The Art of the Con
Are you starting to get the idea that this Trump guy isn’t on the up and up? Marks of the world, unite!
With all recent talk about waste and inefficiency in government, two statistics struck me as particularly relevant.
The first, from the FTC, is this: $10 billion.
That’s the total amount of money individual Americans lost to scams in just the past year.
This is the same as the DoD’s budget for maintaining military facilities. Lost not to poor investing or financial mismanagement, but to actual criminals, charlatans, conmen taking innocent people’s money.
The second stat is this: two-thirds.
That’s the amount of scam victims who don’t disclose their experience to anyone.
This isn’t due to guilt or criminal jeopardy, but to the existential trauma of simply learning that they’ve been scammed, a reportedly horrific moment of anagnorisis in which they abruptly see themselves recast as “a mark.” My sense is that Americans will go to great lengths to avoid this moment.
I’ve followed many accounts from such victims over the years, and, man, are they rough sledding. But they’re possibly helpful for navigating a moment that may be in our not-so-distant future.
One stands out to me now, from a piece last fall in the Guardian: a 59-year-old single dad drawn in by a Facebook ad for an “AI cryptocurrency platform,” who called the number and found himself in nightly conversations with a financial adviser who touted the platform’s endorsements from Elon Musk among others, and who ultimately separated this man from nearly $100,000.
Learning the truth plunged this guy into something worse than financial ruin: depression, anxiety, paranoia, and a profound loss of confidence in his own agency. “I did think I was very streetwise,” he told the Guardian. “I would be the person to warn someone: ‘That’s a scam, it doesn’t sound right.’ And yet here I am.”
Here he is, hearing all the alarm bells he ignored. Seeing all the red flags he might have spotted.
A president who ran on his own deal-making business savvy tanks the stock market in his first four weeks, the early promises of lower grocery prices on Day One becoming ones of “pain” and “detox.” The supposed wizard he assigned to root out government fraud — through an ad-hoc agency named, literally, after a scam — exponentially inflates, misreads, or invents figures about the waste thus far eliminated, while throttling essential agencies, gutting the veterans’ healthcare system, and eliminating crucial workers including those in charge of nuclear weapons.
You know what? I’m starting to get the idea this Trump guy isn’t on the up and up!
Easy for us to say, we’re not the identified marks.
This is, apparently, no reason to gloat. Scams may be one of the most universalizing facts of modern life, in that we’re all certain we’d never fall for one and almost all us certainly would. In her book, Confidence Game, psychologist Maria Konnikova attributes our susceptibility to cons to a baseline human instinct to trust people. This, and whatever biases or state of mind make us vulnerable to one particular line of attack over another.
One horrible fact of cons, Konnikova explains, is that once you’re hooked and committed, the ruse can get thin to transparent without your being any more able to see it, even if it’s glaring to outside observers.
If you should sense something awry — like, say, a horde of fellow travelers attacking cops in the Capitol Building — the con adapts in a specific, age-old way. It enters the stage known to adepts as “the breakdown.”
The huckster upbraids the mark for their treasonous, suspicious mind. What, you’re accusing me? After all I’ve done for you!
This internalizes a mental dialogue in which the mark turns on themselves. If I trusted this person and now distrust them, I must be confused, a bad judge of character. It’s easier to ignore certain realities than face the more debilitating one that you might have been had.
A shrink from the British Psychological Society told reporters that this shame “shuts us down,” that “it stops us from reaching out to get the help that would make us feel a bit better.” And like most trauma, unless it’s treated effectively, it can become dangerous to others, as the victim struggles to manage pain from such a primal wound.
One ego-preserving strategy that I’ve actually witnessed firsthand is, once the charade is exposed, to inflate the brilliance of the conman, lauding the sophistication and diabolical genius that this world-class master of deception turned on you.
True, this gets harder to do when the con “artist” in question is on TV rambling about turning on the faucet in Northern California to quench fires in LA.
But never underestimate the lengths the ego goes to defend itself.
This is far from a victory lap. This regime’s corruption, incompetence, and spite will keep causing suffering for millions, possibly past its constitutional expiration date. But when I try to imagine America after this regime, I see huge swaths of people undergoing a suffering distinct from what it’s gleefully inflicting on its purported enemies.
Even late in his first term, Trump supporters were already angry about his administration hurting the wrong people — as if it just needed to adjust its aim, reacquire the targets. Now, this buyer’s remorse looks like the so-called fuck-around-and-find-out, face-eating-leopard scenario, where Trump voters see their loved ones getting swept up and deported by ICE.
These people are victims. They deserve justice and compassion, at least as much as someone who gave their 401K to a crypto scam. (Which, btw, increasingly looks like a central part of DOGE’s long con.) And in one shitty best-case scenario, their ranks may soon swell by millions.
If this happens, those of us who weren’t this con’s marks must offer them a social version of Sun Tzu’s golden bridge, an offramp toward honorable retreat.
Easy for me to say. These marks include people I love. I’d prefer they not go through the pain of a recovering mark without compassion and support. And if, say, the Treaty of Versailles is any indication, people don’t do well with group humiliation.
As Judith Butler writes in the LRB: “Any alternative to authoritarianism must address these fears with a compelling vision of a world in which there would be security for all who now fear their own vanishing and the vanishing of their communities.”
I’d add that if this alternative looks like a bunch of scolding guidance counselors going “I told you so!” — we’re all good and effed.
So it’s probably crucial that we privately, silently accept the cheap version of superiority that any sane person has over someone suffering from mental illness, or that someone not in the throes of active addiction has to someone who’s deep in it. That non-mark has to con victim.
I suppose you might extend this line of argument into compassion for members of the radicalized/captured GOP and its media partners. People whose professional success now requires them to tell the biggest, most bald-faced lies, to be seen vigorously laughing at the ringleader’s jokes. People who’ve given up their dignity, piece by piece, countenancing each new outrage, forsaking old ideas, friends, and selves, and who’ve sunk so much money into this thing that it really, really better pay off.
Aren’t these people victims too?
Well, if they’re still there in the ring’s call center, dialing up suckers, putting them on the send, salting the mine, and setting in the fix, I’m pretty sure they can still fuck right off. Report them to the FTC’s fraud line, unless it’s already been disconnected.
9-1-1 is a JOKE...(Flava Flav)....and so is The FRAUD LINE.