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Donald Trump and the Art of the ‘Con’

The president keeps inveighing against all the con jobs he imagines surrounding him. You could say that it takes one to know one.

Ben Zimmer
The Atlantic, SEPTEMBER 27, 2018

Excerpt...

But perhaps the most significant word of all for Trump was a three-letter one: con. More than a dozen times he used it in the phrases con artist, con job, or con game. First, he called out Democrats as “con artists” for destroying the reputation of his Supreme Court pick, Brett Kavanaugh, characterizing the mounting accusations of sexual misconduct as “a big fat con job.” The lawyer Michael Avenatti, representing one of the accusers, got singled out as a “con artist,” and he insisted that even “George Washington would be voted against 100 percent by [Senator Chuck] Schumer and the con artists.”

Amidst all of this “con” talk, Hannah Thomas-Peter from Sky News asked Trump, “Are you at all concerned at the message that is being sent to the women who are watching this when you use language like con job?” Trump interrupted her, saying, “I’ve used much worse language in my life than con job. That’s, like, probably the nicest phrase I’ve ever used.” He then offered an etymological lesson: “It’s a con job. You know, confidence. It’s a confidence job.” He proceeded into a discussion of the Russia investigation, which—you guessed it—is nothing but a “con job.” After all of that, he had the chutzpah to add, “And it’s not a bad term. It’s not a bad term at all.”

Snip...

By the time young Donald Trump was growing up in mid-20th-century Queens, “con jobs” and “con artists” were part of the urban scenery. Not surprisingly, the word shows up several times in the book he cowrote in 1987 with Tony Schwartz, The Art of the Deal. “I’ve always felt that a lot of modern art is a con,” he opines. A less-than-trustworthy project manager named Irving is described as “a con man” who “had done all sorts of con jobs and swindles.” And one of his major precepts in the chapter on “The Elements of the Deal” states, “You can’t con people, at least not for long … If you don’t deliver the goods, people will eventually catch on.” (Trump would quote this line in a 2011 tweet, directed at House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor when they were pushing through their plan to resolve the debt-ceiling crisis.)

Trump likes to portray himself as a man who knows all the cons and can’t be conned himself. You could say that it takes one to know one. In the 2016 Republican primaries, Senator Marco Rubio referred to Trump on several occasions as a “con man” or “con artist,” a characterization he stood by even after dropping out of the race and supporting Trump as the nominee. And Schwartz, his Art of the Deal co-author, said on MSNBC last year that when Trump talks about con artists, it’s “classic projection”: “That notion that he’s a con man, believe me, that is deep inside what he knows himself to be.” No wonder he keeps inveighing against all the con jobs he imagines surrounding him, all the better to deflect attention from his presidential confidence trick.

Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/09/donald-trump-and-the-art-of-the-con/571528/