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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE CON AT THE CORE OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY  
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Nina Burleigh
August 20, 2024
The New Republic
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_ The conservative movement’s total abandonment of even the
appearance of principles has been decades in the making. _

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_The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American
Conservatism_
Joe Conason
St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 9781250621160

Pick your metaphor for the last eight years of American politics.
Sewer or garbage truck? Practically every day a helpless nation
watches a new scrap of official grift, crime, abuse of public trust
revealed and tossed into the churning dumpster of history. Most of us
identify this era with Donald Trump, who sailed down a golden
escalator in the summer of 2015 and lit the dumpster fire. But in his
bracing history of American conservative hustlers, _The Longest Con_
[[link removed]], veteran political writer
Joe Conason proposes that the American right has for more than a half
century been increasingly OK with “politicized larceny.” After
decades of professional fearmongers, scammers, and grifters chipped
away at the line between right and wrong, the right was ready to
support the idea, as Gordon Gekko put it, that greed is, actually,
good. The ends always justify the means, if you can make bank on the
way.

A crucial representative of this attitude, according to Conason, was
Roy Cohn, the red-baiting Joe McCarthy aide, New York power broker,
and Mafia lawyer whose “philosophy of impunity” was so successful
that it shaped right-wing politics for decades to come. His most apt
pupil 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 everything,” Conason writes. As a lawyer,
Cohn’s motto was: Better to know the judge than to know the law. As
a businessman, it was: Better to stiff creditors than pay bills; and
always worthwhile to lie, bribe, steal, and swindle while never
apologizing.

 
Conason devotes the first third of the book to some of the right-wing
scammers “corroded to [the] core” like Cohn, who roamed the
hinterlands of Cold War America preying on Red Scared hayseeds for
personal profit. Unlike Cohn, many were nominal Christians, with names
that sound like something straight out of _Deliverance_ (Bundy,
Smoot). They sold anti-Communism with Jesus. Oklahoman Billy James
Hargis got rich off his radio ministry and as a fake doctor stumping
churches and town halls of America on a “Christian Crusade.” He
signed on former Army Major General Edwin A. Walker (a spiritual
predecessor to General Mike Flynn), a man forced out of the military
over John Birch Society propagandizing. Together the duo raked in
money on a national tour warning auditoriums and town halls of an
enemy within America’s schools, government, and churches who
constituted a “repulsive Satanic force.”

The 1960s saw the rise of a new crop of operatives wielding modern
technology. Richard Viguerie amassed a fortune and bought himself an
estate in Virginia horse country by cornering the market on direct
mail in the early computer age. His company reached its zenith after
Watergate, when it was sending one hundred million pieces of mail
annually, soliciting donations from gulls inflamed by keywords like
“union bosses” and “federal bureaucrats” and “radical
feminists” and “homosexual activists.”

Within the conservative movement, the audacity of con men appalled
many, at least in the beginning. Paul Weyrich once said of Roger
Stone’s penchant for Patek Philippe watches and bespoke suits paid
for by his firm’s work for dictators that he “rivals Imelda
Marcos.” (“Dictators are in the eye of the beholder,” Stone has
said.) Stone, a Cohn acolyte, worked for Nixon (tattooing the
disgraced President’s face on his back) and was still around to
advise Trump. He understood that “Trump” as a brand, built on
utter fakery, and Trump’s own penchant for schemes like Trump U,
Cohnian lying, and impunity, made Trump a promising political
candidate.

Conason devotes several chapters to the capture of the modern
religious right by men and women who welded Christianity to massive
moneymaking schemes. He explains how Jerry Falwell Sr. created Liberty
“University,” which became a business model for tax-exempt
Christo-capitalism—a model his son, Jerry Jr., would expand and then
explode, but not before urging his flock to get in line behind a
blasphemous, immoral scoundrel for president.
 

The arrival of the TV as remote church collection basket in every
American living room inaugurated a new era for the prosperity gospel.
The fake TV businessman who had fooled millions into thinking he was
the second coming of Jack Welch was the secular version of
televangelist grifter. “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
the most successful among them,” Conason writes.

 

By the time Trump announced his run for president in the summer of
2015, the carpet was rolled out, table was set, and rank and file
conservatives were primed. By election night 2016, many of the
remaining shockable conservatives had already witnessed how depravity
delighted and thrilled the political base. They had watched crowds
chant along with calls for Hillary to be locked up and roar at
Trump’s vulgarity. His supporters didn’t seem to care that he had
ripped off thousands of people in his Trump U scam, failed to spend
his foundation money on charitable causes, declared bankruptcy six
times, or bragged about grabbing women by their genitals.

Refusing to accept the results of the 2020 election proved a
particularly profitable scheme. In just two months between election
day and the insurrection, the Trump machine raked in $255 million,
“a record-setting haul by nearly any measure,” Conason writes.
They accomplished this with a combination of the scams and strategies
honed over the previous decades, augmented by technology: online ads
and as many as 25 email appeals daily, appealing for money to fight a
totally fictitious battle against a nonexistent problem. At least two
million individual donations poured in. About eighty million dollars
of that haul went to Trump’s Save America PAC, a pile “immediately
available to Trump for his personal use to pay for travel and hotel
costs” and later for his legal bills.

 
The current crop of MAGA scammers sprouts from the lineage of decades
of conservative con artists. Steve Bannon was accused of taking
millions of donor dollars for the wall between Mexico and the U.S. and
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 organizing
outfit, grifted itself into notoriety, tried and failed to go into
bankruptcy, and was forced to defend itself against civil corruption
charges.

The compendium of con is infuriating, but by the end of the book,
bafflement replaces outrage. Almost every Republican leader today
supports convicted felon Trump. Decent conservatives have been extinct
for a while. Over the decades, many of the most prominent figures on
the right, from aristocrat William F. Buckley in his day, to the
now-regretful Never Trumpers like Bill Kristol and Steve Schmidt (the
strategist who had the clever idea of welding Sarah Palin to John
McCain), failed to object to the rot within—or at least not until it
was too late. How is it that all these people were unbothered?

Conason’s book offers the suggestion of an answer. Writing about how
then–RNC chair Ronna McDaniel knew Trump was lying the Big Lie, but
didn’t interfere with the scam, Conason explains: “Intimidated by
Trump and profiting heavily from his grift,” the RNC “continued to
spread disinformation.” Its response to Trump’s lies “was merely
to tinker around the edges of the fundraising copy, never to
fundamentally challenge the message.” Intimidation and profit. The
paired goads—the stick of fascist abuse, the carrot of free grifted
money—may be only logical explanation for the conservative
movement’s total abandonment of even the appearance of principles.
 

Whether or not Trump survives this election, the transmogrification of
the right, Conason writes, is likely permanent. “The industrial
production of falsehood and fraud will grind on shamelessly, with or
without him, overseen by entrepreneurs who understand that substance
and commitment carry no sales value in a political culture dominated
by noisemaking, grandstanding, and malice.” This machine was built
over decades by people who have chipped away at the ethical norms of
public life, lining their own pockets. It will most certainly grind on
unimpeded by shame or law as long as the right maintains a grip on the
levers of power.

Nina Burleigh [[link removed]]
@ninaburleigh [[link removed]]

Nina Burleigh is a contributing editor and author, most recently, of
the novel _Zero Visibility Possible_.

* Modern conservatism
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* Right Wing Politics
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* Cold War politics
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* Donald Trump
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* Christian nationalism
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