Donald Trump, Con Artist?

The New Yorker:

Late last month, on “Good Morning America,” “CBS This Morning,” and other political talk shows, Marco Rubio called Donald Trump “a con artist.” (“We’re on the verge of having someone take over the conservative movement and the Republican Party who’s a con artist,” he said, on “Today.”) Trump, Rubio argued, has made a career of “sticking it to working Americans”; several of his businesses had gone bankrupt and some, like Trump University, may have been fraudulent. Rubio implied that Trump’s Presidential campaign was another instance of intentional deception. It’s a message we’ve heard not just from Rubio, but from Ted Cruz and Mitt Romney, as well as various pundits. I heard it with special interest: my book “The Confidence Game,” about con artists and the psychology of the con, was published earlier this year. Suppose that Trump is a con artist—what, exactly, would that mean?

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As Shelley Taylor, a psychologist at the University of California at Los Angeles, put it, people generally believe that “the present is better than the past and that the future will be even better.” It’s how we get through life. Taylor explained that “in effect, most people seem to be saying, ‘The future will be great, especially for me.’ ”

Read the whole story: The New Yorker