How Much Longer Can Trump's Con Endure?
Trump’s lies offer his followers hope. It takes more than fact-checking to change their minds.
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Many years ago, a con man came to my church. I belonged to a small working-class congregation in rural Kentucky. Although most of the members had jobs, many folks were struggling, living paycheck to paycheck and desperate for some degree of financial security.
Enter the con man. He was starting a new multilevel-marketing plan featuring diet pills. MLMs are nothing new, and many of them operate quite legally across the country. Legal MLMs make their revenue primarily from their products. An illegal MLM, by contrast, is little more than a pyramid scheme, with participants earning money almost exclusively by recruiting new participants.
A pyramid scheme is inherently unstable. The instant its recruiting pool dries up (which can happen remarkably quickly), it runs out of cash. Most people lose money, but the founder of the scheme can often pocket extraordinary profits.
I knew the MLM at my church was a scam the moment I heard the pitch. “If you want to take the pills, fine, but don’t worry about selling them. Just bring in your friends, and let your friends bring in their friends, and you’ll start building your business, fast!”
At first, I wasn’t concerned. The pitch was so obviously too good to be true that I didn’t think my friends would fall for it. But I was wrong. I’d underestimated people’s dissatisfaction with their jobs and the appeal of a new opportunity. The con man’s product was a pyramid scheme, but he marketed something else. He marketed hope.
I was the only lawyer at the church, and—as luck would have it—I’d just finished working on a securities-fraud case that involved a pyramid scheme. I knew the law. I also knew how the pyramid worked, and I set about explaining it to my friends. I even went to one of the pyramid sales pitches and talked it over afterwards.
Remember, this was years ago. I was young, barely out of law school, and I thought that the folks at my church would be happy to hear the truth. I presumed they’d be glad to dodge a fraudulent bullet. After all, they weren’t hearing warnings from just anybody; I was their neighbor. I was a deacon. I had even represented the church in a successful First Amendment lawsuit.
None of that mattered. Not only did most of my friends completely reject my warnings, but a few of them were also furious with me. I was shocked and hurt. In my mind, I was only trying to help. In my mind, I was using the gifts God gave me to protect those closest to me from harm.
But that was in my mind. What was in the minds of my angry friends? It took years for me to see it clearly, but now I do. On the one side, there was a man who offered hope and relief from the crushing financial burdens of their lives. But what did I offer? At best, it was the status quo. I didn’t come with any hope. I promised no relief at all.
I’m thinking about cons today because of yesterday’s “major announcement” from Donald Trump. After teasing something dramatic, he unveiled a set of digital Trump trading cards, available for a whopping $99 apiece. The trading cards are non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, unique digital files that only the owner can possess.
At the height of the NFT craze, in 2021, people were paying absurd sums of money for digital files. In March 2021, an NFT of Jack Dorsey’s first tweet sold for $2.9 million. This past May, auction bids for the same NFT “topped out at just $14,000.” Trump jumping into the NFT market is like jumping into the pet-rock market in 1976 or investing in Dutch tulips in March 1637.
But don’t tell Trump’s most devoted fans. According to a real-time tracker, Trump allegedly made more than $4 million only a day after his announcement.
Indeed, this is hardly Trump’s first con. Yesterday, HuffPost reported that Trump spent only a small fraction of the money he’d raised, ostensibly, to aid GOP Senate candidates. The rest, he hoarded for his own presidential campaign.
The most spectacular and dangerous of Trump’s cons was his “Stop the Steal” effort after the 2020 election. In addition to conning tens of millions of Republicans into believing a free and fair election was broken and corrupt, he raised $250 million to support an “Election Defense Fund” that the January 6 select committee says did not exist.
One can write books about Trump’s various cons, yet, until recently, his Republican support remained rock-solid, despite his obvious lies and grift. The reasons are complex, but they’re related to the story I told at the start of this newsletter. Ever since I first raised concerns about Trump, in 2015, I’ve experienced one long case of déjà vu.
As friends and neighbors expressed anger and frustration with my opposition to Trump, I felt like I was back in my small church, stealing hope from people gripped with fear. “Make America Great Again” was a genius slogan, and by the end of the primary season in 2016, the alternative to MAGA was exactly the thing that Republicans feared so much: the status quo of Democratic control of the Oval Office.
In fact, Hillary Clinton was so despised that many millions of Americans viewed her as worse than the status quo. Never Trumpers like me threatened to take away Republican hope and give Republicans nothing in return—nothing but the very reality they were hoping to escape.
There’s an important lesson here, applicable to pyramid schemes, politics, and a host of cultural challenges where people find hope and purpose in all the wrong places. You can’t fact-check a person out of hope and purpose. They’ll resent you even if you’re right.
Instead, it’s always preferable, if at all possible, to replace something bad with something better. That’s a key reason Trump is losing altitude now. It’s not that his behavior has been meaningfully worse since he left office (it’s hard to top January 6 as an act of dangerous political malice); rather, Republicans are starting to realize that someone else is likely a better ambassador for their policies and values.
In other words, arguing against Trump no longer means arguing for a Republican defeat. Trump’s opponents can offer their own version of hope. So far, that “someone else” seems to be Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (I’m far from sold on DeSantis, but that’s a piece for a different time), but for the moment, the identity of the alternative is less important than the existence of an alternative—and it’s that very existence that just might finally break the spell of the Trump con.