The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism

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. (July)