Felon47's Three-Card Monty

To the con artist in the White House, everyone is either a mark or a shill.

In the years that the current occupant of the White House was a fixture at Studio 54 and a running joke on the front page of the city’s tabloids, I was a naive young sprout living in New York City, and I was broke or nearly broke nearly all of the time. As a struggling singer/actor/writer/whatever, I often had to make tough choices in order to save money. I could either walk everywhere and save my subway fare so I’d have enough money for a slice of pizza or a street hot dog, or I could spring for a subway token to spare my legs a few miles of walking and live with the resulting hunger.

So when I spotted some guys playing three-card monty one afternoon in Times Square, I naively thought it looked like a way I could both eat and ride the subways. Uncharacteristically that day, I had $20 in my pocket. So I watched and waited for the right opportunity. I saw how people were making foolish mistakes, especially this one woman — repeatedly pointing to a card that anyone could clearly see was not the ace of spades and apparently losing twenty after twenty. And then, every so often, she’d get it right and would get a payoff. I was sure I had it all figured out. I took my one shot and, of course, I lost my lone $20 bill. It was no sooner snatched out of my hand than I realized the woman was one of the dealer’s shills and she was there to help reel in suckers like me.

The loss of the $20 was a huge hit to my meager budget, but far more painful was the humiliation that I had been taken by these con artists. I didn’t mention the incident to anyone for years afterward, because I was too embarrassed. I was supposed to be smarter than that.

I relate this story because I’m starting to view the MAGA crowd through that lens of shame and humiliation. So far, most of them are too ashamed to admit it publicly, but they are starting to understand that they’ve been taken, particularly since the irrational changes Felon47 is inflicting on the nation are also affecting his MAGA base.

They’ve been groomed for years. They’re still in a state of deeply rooted denial. They want to believe (and who wouldn’t?) that the kind of pervasive corruption that our government is riddled with couldn’t possibly happen. The insanity they’re witnessing must be part of some overarching plan that eventually will make things better. They couldn’t possibly have been wrong all this time, right? They may not understand the economy or international diplomacy or military strategy but surely Felon47’s self-promoted “common sense” was all that we needed, wasn’t it?

But their reality these days is that they’re being forced to reconcile that set of beliefs they’ve been spoon fed against the day-to-day reality of their hero and cult leader systematically disassembling their lives.

When you walk into a car dealership, the salespeople try to keep you on their lots for as long as they possibly can, because they want your investment of time. It’s human nature not to want one’s time wasted, so if you spend a couple of hours test driving cars and making small talk with the salesperson, you’re less likely to walk away without buying a car.

The MAGA crowd has now spent ten years on that metaphorical car lot. They’ve had Felon47’s blatant lies repeated by the right-wing media industry as if they were gospel. They’re deeply invested. They’ve bought the merch. They’ve flown the flags and festooned their trucks with hyper-patriotic artwork. They’ve proudly retrofitted their boats to be floating political ads. All that can’t possibly be wrong, can it?

But, in truth, if you’ve been donning one of those red hats, you’ve simply been signaling to the felon-in-chief that you’re a willing pawn, some who’s an easy mark. He’ll take your money, he’ll rely on you for your vote, but he’s perfectly at ease taking away your job or your health care or your children’s education standards, as he’s demonstrated so clearly in the last few weeks. You will be used in whatever way Felon47 wants. He uses you the way a drug dealer uses a neighborhood teenage drug runner to take all the risk on the frontlines of drug trafficking. If you get arrested or killed, no big deal, as long as there are no ties back to the kingpin.

To con someone, you must first build trust. Building that trust is much easier among people who are inherently trusting — people who take things at face value without looking too deeply at underlying motivations. And — let’s face it — how often have even those of us on the left said things like “I never would have believed this could happen in the United States”?

The sheer audacity with which Felon47 has bulldozed through norms, laws, regulations, and precedents has baffled most of us on the left, because we couldn’t fathom anyone being so brazen.

Because Felon47 has been so successful in deceiving his followers with his warped world view, he must be kind of surprised at getting pushback not just from those on the left but from his most ardent supporters. In response, he’s erratically backtracking on policies, on firings, on tariffs, creating a firestorm of chaos.

(He’s also probably convinced himself so thoroughly of his powers of persuasion that he expected world leaders to roll over the way his MAGA devotees have. He’s finding out that what he’s selling, the world ain’t buying. But that’s probably a whole other post.)

It will take a multi-pronged approach to put the brakes on Felon 47. The pushback that he’s getting from his base is one prong. Pushback from the courts is another major prong. Complaints and repercussions from Wall Street are a significant prong. Street protests in hundreds of cities are another prong. I suspect there ‘s another prong in the behind-the-scenes pushback from Republican members of the House and Senate. Their town halls are full of their disgruntled Republican constituents, so it’s only a matter of time before they start putting the longevity of their own political careers ahead of loyalty to Felon47. (Of course, you’d never know that from the fawning adulation they all rolled out during the Presidential Address to Congress earlier this week.)

On one level, I have some sense of empathy for at least a small segment of the population who voted for the felon, as someone who has fallen prey to a short con. These voters have been the marks of a long con, and Felon47 and his cronies have manipulated them and relied on their naïveté for their own nefarious purposes. They have breached trust in ways that his true believers couldn’t imagine because they couldn’t contort their minds into thinking such deviant thoughts. That is the primary skill of a con artist.

I am less forgiving of the followers who stubbornly choose to block out any information that contradicts what Felon47 tells them, since we live in an era where factual information is more readily available than at any time in our history.

But I’m finding it impossible to forgive the Republicans in the House and Senate who have marched in lockstep with the felon-in-chief for the better part of a decade. They can’t feign ignorance of Felon47’s behavior and character; many of them have publicly excoriated him prior to turning 180° and praising him (or even becoming part of his cabinet). These folks are the political equivalent of that woman who kept feigning defeat as she fed twenty after twenty to her friend, the three-card monty dealer. These Republicans will never be able to wash off the stench of corruption acquired by rubbing elbows with the bumbling incompetent wannabe dictator.