Good write up here...
The confidence game doesn’t begin with a lie. It begins with a story—one so emotionally resonant it feels like truth. It offers meaning, identifies villains, flatters the audience, and—when fully deployed—quietly opens the vault.
Donald Trump’s political rise is not just a break from convention. It’s a textbook long con. Not in the casual sense of dishonesty, but in the classic structure: the Big Lie, the emotional hook, the moving target, the victim narrative, and finally, the identity trap—where the mark can no longer afford to walk away because belief has become inseparable from self.
The script is familiar. Whether in a Ponzi scheme, a shell company, or a populist campaign, the pattern is the same. The conman begins not with evidence but with a narrative. Trump’s version is always some variation on a central myth: America has been betrayed, the system is rigged, and only he can fix it. The villains rotate—immigrants, globalists, bureaucrats, journalists—but the goal is constant: create clarity through division, and turn grievance into identity.
The genius of this narrative lies not in its truth, but in its simplicity. It sells not just an outcome, but a self-image. You’re not just supporting a candidate. You’re seeing through the lies. You’re part of the resistance. To believe is to belong. To doubt is to defect.
This is the first move of the long con: the Big Lie. Not just a falsehood, but a worldview. “The election was stolen.” “The deep state is after me because I’m fighting for you.” These aren’t claims to debate. They’re loyalty tests. And the price of failing them is exile from the story you’ve been promised.
And the mark? The mark is not foolish. The mark is angry, disillusioned, and tired of being told to trust institutions that no longer deliver. Trump didn’t invent that despair—he capitalized on it. He gave it direction. He gave it enemies. And he offered himself as both weapon and refuge.
Once belief takes hold, facts become noise. The con fuses politics with identity, and identity with moral survival. Doubting Trump means doubting yourself. And so the mark invests more, not less.
But a con doesn’t pay off. So the grifter keeps moving the goalposts. The wall? Still coming. The swamp? Still draining. The deep state? Still lurking. Every failure becomes proof of sabotage. Every delay, evidence of how powerful the enemy must be. The promise is always just out of reach—and that’s the point.
And when reality intervenes—when courts reject his claims, when fraud is exposed, when indictments land—Trump doesn’t retreat. He adapts. Exposure becomes persecution. Accountability becomes martyrdom. The scam becomes sacred.
This is the fatal turn in the long con: when truth no longer matters. When reality is no longer shared. What remains is not democracy but spectacle—a theater of grievance, rage, and blind loyalty.
We’ve seen this before.
Mussolini cast himself as a savior while dismantling Italy’s institutions. Berlusconi blurred corruption with charisma, laundering scandal through media control. Ferdinand Marcos used crisis to seize power and enrich allies. Joseph McCarthy waved blank papers and claimed they named traitors. Each man sold lies as loyalty, and each hollowed out public trust from within.
And there may be another layer to this performance: a financial con wrapped inside the political one. The chaos isn’t incidental. It may be the plan.
In times of upheaval, those closest to power often find ways to turn disruption into wealth. Trump’s erratic tariff wars, billed as economic nationalism, upended markets, collapsed sectors, and triggered retaliatory shocks. But while farmers went bankrupt and consumers paid more, the market opened space for those with foresight—or insider access—to buy low and consolidate.
Geographer David Harvey calls this accumulation by dispossession: crisis used not to correct the system, but to extract from it. Devalue public assets. Destabilize protections. Create just enough chaos to buy cheap what others are forced to abandon. It’s not just policy failure—it’s extraction dressed as populism.
The con isn’t just psychological. It’s material. It’s not just about being lied to—it’s about being looted.
And that’s what makes this moment different—and more dangerous. The scam isn’t happening outside the system. It’s running through it. Congress, the courts, and the press are not just targets. They’re props. The goal isn’t to fix government. It’s to turn it into a shell—one that can still collect taxes, enforce laws, and declare wars, but no longer serve the people who fund it.
The stakes are no longer just political. They’re existential. Can we still agree on what happened? On what’s real?
Because here’s the brutal truth about every confidence game: it doesn’t end when the lie is exposed. It ends only when the mark walks away. And that is the hardest part—because it requires admitting not just that you were lied to, but that you believed it. That what felt like belonging was, in fact, betrayal.
But if that reckoning doesn’t come—if the spell isn’t broken—the damage won’t stop at the believer’s door. This isn’t just a private illusion. This is a public unraveling. A national hollowing-out of trust, truth, and democracy itself.
And so we must hope—urgently and without illusion—that those caught in the story come to see what it is. That they see the man behind the curtain, the sleight of hand, the fantasy sold as fate.
Because if they don’t, this story won’t end with the emperor having no clothes.
It will end with all of us—every institution, every safeguard, every principle—stripped bare. Not just humiliated, but exposed. Not just misled, but fleeced.
If the con holds, we don’t just lose our shirts.
We lose the republic.
I am a Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, Founding Editor of the Journal of Political Ecology, and past president of the Political Ecology Society.
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