The Con-Man-in-Chief
The Case Against Donald Trump, Part 4
The case against Donald Trump is so sweeping, I had cover it in three previous installments.
The final segment of the argument is really an explanation for all the others. Trump isn’t wrong on those other things—wrong on political liberty, wrong on foreign policy, wrong on immigration and the economy—by accident. He is wrong because he has a fundamentally deficient method of thinking. He is wrong because he is intellectually unfit for office.
No, I am not saying that he suffers from dementia, which is hard to diagnose from a distance and especially hard to diagnose in a guy who has never shown evidence of holding a coherent thought in the first place. The problem is not his physical ability to think but his deeply flawed method of thinking—or rather the absence of any rational method.
I said this about him from the beginning, and I said it four years ago, when I described our choice as an “epistemological election.” We are not asked to choose a policy so much as a method of thinking.
The Crank Realignment
We can see Trump’s intellectual unfitness in his constant lies and the way he serves as conduit for a geyser of misinformation.
He lies about things big and small. Trump helped spread malicious partisan rumors about the federal response to Hurricane Helene, leading to threats against aid workers that caused work to be suspended for several days. But he also lied about browbeating John Deere into halting plans for the factory in Mexico, when they made no such change to their plans. Follow that link and read the rest of the article, which is a catalog of 19 falsehoods in just one typical Trump speech. Most politicians lie; none are so prolific.
If you follow Trump closely—as, alas, I am required to do—you really see all of this insanity add up. Charlie Warzel surveyed a catalog of all of Trump’s posts on Truth Social, and his observation jibes with my experience.
Like many reporters, I’d been aware that the former president’s social-media posts had, like his rally speeches, grown progressively angrier, more erratic, and more bizarre in recent years. Having consumed enough Trump rhetoric over the past decade to melt my frontal cortex, I’ve grown accustomed to his addled style of communication. And yet, I still wasn’t adequately prepared for the immersive experience of scrolling through hundreds of his Truths and ReTruths. Even for Trump, this feed manages to shock. In the span of just a few days, you can witness the former president sharing flagrantly racist memes about Middle Easterners invading America, falsely edited videos showing Harris urging migrants to cross the border, an all-caps screed about how much better off women would be under his presidency, a diatribe about Oprah’s recent interview with Harris.…
If you, like me, have had the experience of seeing friends or loved ones radicalized online or lost to a sea of Facebook memes and propaganda, then scrolling through Trump’s Truth Social posts will provoke a familiar feeling. On his own website, Trump doesn’t just appear unfit for the highest office in the land; he seems small, embittered, and under the influence of the kind of online outrage that usually consumes those who have been or feel alienated by broad swaths of society. It’s not (just) that Trump seems unpresidential—it’s that he seems like an unwell elderly man posting AI slop for an audience of bots on Facebook.
The primary manifestation of this is what Matt Yglesias calls the “Crank Realignment,” in which a whole cohort of the craziest conspiracy theorists moved from the left to the right because it offered them a more permissive environment. Hence one of the items I mentioned in my last installment: Trump promising to give control of federal health agencies to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a fanatical peddler of crackpot view on medicine, nutrition, and health.
Since then, RFK has promised to end the fluoridation of water. And yes, this is the old conspiracy theory that featured prominently in the satirical film Dr. Strangelove, where it was used as proof of a rogue Air Force general’s derangement. But notice when Trump is asked about this how casual he is in his answer. “Well, I haven’t talked to him about it yet, but it sounds OK to me. You know, it’s possible.” And in this same interview, Trump refuses to commit either way on “banning certain vaccines.”
This is how Trump thinks on vitally important issues. He is a man with an open mind: open, empty, and directionless.
Con-Man-in-Chief
Except that there is one specific direction toward which Trump is drawn. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a politician who so openly and flagrantly seeks to financially exploit his own supporters.
The Bulwark’s Jonathan Last has a longstanding interest in fancy, high-end watches, so I was interested to see his take on the Trump watch, which turns out to be, you guessed it, a scam.
The internet is full of off-brand watches like this. Here’s how you build one:
Everything you need comes from China using AliExpress. First you buy a steel case and bracelet for, say, $30. Like this one....
All told we’re in the neighborhood of $60. And that’s if you’re just trying to build a single watch without bulk purchasing power.
Reminder: They’re selling it for $499.
Then there is the special $100,000 version, which Last estimates as equivalent to a $20,000 watch.
Trump says that his Victory watches are limited to 147 pieces in total. But they’re offered in three colorways. I would bet he’s selling 147 of each, for a total of 441 pieces. At $100,000 per, that’s $44 million. Less the production costs, that’s still $35 million. Trump licensed his image and likeness to the company doing the watch sales—exactly as he did with his sneakers and NFTs. We don’t know what his percentage of the take is, but if it’s less than 75 percent, he’s a fool….
From Trump’s perspective, he puts in an hour of work—signing off on the design and taping his video spiel—and walks away with low eight figures.
Or consider Trump’s involvement in the ultimate con-artist’s playground, cryptocurrency—literally selling people money that is backed by nothing and has no value.
Little is known so far about [World Liberty Financial], which was formerly named “The Defiant Ones.” However, portions of a white paper seen by Coindesk show its early iterations are built on the code base from Dough Finance, a DeFi project that suffered a $2 million hack in July. In addition, several key players are relatively inexperienced in blockchain technology, including Trump’s youngest son, 18-year-old Barron Trump, who is listed in the white paper as WLF’s “DeFi visionary,” as well as real estate developer Steve Witkoff and his son Zack Witkoff, who lead the project’s “Institutional Investment” and “Intelligence” groups, respectively. Trump’s two other sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, are listed as the project’s “Web3 Ambassadors,” with both appearing to have little crypto experience besides familial affiliations with Trump’s NFT projects and personal friendships with some industry advocates….
Aside from WLF apparently using Dough Finance’s code base, no one named as a core leader in the white paper seen by CoinDesk boasts any technical development experience, implying that the project is outsourcing its technical expertise to third parties…. According to Hayner, relying on third-party experts for technical development is catnip for hackers, who often look to exploit parts of the stack that leadership is trusting third parties to build securely and responsibly.
This looks like another great way for Trump backers to lose their money—whatever they have left after Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company for Truth Social, which is crashing again as it looks less likely Trump will win the election. The stock is valued at billions despite the fact that the company is unprofitable and has a small user base that is not growing. As one investment expert puts it, “Remember, that stock is basically a binary, leveraged election wager.” In other words, its value is purely based on speculation that if Trump is elected, big companies will feel obligated to buy advertising on Truth Social to curry favor with Trump. In effect, Trump has figured out how to sell shares in graft.
Aside from being a dishonest enterprise in its own right, Truth Social has become a magnet for scammers. By gathering his most ardent supporters in one place, Trump has compiled the ultimate sucker list.
[T]he scams happening on Truth Social appear to be most commonly pig butchering, a method of gaining someone’s trust while getting them to give you increasingly large amounts of money, all while making it seem like the victim is making wise investments. Truth Social, with its older user base of Boomers who have access to a lifetime of savings and retirement accounts, appears to be an attractive target for scammers running pig butchering operations.
In a move that was predictable if you know Trump and if you know the culture of American Christianity, Trump is using the Bible to con people.
When the education superintendent of Oklahoma, Ryan Walters, ordered this year that every public school classroom in the state must have a Bible in the classroom, he didn’t mention any special requirements.
But bid specifications for the Bibles, released this week, contain several narrowly drawn and unusual details…. What Bible fits the bill? The country music star Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the U.S.A. Bible, which is endorsed by former President Donald J. Trump and costs $60, far above the average price for Bibles. Mr. Trump receives royalties from their sales; financial disclosure reports filed in August show he has made $300,000 from the Bible since endorsing it.
The specifications caught the eye of Oklahoma Watch, a nonprofit news organization, which first reported this week that the bid specs seemed tailored to steer the state’s selection toward one Bible.
Note, though, that Trump can’t pull this off alone. He leads a movement of con-men and opportunists, from his immediate family down to the education superintendent of Oklahoma, whom he has unleashed on his credulous followers. Next, he will unleash them on the rest of the country.
Hippies of the Right
To me, though, the signature of the Trump era is its vulgarity, the way it has unleashed a literally obscene attitude to life throughout the heartland. I notice it out here in rural Central Virginia where I now routinely see pro-Trump signs emblazoned with four-letter words, everything from bumper stickers to big banners on the side of the road.
It all comes from the top down. Here is a New York Times overview of Trump’s “new levels of vulgarity.”
Former President Donald J. Trump on Saturday spewed crude and vulgar remarks at a rally in Pennsylvania that included an off-color remark about a famous golfer’s penis size and a coarse insult about Vice President Kamala Harris.
And there is the Trump rally where supporters were selling and buying T-shirts calling Kamala Harris a whore.
Sold: to two parents who gave the shirt to their 13-year-old daughter.,,, Sold: to the Mikhailovs, who let their 14-year-old put it on and laughed as she talked about its meaning….
Many supporters say they revel in his unfiltered rhetoric and see it as a core part of his appeal, effectively creating a safe harbor at his events for vicious insults.
What candidate has ever campaigned like this before? This could be dismissed as a mere complaint about Trump’s “style,” but it some point style takes on a substance all its own. The reason why people “revel in his unfiltered rhetoric” is because Trump offers to liberate them from any attempt to appear respectable. The crudeness of his language is a symbol for the contemptuous dismissal of intellectual and moral standards. Put simply, the Trump campaign is a giant middle finger to the world.
Notice that as the election nears, Trump get cruder, more incoherent, more open about pledging to abuse his power—and the result is that his poll numbers go up. Tom Nichols is onto something when he posits that many of his supporters “want Trump to be terrifying and stomach-turning so that reelecting him will be a fully realized act of social revenge.”
In effect, Trump supporters are creating their own bizarre mirror-image of the 1960s Counterculture. But it’s not the answer we expected from the right. We were expecting a strait-laced return to the 1950s. Instead, we are getting a right-wing version of the hippie movement: people who reject the entire existing order and want free rein to act unreflectively on their feelings. That’s why they so casually spread fake stories with obvious AI-generated images. It’s not that they are duped by misinformation. It’s that they don’t care whether the information is true or not so long as it validates their feelings.
(If they are “hippies of the right,” I supposed this explains how easily Trump was able to knock over the Libertarian Party.)
This fits an old pattern. Conservatives have always tended just to repeat whatever the rest of the culture was doing, but at a delay of several decades. The people who used to complain about the hippies are now adopting their own version of the Counterculture ethos.
But it’s a right-wing version, and specifically that means breaking down inhibitions about respectability when it comes to racism.
There is Trump, of course, talking about immigrants having “bad genes.” And there is his new top campaign surrogate, Elon Musk, promoting yet another openly racist internet commenter. I gave this phenomenon a name a while ago, Secret White Nationalist of the Week, as one after another of these guys was unmasked within the conservative media and the Republican Party. But now they don’t even bother to keep it a secret.
Consider one of the new people brought in to the Trump orbit by RFK, Jr.
Charlene Bollinger is a fringe commentator whose account endorsed threads praising Adolf Hitler and pushing claims about a “Jew World Order.” She recently said that she’s “part of” and “working with” former President Donald Trump’s transition team to help close friend Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
During a November 1 interview on One America News’ Real America with Dan Ball, Bollinger said: “The transition team right now is being put together behind the scenes. I am working with a number of people to put together something beautiful so that Bobby Kennedy can roll out his vision and we get to be a part of this.”
This is the kind of story that would have been a massive scandal and immediately sunk any previous presidential campaign. Heck, it would have sunk a campaign for dog-catcher. Now it seems like I see a story like this breaking every six minutes.
It used to be that to run for president, you had to be something of a populist and make emotional appeals to the masses—but you also had to give carefully crafted policy speeches and show that you could be intellectually respectable. But Donald Trump does not care about being intellectually respectable and has no need to present himself as thoughtful and knowledgeable. He found that he could control the entire Republican Party without any of that. In fact, it gives him more control, because he can do whatever he likes without worrying about facts or consistency.
Be the Guardrail
This has all been known about Trump from the very beginning. People who supported Trump nonetheless often acknowledging his worst impulses but assure us that he will be limited by the “guardrails” in our constitutional system. Since then, of course, Trump has managed to knock down a bunch of those constitutional guardrails. The very people who served as guardrails within his first administration, his former cabinet officers and top aides, are now warning us against him. And as I recently detailed, the Project 2025 plan for his next administration is specifically aimed at getting rid of officials who view themselves as “constitutional guardians.”
Trump is increasingly declaring his desire for authoritarian rule out in the open. See a roundup of some of the most outrageous things he has said. In fact, one of the curious characteristics of this campaign is that Kamala Harris has been urging us to watching Trump’s rallies and even showing clips from them. Have you ever seen a candidate advertising the rival candidate’s rallies like this? In effect, her closing argument is, “These are all the awful things Trump will do”—and Trump’s closing argument is, “There are all the awful things I will do.” It’s captured nicely in a headline in The Onion: “Both Campaigns Release Ads Showcasing Trump’s Most Racist Comments.”
The “guardrails” argument has its place, as a reminder that no president gets to do everything he or she wants. We don’t elect a philosopher king empowered to remake the country to reflect his entire worldview. But in this context, the guardrails argument is being used to evade rather than enlighten. It asks us to expect someone else to perform the function of a guardrail—while telling us not to perform that function ourselves.
My advice to you in this election, my own closing argument against Trump, is simply to be the guardrail. The first and last line of defense for a free society is always you, the voter. If you don’t want someone who is dangerously unfit for office, the job of protecting our political system starts with you.
When you go to vote tomorrow, be the guardrail.
Did I miss something?
You promised me (us) you’d give us one or two reasons for voting for the Democratic Harris-Waltz ticket over the Republican Trump ticket.
Did you do it and I missed it, or were you simply not able to come up with any reasons?
If not, doesn’t that mean you should not vote for either party, or, rather, let me inquire: if you do vote for the Democratic POTUS ticket without a reason is that “objective”?
Or is voting for a Democrat because they are not Republican a valid reason this time around?
If so, it sounds like you are arguing that an absence is a substitute for a presence which I disagree with because to our human mind there is no such thing as an absence (BiO Spiritualism Principle #N: everything is something to a Human Mind.)
Sometimes one's emotions can be ahead of one's thinking (Branden, somewhere) and this election could very well be one of those times.
I agreed to your recommendation in 2020 to vote for Biden but since I am now “A Never Marxist” I of course can’t vote for Democrats who have become Marxists to the core just like you are accusing Republicans of becoming “hippies” to the core.
Since Marxists, philosophically are Kantians and “hippies” are emotionalists I think since Kant is the evilest philosopher to have ever existed (Ayn Rand somewhere) you haven’t made the case that being an emotionalist is eviler.
Hence, you should vote for the lesser of two evils.
Unless I also misunderstood this is what you were advocating.
If so then I agree, vote your conscience and become a guard dog.
Love the "hippies of the right" integration. I know Rand meant it for libertarians, but it fits MAGA to a T. Pure emotionalism, and proud of it. They're proudly spouting: "Don't come to us with your principles and standards and stuff. I do what I please and say what I please whenever I please and wherever I please! That's my standard!" And that's why they love Trump. He embodies that "standard" more than anyone.