Epstein, Trump, and the culture of endless grift

Thanks to an exemplary work of investigative journalism from The New York Times, we now know more about how now-dead sex predator and Trump friend Jeffrey Epstein made his money. It turns out that Epstein was nothing more than a run of the mill con artist—a confidence man, through and through. The magic formula that parted an ever-widening stream of rich people from their money dates back to the invention of money itself. Epstein:

• Lied about his accomplishments to gain access to potential partners and marks.

• Charmed wealthy targets, sliding into their good graces and convincing them that he was a financial genius and raising doubts about the trustworthiness of the target's current staff and family members.

• After gaining their confidence, made off with a good chunk of their money. Sometimes over time, and other times as Ponzi-styled one-offs.

And it worked. It almost always worked, and there was never any lasting repercussions; he used the connections he made while fleecing one mark to slide immediately to a better, richer one. It continued after he was exposed as a fraud at Bear Stearns. It continued after he made off with the money of self-made men and old-money aristocrats both. It continued after his exposure as a sex predator. The man discovered that the secret of success was to charmingly blow smoke up the asses of wealthy people who craved such experiences, and it took no great genius to discover that.

A confidence man, and nothing more. A Dirty Rotten Scoundrel, a man whose wealth consisted entirely of whatever he could convince others to give him, and who never saw a comeuppance of any real note until his final imprisonment.

Because the Times story relies solely on those who knew Epstein, the story it tells is suspiciously flattering to all those willing to speak about it. Everyone the Times was able to interview either asserts themselves to be a duped victim or unaware of his more tawdry operations, and whenever you read a story in which all the living narrators grouse that they were victims of the several people in the story who are now dead, you ought to be suspicious from top to bottom.

You could read the story as the narrators intended, as a tale of loosely connected confidence schemes and outright thefts.

Or you could marvel that, at every stage of this process, Epstein was able to breezily flit off to new targets without becoming the sort of infamous pariah that you might expect, after a con artist gets caught. He fabricated credentials to land at Bear Stearns, and when Bear Stearns discovered the fraud he was kept on anyway because, apparently, being caught in a fraud is hardly of consequence in a Wall Street institution like Bear Stearns. He used an aristocrat's son as unwitting partner in an investment scheme that bilked various family members out of cash only to see it apparently vanish; at a later point in the story, the same son returns to partner with Epstein again?

At some point your suspicions might solidify into an alternate interpretation of all these events. It was not so much that Epstein was an especially charming outlier who took advantage of Wall Street institutions, wealthy socialites, old-money scions, models, and a swirl of other American and British elites. Perhaps Epstein instead only ingratiated himself into a culture in which lies, swindling, fake investments, outright embezzlement and other behavior was a natural part of the landscape—to the point that Epstein, even when he was repeatedly caught, never stood out among the others.

Maybe the story is that Epstein was a consummate confidence man, able to talk his way into any man's pocket and any woman's bed. Or maybe he was a relative wallflower, in ballrooms and at parties in which many or most of the guests were all trying to do the same, and he was not resented for his scams because there was nothing to resent. It is suspicious that all of the living narrators assert that a handful of dead men bear the blame. It is suspicious that Epstein's pattern of crimes were petty and predictable, things like stiffing landlords and illegal subleases and making exorbitant purchases with the money he allegedly managed, and the only consequence that ever came of it was being introduced to bigger and bigger marks.

But the Epstein story sounds familiar for another reason; it takes no great puzzle-solver to notice that the Epstein patterns are remarkably close to those of once-friend Donald Trump himself. Epstein was said to have become the manager of an aging wealthy man's wealth by touting himself as a financial wizard and with claims that the man's existing allies and family were cheating him; members of Trump's family have claimed that Trump himself deployed that same confidence scheme to dupe his own father, a dying Alzheimer's victim, into signing away his own wealth. Epstein was said to assert that he was a financial wizard of such genius that the chosen target's current managers were incompetent in comparison; Donald's very personality is made up of that line, repeated over and over, forever insisting that everyone from world leaders to military generals to all the scientists on the planet are all pikers, mere pretenders, when compared to him.

And, of course, Trump lies as he breathes. Epstein claimed false credentials and asserted fake connections to high-profile families as his means of gaining access to more-elite circles; there is no issue or policy in which Donald does not claim false victory, no numbers that he does not re-invent, no supposed accomplishment that is not embellished and re-embellished until it lands in the realm of pure delusion.

It is not that Epstein was an outlier, or Trump is. They are both part of a wider subculture in which they represent the norm—in which they are held up as exemplars of the culture, the ones to be admired for their skills in charming, in lying, and in bilking those around them.

Make America Great Again is, at its heart, a confidence game. It is a movement based around the honorable swindler, the clever criminal, a supposed class of people who are entitled to cheat their friends and neighbors because it is part of the game. And we see it everywhere. It is the movement's cornerstone, and its only deeply held belief.

It is a movement of petty con artists who believe that people who follow laws are chumps and people who slide past them are heroes, and if you know a Trump true believer in the year 2025 it is almost certain that that is the personality feature that most defines them. Not outright hostility, not violence, not racism. Simply an innate belief that legality and morality are cudgels to be used on others, but ones that they themselves are exempt from.

There have been multiple examinations of who, in the electorate, tends to back Trump over each of his rivals, and the results appear consistent. Trumpism is not a movement of the working class, but of Americans of at least comfortable incomes; people who may not be wealthy enough to be counted as elites, but who are in the upper brackets of their own local communities and hold (or presume themselves to hold) some small amount of local power.

This group constitutes an "American gentry," as described by of at least one author, or an American petit bourgeoisie. It consists of large land owners, like ranchers and farmers, and the owners of car dealerships, or franchises, or small businesses, or nontrivial real estate agents. It is an ownership class, rich only in the context of their own locales.

The reality of American wealth and power is more banal. The conspicuously consuming celebrities and jet-setting cosmopolitans of popular imagination exist, but they are far outnumbered by a less exalted and less discussed elite group, one that sits at the pinnacle of the local hierarchies that govern daily life for tens of millions of people. Donald Trump grasped this group’s existence and its importance, acting, as he often does, on unthinking but effective instinct. When he crowed about his “beautiful boaters,” lauding the flotillas of supporters trailing MAGA flags from their watercraft in his honor, or addressed his devoted followers among a rioting January 6 crowd that included people who had flown to the event on private jets, he knew what he was doing. Trump was courting the support of the American gentry, the salt-of-the-earth millionaires who see themselves as local leaders in business and politics, the unappreciated backbone of a once-great nation.

If you are chartering your own plane to fly to an attempted insurrection, it is difficult to consider you "working class." If you have a boat of enough size and speed to get a snappy flutter from a full-sized Trump banner you've lashed to it, a boat you're willing to capsize in a confusing show of force meant to intimidate the nearby land-dwellers, you are not entirely hurting for money.

And, as we have seen time and time again, the typical Trump supporter and rally goer is one who likes the man's calls for roughing up opponents, and likes his incessant and repetitive insults of anyone who even momentarily offends him—and supports a little violent insurrection, here and there, so long as there is a whiff of plausible deniability to it.

What is notable about the local gentry, district by district, is that if you have lived long enough to have seen the calendars strike double-zero, back before all hell broke loose, you probably have certain preconceptions about local powerholders that are probably more negative than positive. The local car dealership has for decades been an American stand-in for petty crookedness and rule-skirting. Farmers and ranchers are among the most vocal in voicing their objections to limits on what they can do to local land and water supplies and laborers, both skilled and not.

Scratch a Trump supporter from this category and you will almost certainly find an Owner of a very specific sort, one who skirts the rules on paying employees, or on cleaning the kitchens, or on safety protocols in the warehouse—because those are the only sorts of people who would look to a transparent bluffer, preposterous liar, and proud international cheat as the role model that best represents what America should be. Trump represents the America of skirting the rules, and of breaking laws when you think you can't be caught, and of inflating estimates or skimming from the tip jars because you are You, and therefore deserve it, and other people are Them, who deserve the pain because they didn't have the power or knowledge to stop you.

That, I maintain, is the only flag of the MAGA movement. Racism is inherently an assertion that others deserve less because they are not You and Yours; religious bigotries are identical; all of it flows from the same central conceit that powered Jeffrey Epstein and which consumes Donald Trump. Laws are meant to be broken, and breaking them shows power. Neighbors are meant to be cheated, because cheating shows cleverness and being cheated shows unworthiness.

It is a movement of petty Epsteins and Trumps. America, like every other place, is a mix of the moral and the amoral, the ethical and the petty thug, and the elevation of con men and self-promoting saboteurs into the upper ranks of high society is as inevitable as the resulting cyclical collapses are. We are in a cultural moment in which being a petty cheat is expected.

It is even called innovation, now. Taxi companies became heavily regulated after rampant acts of petty crookery; Uber's innovation was to ask but what if they weren't. Hotels face regulations to ensure base levels of cleanliness and safety; AirBnB innovated a new shadow network of petty hoteliers willing to skirt those consumer protections and others. Copyright law has long protected authors and artists from having their works appropriated by petty thieves; the current A.I. "revolution" is premised, in entirety, on the innovative approach of ignoring all of it. Sports networks now recognize their most profitable audience to be addicted gamblers, not empty-headed fans. Cryptocurrencies were designed for the purpose of conducting monetary exchanges that left no trail for authorities to track; they are not only now a preferred currency for drug running, terrorism support, sex trafficking and other crimes, but the wealth generated by the crimes has created a new class of gentlemen money launderers with enough clout to bend elections and, if their plans bear fruit, force taxpayers to forever prop up their currencies no matter how unstable and fraud-riddled their markets get.

The new American gentry is the confidence man—the con artist who believes themselves entitled to wealth and is willing to bend rules and tell extravagant lies to pocket just a little bit more.

This is who MAGA is, and if you don't believe it you can peek into the Oval Office and see that the model Epstein used to court victims and Trump uses to stoke fervor from his base is now the sole—not the dominant, but the sole—means by which the "movement" governs the country.

Elon Musk swept into an unclear and seemingly illegal government "position" with the confidence man vow that he and his accessories were the geniuses who would immediately discover and rout the incompetence and crookedness of career experts. He lied often and ponderously about the fraud, found nothing, and in the end left behind ransacked government offices and new government favors and contracts for himself.

Pete Hegseth is the incompetent and allegedly day-drinking television blusterer who was chosen to scrub the United States military of supposed incompetence and "diversity." He was selected for the position specifically for his many rabid pronouncements that breaking war crimes laws is not just tolerable but Good; he stormed into the office claiming thuggish genius despite flaming out of the military as a low-ranking nobody with so little knowledge of military strategy that he likely could not spell it. His speeches to high-ranking generals have amounted to the boasts of a forever-angry child.

Kristi Noem and Kash Patel are the very personification of the confidence game: They are social media influencers, they remain influencers, they believe their sole job in government is to be influencers who charm and boast and bullshit to audiences who deserve to be fleeced. To them, government service is a fashion show and an access point for petty luxuries and private jets.

Pam Bondi gained control of the Department of Justice as reward for her past efforts in helping social allies dodge laws, and without hesitation turned Justice into an agency devoted to tearing up indictments of Trump's associates and to threatening his announced enemies.

The whole of the Trump administration is criminal, and is proud of it. It exists as Epstein did: Each official working their own confidence game, all of them liars asserting completely invented expertise even as they bungle their most basic duties, each giving elaborate speeches insisting that everyone Americans ever trusted is a crook and an enemy and that they, only they, have the genius required to set things straight. It is not even creative; it is the mark of con artistry. It is overt.

And it is overt in Congress, as well. In the House and Senate, all the supposed elites watch from the sidelines and either defend the con or pretend to not see it. Perhaps they, too, will appear in a New York Times story twenty years on, and perhaps they too will explain that they were all victims, victims to be pitied, really, all of them snookered by the con but unwilling to speak out because admitting the con simply isn't done in social circles as glitteringly exclusive as theirs.

We already know they favor sex traffickers and will cover for them; they have already done that. We already know that they are fine with fraud, with reality-mocking lies, with glad-handing the conspiracists; they announce it on television. The billionaire class has gone all-in, handing money to the confidence man in great gobs in order to remain in his good graces and to have government look away from their own bending of laws.

MAGA is a revolution of America's self-grown con artists, scammers, tax cheats, Ponzi schemers, compulsive liars, tire slashers, wage stealers, trash dumpers, child predators and petty cultists. What nauseates most Americans about Trump is what these smallest of would-be aristocrats are most attracted to; there is both an Epstein and a Trump on every block of every American neighborhood, and those Americans are enchanted by watching Trump lie comically, incessantly, almost deliriously, as he plays the whole world using nothing more than the same cheap bravado and invented gibberish that they themselves might use to convince a car owner to spring for an unneeded new transmission or a homeowner to agree to an inflated plumbing bill.

Everyone in Trump's orbit is the same person with a different face, a perpetual blusterer who found success by lying boldly, one who insinuated conspiracies and promised that they alone would expose them, an innovator who innovated their way into Trump's orbit through acts of con artistry that resonated with his crooked miserable soul.

Everyone who voted for him was either conned, like all those very wealthy people who met Jeffrey Epstein were conned, or they recognized the con from the outset and were only too happy to give it a boost so long as it was aimed at someone who wasn't them. Immigrants, perhaps. "Diversity," perhaps.

But they will all claim to be victims, when this is over. Every last enabler will claim they never expected the forever-lying law-skirting professional confidence men they cackled and boasted over would do crimes.