'License to steal': Donald Trump's history of fraud emerges as a new threat with SCOTUS decision

Donald Trump is a fraud and a con artist. This isn't an opinion, but adjudicated fact, proved by a New York court that found Trump liable for nearly half a billion dollars for his decades of business fraud. Or another court, which accepted Trump's settlement of $25 million for years of defrauding customers of his fake "Trump University." Or the jury in Trump's criminal case, which convicted him on 34 felony charges for defrauding voters by paying hush money to an adult film actress.

What can still be hard to wrap one's mind around, however, is how a man so shamelessly criminal, who openly treats his supporters like wallets to be picked, is the GOP nominee for the third presidential election in a row. But perhaps it's not so surprising, argues Joe Conason. In his new book, "The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism," the journalist and editor-in-chief at The National Memo traces the long marriage between right-wing politics and con artistry. Trump is no anomaly in this history, but the natural result of decades of snake oil salesmen bamboozling the Republican base for political gain and profit.

Conason spoke with Salon about why this history matters for the 2024 election.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

We have the Supreme Court's immunity decision. Donald Trump keeps making violent threats and promising retribution. With Project 2025, he's going full fascist. In the pantheon of terrible things about him, one of the least alarming things to most people is that he's a criminal and a fraud. The fraud case he lost fell off most people's radars because everything else about him feels so scary. So why should people care about the fraud angle?

It's all part of a larger whole, right? This is a hugely dishonest person who can't be trusted with the presidency. I don't want to sound Pollyannish about this, but I don't necessarily believe that the armed forces or even most law enforcement officials would carry out the worst kinds of abuses that he may think he wants to perpetrate, in terms of violence against Americans. Now the deportation plan is very bad and I don't want to minimize that. But I still find it hard to believe — and I could be proved wrong — that our military and most law enforcement agencies will seek to perpetrate physical violence on other Americans.

At the same time, the immunity decision gives him license to steal. I think that is what he's most interested in. He really wants to get as much money as he can possibly get his hands on. If he's president. and can use the powers of the presidency without fear of criminal prosecution to enrich himself and his family, I believe he's going to do that in ways that will astonish everyone. He can do whatever he wants in terms of bribery and corruption and foreign emoluments. The sky is the limit. So I do think people should be concerned about that too.

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To this day there's a tendency in much of the press to talk about Trump as an anomaly in Republican politics It doesn't seem Republican voters or politicians care that he's a grifter and a fraud. Tell me how your books explain their indifference.

He is the logical conclusion of what Republicans have been doing for a long time, and it's been growing worse. He is the epitome of a way of doing politics that is all about defrauding people. What Rick Perlstein said in the article in the Baffler that inspired this book is that the scam and the ideology are now inseparable. They're part of one continuous loop. Those Americans who are susceptible to it are in this loop. The ideology, the belief systems, the paranoid ideas, the prejudices are all used to induce them to send money or to buy gold, to buy penny stocks, to buy fake cancer cures. There's an anti-science part to it, too.

I tried to show that it started quite a long time ago. The moral decay of the right began in the fifties. It accelerated in the early sixties with the anti-communist crusades that were all about milking people out of money to assuage their paranoia about communism. It's taken different forms since then. The Tea Party was one form. The prosperity gospel is another form. The religious right had aspects of this. Trump has been part of lots of them. He has qualities that make him like a prosperity gospel preacher. And those were the evangelicals who surrounded him in 2016 and lifted him up as their candidate. The reason is he's a lot like them as a grifter, as a con man, and as someone who preys on weaker people. He's also been in multilevel marketing, in a couple of cases I examined in the book. Trump University was a real estate seminar scam.

"The Apprentice" created this illusion of Trump as a "genius billionaire," you know, the "greatest businessman." He used that to market these scams to the audience. That was also the way he got elected president. It was the insight of Roger Stone and other people around him who saw this as a way to market a candidate, and it was actually something new.

The prosperity gospel is such an illustration of how fraud is integrated into the religious right. Tell me a little bit more about like the kind of history of religious fraud and how it influenced Republican politics.

Richard Viguerie was the great direct mail fundraiser of the right and pioneered all these techniques for inducing people to send their money to right-wing causes. He came to Jerry Falwell and said the evangelical churches can be milked of money if we start a religious right organization. Initially, Falwell didn't believe him. He was skeptical that you could get the evangelicals into political organization because it was too worldly. But they did a poll and they found out that there was some potential there. So they started the Moral Majority.

In the beginning, it was not as blatant as the prosperity gospel. And in fact, Jerry Falwell positioned himself as an opponent of the prosperity gospel. He conflicted with Jim and Tammy Faye Baker, and the reason he gave at the time was the prosperity gospel, which they were identified with. He called it a heresy and an abomination. And yet, you flash forward and the prosperity gospel is now a dominant mode within the evangelical right.

There's a pastor named Paula White, who is the one who's closest to Trump. She's a prosperity gospel millionaire. Same with Kenneth Copeland and Benny Hinn. There are a lot of pastors who have gotten very rich by fleecing their parishioners of their money in megachurches on television. Some evangelical leaders find this appalling and despicable even now, but they are powerless to do anything about it. The premise is that, if you tithe to these preachers, they will insure that you are blessed by God, and you will yourself become wealthy. It's incredible that anybody believes it, but they do. At the same time, the pastors are telling them how to vote. They come pretty close to worshiping Trump at this point.

In cases where the victims go to faith healers or prosperity gospel pastors promising relief from debt, they victims are sympathetic. The people that Trump sucked in with Trump University are sympathetic, people who were just looking for better career options. But a lot of the people that get sucked into right-wing scams are not sympathetic victims. The fraud emails they fall for play on their racism or misogyny. I recently wrote about John McEntee from Project 2025. He also runs a "dating" site called The Right Stuff that, as far as I can tell, barely has any female users. It's marketed entirely to incels and sad MAGA dudes and plays on their desire to be jerks. For a lot of people, it's hard to care about a grift when the victims are so unsympathetic.

Everybody has a story. I'm reluctant to judge people that harshly, even when I despise their politics and their attitudes. There's something in their background that made them that way. You have to think something has happened to turn people in the bad direction and hold out hope that they can change. My friend George Conway wrote the forward to this book. He's a very different person than he used to be. I mean, I had a lot of conflict with him back in the Clinton days and I don't think I would have liked him. Now he's a different person.

You're right that a lot of the appeals that are used in these right-wing scams and fundraising operations are designed to appeal to bigotry. The homophobia goes way back in this world. Racism has been a part of it since the very beginning. Viguerie put his mailing list together from the 1964 Goldwater campaign, which only won in Confederate states. You can imagine what kind of a list that was and the appeals that they made. So you're right. Still, some unsympathetic people are also victims at the same time. There are illusions that they live under and the way they were raised. I try to reserve some compassion for all of them.

This book goes back decades and shows the sort of way that grift has been interwoven with right-wing politics for decades. But how should we think about going forward? We have an election coming up. A lot of characters who come from this world of grifting and con artistry are involved in the Trump campaign. How should we think about our future with them in power, if Trump gets back into the White House?

They would all be stealing with both hands. Look at Steve Bannon, who is currently in prison. Bannon was involved in this "build the wall" scam, he will go on trial for those offenses in October. And I believe he's likely to be convicted. If he gets out of prison, he will go right back to these scams and cons. That's what they do. The first Trump administration was full of crooks,

These are people who are going to loot the government to the greatest extent they possibly can. At the same time, they would like to cut every program that helps working people and working families. This would be like living in a country run by gangsters. That's my hope in writing the book is that people will think harder about their political choices. This has been a grift and a con and a deception. I hope they make a choice that reflects that understanding.