The Land of Greater Fools
America as a big con.
Hamilton Nolan
Jan 21, 2025
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.
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 ****ing 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 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.
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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.
