The Mark Always Thinks He is the Dealer: How James B. Greenberg Cons Himself
A rebuttal to
’s article, “The Confidence Game: How Trump’s Con Threatens More Than the Truth”.The confidence game.
A clever metaphor. An elegant structure. A beautifully crafted illusion — delicate enough to impress, deceptive enough to distract, seductive enough to ensnare.
But like every sleight of hand — like every well-worn grifter’s trick — its success depends not on the brilliance of the magician, but on the inattention of the audience.
It depends on one thing.
That you never look too closely at the man behind the curtain.
Let’s look closer.
Let’s see what the magician does not want seen.
This critique, for all its eloquence, rests not on bold truth — but on a fragile, convenient, and deeply unserious premise: that narrative itself is fraud — but only when Donald J. Trump wields it.
As though the political story — the crafting of grievance, the identifying of villains, the promise of salvation — was some corrupt invention born in the golden escalator descent of 2015.
As though every president before him was some sterile technocrat, sterile of myth, unsullied by symbolism, untouched by story.
Tell me — what exactly was Hope and Change?
What was Yes We Can?
What was Build Back Better?
What is Equity — if not the latest, most ludicrous theological Big Lie of the modern Left? A gospel without grace. A salvation without merit. A promise that history itself will be rewritten to crown the favored victim.
Politics is — and always has been — the art of narrative. Always has been. Always will be.
The question is never who tells the story. The question is always: whose story survives contact with reality. Because every tyrant tells a story. But so does every patriot.
Every conman spins a yarn. But so does every revolutionary. The dividing line is not in the telling. The dividing line is in the truth.
You warn us — with grave theatricality — that the confidence game ends only when the mark admits he was fooled. Very well. Let’s speak plainly. Let’s speak as men unafraid to confront error.
Who was fooled?
Who bought the fantasy?
Was it the working-class American who believed manufacturing jobs could return — and then watched Trump bring them roaring back to levels unseen in half a century before the artificial interruption of COVID shattered the global economy?
Was it the energy worker — the welder, the roughneck, the man with dirt on his hands and callouses on his soul — who believed America could be energy independent? And then lived to see the first net energy exporter in modern history — the shale boom, the keystone revival, the very thing the climate cultists had promised was impossible?
Was it the Black or Hispanic American who believed wages could rise faster for minorities than for elites — and then watched it happen for the first time in decades during the Trump economy?
Or was it, perhaps — as we ask the harder question — the man who believed that Hillary Clinton was inevitable? That the Steele dossier was real? That Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation? That lockdowns would save lives? That masking toddlers was science? That vaccines would stop transmission? That men could become women? That printing trillions of dollars would not create inflation?
Tell me — who was conned? Who was the mark?
Because from where I stand, it was not the forgotten American — not the farmer, not the trucker, not the man who placed his battered hope in a flawed, pugnacious billionaire who promised to fight for him.
No.
The mark was the obedient subject — the man who trusted the system that laughed at his suffering while enriching itself. It was not Trump who erased trust in America’s institutions. It was the institutions — through their relentless, suicidal devotion to propaganda over truth, control over service, censorship over dialogue — that obliterated their own credibility.
And now — stripped of moral authority — they sneer at those who dared look elsewhere for leadership. But here — here is the tragedy your essay dares not confront. Here is the wound your metaphor cannot heal.
The people you pity as marks — the truck driver in Ohio, the rancher in Texas, the single mother in Michigan — they were betrayed.
Not by Trump. By you. By the system. By the media-industrial complex that gaslit them for decades. By the permanent political class who exported their jobs, imported their replacements, mocked their faith, insulted their patriotism, and told them to sit down, shut up, and wait their turn in a line that was never going to move.
And for decades they turned — with humility, with patience, with dignity — to Democrats, to Republicans, to unions, to churches, to schools, to newspapers — and found nothing but contempt.
Trump did not create their loyalty. He earned it. Not because he was perfect. Not because he was some messianic figure. But because he did what no one else would do:
He told them the truth. He told them that their suffering was real. That their nation deserved better. That their voices mattered. And if that is a con — then may God raise up ten thousand more.
Because the alternative is what you offer: an America governed not by citizens, but by managers; not by consent, but by manipulation; not by truth, but by narrative maintenance teams staffed by credentialed liars.
An America run by insulated elites, unelected technocrats, corporate overlords, and federal agencies whose faith in democracy extends only as far as their control over its outcomes.
You worry — with trembling pen — that we will lose the republic.
Open your eyes. We lost it long before Trump. We lost it when citizenship became secondary to consumerism. When politics became theater for donors. When truth became negotiable. When patriotism became mockery. When the American flag was treated with more suspicion than foreign banners. When dissent was branded extremism. When free speech became misinformation.
If we recover this republic — if we rebuild this fragile, beautiful thing called America — it will not be because the system saved us. It will be because ordinary Americans — despised, defamed, mocked, ridiculed — stood their ground. And believed not in a man. But in themselves. In their dignity. In their worth. In their country.
That is not a confidence game. That is not a long con. That is the last hope of a free people.
And if you cannot see the difference — if you genuinely cannot distinguish between the story of a tyrant and the cry of the forgotten — then perhaps you were never playing with a full deck to begin with.
And worse still — perhaps you never cared to.
This is extraordinary and eloquent bullshit.