Joe Conason on How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds Hijacked Conservatism

Joe Conason’s writing chronicles the complexities and absurdities of American politics. His study of President Bill Clinton includes two fascinating books—The Hunting of the President, about the vast right-wing conspiracy to take down the Arkansan, and Man of the World, an intimate and engaging examination of Clinton post-presidency.

Another standout in his bibliography is Big Lies: The Right Wing Propaganda Machine and How it Distorts the Truth. A source of insight during the dark days of the George W. Bush administration and the Iraq War, Big Lies has remained highly relevant as the Republican Party and right-wing media wax more duplicitous and hallucinatory. 

His new book is one of the most thorough and vital explorations of the Republican Party and its culture. The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism begins with Roy Cohn in the 1950s and ends in the present with the redbaiter’s protégé in the presidency. Conason meticulously, forcefully, and often hilariously depicts a political movement that is no longer merely the home of con artists but one big con.

“Ripping people off,” the 70-year-old writes, is central to the American right and equally significant for its revelations related to our history and contemporary struggle to preserve democracy.

I spoke with Conason over the phone about his new book on July 21^st.

DM: How is con artistry, or grifting, central to the political movement and its attendant culture on the American right?

JC: Deception is central to the contemporary right for two reasons. One is that they’ve discovered, over a long period, that it is highly profitable to mobilize people’s fears and resentments around mythical issues. You can pull in vast sums of money from the right-wing base. The second reason is that facts don’t work for them. It is very hard, at this point, to make arguments on behalf of their positions that are fact-based.  They push lies, conspiracy theories, fantastical inventions that support their ideological positions. To take one example, there is an idea that the minimum wage costs jobs. Not true. It’s been debunked. No respectable economist believes it. Or if you cut taxes, you’ll generate economic growth. Not true. It’s been disproven over again. So, they rely on falsehoods. Now, it is the “global elite” that is responsible for our problems—the faceless people at Davos. There is a large cohort of Americans who you can deceive with these myths.

DM: You mention the large cohort of Americans who believe this nonsense. Why isn’t a revolt even when some leaders are proven to be con artists? When Steve Bannon defrauds the MAGA people, he loses no popularity. When the Dominion case shows Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Laura Ingraham texting each other that Trump is crazy, but they say the opposite on the air, it doesn’t reduce their audience.

JC: There are two aspects. To take the second one first, they’ve succeeded in creating a bubble of insulation against the realities of things like the Dominion case. There wasn’t much said on Fox News about the Dominion. There wasn’t much said in right-wing media because they were all vulnerable to the same litigation. So, the Americans we’re discussing are shielded from information that might cause them to question their beliefs. I say “might” because people are stubborn and often don’t want to move away from their favorite conspiracy theories, even when debunked. Cults—and this is one—are notorious for this. The leader makes wrong predictions, and it doesn’t cause the members to disband.

The second reason is that they have what I call in the book “the culture of impunity.” If you are part of the structure of the right-wing, the chances are that you can do almost anything, and you won’t be criticized for it by others in that structure. Look at the National Rifle Association. People who were stealing from NRA for years were caught red-handed, but they were caught by a Democratic Attorney General in New York. So, they got away with it until they were held accountable in court. Even so, until then, Donald Trump would not criticize them. No Republican in the Senate would criticize them.

The same thing applies to Bannon, who remained in the favor of Trump and everyone in Trump’s orbit. So, when Bannon was caught ripping off the people who gave to his We Build the Wall charity, Trump not only defended him, he pardoned him. The other three guys caught along with him all went to jail. So, we know he’s guilty, but he’s been allowed to get away with it.

The phrase you often hear on the right is “own the libs.” Well, you know who they really own? They own their people. It is the people who call themselves “conservative,” and I don’t think they are conservative, who they rip off. They’re not ripping off liberals.

DM: You make the point that projection is part of the grift. While they’re ripping off their voters and supporters, they’re screaming about how the Clinton Foundation is one big scam or how Joe Biden is the Don of a criminal family.

JC: Bannon was doing the same in 2015 when he mounted a huge campaign to attack the Clinton Foundation on behalf of Trump. So, the Clinton Foundation, according to every study and investigation, is clean as a whistle, but Bannon was ripping people off with a non-profit, and so was Trump with the Trump Foundation. This was very bad for America because The New York Times ran stories on its front about the Clinton Foundation, all of which were debunked, but failed to investigate the Trump Foundation, which was an enormous fraud and was proven as corrupt in the court of law. Yes, whatever they accuse liberals of doing, they are assuredly doing themselves.

DM: You write well about the connection between right-wing ideology, which expresses opposition to the public good, and the prevalence of these cons. What is the relationship there? How does one advance the other?

JC: There are very few barriers between these con artists and their intended victims. The only barriers are elements of government—Attorneys General, for example, who are in charge of regulating charities. The right wing doesn’t want that. So, the ideology that argues we don’t need government to protect people from crooks is the same ideology that protects the crooks who are operating these so-called “charities.”

So, the ideology that wants very little government fits very neatly with the aims of con artists who want to rip people off.

That’s one reason why Trump was so attractive to another group I write about in The Longest Con—the right-wing, evangelical Christians—the preachers of the prosperity gospel who are ripping people off all over the place, abusing their tax exemption to enrich themselves.

Years ago, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley wanted to investigate the preachers of the prosperity gospel. He sent subpoenas to many preachers, including Trump’s favorite, Paula White. That was quickly crushed by the Republican Party. They knew that they had a lot in common with the preachers. We eventually get a president who is very much like the prosperity gospel preachers. He ran Trump University, which was similar to a prosperity gospel scam. The courts shut it down, and he had to cough up $25 million.

DM: It shocks me that people are shocked that evangelical Christians have such love for Trump. Some reasons go beyond the con, but you write forcefully about how the con, even going back to Jerry Falwell, is crucial.

JC: Yes, the corruption of evangelical Christianity is a phenomenon that we’ve observed in America for almost 50 years. As you mention, it goes back to Falwell and the founding of the Moral Majority, which was done for commercial reasons by Richard Viguerie, the master fundraiser whose career I track in the book. He approached Falwell in the 1970s and essentially said, “If we can organize evangelicals into a right-wing political movement, there’s a lot of money there.” Falwell was, at first, skeptical. He was an up-and-coming Southern Baptist minister in Virginia known for attacking Martin Luther King. That was how he became famous. As I explain in the book, the origin of the religious right had nothing to do with abortion; it was because they were upset that the government was taking a hard look at their schools enforcing segregation.

But what is funny is that in the beginning, Falwell was an opponent of the prosperity gospel. He denounced it as a heresy. He believed God wanted him to take those people down, and he did that when Jim and Tammy Baker got into trouble for defrauding their supporters. If you flash forward, Falwell is gone, his son has taken over Liberty University, and the prosperity gospel is all there is. No one is denouncing it, and the Republican Party has latched onto it.

It is a big threat because they’ve allied themselves with fascism. The power that they wield is now in service of anti-democratic forces.

DM: Noam Chomsky, who has called Trump a “proto-fascist,” once argued that corruption is, counterintuitively, a good thing. He said that if we had a fascist who was entirely sincere, it would be very dangerous. The greed of American fascists helps because it distracts them from their political aims. Is there any validity to that argument?

JC: Aside from its racial component, fascism is an ideology that is about the acquisition of power and wealth. Other than that, it has little content. It is very malleable. Trump doesn’t believe in anything but the acquisition of power and wealth. The vulnerability of fascism in the Trump period is that they are stupid and that their followers are kind of stupid. They proved that in the first Trump administration. There is no reason to believe they are any smarter now. The people surrounding Trump now are more craven and narrow-minded than the last group. They’ve screwed up the abortion issue and women’s rights in ways that are massively favorable to the Democrats if the Democrats can figure out how to take advantage of it, which I believe they will, and already did in 2022.

So, no, I don’t think their corruption protects us. It would be good if Democrats paid attention to what I expose in The Longest Con. This is an argument that works because no one likes being ripped off.

DM: You said earlier that you don’t consider these people “conservative.” I agree and try to avoid using the word to describe the contemporary right. Why do you say that Trump and those who surround him are not “conservative”?

JC: I think that they are fascist, or as Chomsky would say, “proto-fascist.” In any case, they are authoritarians. Conservatism had a significance that included civic virtue. They would stand up against the corrupting influence of urban machine politics and aspects of modern politics that seemed to corrupt the virtuous yeomanry of our past. There was something to that. It isn’t my politics, but conservatives stood for civic virtue and moral character in politics. Those were things that conservatism represented. It doesn’t anymore. They don’t want it. They don’t even know what it is.

I quote Erick Erickson, who is very conservative, saying that he remembers when CPAC was something other than “a grift with an attached gay cruising scene,” referring to the Matt Schlapp sexual harassment scandal. I try in this book to rely on real conservatives, including George Conway, who wrote the foreword, because they show how empty conservativism has become.

They’ve even overthrown the positions on issues that they used to hold dear. So, they are all for tariffs now, for some crazy reason…

DM: Trump said 200 percent tariffs on all foreign cars.

JC: Right. So, they’re going to destroy the economy. They stopped worrying about deficits a long time ago. They claim that they are worried, but it is clear from their behavior that they don’t care about the conservative touchstones of economics – balanced budgets, deficits, free trade.

DM: You present Trump as the culmination of the “longest con.” How frightened should voters feel about him and his dominance of the Republican Party?

JC: If the scams and cons had not gradually taken over the Republican Party and the right, Trump would not have been possible. If they didn’t accept con artistry, Trump could not be the leader. Corruption has rapidly taken over their party. It was just in 2015 that Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, two leading Republican Senators running against Trump, declared that the Trump University scam in which Trump ripped people off made it clear that they could not have Trump as their nominee. They gave speeches arguing that ‘we can’t have a crook as the face of our party.’ Well, guess what? They all support him now. They are fine with having a man they know is a con artist as their leader. When that happens, there’s nothing left.

Authoritarianism suppresses dissent that points out that the leader is a crook. It is why the country is in grave danger. If those people take over, they will ruthlessly suppress dissent and be out for themselves. If that means making deals with war criminals like Vladimir Putin and violating the alliances that have made our world safer for decades, that’s what they’ll do.

DM: That brings us to the conclusion of your book. You write that even without Trump, the American right would reward con artists and tolerate, or even celebrate, exploitation. Let’s say that Kamala Harris is inaugurated in January. That would likely end Trump’s ghastly political career. What happens next with the American right? What is the next stage of the longest con?

JC: I’m happy to predict a political bloodbath in the party to see who takes over for Trump. I’m not convinced a loss will be the end of Trump. He has already promised to challenge the election like he did in 2020. But if President-Elect Harris and President Biden took whatever measures necessary to ensure the orderly transition of power, there would be a serious fight for the torch from Trump.

It would include Trump’s son, Don Jr. J. D. Vance, and a big group waiting in the wings. They would fight among themselves. That’s something I would enjoy observing.

The post Joe Conason on How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds Hijacked Conservatism appeared first on Washington Monthly.