More than 70 years ago, while on leave from the Royal Marines, Evelyn Waugh penned a portrait of a buccaneering moneyman with political ambitions and a hollow interior, a sketch that rings loud bells of familiarity in today’s presidential campaign. When Rex Mottram first appears in Brideshead Revisited, it’s not clear what the source of his wealth is. It certainly isn’t old money, like that of the aristocratic Flyte family to whose elder daughter, Julia, he pays court. Rex is very much the Modern Man: Having made his pile, he wants, and gets, the best cars, the best brandy, the...