The Land of Greater Fools

America as a big con.

We look forward to working with you to craft a common sense football policy, sir.

Successful criminals and politicians both understand the wisdom of going big. It’s a felony to steal a thousand bucks. It’s still a felony to steal a billion. Might as well steal the billion. Likewise, it takes about the same amount of political capital to do something small as it does to do something along the same lines, but bigger. Raising taxes on the rich by one percent will get you called a socialist. Might as well raise their taxes a hundred percent. More bang for your buck, for the same price. This applies to every issue.

One thing Donald Trump is good at is taking things to extremes. His opponents get overwhelmed. It all starts to blend together. The outrages come so fast that it all gets coded as, “He is doing something bad.” He understands, as only natural born villains can, that he will not suffer much more for ever more extreme gradations of “bad,” once his badness has been decried already. If you want to truly grasp what he is doing, it is vital to consciously maintain a baseline of normal behavior in your mind, so that you do not fall into the trap of comparing a downward spiral to other points that just came earlier in the same downward spiral.

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Watching Trump launch a crypto coin days before his own inauguration that instantly made him billions of dollars richer is kind of impressive, in the way that you might be impressed by watching the planes strike the twin towers on 9/11. People said this was bad, yes. But do you understand the level of corruption that is on full display here? This is—I don’t want to be hyperbolic here—a level of public corruption that is, let’s conservatively say, one thousand times worse than the Watergate scandal. That was just an instance of a paranoid president trying to steal secrets from his political opponents and then covering it up. This, on the other hand, is the president-elect of the United States of America putting out a big bucket that says “BRIBE ME” right before he takes office. Anyone can now buy an imaginary “coin” and the money will go directly into the pockets of the Trump family, as they run the United States government. That is what happened here. Donald Trump’s net worth went up by tens of billions of dollars in one day. In one day! The day before his inauguration! Out of thin air! And then his fucking wife made a coin, too! This is not even the same as the Trump family launching a business, building hotels that wealthy interests might stay in to try to curry favor. There is no business here. This is just saying, “Give the president money and we’ll give you this token we made up.” It is a tip jar that sits on the desk of the Oval Office. You almost have to laugh. The way that I know that people have not quite internalized how outrageous this is is that everyone is not still talking about it, right this minute.

Imagine a grainy undercover FBI sting video of a crooked politician being handed a paper bag full of money. Now imagine that the bag contains ten billion dollars. Now imagine the camera pulling back and the guy taking the bag also controls the FBI. That’s what is happening, my friends. It is not hidden. It is the opposite of hidden. Boldness is the way of the wise crook. Hiding things implies that you think that they are wrong.

It is not a good sign, for America, that the slimeball pastor who gave an invocation at Trump’s inauguration yesterday followed up that appearance by immediately launching his own crytpo coin as well. I don’t mean that it’s a bad sign because it is hilariously crooked—it is, obviously, but slimeball pastors have been doing crooked things since religion was invented. What really troubles me is that the assumption that scams are the way to get ahead has gotten so big that it now envelops something approaching the majority of this country. Trump’s own political career has served as a proof of concept. Now, everyone in Trump’s orbit also operates in a way that is geared toward ripping off the suckers, towards cultivating a crowd that can be exploited, towards building a cheap facade that can be sold for a bundle right before it collapses. That is the operating principle of not just the Republican Party, but—with Trump’s ascent into the White House again—of the entire political and economic power structure of the richest country on earth. The tech CEOs sitting on the dais during the inauguration ceremony, the other CEOs bowing and flattering Trump’s ego in recent weeks, the asteroid field of Trump-adjacent grifters of all stripes that are here to sell you shitty supplements or shitty pillows or shitty meme coins… all of these things point to a disturbing underlying set of beliefs about how to get things done in this country. The American myths, the fairy tales that are supposed to prod us to be better versions of ourselves, are getting meaner and more hollow. We’re not even telling ourselves righteous lies any more. We’re using all our ingenuity to pick one another’s pockets and come up with creative new minorities to blame it on.

Invest now!

A bedrock of investing is the Greater Fool Theory, which essentially says that even if you paid a foolish price for something, it can still work out, as long as you can find a greater fool to sell it to. The arc of these things—from rational analysis, to foolish speculation, to the faster scramble for greater fools to con—always ends in disaster for someone. The idea is just that the someone is not you. This is the ethic of con men: They valorize those who can successfully rip off others without being ripped off themselves. This ethic carries a certain romantic allure when it is deployed by underdogs against targets who in some sense deserve it: Robin Hood robbing the rich, the brilliant Ocean’s Eleven crew robbing the casino, the swashbuckling pirates robbing the mighty galleon. But what we are facing now is an entire nation in which this ethic is turned against the public. You, me, all of us, the people, are the marks. The hustlers, the heroes of their own stories, are the ones in charge. Piracy makes for good movies, but it is a very destructive way to run a government.

Until the political opposition in America grasps all of this, they will continue to wake up and find that they themselves are the Greater Fools. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, mysterious about Donald Trump, his allies, or what they are going to do. They are going to try to loot this country for as much as they can grab. Those who are with them will get a pass and those who are against them will be their enemies. After they leave, we will find that our institutions are weaker, our government is half broken, our crises have compounded, our most vulnerable citizens have suffered the greatest harms. Even now, I see many people who should know better falling into the trap of telling themselves that they will be able to get on Trump’s good side, to gently cajole him into the right place on their particular issue of concern. They believe that they can take advantage of his aggressive disinterest in most things by flattering him and then steering him the right way. So the Democratic governor of New Jersey gently proclaims that he wants to work with Trump to defeat congestion pricing and the Teamsters proclaim that they want to work with Trump on a pro-worker agenda and the UAW proclaims that they want to work with Trump on good trade policy and liberal columnists proclaim that Trump has a chance to do good things in the Middle East. And on, and on, and on. The con man maintains just enough unpredictability to fill his marks with hope that this time, they will be the ones to find the ball lurking under the shell.

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The problem with this impulse is that inherent in the hope of working with this guy is the accompanying understanding that you must not try as hard as you can to smash the guy at the same time. You can’t say “Donald Trump is a loathsome fascist” and then say in the next breath “We look forward to crafting a worker-friendly trade policy with you, sir.” Yet, hey, guess who the people are who, collectively, are nurturing all of these disparate hopes of winning on their pet issues? They are the opposition. We are entering an age of gangster style fascism. We are going to need all of the opposition that we can get. If most of the opposition is busy flattering itself that they can soften Trump on this or that, they are not doing their most important work: Trying to destroy his entire political project. That political project is, I remind you, one of destroying the rest of us. An opposition that can’t dedicate itself to being the opposition is a weak opposition, indeed. And Trump has always enjoyed a weak opposition.

If you think that you are a savvy politician because you got Trump on your side regarding congestion pricing and meanwhile he is stripping thousands of your citizens of their birthright citizenship, you are wrong. If you think that you are a savvy union leader because you got Trump to a little better place on trade and meanwhile he is stripping every woman in your union of her right to abortion, you are wrong. If you think that you are a savvy liberal writer because you cajoled Trump into a little better place on foreign policy and meanwhile he is telling your trans friends that the government will no longer legally recognize their identity, you are wrong. You have made a miscalculation. You have not taken in the full picture of what you are dealing with here. You have been sold a worthless little bauble in exchange for something real. You have not done the math. You are the Greater Fool.

The bad guys are in charge right now. You can’t triangulate your way out of this. All you can do is fight.

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Independent Media in 2025

Part of the reason why it is easier for crooks to flourish today is that the traditional press, which played referee in the public interest, is in decline. Independent media, I would argue, is therefore more important than it has ever been in my lifetime. The site you are reading, How Things Work, is as independent as it gets. Here is how this site is able to exist: I ask that if you read it and find it to be of value, you become a paid subscriber. The price is pretty modest. As long as enough readers voluntarily pay for this site, I am able to continue producing it, and to keep it paywall-free so that those who can’t afford to pay can still read it. This is a system that I believe in, and that is working so far. If you’d like to help it keep working, take a few seconds to become a paid subscriber right now. Together we will keep it rolling. Thank you.

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More

• Related reading: How a Strongman Gets Stronger; Crypto, as a Political Characteristic; The End of Liberal Institutionalism.

• For the past few days, I’ve been in DC covering the inauguration for In These Times. I wrote one story on Sunday about the People’s March and the apparent lack of juice on the left right now. I wrote another story about Inauguration Day itself, which should be published today on InTheseTimes.com, and will be in the next print issue as well. Overall I would say that DC is going to be even more full of terrible people than it usually is for at least the next four years, and maybe forever.

• Often when I write about our grim political situation people ask, with hopelessness, “What can I do?” You can do a lot of things—join an organization that is fighting the good fight, and participate in it—but one thing I recommend most often is: Join the labor movement, by unionizing your workplace. Organized labor is the thing best positioned to resist what is coming, and it needs your help. I wrote a simple explainer post here about how to find help organizing, and other things you can do to help the labor movement. If you want more context, I wrote a book about this topic, called “The Hammer,” that you can buy wherever books are sold.