The Con at the Heart of the Republican Party

Pick your metaphor for the last eight years of American politics. Sewer or garbage truck? Virtually every day a helpless nation sees some new piece of official chicanery, criminality, abuse of public trust exposed and tossed into the seething dustbin of history. Most of us identify this era with Donald Trump, who in the summer of 2015 went down a golden escalator and lit the dumpster fire. But in his bracing history of American conservative con men, The longest scamVeteran political writer Joe Conason argues that the American right has been increasingly okay with “politicized theft” for more than half a century. After decades of professional fearmongers, con artists, and frauds blurring the lines between right and wrong, the right was ready to embrace the idea, as Gordon Gekko put it, that greed is actually good. The end always justifies the means, if you can make money along the way.

A key exponent of this attitude, according to Conason, was Roy Cohn, the red-baiting Joe McCarthy aide, New York power broker, and mob lawyer whose “philosophy of impunity” was so successful that it shaped right-wing politics for decades. His most accomplished disciple was Donald Trump, whom he represented in his later years. Cohn taught the younger Donald that “it was not only possible but admirable to lie, cheat, swindle, fabricate, then deny, deny, deny—and get away with it,” Conason writes. As a lawyer, Cohn’s motto was: Better to know the judge than to know the law. As a businessman: Better to swindle creditors than pay bills; and always worth it to lie, bribe, steal, and swindle without ever apologizing.

Conason devotes the first third of the book to a number of right-wing con artists who were “corrupt to the core” like Cohn, who roamed the backwoods of Cold War America, hunting Red Scared hay seeds for personal gain. Unlike Cohn, many were nominal Christians, with names that sound like something straight out of Salvation (Bundy, Smoot). They sold anti-communism with Jesus. Oklahoman Billy James Hargis grew rich from his radio ministry and as a fake doctor who tried to thwart churches and city halls across America in a “Christian crusade.” He signed up former Major General Edwin A. Walker (a spiritual leader of General Mike Flynn), a man who had been thrown out of the Army for John Birch Society propaganda. Together, the duo made money by going on a national tour warning auditoriums and city halls of an enemy within America’s schools, government and churches that was a “repulsive satanic force.”

In the 1960s, a new breed of agents emerged, using modern technology. Richard Viguerie made a fortune and bought himself an estate in Virginia, a horse-riding area, by monopolizing the direct-mail market in the early computer age. His company reached its peak after Watergate, when it sent out a hundred million pieces of mail a year and solicited donations from seagulls drawn by keywords like “union leaders” and “federal bureaucrats” and “radical feminists” and “homosexual activists.”

Within the conservative movement, the audacity of the scams astonished many, at least initially. Paul Weyrich once said of Roger Stone’s penchant for Patek Philippe watches and suits paid for by his company’s work for dictators that he “equals Imelda Marcos.” (“Dictators are in the eye of the beholder,” Stone has said.) Stone, a Cohn supporter, had worked for Nixon (tattooing the disgraced president’s face on his back) and was still there advising Trump. He understood that “Trump” as a brand, built on total counterfeiting, and Trump’s own penchant for schemes like Trump U, Cohnian lies, and impunity, made Trump a promising political candidate.

Conason devotes several chapters to the conquest of the modern religious right by men and women who have forged Christianity into vast money-making schemes. He explains how Jerry Falwell Sr. created Liberty “University,” which became a business model for tax-free Christo-capitalism—a model that his son, Jerry Jr., would expand and then explode, but not before galvanizing his flock to rally behind a blasphemous, immoral thug for president.

The advent of the TV as a remote church collection basket in every American living room ushered in a new era for the prosperity gospel. The fake TV businessman who had fooled millions into believing he was the second coming of Jack Welch was the secular version of the televangelist con man. “What drew the prosperity preachers and their congregations to Trump, eventually joined by millions of white evangelicals, was how much he resembled the televangelists who were most successful among them,” Conason writes.

By the time Trump announced his candidacy in the summer of 2015, the carpet had been rolled out, the table had been set, and rank-and-file conservatives were primed. On election night in 2016, many of the remaining shell-shocked conservatives had already seen the depravity that thrilled and excited the political base. They had watched the crowd chant for Hillary’s jailing and howl at Trump’s vulgarity. His supporters didn’t seem to care that he had ripped off thousands of people with his Trump U scam, failed to give his foundation money to charity, declared bankruptcy six times, or bragged about grabbing women by the genitals.

Refusing to accept the results of the 2020 election proved to be an extraordinarily profitable scheme. In just the two months between Election Day and the insurrection, the Trump machine raked in $255 million, “a record haul by almost any measure,” Conason writes. They accomplished this with a combination of the scams and strategies honed over decades, supplemented by technology: online ads and as many as 25 email appeals a day, asking for money to wage a completely fictitious fight against a nonexistent problem. At least two million individual donations poured in. Some $80 million of those proceeds went to Trump’s Save America PAC, a pile “that was immediately available to Trump for his personal use to pay for travel and hotel expenses” and later for his legal bills.

On election night 2016, many of the remaining shocked conservatives had already seen the depravity that had enraptured the political base.

The current crop of MAGA con artists comes from a decades-long tradition of conservative con artists. Steve Bannon was accused of taking millions of dollars from donors for the wall between Mexico and the US, enriching himself and others. Trump preemptively pardoned him on federal charges, but he still faces related state charges. The National Rifle Association, another conservative political organization, has made itself notorious, tried and failed to declare bankruptcy, and was forced to defend itself against civil corruption charges.

The compendium of frauds is infuriating, but by the end of the book, bewilderment gives way to outrage. Nearly every Republican leader now supports the convicted felon Trump. Decent conservatives have been extinct for a while. Over the decades, many of the most prominent figures on the right, from the aristocrat William F. Buckley in his day to the now-lamented Never Trumpers like Bill Kristol and Steve Schmidt (the strategist who had the bright idea to weld Sarah Palin to John McCain), did not object to the rot within—or at least not until it was too late. How could all these people not have cared?

Conason’s book offers a suggestion for an answer. Conason writes about how then-RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel knew Trump was telling the Big Lie but didn’t get involved in the scam. “Intimidated by Trump and profiting enormously from his scams,” he explains, the RNC “continued to spread disinformation.” The response to Trump’s lies “was only to tinker with the edges of the fundraising blurb, never to fundamentally challenge the message.” Intimidation and profit. The paired incentives—the stick of fascist abuse, the carrot of free scam money—may be the only logical explanation for the conservative movement’s total abandonment of even the semblance of principle.

Whether or not Trump survives this election, the right’s metamorphosis, Conason writes, is likely to be permanent. “The industrial production of lies and deceit will continue unabashedly, with or without him, under the auspices of entrepreneurs who understand that substance and dedication have no market value in a political culture dominated by noise, bravado, and malice.” This machine has been built over decades by people who have undermined the ethical standards of public life to line their own pockets. As long as the right holds power, it will almost certainly continue, unchecked by shame or law.