Gary Silverman’s excellent Financial Times article includes passages about repossessed monkeys and Ukrainian trophy wives, as all good stories about the odious Trump campaign must.

The piece is about the corrosive candidate’s political point man in Vegas, his billionaire business partner Phil Ruffin, who would be a wonderfully entertaining Horatio Alger figure if he wasn’t working his damndest to elect an American Mussolini. A “Cadillac-and-redhead man” is how the journalist describes his subject, who in the ’50s repossessed a surly simian for a Texas department store and in the Aughts acquired a second wife, an Eastern European beauty queen 46 years his junior.

Ruffin hated the monkey and loves his bride but lacks any kind of passion for politics. He promised his buddy he’d back him, however, and a deal’s a deal.

An excerpt:

A wiry, wily Wichita, Kansas, native who was 147 pounds when he was winning titles as a high school wrestler, Mr Ruffin is the stylistic opposite of his brash buddy from New York. He wears wire-rim glasses. His thinning hair, dyed a deep orange, falls haphazardly across his scalp, unlike Mr Trump’s structured coiffure.

They are the kind of Americans who inspired historian Walter McDougall’s description of the US as a nation of “hustlers”, by which he meant “builders, doers, go-getters, dreamers, hard workers, inventors, organisers (and) engineers” as well as “self-promoters, scofflaws, occasional frauds and peripatetic self-reinventors”.

Both trace their family histories in the US to the frontier. Mr Trump is the grandson of a German immigrant who took part in the Alaska gold rush before settling in New York. Mr Ruffin’s paternal grandfather left Lebanon for Oklahoma, where Mr Ruffin’s father recalled witnessing the 1924 gunfight that took the life of Bill Tilghman, the legendary gunslinger and marshal of Dodge City, Kansas.

Neither Mr Trump nor Mr Ruffin has created a smartphone app or commanded an enterprise of the complexity of a General Electric, a Goldman Sachs or a Google. They are wheelers and dealers in real estate, hotels, casinos and whatever else comes their way. Theirs is a milieu where money is made by seizing moments, squeezing contractors, battling creditors, and “pushing and pushing and pushing,” as Mr Trump put it in The Art of the Deal, his 1987 book.

“We negotiate all the time,” says Mr Ruffin. “We negotiate something every week.”•