The Most Successful Con In American History Laid Bare
Image by EunHee Han from Pixabay
When you compare Trump’s cons with the $50 trillion that the GOP has swindled out of the American working class and given to the top 1 percent since 1980, Trump looks like a piker
The title of Maggie Haberman’s new book about Donald Trump is “Confidence Man” and, truth be told, Trump has been a con man his entire life. Haberman documents it all in excruciating detail.
But when you compare Trump’s cons with the $50 trillion that the GOP has conned out of the American working class and given to the top 1 percent since 1980, Trump looks like a piker.
He played his role in that GOP con, of course, setting up the very richest Americans to get more billions of dollars a year in tax breaks for the foreseeable future, but he’s a Johnny-come-lately to the GOP game.
They’ve been running a money-and-power scam on white voters since Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” of the 1960s, a long con that went hypersonic with the election of Ronald Reagan.
This scam has two parts and one giant mechanism to make it possible.
Those two parts are money and political power, and the mechanism is a nationwide conservative media infrastructure for which there is no match on the Democratic or progressive side.
First came the con’s funding and administrative infrastructure. Just like in the movies, a good con requires establishing a strong setup, kind of an alternative world that will bring in the rubes and help you convince them of your alternate reality.
That alternate reality would eventually include a Republican Party that no longer believes in American democracy, and actively works to promote the interests of billionaire oligarchs and foreign dictators over those of America.
It started back in 1971 when tobacco lawyer Lewis Powell wrote a memo to his friend and neighbor Eugene Syndor, the head of the US Chamber of Commerce, warning that the end of capitalism was on the horizon because of Ralph Nader’s consumer movement and Rachel Carson’s environmental movement.
In that era, Americans had a lot of trust in their government — around 80 percent of Americans said they trusted government — as did the citizens of virtually all the western European countries. Today, as Powell’s work has borne fruit, the Pew Research Center says only 17 percent of Americans say they trust their government.
As Lewis Powell wrote in his infamous 1971 memo arguing that businesses and very wealthy individuals needed to mobilize to stop this “assault” on American business:
Powell then quoted a May 1971 article profiling Nader in Fortune magazine:
This was no less, Powell declared in his next paragraph, than “A frontal assault … on our government, our system of justice, and the free enterprise system…”
His solution, as history shows, was for big corporations and the morbidly rich to create:
A network of think tanks to change and eventually control public opinion
A filtering organization to help pack the courts with young rightwing ideologues
Rightwing media empires that would help elect Republicans and influence political discussion across the American political spectrum
And to place “business-friendly” professors in schools and colleges to train up a new generation of rightwing ideologues.
After Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court in 1972 and the Court then legalized political bribery in a decision Powell himself authored (Bellotti), billionaires and corporations got to work creating a nationwide political infrastructure that has absolutely no match on the Democratic or progressive left. It includes:
A national group that brings together lobbyists and Republican state politicians to write and introduce legislation in every state in America.
Major national think tanks that churn out policy papers, newspaper and magazine op-eds, talking points for conservative media outlets, and develop elaborate rationalizations for toxic policies from denying climate change to fighting gun control to arguing that tax cuts on billionaires benefit average workers.
Rightwing media outlets in every state in the union, including hundreds of regional newspapers and television stations, thousands of websites, the outsize presence of paid trolls across all meaningful social media outlets, and over a thousand rightwing radio stations.
State-based think tanks or “policy centers” in all 50 states, each working with Republicans in those states’ legislatures to bring forth rightwing legislation and help convince the people of each state that these policies are best for them.
Both federal and state-based dark money groups that oversee moving literally billions of dollars from corporations and the morbidly rich into (in many cases nearly untraceable) PACs and SuperPACs supporting the campaigns of Republican candidates from school boards to city councils to state legislatures to the US House, Senate, and the presidency.
Groups that bring together the CEOs and senior executives of America’s largest companies to loosely coordinate and provide cover for lobbying, fundraising, and other political activities.
This new rightwing, billionaire-funded infrastructure has more employees, more offices, and a larger budget than the Republican Party itself.
The result of this 50-year-long investment of billions of dollars and millions of person-hours of time has been a complete shift in American politics away from reality and into the realm of dystopian fantasy.
Because of this massive infrastructure, Republican strategists and politicians can now quite literally create complete bullshit out of thin air and turn it into a national campaign strategy within a few months.
All across America, for example, Republicans are running campaigns warning voters that Democrats support “groomers” in our schools who are “recruiting” young people to drop their birth gender identity and become trans. And then those trans kids, particularly the “boys who become girls,” are unfairly competing in school sports. And while they’re at it, they’re leering at your kid in the bathroom and locker room.
As John Oliver recently and brilliantly pointed out (video here) South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, who aspires to be president, is a classic example of this strategy at work (other Republican governors across the nation are playing the exact same game).
In the past few decades, Oliver says, there has been only one trans student athlete in the entire state, and that was years ago. There are exactly none today. And even if there were, they don’t represent a threat to anybody and have never committed crimes like those Republicans describe in any school in the country.
But Noem got legislation passed outlawing trans kids from competing in public school sports and has blanketed the airways with ads bragging about how she’s “protecting” the children of North Dakota from this non-existent “threat.”
She’s supported in this by heavy media coverage of the “trans crisis” in North Dakota (and nationwide) including Fox “News,” rightwing talk radio, local TV coverage, newspaper articles and editorials, and a torrent of cash donations.
And she’s not alone: over 100 anti-trans laws have been introduced in our states and 12 different states have signed them into law.
So, here we have Republican politicians acting on behalf of rightwing billionaires as they are spending mind-boggling amounts of time, effort, and money promoting “solutions” to a problem that doesn’t exist.
It begs the question: why?
Why would a network created and funded by morbidly rich billionaires and major corporations help promote a rightwing ecosystem that is spending millions on trashing trans children?
Why would they go all-in on promoting the lie that Critical Race Theory was being taught in our public schools and that it’s a national crisis?
Why would they devote their efforts to fighting gay marriage and the rights to abortion and birth control?
The answer, it turns out, is straightforward: like in any classic con, they do it because it takes our minds off the fact that they’re robbing us blind.