The Longest Con
How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism
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A sardonic chronicle of how conservatism turned into a racketeering enterprise – and why Donald Trump became the living emblem of the American right’s moral decay.
The Longest Con tells the fascinating story of the partisan con artists who have corrupted conservative politics in our time, creating a toxic phenomenon that culminated in the election of Donald Trump, a bumptious fraud whose checkered career and tawdry retinue, including his presidential cabinet, have featured almost every variety of scam. But long before he appeared, Trump’s path to power was blazed by the motley horde of swindlers and quacks who preceded him.
From the “professional anti-communists” (whose tactics even J. Edgar Hoover despised) to the “populist” grifters of the Tea Party movement and the religious charlatans of the “prosperity gospel” (who provided a pious front for Trump), the right-wing ripoff has remained remarkably consistent, even as personalities change and new technologies emerge: Stir up anger and resentment, demonize political opponents, promise vengeance, and collect donations from the gullible. It’s a highly lucrative game that any unscrupulous charlatan can play, as many have – and they are named in these pages.
In an unsparing and often comic narrative, Joe Conason explores the right’s long, steep descent into a movement whose principal aim is not to protect freedom or defend the Constitution, but merely to line the pockets of pretenders and blowhards whose malevolent tactics now endanger the nation.
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The scams and lies that characterize today's Republican party are "less a comic distraction than a central feature," one endemic to the past several decades of the party's history, according to this well-researched and rambunctious account. Journalist Conason (Man of the World) traces the origins of the party's swindler ethos back to Republican hatchet man—and eventual Trump associate—Roy Cohn, the unscrupulous attorney who masterminded Joe McCarthy's anticommunist crusade. Cohn "demonstrated how a conspiracy theory could be used not only to advance a far-right agenda but to glom unearned benefits for himself," Conason argues, probing at a little-remembered episode of the 1950s Red Scare in which Cohn, claiming that American national security was threatened by "supposedly leftish books in United States Information Service libraries across postwar Europe," went on a junket across Europe to root out the communist influence, most of which he spent luxuriating at five-star hotels on the taxpayer dime. Later chapters delve into similar episodes of personal enrichment connected to Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign, Richard Nixon's dirty tricksters, Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, and the Tea Party movement. Conason's account culminates with a fascinating blow-by-blow of Donald Trump's takeover of the swindler wing of the party in the mid-2010s, coopting and overshadowing the Tea Party as a stepping stone on his way to the presidency ("Trump ingested the movement whole, scarcely pausing to burp"). It's an entertaining and eye-opening litany of misdeeds.
