Donald Trump’s ‘Big Con’

In 1973, Robert Redford and the late Paul Newman starred in the Academy Award-winning movie, “The Sting.” It was a story about how two professional grifters conned a mob boss – an exploit they referred to as their “big – or long - con.” You might remember “The Sting” because Marvin Hamlisch revived Scott Joplin’s ragtime classic, “the Entertainer” as its theme song.

But the movie also offered great insight into the modus operandi of our new President, Donald Trump – and his own “big con.”

A con man picks out a “mark” – in Trump’s case, ordinary working people who have not seen their incomes go up in decades.

Then he “plays” the mark. He wins the “mark’s” confidence – hence the name “con man.” He creates a plausible scenario to get the mark to willingly part with his money – and in Trump’s case – their votes and then their money.

The “sting” itself refers to the moment when the con is successful. And if he has done it well, “the mark” does not realize he’s been conned until the con men are long gone.

Great con men operate like magicians.

Magicians generally employ several distinct phases of activity to create their illusions.

First, the magician tells you what he is going to do – so you begin to expect to see what will actually be an illusion.

Second, the magician creates an elaborate preparation for the illusion – one that begins to convince your subconscious mind that it just may be plausible.

Finally, the magician directs your attention away from the site of the actual trick ― usually with something you can’t ignore. The dove flies out of the hat. Or the magician uses comedy because, it turns out, recent neuroscience has found that humor suppresses attention. Or maybe he separates the actual trick from the illusion in time, by completing the trick during the apparent preparation.

Then, the magician – or the con man – presents you with an illusion that you believe.

We pay to see magicians because we want to be deceived and made to believe. A magician convinces you that her assistant has been made to disappear – and you can’t prove it isn’t true until you see her walk out of the stage door after the performance — and you love it.

The con man is a different matter – with the con man, you’re furious to learn, often well after the fact, that you have been defrauded and scammed.

I’ll give him this: by winning the presidency, Donald Trump showed himself to be one of the greatest con men of all time. He conned many ordinary Americans into electing him president of the United States because they became convinced that he is on their side, when nothing could be further from the truth.

The good news is that, as President Obama said in his farewell address, reality has a way of catching up with you.

Of course, winning the White House was not Donald Trump’s first con. Like Henry Gondorff, Paul Newman’s character in “the Sting,” there were many and varied dotting his career. Perhaps the most notorious was “Trump University” – a scheme so transparently fraudulent that he was forced to settle a lawsuit by paying victimized “students” $25 million before he assumed the Presidency. While he was busy trying to convince working people that he was on their side, he made his ties, his shirts, his perfume, his cuff links, his furniture and many of his other goods in low wage countries like Bangladesh, China, and Honduras. And his hotels were using every tactic in the book to resist allowing his workers to unionize and negotiate over their wages and working conditions.

The ordinary working people who were conned by Trump in the big “presidential con” will not realize they were conned simply because people like me tell them they were duped. Nobody wants to believe they were conned and telling them so will not be convincing.

But many of them will come to believe it on their own as they watch what he does rather than what he says in the months ahead.

In his dark inaugural address, Trump said that his administration would transfer power from the “elites” back to the American people.

But between that speech and the inaugural balls, Trump was busy signing an executive order aimed at beginning the process of taking health care away from what the Congressional Budget Office says would be 32 million ordinary Americans.

And he signed another order that would raise the cost of mortgage insurance by $500 per year for many first-time middle and lower income home-buyers. Now Donald, that doesn’t sound much like standing up for ordinary Americans on the very first day of your presidency.

Huffingtonpost.com