Every man, woman and child of the United States should be on their knees thanking the Good Lord Almighty that Donald J. Trump is our President and Commander-in-Chief. Every. Single. Day.
When done right, the confidence game is a thing of beauty. With a smile, a laugh, sleight of hand and a good line, a good con artist can take your money right before your eyes while you think it was all your idea. The con is an art form.
From the short con to the long con, the main thing is always the money. A small time grifter uses the con to pass off a ten as a twenty before a bartender notices, or deal from the bottom of the deck, or catch a tourist in a quick shell game. A successful con ensures the mark does not even realize that he is being conned. The short con takes confidence, dexterity and some fast-talking. If you can master those skills and with a smile and a touch of humor, the mark will be out a couple of bucks before anyone realizes what happened.
Even in the long cons, the basic skills still apply but the prize can be a whole lot bigger. In every con, whether it is a small barroom con, or the longer con with a million dollar prize, the best cons work when the mark thinks it was his idea to give away his money. When a con goes right, the mark thanks the artist for painting him into a corner.
Two truths about cons; the bigger the prize, the longer the con and, large or small, if you are running the con always keep your eye out for the wild card.
To get the big money, the con game is going to have a lot of moving parts. It takes time and patience. All the players have to get the hook set. The mark has to be primed and ready to be had. A con man does not get your house in one night. It takes days. A con man does not get your million dollar investment in a couple of days, it takes weeks. The bigger the prize, the more players, time, patience and luck that the game needs. A con man passing off fake paintings is not working alone. There are, ropers, shills, players, a number of people who the mark doesn’t even see until it is too late.
The long con takes seed money to build a front, earnest money to show the mark that the con artists also has his own skin in the game.
If you are good at the game, any con, short or the long, is, as they say, easy money. All you have to do is smile, stay calm, read the mark and when you know he wants what you are selling, reel him in, hook, line and sinker.
That is why every man, woman and child should be down on their knees thanking God that Donald J. Trump is our Commander-in-Chief. Little Donny J. is the wild card.
For thirty years, the Neocons have been chipping away at the American public and our institutions. The ropers, the propagandists, Rush, Lars, Laura, Sean, Alex, and the newest mouth, Tomi, have been setting the stage for this play, constantly yelling at the American people telling them exactly what they want to hear. They scream at them for hours a day. In an angry, frenzied fit of hysteria, the propagandists tell them that the government is corrupt, that it is giving away all their hard-earned money to people who do not deserve it, that socialism is the devil’s paycheck, that no one in government is honest, that no one who supports the government is honest. Through all their political fire and brimstone the ropers only comforting word to the mark is to make sure the mark knows that the only, the last, honest person in America is the propagandist.. These ropers, these mouthpieces of the con artist have been filling the mark’s heart with everything they desire to hear for decades. They tell them nothing is their fault. It is the system. It is rigged and always has been rigged. The Democrats keep taking their money and giving it away to others. Meanwhile, ever so slowly and efficiently, the Neocon backed the truck up to the government vault and strategically took the money from the treasury while the American Public thanked them for doing it.
Just look at the 2016 Chapman University Survey on the top fears of the average American. The number one fear, over death, over death of a loved one, over a car accident, or being hospitalized, is fear of government corruption. The number one fear is a corrupt government.
For thirty years, the Neocons have been roping in the American Voter.
Of course, each year, each election Necons have been tilting the table toward their own interests more and more just like the crooked card dealer who hands himself a straight while you have three queens. Behind the voters’ backs the Neocons were using sleight of hand, gerrymandering, to make sure that the voters thought they were getting a twenty when they were actually only getting a ten.
Like any good con, the more the tables slid away from the citizens, the more the game looked legit to the mark.. “This government is rigged. You are right. I didn’t believe it at first but this is ridiculous. We are all in trouble. How do we fix this, Neocon?”
“It is just like I have been saying, voter. We need to fight it. I need you to support me and invest in me and together we can fix it. If we don’t both of us will lose everything.”
As the con played out, the mark brought in more marks. The Neocon gerrymandered more districts. The more problems swelled in the country, the cons made sure the marks doubled down on their bets. “It is getting worse by the day.”
The con is all about getting cash. There is no bigger cash prize in the world than the United States Government. The goal over the past thirty years was to get their hands on that vault. The ropers, the propagandists ,have done their job well. The voter does not even know he is being conned. The voter is convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is handing his power and voice over to a friend who wants the same thing he wants, a friend to save the people from their own government. A corporation who, for a myriad of small fees for what once we part of our tax, will straighten everything out.
For thirty years, as the table tilted more and more toward the elite, away from the voter, the Neocon told him it was those other guys fault and he was just as appalled as the voter. “We are just going to need more drastic measures, “ said the Neocon. The more he followed the Neocons the mark went from first a house, to an apartment, to a trailer and the more he hated those liberals and the government who, in the mark’s eyes, put him in the trailer park.
The last three decades, we have watched the Neocons gut the government, privatize everything they could, cut social services, not allow the government to provide job programs, rip through the safety net. For every Neocon vote against the American people, the ropers made sure the mark got the message that the pain the mark was feeling had nothing to do with the Neocons and everything to do with a corrupt and ineffectual government hell-bent on destroying everything the mark had ever worked for. During the last ten years, the Neocons got the mark into a fever pitch. IT IS WORSE THAN EVER. THE SKY IS FALLING, they said. The mark was primed for the final push.
In the last decade, the Neocon began the end game. With a Democrat in the White House, the NeoCon doubled down on the message that the Democrats where not working for the country or the voter. The Neocons refused to even discuss any issues or bills. They froze the country in congressional gridlock.
The ropers had their back. They ramped up the rabid attacks on government. They went full tilt. Even having the first lady suggest that people should eat vegetables was seen as proof Democrats were corrupt, socialist heathens out to destroy everything American. Only the Neocons had the interest of the voter, they said.
Democrats fell for the con and played the very role the Neocons told the voters they were playing. Democrats abandoned their own base. The Dems wanted to chase after some of that big money as a kind of trickle down democracy. They figured working class would never leave the party. They were wrong.
The Republicans were not quite sure who they wanted to handle the payout of 2016, so they had over a dozen candidates standing up, none of them were that exciting. They all said the same thing which was regurgitated by the propagandists.
But, by 2016, the marks had taken everything the Neocons had told them over the last thirty years, soaked it in butter, broiled it for a while and served it back to the Republicans in a tin foil hat. What came out was a half-baked deep dish hatred of the government, the political parties, Washington DC, information, education and experience. The mark did not want to change the system. After thirty years of being told the government is their enemy, they wanted to blow up the entire system.
Beware of the wild card.
Enter Little Donny J.
Little Donny J. has been on the con for a long time. Going back to the early seventies. Little Donny J has conned unions, casinos, tenants, corporations, banks, investors, partners, politicians, pretty much anyone who has come into his circle has been, at one time or another, conned. It is not a fluke or accident that Little Donny J. did not carry the election in New York. People know him there. He is a carnival barker, a golf course owner who cheats at golf, a chairman whose boardroom is made of cardboard, a husband whose wives are set dressing, a father whose children are props. Donny J. is the conman’s conman. Little Donny J. set his sights on the White House in 2016. If all that public money was going to moving anyway, he was going to get a piece of the action.
Like the proverbial fox, Little Donny J. slipped into the henhouse just before the Neocons were going to collect the eggs. Each and every one of us needs to be down on our knees thanking God.
Donny J.’s con has not been particularly clever. Donny J pushed aside the Neocons by force of will and lines of bullshit that can be seen from space. Donny J. came into the Republican Party used his smile along with a specific line of b.s. to bully himself to the presidency. He used the parties own rhetoric to beat the Neocons at their own game. He knew that the electorate had been primed and ready to be plucked. He saw his opportunity. Little Donny J. swooped in and stole the con out from under the con men.
Don’t believe it? In the last several days Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and the Koch brothers have all come out against Little Donny J.’s policies, presidency and woefully inept administration. The designers of the long privatization con came out against the incumbent Republican President. The Koch Brothers? Karl Rove? Only one reason makes them come out against the Republican President, they are not getting a cut.
The only reason Bernie Madoff got caught is because less subtle, more reckless con men of Wall Street brought down the whole shell game through their own greed, lack of dexterity and inability to hide the con. If not for the brutish, less articulate con artist scaring away the marks, Bernie would still be in business today.
With a brutish lout like Donny J. taking the prize, the engineers of the Libertarian con game, Koch, Rove et al, are in the same boat as Madoff. Trump is far less nuanced and methodical about raiding the chicken coop. Had the engineers won, the cabinet would not be a hodge-podge of obvious egg-suckers but rather a carefully selected assemblage of discrete raiders who slowly over time would transfer the government accounts to their accomplices. Trump wants to funnel the cash out of the fault as soon as possible and he is taking a piece of it with him.. His cabinet reflects that. We have an attorney general who does not believe in justice, an education secretary who does not believe in education, an environmental secretary who does not believe in the environment, and the list goes on.
This administration is the very thing that will destroy the Libertarian con and is exactly why we should be thanking the Lord above. Though his bluster and greed, Trump blows the whole con. Trump may or may not walk away with part of the treasury but The Republican party will never be the same. As they stand side by side with Trump, a man without subtlety, a man without integrity, a man whose con has no art, no finesse, those Republicans who had hoped to get the treasury transferred to their own accounts have been exposed. Trump did to the Neocon just what Wall Street did to Bernie Madoff, ripped the covers of a really sweet con. As we watch the naked corruption and sheer greed assemble in the White House, all the Neocons’ true believers are sickened. In fact, just like poker player who catches the con artists dealing from the bottom of the deck, the marks are pissed. Take a look outside. Those record number protestors, those newspaper columns, those letters to the editor, those are all the same faces you see at a busted shell game on the corner just outside Trump Tower. When Trump goes down, and he will, he will take the Republican Party with him particularly if they continue sticking with every move he makes. Then, like Bernie Madoff before them, they will be forced out of the game.
Of course, we are just now at the top of the con and there is one worry, if the Neocons did not help Trump grab the White House, who did?
I bet, if you crane your neck, put in some thought without rushing to judgment, you can see the con man from your house. A good con is always right in front of your face.
Beware the wild card. A wild card can take down the whole thing.