The 2024 election is over and career con man Donald J. Trump has pulled off his biggest con ever. (Cue music from The Sting.)

And now the losing Democratic party is being force-fed chest-beating analysis where the public is told Democrats did “everything” wrong and that they just don’t “get it.” As the week progressed, these claims became more strident leading to headlines telling Democrats to “change everything” or to re-invent themselves.

Yet this wasn’t a landslide. Trump eked out his usual type of win — the type of near-loss which is a hallmark of his career. Having spent far too much time around business Con Men or Women, I decided I had to offer the conversation some insights which might seem unusual to political operatives. This starts with a demand that we accept the truth: America Fell for a Con-man’s Act.

Before we proceed, though, I want to to be clear — those who voted for Trump were not “dumb” as ANY of us can be turned by anxiety in a con. It’s embarrassing to admit but a few years ago I lost a significant sum of money when conned by a classic group of phishers portraying themselves as my bank customer service department with tremendous sophistication. No one is “dumb” in this — Democrats and Republicans alike were played in Trump’s con.

Further, elections are woven of many complex and inter-related threads. No one view can ever summarize “why” an election turned. We must consider many points of view similar to how each photograph of our dog reveals different truths about her whole personality. Anyone wanting to understand this election (from either side) must consider many analyses as each can reveal something about the whole. I offer this post as simply one of many analyses — a viewpoint I believe has value and is unique.

Electioneering as an Internet Fraud

Trump’s long-con is remarkably similar to modern internet frauds which one article simplifies to two-steps:

1. Give scam victims a sense of urgency or make them feel unsafe or in danger.
2. Offer them a solution or way to get to safety.

Key to the scam working is creating anxiety in the target — only by making people feel unsafe can the con earn victims’ trust. Dr. Patricia Harney explains “Anxiety is all about the response to a threat,” and continues “When you feel unsafe, the immediate instinct is to do whatever you can to feel safer.”

Having engendered high states of anxiety, the con men and women step in promising safety or protection — even in the patently absurd claim by Donald Trump that women should give up and seek his protection. Dr. Harney continues “it’s a natural response to accept that help.” These are the tactics of a one-on-one internet scam. But they are also the mass market tactics of an election con.

Evidence of The Election Con

“Like trade, cons are voluntary exchanges, what most people call “deals.” And, like fraud, cons are voluntary exchanges induced by misleading representations. This ambiguity, in turn, complicates efforts to fight cons [while] philosophical beliefs provide rationales for objections to such efforts.” (Con Men and Their Enablers: The Anatomy of Confidence Games by Barak Orbach, Lindsey Huang)

Our evidence begins with the anxiety created to manipulate voters. It is clearly seen in the data as most of those who voted for Trump believed anxiety producing things fully and easily proven false. Consider some examples from an Ipsos chart which was so badly organized I won’t present the chart here:

• Trump voters believed violent crime rates are at or near all-time highs in most major American cities. This is entirely false.
• Trump voters believed inflation a massive problem even though inflation in the U.S. has declined over the last year and is near historic averages.
• Trump voters believed stocks were failing yet the U.S. stock market is at or near all-time highs — far higher than under Donald J. Trump.
• Trump voters believed the borders were fully uncontrolled. Yet over the last few months, unauthorized border crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border are at or near the lowest level in the last few years.

Evidence of the scam is also found in the very direct statements of a large number of high level ex-Trump administration operatives who warned American of the scam. Additional evidence is found in that the Trump “gang” benefited without creating general Republican strength.

• Of 6 swing states Trump won, five elected Democratic senators with Pennsylvania the one exception.
• Abortion rights were generally supported across the country despite clear evidence Trump will enable Republicans to continue to roll them back.

Digging into qualitative information, an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal is a useful read. About half of what the author writes are heartfelt, wise observations (eg: how “loving acceptance of trans people was transformed into speech control”). Yet the other half of the article is filled with false claims showing she was taken in by the long-con — lies about the state of affairs in the US like claiming Democrats have breached “our First Amendment rights … using canny convolutions like “misinformation” and “conspiracy” to justify suppressing ideas they don’t like.” In this she reveals how deeply she absorbed the anxiety created by the team of con-conspirators hired by Trump.

Another interesting case involves a Twitter account which gathered uncommitted voters with the appearance of honest soul-searching only to suddenly commit to Trump in the last few days and suddenly become an extreme advocate for Trump. I suspect this individual account is an intentional part of the long-con — modeling the naive behavior they want voters to follow. In fact, I suspect they were paid for their efforts in some way.

Those who voted against Trump were also conned. His campaign’s outlandish claims were easily ignored by those who thought themselves too smart to be taken in. Choosing those claims, the campaign forced Democrats away from those who needed to hear what they had to say. In other words, Democrats were played also.

My Own Experience Around Scammers

I bring to this topic unusual experience around scammers. That might seem weird and it certainly seems weird to me as I look back on my career.

Yet for 25 years I introduced new consumer products using direct response television advertising and for 20 of those years I owned and ran my own agency doing this work. Direct response television offered exceptional opportunity for solid, reputable companies to help people understand new products in ways no other medium could do. Yet in my work I had to attend trade-shows for direct response television companies to meet the vendors we engaged for our customers. As a result, I crossed paths with far too many scammers — and some of those were direct competitors scamming large brands for near term profits. Yes, they made infomercials.

The scamming was so wide-spread I used to joke that after 2 hours on the trade-show floor I had to return to my room to shower off the filth from rubbing shoulders in that crowd. While we found excellent service vendors, the product selling companies were usually scammers in their hearts and souls. Here are a few examples:

• Having started doing some work for a very large European DR marketer, one day the owner bragged that their most successful ad had sold millions because it claimed the product did what it couldn’t do.
• The HEAD of the DRTV trade-show organization mounted a US campaign for an electronic belt claimed to exercise abs while sitting in an easy chair. Knowing they lied, he put it onto the market in such a massive, rapidly scaled campaign that the company made millions in profit (and stashed millions in their legal defense fund) in the few short months it took for the FTC to shut them down. They walked away rich.
• An unfortunate choice to take a certain project led me to end up in a room where the client and her business partner tried to convince me to illegally fake before/after results — suggesting it was OK because we’d get away with it. They claimed the FDA and FTC weren’t enforcing the laws at that time (which they probably weren’t but that didn’t matter to me).
• Many of these con-men and women eventually fled off-shore. One was put onto a panel I moderated and told me Eastern Europe was a great market because he could lie as much as he wanted to sell vast sums of products because no government would care.

Point Number 1: Con-men and women exist and Donald Trump is one of them. The Democratic Party doesn’t seem to comprehend that such a person could be involved in a national election. In July I put out a post worried about Joe Biden stepping off the ticket — partly because I felt only Biden had the savvy to win against Trump’s manipulations — the Trump long-con.

The dismay at Trump’s win reminds me of enlightenment thinkers. Believing strongly in free and independent men (it was the 1700s) guided by logic and rationality, they were shocked when the working men of their day used these new ideas to take over the government in a horrible, primal, and raw bloodbath. Isaiah Berlin suggests they had ignored the same forces which led to 20th (and 21st) century totalitarian regimes.

Point Number 2: Well paced political approaches do not work against the con. Donald Trump dominated headlines from the debate to the election using unconventional and disreputable methods. That these methods were disreputable, though, doesn’t excuse Democratic inability to expect that they would arrive and to be prepared to succeed despite them. This long-con regularly upended normalcy to create the high anxiety needed for people willingly vote against their best interests. Trump’s claim about eating dogs and cats was one strategic move along the way — a literal version of a political scam known as the Dead Cat Strategy.

There is one thing that is absolutely certain about throwing a dead cat on the dining room table – and I don’t mean that people will be outraged, alarmed, disgusted. That is true, but irrelevant. The key point, says my Australian friend, is that everyone will shout, “Jeez, mate, there’s a dead cat on the table!” In other words, they will be talking about the dead cat – the thing you want them to talk about – and they will not be talking about the issue that has been causing you so much grief. (Wikipedia)

Author Rory Sutherland offers important insight about people like Trump in his excellent book Alchemy. Large bureaucratic operations become so predictable — and this well summarizes the Democratic Party today — that they open the door for someone like Trump to use predictability against them by being entirely unpredictable. Unpredictability gave Trump control of the game. Both parties must find a way to prevent this.

Winning Against a Con-Woman or Man

Living at the edges of the DRTV business, I sometimes competed against con-men. It took time to develop the skills and habits to remain focused on what mattered for clients AND to win good business despite the con-men. A few thoughts from this experience.

• We had to learn to detect the con-game in its early stages. Only this way could we protect the company and win the business which made sense for us.
• We had to learn not all wins are good for a company — some win’s cost more than is worth it. This is not to say that losing an election is good. Yet something good can be brought out of every defeat — no matter how painful.
• We had to learn to find those people and companies who disliked the con-man. While it is frustrating to see people being conned, people do NOT want to be conned. We found the people who embraced what we offered and focused on what mattered to them. Democrats must abandon any idea “they were so stupid they were conned”  to find empathy for people led to give away their vote so that Trump could aggrandize himself.
• We had to learn that every con-man situation is different in order to respond quickly to the uniqueness of THIS con — here and now. Resilience requires adaptability. The Democratic Party seems quite brittle and slow to adapt today.

Over time we found powerful ways to win — including an incredible 8-year run creating and running national television ads introducing new products for Lowes Home Improvement stores. Our ads appeared in MNF, World Series Games, and more — one was even a topic in Jay Leno’s opening monologue. We also worked with companies who had been scammed and learned, first hand, Mark Twain’s admonition that “It’s far easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled.”

Democracy is Vulnerable to Con Games

Ordinary politicians fail when confronted by a confidence game. Why? They trust in a type of orderly logic to how things proceed. There’s a famous story about Sara Palin’s run for governor of Alaska where she had dinner with her opponent before a debate. As the story goes, she thought the guy was brilliant and knew far more than she did about policy. She also knew it didn’t matter as she would win the debate by avoiding policy.

Donald Trump also knows this about ordinary politicians and used it to upend all logic as he has done throughout his career. Unless Democrats and Republicans both learn to respond successfully amid con-men, our democracy will continue to have periodic chaos hurting our economic and social development. Yet the US is not alone in having fallen for a scam. The UK fell for con man Boris Johnson who embedded the country in a full-blown Brexit disaster. And, today, we seem to be in a period where con men take over democratic governments. While this won’t be happening forever, world conditions are somehow ripe for political con men and women at this point in time.

So while the Democratic party (and also the Republican Party) needs to continue its soul searching, both parties must also learn how to defeat con men and women. In the Republican case, the con-man took over their party. In the Democratic case, the con-man controlled the final two-months of the campaign in ways typical for con-men.

Important wisdom is also needed as we view the many views of the election. Phil Rosenzweig, in The Halo Effect, observed “[W]e don’t want to read just that Lego’s sales were sharply down, we want an explanation of what happened. It can’t just have been bad luck — there must have been some reason why a proud company…suddenly did so badly.” Americans who care about a better future must reject the mad dash to psychologically comfortable answers because they are clear and simple — they are also wrong. Sometimes, a great deal of bad luck also contributes to election loss.

In this case, we face at least the bad luck that democracy is vulnerable to con games — a truth our founders knew but could not prevent while ensuring we still had a republic. We must also learn that policy and logic do not guarantee electoral wins. To win elections, those who have valid and important ideas must also be street-smart — able to dominate the conversation against a con-man like Trump.

Unless both parties accept this truth they risk making things worse through their own actions. And if this happens, they will once-again been conned.

Be well. A few thoughts for recovery after this election are offered below.

©2024 Doug Garnett — All Rights Reserved

Through my company, Protonik LLC, I consult with companies as they design and bring to market new and innovative products and am writing a book exploring the critical value of complexity in business success. That said, I have a lifelong interest in politics and government — their critical importance to healthy nations, healthy societies, and healthy business. 

Some Added Thoughts on Emotional Recovery after this Election

There is always frustration for the party which loses an election but this week I’ve seen far more depression, sadness, and confusion than is typical — and have felt it myself. Let me offer, then, the following image from a Feedzai article about the emotional results of being scammed.

The entirety of America was scammed though at the moment it is most deeply felt by those who voted against Trump. Many today feel a powerlessness to take action yet fear even for their own safety — especially if they are Democrats living in hard core MAGA environment or are part of a minority population Trump has promised to punish.

Eventually, the majority of those who voted for Trump will also feel this fallout as they come to grips with how they have been scammed. The continuing convictions for criminal activity on January 6 — after the last election — reveal that many defendants now realize that Trump conned them into doing things they would never have done under ordinary circumstances.