writing checks out of client cash, and don’t cry for the clients, who are paying the lobbyists to get access in order to get what they want from the state government. The victims here are constituents who don’t have the money to drop on 18 holes with the governor and first lady. But not only is the public shut out of whatever the benefits of the spending are; DeSantis has done his best to make sure they can’t even know who’s doing the spending and on what.

One way he’s done this is to structure his political operation to obscure the spending. Someone paid for DeSantis’s flop of a trip to Europe, but good luck figuring out who. As Politico reported, DeSantis’s office said no taxpayer money went to the trip. But neither his PAC nor the state party disclosed any expenses related to the travel. DeSantis’s campaign has relied heavily on charter jets, many times with unclear funding. The New York Times was able to trace some of the tab to (surprise!) Florida lobbyists, but in other cases found that the funding was hidden from view by a nonprofit organization established to pay for them. (Now, with DeSantis’s campaign reeling, donors have become annoyed about all the expensive air travel.)

When clever loopholes in existing law don’t present themselves, DeSantis has changed the law. In May, DeSantis got the state legislature to pass a law that hides travel-related records from the public. “The law applies retroactively and would cover his extensive use of state planes throughout his time as governor. It would also cover records related to visitors to the governor’s mansion, opponents said,” CNN reported. Florida has long been a model for the nation on transparency laws, but DeSantis has worked to weaken such provisions.

[David A. Graham: How a purple state got a bright red sheen]

The campaign-finance system in the U.S. makes nearly every candidate for major office complicit, willing or not, in a distortion of democratic values through implied, and sometimes explicit, peddling of access. Even though DeSantis has been particularly zealous in embracing the possibilities, that hasn’t received the same sort of scrutiny that his campaign tactics or feud with Disney have. It should, though. Even if none of it is illegal, as so far appears to be the case, it is a form of corruption beyond even the normally grubby standards.

DeSantis’s aggressive approach on campaign finance is consistent with his embrace, as governor, of what I’ve called “total politics,” seeking to use the most aggressive methods available under law, precedent or prudence be damned. As with DeSantis’s record of conservative achievement as governor, one wouldn’t expect him to be able to translate all the same methods to Washington were he president. Federal laws are different from state laws, and Congress is not so easily bullied as a Republican-dominated, term-limited state legislature.

But his unethical approach here is likely a model for how he might approach the presidency. Perhaps no one should be surprised that Florida would produce such a swamp creature.