Gift Shop in Trump Tower, New York City, September, 2022. Photo credit: Suiren2022/Wikimedia Commons

In the 1939 movie, “You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man,” W.C. Fields played a role familiar to Depression-era audiences: the grifter. Rotund, alcoholic—but nevertheless, quick witted—Fields’s character, Larsen E. Whipsnade (Get it? Larceny?) is the owner of a virtually bankrupt circus staying afloat by cheating his employees and the public. In one scene, he shorts a customer on his change, and then mocks the cheated man relentlessly. Whipsnade’s daughter tries to save the circus with her own grift (marrying the son of a millionaire), but her father’s inability to contain his fraudulence undermines the plan almost immediately.

Sound familiar? The Con Man, or “confidence man,” is an American character born out of early nineteenth-century urban life, when middle-class Americans became uncomfortably aware that appearances could be deceiving. As historian Karen Halttunnen wrote in 1982, before the Civil War, advice manuals warned that confidence men and so-called painted ladies “prowled the streets of American cities in search of innocent victims to deceive, dupe, and destroy.” In 1859, Herman Melville wrote a novel, The Confidence Man, about just such a mysterious character.

In the decades after the war, average Americans became aware that there was a bigger problem: from banks, speculators and the federal government to patent medicine salespeople and card cheats, scam artists saw every American pocketbook as an opportunity.

In other words, separating chumps from their money is an American tradition, and by the mid-twentieth century, political campaigns became another way to do that. A system that began in the 1950s with mailing lists and newsletters wheedling money out of registered voters evolved into what we have today: endless text messages asking us for $5.00, sweepstakes that promise a meeting with the candidate for one lucky donor, and hysterical emails scolding us about failing to protect democracy—or, alternatively, keep men out of women’s bathrooms.

As my guest, political reporter Joe Conason, points out in his recent book, The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin’s Press, 2024), while the political style of these campaigns are similar, it is the American right that has persistently used politics to fleece their followers. If a sucker is born every minute, it seems like a conservative sucker is born every 30 seconds.

So, who was surprised that, having run every grift imaginable—cheating investors by declaring bankruptcy, failing to pay workers and vendors, creating a fake university, slapping a label on items as mundane as steaks and water, and reinventing himself as a success on reality TV—Donald Trump would jump into politics? You can read this story in New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman’s book about Trump titled—you guessed it—Confidence Man.

But as Conason explains in this episode, the con is so much wider and deeper than one man. It’s a way of life on the right. And when things go sideways?

Well, you can always blame the victim.

As I promised in my New Year’s message, paying subscribers will receive a full transcript of my conversation with Joe no later than tomorrow. For access to that transcript, consider:

It’s only five dollars—and you can cancel whenever you like. Annual subscribers ($50) can choose to receive a book mentioned in this podcast (mine or anyone else’s) as a welcome bonus.

Show notes:

* Joe mentions the 2019 documentary about fixer Roy Cohn directed by Matt Tyrmauer, Where’s My Roy Cohn?

* Claire discusses the emergence, and political impact, of organizations like the John Birch Society as modern pioneers of the conspiracist grift. You can read more about this group in Mattthew Dallek, Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right (Basic Books, 2023.)

* You can read more about Richard Viguerie and Paul Wyrich in chapter 2 of my own book, Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020.)

* Joe explains the importance of Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority in elevating the far right. You can read more about Falwell’s connections to the present in Keri L. Ladner, End Time Politics: From the Moral Majority to Qanon (Fortress Press, 2024.)

* Joe notes that Trump’s Stop the Steal movement was merely a vehicle for raising money for Donald Trump’s discretionary use. You can read more about that here.

* Claire and Joe discuss the rise of the Tea Party: for an in-depth dive on this populist movement, try Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (Oxford, 2012.)

* Claire quotes Jamelle Bouie’s assertion that Donald Trump’s first debate performance was a “firehose of lies. Bouie actually said “stream of lies.”

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If you enjoyed this episode, why not try:

* Episode 65, Baby Trump: Political scientist Dan Drezner talks about his 2020 book, "The Toddler in Chief: What Donald Trump Teaches Us about the Modern Presidency."

* Episode 61, How the GOP Killed Dissent: A conversation with historian Marsha Barrett about her new book, "Nelson Rockefeller’s Dilemma: The Fight to Save Moderate Republicanism."

* Episode 51, MAGA Is the Newest, and Oldest, American Myth: A conversation with American Studies scholar Richard Slotkin about his new book, "A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America."

And here’s a bonus: all new annual paid subscriptions include a free copy of my book about political media, Political Junkie