In addition to building a damning case that Donald Trump and his co-conspirators hatched a premeditated scheme to steal a presidential election they knew he’d lost, the Jan. 6 committee has exposed the latest chapter in a story that’s at least half a century old.
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We’re talking about the sordid, ongoing phenomenon otherwise known as the right-wing grift machine. For decades, the peddling of hallucinatory tales of impending doom aimed at conservatives has overlapped with the crassest of money-grabbing schemes.
The Jan. 6 committee has documented in vivid new detail how Trump and his allies wielded the stolen election lie to raise up to $250 million from Republican and conservative voters. Yet the “Official Election Defense Fund” that was supposed to be the repository of these funds appears not to exist. Much of that money, the committee says, was channeled back to political outfits run by top Trump allies.
Historian Rick Perlstein, who has written many books about the American right, is uniquely suited to place this story in the larger context of the modern conservative movement’s predilection for such grift.
At least since the 1960s, Perlstein argues, conservative elites have seen extremist tendencies on the right as a ripe target for manipulation, for the purposes of mobilizing mass political movements. That has often shaded into money-raising schemes that smack of outright grift.
Perlstein has traced this pattern from Barry Goldwater’s 1964 Republican presidential campaign through conservative activist Richard Viguerie’s self-serving direct mail fundraising in the 1970s. It runs through Ronald Reagan’s 1966 bid for governor of California, his 1980 presidential race and even his hawking of miracle cancer cures.
It goes through Newt Gingrich’s 1994 House takeover and then through the tea party. Now, it runs right down to Trump’s monumental stolen-election scam.
I reached out to Perlstein to make sense of the latest developments. An edited and condensed version of our conversation follows.
Greg Sargent: The Jan. 6 hearings have uncovered extraordinary grift on the part of Trump and his fellow coup plotters. They raised huge sums of cash off their lies about the election, then channeled a bunch of it back into groups run by top Trump allies.
What do you see in this particular form of grifting?
Rick Perlstein: What is the distinction between the Republican Party under Trump that we see on full display in these hearings and the Republican Party prior to Trump?
This phenomenon of conservative Republican leaders seeing their constituencies as a pool of marks to squeeze money out of really does go back to the beginnings of the conservative takeover of the Republican Party in the 1960s.
As is so often the case in the Republican Party under the Trumpist reign, it takes normal historical patterns of behavior and turns them up to 11.
Sargent: The “big lie” actually was the “big grift.”
Perlstein: It’s partially an opportunity to raise money. It’s also partially an opportunity to keep power. The important thing to understand about how grifting works in conservative culture is that the two things work together.
It’s impossible to understand where the ideological con ends and the money con begins. They work together.
In the late 1970s, when people started drilling down into Richard Viguerie’s operation, they would say, “You’re making tons of money, and the people you’re raising money for are receiving little or none of it.”
He would say, “Every time we send out one of these letters, we’re also educating the public. We’re also building power. We’re also telling a story about the liberals.” Their own self-understanding was: This is also a political project.
Sign up for a weekly roundup of thought-provoking ideas and debates
We’re talking about the sordid, ongoing phenomenon otherwise known as the right-wing grift machine. For decades, the peddling of hallucinatory tales of impending doom aimed at conservatives has overlapped with the crassest of money-grabbing schemes.
The Jan. 6 committee has documented in vivid new detail how Trump and his allies wielded the stolen election lie to raise up to $250 million from Republican and conservative voters. Yet the “Official Election Defense Fund” that was supposed to be the repository of these funds appears not to exist. Much of that money, the committee says, was channeled back to political outfits run by top Trump allies.
Historian Rick Perlstein, who has written many books about the American right, is uniquely suited to place this story in the larger context of the modern conservative movement’s predilection for such grift.
At least since the 1960s, Perlstein argues, conservative elites have seen extremist tendencies on the right as a ripe target for manipulation, for the purposes of mobilizing mass political movements. That has often shaded into money-raising schemes that smack of outright grift.
Perlstein has traced this pattern from Barry Goldwater’s 1964 Republican presidential campaign through conservative activist Richard Viguerie’s self-serving direct mail fundraising in the 1970s. It runs through Ronald Reagan’s 1966 bid for governor of California, his 1980 presidential race and even his hawking of miracle cancer cures.
It goes through Newt Gingrich’s 1994 House takeover and then through the tea party. Now, it runs right down to Trump’s monumental stolen-election scam.
I reached out to Perlstein to make sense of the latest developments. An edited and condensed version of our conversation follows.
Greg Sargent: The Jan. 6 hearings have uncovered extraordinary grift on the part of Trump and his fellow coup plotters. They raised huge sums of cash off their lies about the election, then channeled a bunch of it back into groups run by top Trump allies.
What do you see in this particular form of grifting?
Rick Perlstein: What is the distinction between the Republican Party under Trump that we see on full display in these hearings and the Republican Party prior to Trump?
This phenomenon of conservative Republican leaders seeing their constituencies as a pool of marks to squeeze money out of really does go back to the beginnings of the conservative takeover of the Republican Party in the 1960s.
As is so often the case in the Republican Party under the Trumpist reign, it takes normal historical patterns of behavior and turns them up to 11.
Sargent: The “big lie” actually was the “big grift.”
Perlstein: It’s partially an opportunity to raise money. It’s also partially an opportunity to keep power. The important thing to understand about how grifting works in conservative culture is that the two things work together.
It’s impossible to understand where the ideological con ends and the money con begins. They work together.
In the late 1970s, when people started drilling down into Richard Viguerie’s operation, they would say, “You’re making tons of money, and the people you’re raising money for are receiving little or none of it.”
He would say, “Every time we send out one of these letters, we’re also educating the public. We’re also building power. We’re also telling a story about the liberals.” Their own self-understanding was: This is also a political project.
