The Longest Con

Starred review from May 15, 2024
Politicians and corruption seem to go together as naturally as salt and pepper. Though grifting has become more blatant in the Trump era, it has been a driving force in American politics for decades. Award-winning journalist Conason begins his deep dive into the charlatan swamp with an exploration of the unholy cabal of Roy Cohn and Joseph McCarthy during the 1950s HUAC investigations. Subsequent big-name scandals such as Watergate and Iran-Contra gave way to the pervasive drip, drip, drip of smaller cons perpetrated by dodgy PACs and bogus not-for-profits in which ill-gotten funds transferred from one to another as fluidly as a Slinky cascading down a staircase. Rarely did any of the millions raised go to their purported causes. Instead, the scammers at the top of the organizational chart just got richer while their willing dupes kept dinging their debit cards. In his examination of the massive fraud, fleecing, and self-dealing that has reshaped American politics, Conason focuses on campaign and administration cons as well as the schemes hatched by influential agencies such as the NRA and evangelical movements. With disinformation run amok, unwavering investigations such as Conason's are essential reality checks on the duplicitous nature of money in politics.

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June 1, 2024

Conason (editor in chief, The National Memo; Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton) pulls no punches in this wide-ranging survey of right-wing political extremism in the United States. Starting with communist conspiracy theories and McCarthyism in the 1950s, the book traces the growing influence of Republican Party fringe groups and movements. For example, Conason finds a direct link from John Birch Society views to present-day paranoia about QAnon theories. The book weaves together significant threads in this progression: the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade; the Goldwater movement; the machinations of Richard Nixon's presidential reelection campaign; the Reagan administration's indictments; Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority; the Tea Party movement of the late aughts; and the rise of Trumpism. The roles of the church and right-wing media celebrities are also given attention. The final chapters focus on Trump's business schemes and failures and the prevalent corruption throughout his presidency. Conason's book is well researched, although it often reads like a series of in-depth magazine expos�s as opposed to a cohesive work. VERDICT A worthy addition to the growing body of literature about the current state of U.S. politics. Pairs well with Sarah Posner's God's Profits: Faith, Fraud and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters and Maggie Haberman's Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.--Thomas Karel

Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2024
A book whose title puts the con in conservatism, exposing far-right politics as a long-running shell game. "Conservative philosophy demands civic virtue and moral rigor," writes political journalist Conason, author of Big Lies and Man of the World. Yet "Americans who call themselves conservative are undeniably more susceptible to the multiplying varieties of politically tinged fakery," including fake cancer cures, Amway soap, NFTs, gold tennis shoes, and MAGA hats made in China. However, notes the author, the con far antedates Trump and Trumpism. His story begins 70 years ago with Joseph McCarthy henchman Roy Cohn--Trump's pre-Giuliani lawyer--who took a junket to Europe putatively to ferret out communists in the State Department but instead holed up in fancy hotels. Cohn traded in hatred and fear, as did the forerunners of today's right-wing Christian nationalists, "scaring impressionable rubes by the thousands while relieving them of large wads of cash." A direct path connects Billy James Hargis and Jerry Falwell to Ralph Reed and today's megachurch supremacists, just as a solid line runs from the self-dealing vandals of the Reagan administration to Sarah Palin, who traded on commercialized fame and monetized ideology, then on to the endless supply of unabashed grifters who continue to loyally serve the MAGA-verse. Conason stops to look deeply into the Trump University swindle, which would seem to be emblematic of Trump-style business writ large. "Grifting may be too mild a term" for their collective crimes, Conason concludes, with the big lie being yet another instrument with which to separate the rubes from their money. The author is intemperate but not shrill, which won't do a thing to separate Trumpists from their apparent devotion to being played. Still, his righteous, indignant anger makes for oddly entertaining reading. A timely contribution to the present election cycle.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

August 12, 2024
The scams and lies that characterize today’s Republican party are “less a comic distraction than a central feature,” one endemic to the past several decades of the party’s history, according to this well-researched and rambunctious account. Journalist Conason (Man of the World) traces the origins of the party’s swindler ethos back to Republican hatchet man—and eventual Trump associate—Roy Cohn, the unscrupulous attorney who masterminded Joe McCarthy’s anticommunist crusade. Cohn “demonstrated how a conspiracy theory could be used not only to advance a far-right agenda but to glom unearned benefits for himself,” Conason argues, probing at a little-remembered episode of the 1950s Red Scare in which Cohn, claiming that American national security was threatened by “supposedly leftish books in United States Information Service libraries across postwar Europe,” went on a junket across Europe to root out the communist influence, most of which he spent luxuriating at five-star hotels on the taxpayer dime. Later chapters delve into similar episodes of personal enrichment connected to Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, Richard Nixon’s dirty tricksters, Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, and the Tea Party movement. Conason’s account culminates with a fascinating blow-by-blow of Donald Trump’s takeover of the swindler wing of the party in the mid-2010s, coopting and overshadowing the Tea Party as a stepping stone on his way to the presidency (“Trump ingested the movement whole, scarcely pausing to burp”). It’s an entertaining and eye-opening litany of misdeeds.