Great book! Very interesting analysis of how partisan politics allowed for the election of Donald Trump.

For our Country and a Democracy to flourish, there needs to be room for different viewpoints. This is why we often hear of Liberal, Progressive, Moderate, or Conservative Democrats or Moderate, Conservative, or Religious Right for Republicans. If the people running under those platforms believe in their philosophy, even if others vehemently oppose that viewpoint, we are working as a Country should.

The focus of this book is on the Conservative Republican Movement. It is very well researched. If some of us are left wondering how we are at this point in our country, this book does a wonderful job lying out the facts of those who were never really tied to ideology, but were flexible as long as Money and Power came to them. Joe Conason documents that this did not start with the Trump Presidency. It shows how starting in the 1950’s, Fear Tactics mostly about Communism were severe threats to our democracy. Using Threats to Safety is quite an effective strategy and beginning with Direct Mail, there was always someone to ask for money stopping the threat. Sadly, most of the time it never went to the causes it promised. Then with the Internet it became even easier to Swindle people out of their money. Since, the Conservative Party tends to be more anti-government, it made it easier to target these individuals. As the decades go by, The Religious Right comes into play, but this is the time when Mega Church Leaders who used Their own Charisma and Charm promoted a New Religion that promised Wealth. The targeting to Working Class People and the Tea Party begins to form. It is founded on Anti-Intellectualism and a Distaste for Politicians. Common Sense Politics start taking hold. The Point here is whatever held a little truth and conjured Terror among people willing to give money, many Unscrupulous People were happy to exploit that and get rich. Further, Entertainment News and Serious Journalism were crossing over more frequently.

Trump was on the Apprentice, a Reality TV Show, so not a Real Politician, but someone people remembered. He didn’t follow Conservative Ideology. Neither did the people he had work for him. Yet, that TV Fame and Showmanship Mirrored the TV Evangelicalism certain Born Again Christians knew well. Even as their leaders fell from grace, there were those who stepped in and offered Donald Trump as a New Savior.

He would Make America Great Again. Except, sadly he has not. He and most of the individuals around him will lie, cheat, steal, or go along with whatever provides huge payoffs for themselves. So, we are left with millions of Americans who feel the entire government operates like this and this spreads more cynicism and distrust. Decency, Honesty, and Integrity are seen as Naive. Greedy Individuals are running the Republican Party without even basic guidelines, let alone a Moral Ideology. This is quite dangerous. It has already led to unconscionable acts. This will continue unless our nation starts to really look at the facts. Joe Conason certainly lays those out here. Certainly, made me think and hope to see a return to expectations of decency to prevail.

Thank you NetGalley, Joe Conason, and St. Martin’s Press for a copy of this book. I always leave reviews of books I read.

As regular readers of this space know, I am forever trying to read and appreciate right wing, conservative viewpoints. But I keep running into irrationality, lies, and malfeasance that turns me right off. It has always astounded me that conservative writers and politicians are of such obviously low quality. The same goes for political candidates. But I keep trying, hoping to find a standard-bearer I can refer to and rely on for sound analysis and balance to the noise from the left. But then, Joe Conason showed up with his new book, The Longest Con.


Conason’s book traces the grifters of the Republican party from the early days in the Nixon administration, through outright theft and scams of it principals in the Reagan era, to the Trump era, where the president himself is the biggest grifter, scammer, liar and con artist of all. Ever. He surrounds himself with likeminded scammers, and encourages those down the line to feel free to rip off the government and the populace. It makes him proud of his choices. The grift is stunning in its vastness.


For some reason, when Republicans take power, they feel it gives them carte blanche to drain the coffers of the government. It could be bogus contracts, luxury vacations, meals and flights, kickbacks from contractors, or posing as if they had access to the highest reaches of government. It started embedding itself in the 1970s, and has never looked back, getting worse with every Republican administration. Hating government somehow means it is justifiable to steal as much as humanly possible from it. And wear it openly and proudly.


Government is one fatted calf. The other is Republicans themselves. Conason has an endless list of scams that Republicans bilk each other with, from overpriced gold coins to kitschy junk products (t shirts, caps, sneakers, commemorative “coins”, NFTs….). A growing trend is abusing religion, claiming to be of the faith in order to rip off the evangelicals. He goes on at tremendous length of how the evangelicals themselves rip each other off, claiming to be guided by God in person, proffering get rich quick investment funds, bilking the poor from their weekend religious tv and radio programs, getting the poor to tithe ten percent of their earnings for a place in God’s favor, which goes straight to yachts, condos and private planes. The sex and finance scandals that bring them down (Hargis, Bakker, Falwell, et al. are thoroughly profiled here) never seem to cast suspicion on the rest, who say and do the same things. And who get filthy rich off the modest true believers.


Conason found it hadn’t changed much over the decades: “What remained consistent in each succeeding variation was the reliance on exaggeration, deception, and fabrication, frequently permeated with racial apprehension and hostility, as well as a remorseless drive to squeeze every penny from the dupes.”


As the book comes closer to today, it becomes an all-Trump story. The entire last third of the book is just the Trump administration. There is as much grift in the Trump circles as in the history of it. Half his cabinet resigned in corruption scandals that made the worst ever cabinet in history (Ulysses S. Grant’s) seem like a choir of angels. The corruption of the president ($1.6B), Jared Kushner ($3B) and Ivanka Trump ($.6B) totals more than the GDP of many countries. Nothing in American history has ever even come close.


Trump pulled corrupt grifters like Roger Stone and Paul Manafort out of the dust of history to bilk the rubes once again. They originally ripped off foreign potentates and industrial bigwigs for millions in the Reagan era by claiming to be consultants with direct access to him. They lived high, and delivered nothing. Trump gave them free reign to try new scams, getting rich once again, and offering them pardons from prison as he left.


Conason thinks Trump learned from Roy Cohn, who cut his teeth with the fraudulent Senator Joe McCarthy and his communists-under-every-bed campaign. Cohn, isolated and hated, became a loud, obnoxious fighter for the less than pure, bullying his way to ever bigger paydays, and to hell with everyone. Conason thinks Trump learned at the feet of the master – never give in, never apologize for anything, double down instead, and fight everything loudly, posing as the victim. In a splendid display of his loyalty only to himself, Cohn went back and ripped off the retired Senator McCarthy himself, the kind of story that would make Donald Trump worship at his feet. Trump has called for a Roy Cohn in some of his innumerable, shall we say, difficulties. Alas, all he can find is Alina Habbas.


The book reaches back to the scams of the extreme right, always looking for a foothold in legit society. He examines the scams of the John Birch Society, the NRA, radio preachers, conspiracies about globalists, the deep state, and of course McCarthy. But it was Nixon’s administration that gave them freedom to operate and a home in the Republican party. This is when the open hate and extreme right factions began to attach themselves to the GOP. The rot led to the vice-president resigning in shame, followed by the president himself, by which act the replacement VP, Gerald Ford, suddenly found himself president. And the first thing he did was pardon Nixon. This is the model for Trump’s government.


But the Nixon administration was a babe in the woods, where a handful of operatives tooled around undermining the Democrats. In the next Republican regime, the Reagan administration, 138 officials were nabbed by the Justice Dept. for misconduct or criminal activities, right up to the attorney general, who accepted bribes to lobby the government from his exalted position in the cabinet. And saw nothing wrong with that. Today, we have Trump stealing dozens of cases of top secret documents and seeing nothing wrong with keeping them and storing them in a bathroom at his home, a club with hundreds of members and guests wandering about.


In the 1970s, direct mail came into fashion, changing the whole fundraising dynamic. Rather than beg or cajole, rather than tug at their heartstrings, marketers succeeded by being infuriating. They sought to enrage recipients with threats to their freedom, health, wealth and safety. But especially freedom. Communists were everywhere. They were taking over education, local government and invading your privacy. Immigrants, the Council on Foreign Relations, non-Christians, homosexuals, liberals, civil servants, the UN – absolutely anything could be used to aggravate the mailing list. People sent in money, and the marketers basically kept it, spending little or even none of it helping candidates or causes they espoused in the letters. The mailing list became the most prized possession one could hope for. It was the ticket to untold wealth, courtesy of tetchy, fearful conservatives nationwide.


Conason profiles Richard Viguerie, the man who discovered it all. At his peak, he controlled 300 mailing lists, churning out mailers 24/7, if not for clients then just for his own income. Conservatives are a gold mine for grifters.


And so with Donald Trump, constantly milking his court dates and setbacks for people to send him – a billionaire – more of what little money they have. He also did it with his so-called university, the sole goal of which was to sell more and more courses to those registered. It was not accredited, offered no real degrees, provided no education and no insights students couldn’t have found for themselves in bookstores and libraries. He did it with his “charity”, which provided him with free money. And he does it with every judicial setback he undergoes – and they are practically weekly now.


As for his book, The Art of the Deal, it is entirely fiction, written by ghostwriter Tony Schwartz, who never thought it would go anywhere. That it was just a frivolous vanity publication. But Schwartz is spending the rest of his life downplaying the monster he created. Trump, Schwartz and the publisher say, provided not one word for that book. Schwartz claims it should be recategorized as fiction and should be titled The Sociopath.


The extraordinarily low quality of Republicans came home to roost with John McCain, whose team selected Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska for VP, before it vetted her. Because the Republican party was not out to find a quality VP, but a young woman VP to balance John McCain’s elderly male hero image. She knew no history, no law, no processes. She had never heard of the Federal Reserve, didn’t know there were two world wars, or two Koreas. She thought Africa was a country. Nonetheless, she instantly acquired a cult following as a “hockey mom”, and keeps millions of dollars they send her PAC for her to spend as she pleases. If McCain had won and then developed brain cancer and died as he did, it is unimaginable what would have become of the United States under Sarah Palin. But she put a stop to that possibility every time she spoke, which was way too often. McCain’s campaign was dead on arrival.


In private life, Trump aligns himself with criminals and fugitives for his partnerships. During the Financial Crisis, his son Eric proudly announced that The Trump Organization had no problems with finances, because all its funding came from Russia. He did not add that it was because no US banks would have him as a client. Deutsche Bank was the last of a long line of banking regrets, despite Trump’s court bleatings that no banks were harmed by him or ever complained about him. For Conason, Trump is “the transmogrification of the American Right into a shameless hustle, devoid of principle and fully devoted to exploitation.”


Nothing in The Longest Con is new. Conason used readily available public sources to put this history together. He made no discoveries that he would have to back up with his own sources. He did not have to seek out grizzled historians to flesh out the scams. This is just the way the Republican party rolls now. It no longer even bothers with a platform. It is just about hate and fear and the money they can bring in. And that is possibly the most frightening fact of all.



David Wineberg

A fascinating account about how the conservatives within the Republican party have been conning the public into donating money without informing the donors where the money is spent, usually goes to the people in charge. Mr. Conason went into great detail on the relationship between evangelical preachers how the align with the leaders of Republican party and con the parishioners of their money usually to line their own pockets. I did find the book to be depressing knowing what is happening and not knowing how to stop it.

Thank you St. Martin’s Press for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own. No review was required in return for an advance reading copy and no review was promised.

i just finished The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism by Joe Conason.

I’ve been a fan of Conason’s writing ever since I originally found his work during the George W. Bush administration. So, I was very excited to see that he is having a new book come out. I came into reading this with very high expectations and the book definitely lived up to them.

The thesis of this book is how the conservative movement, and the Republican party, has turned into one big con game. As Conason does a great job showing, it didn’t just start with Trump. Trump is just another datapoint, albeit a very huge one, in an ongoing tale that has lasted decades.

The Longest Con traces it all back to the early 1950s, with Roy Cohen: the infamous lawyer who also became Trump’s mentor.

One of the highlights of the book was the discussion anticommunism movement and it shows its connections to profit motives and religious groups. As one state Attorney General noted, “No wonder this whole movement has been called ‘Patriotism for Profit.’”

One of the most fascinating revelations of the book was how the exposure of Richard Nixon’s corruptions actually made him more popular among many right-wingers and authorities. Ass veteran activist said “If I’d known he’d been up to all that stuff, I’d have been for Nixon all along. I didn’t like Nixon until Watergate.”

Another big highlight of the book was the discussion of the Reagan years, especially the focus on all of the corruption. More than 200 members of the Reagan administration came under ethical or criminal investigation, with 38 indictments. By comparison: 28 members of the Nixon administration were indicted for Watergate, while Clinton’s administration resulted in just two, with none under Obama. And, as Conason points out, while Iran-Contra was the biggest scandal of the administration, there were others that cost the American taxpayers a lot more money. As P.J. O’Rourke summed up the Reagan years, “Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work—and then they get elected and prove it.” But, what Conason adds is this is al of their plan to enrich personal profit and power.

The discussion of the infamous Bush 43 administration, as well as the conservative movement during those years was also one of the highlights of the book. While he’s been overshadowed by the scandals and crimes of his successor, George W. Bush had been our worst president prior to Bush.

And, then when the discussion turned to Trump, it was a series of even more excellent chapters. The book was focused not only on the president himself, but also the many corrupt people he surrounded himself with in his administration.

I gave this book an A+, which results in its induction into my Hall of Fame. NetGalley, Goodreads and Amazon require grades on a 1-5 star system. In my personal conversion system, an A+ equates to 5 stars. (A or A+: 5 stars, B+: 4 stars, B: 3 stars, C: 2 stars, D or F: 1 star).

I just hope that it is also released in Audible format, so I can enjoy it again.

This review has been posted at NetGalley, Goodreads and my blog, Mr. Book’s Book Reviews. It will be posted at Amazon when it is released on July 9.

Mr. Book originally finished reading this on May 29, 2024.