STREET HUSTLES
When I worked in New York City, I was always amazed at those gullible enough (myself sometimes included) to be taken in by street hustles.
They took various forms.
Shell games where one player's victory turns into a subsequent victim's string of losses.
Cash payments for counterfeit tickets to sold-out games or concerts.
Extortionate payments to the ubiquitous "squeegie men" who "cleaned" windshields at backed-up traffic lights.
The hustles, however varied, had three common features.
First, the conned were captured, either physically or mentally. They either had nowhere else to go (those stuck in traffic), thought they had nowhere else to go (the ticket buyers) or convinced themselves they should not go anywhere else (the guy before me won so I can too).
Second, the hustlers were persuasive. They offered what appeared to be either a needed service (tickets; clean windshields) or a reasonable chance at success (victory in the shell game).
Third, even as or after the con became apparent, the individual cost was relatively small and the larger social cost disguised. For the individual, it's about pocket change with the shell game or squeegie man. And though it's much (but not the end of the world) more with the counterfeiter, those who walk away mad generally chalk it up to their own gullibility and vow to be less "stupid" going forward. In fact, gullibility itself disguises the costs writ large for all these cons, as most of us who fall for them are either too gullible to even notice or too embarrassed to do anything about it other than suffer the loss in silence and move on.
And sometimes the gullibility is so complete that denial sets in.
There are, afterall, shell game players who return the next day convinced their luck will change.
For the past six months, more than half the country has watched in somewhat jaw dropping amazement as Donald Trump has pressed his slim 2024 electoral victory, bare GOP House and Senate majorities and 6-3 conservative Supreme Court into the service of his own set of dysfunctional, illegal and often cruel policies and programs.
This has resulted in a raft of executive orders, a single legislative effort, and a series of court decisions:
(i) to pardon over 1,500 January 6 defendants, many who had attacked and injured Capitol police;
(ii) to impose enormous tariffs on allies and enemies alike not seen since the era of Smoot-Hawley and the Depression;
(iii) to mass arrest, detain and deport illegal aliens (even thousands who were here legally under prior Biden orders or standard immigration procedures, and often to foreign prisons without any due process whatsoever);
(iv) to gut the federal work force (including those in the State Department, USAID, the Department of Health and Human Services, the CDC, the Department of Education and the Federal Emergency Management Agency);
(v) to pretend to solve problems he himself created (as in the Iran bombing, necessary only because Trump in his first term pulled out of the 2015 JCPOS agreement that was being honored and actually would have resulted in far less -- in fact de minimis amounts of -- enriched uranium and far fewer centrifuges in Iran than was the asserted reason this year for Israel's attack and America's bunker-busting assistance);
(vi) to sacrifice Ukraine to if not Putin's agenda then certainly to his timing; and
(vii) to pass a misnomer called the Big Beautiful Bill that will result in 17 million losing their health insurance and 2 million losing their food assistance so that the 1% continue to receive enormous tax breaks.
For the cops beaten on January 6, the millions who will lose their health insurance, the Ukrainian nation, those who will die without the HIV drugs USAID was providing, the immigrants who have been or will be shipped to foreign (or even Florida, see Alligator Alcatraz) gulags, and the flood victims who will not be rescued because FEMA has imploded . . .
None of this was or will be a street hustle.
But for the unaffected (or not yet affected) who approve . . .
It was.
Consider the three features of the hustle and how Trump exploits them all.
First, the capture.
Nowadays, those captured are the people Trump has actually conned into thinking they must have what he is offering.
On tariffs and mass arrest, detention and deportation, they are the white men without college degrees who (falsely) think their economic angst is on account of foreigners or illegal immigrants stealing their jobs. On pardons, it is the same group who swallowed the lie that Trump won the 2020 election and that those who overran the Capitol on January 6 were patriots. On foreign policy, they are the insular without passports who think America First means America alone and above it all. And on shrinking government either through irrational seat-of-the-pants lay-offs or trillion dollar spending cuts that will kill healthcare and food support for millions, they are the 1% convinced they cannot live in a world where the marginal tax rate is what it was (a few points higher) during the Obama administration.
They all think Trump, and only Trump, is giving them something they need or deserve.
Many of them think they do not have any other choices.
Almost all of them are angry.
And like the proverbial sidewalk optimist watching the shell game, all of them have been captured by the con.
Next, the persuasion.
If you had to pick an easy group to vilify these days, illegal immigrants would be at the top of the list. They are by definition doing something illegal. They have no capacity to fight back. And more than half of them are brown. Similarly, if you need to cut spending to preserve a tax cut, the easiest services to cut are those that go to the fewest number of recipients -- the poor who need but can't pay for heath care (hence, Medicaid), the flood victims who want but can't afford to rebuild (hence, FEMA), the foreigners who want but do not have all the ammunition needed to defeat the tyrant (hence, Ukraine) or the ill beyond our borders who cannot live without life-saving medicine (hence, USAID).
All of these groups are easy targets and in the twisted world of a dishonest con-man can be turned into villains who become props in the sale of his con.
The two central moves in Trump's limited rhetorical arsenal are his degradation of immigrants and his pathological willingness to lie. Though the vast majority of undocumented immigrants are law-abiding and are here because they were fleeing poverty and sometimes even death for themselves or their families, Trump has spent all of his now almost ten years in national politics talking about them the way Hitler talked about Jews. See A Tale of Two Fascists, October 23, 2024 https://neils3ds.blogspot.com/2024/10/a-tale-of-two-fascists-hitlers.html. And in his current tax and spending con, he routinely characterizes any spending cuts or lay-offs as being made solely to eliminate "waste, fraud and abuse."
His immigrant talk -- apart from being inaccurate -- is also disgusting.
And his "waste, fraud and abuse" claims on lay-offs and spending cuts do not survive even cursory factual review.
Many were refuted soon after the lay-offs themselves, when the "waste, fraud and abuse" that were the departed employees had to be brought back to actually perform the jobs Trump's acolytes had mindlessly fired them from. Others were belied by the people who actually went in and did Trump's bidding. As one DOGE reviewer noted after his run through the federal bureaucracy in search of demons to slay: "I did not find the federal government to be rife with waste, fraud and abuse. I was expecting some more easy wins."
Finally, the gullibility of apparent low cost and denial.
The most interesting thing about the Supreme Court's 2024-2025 Term is the number of important and perhaps determinative decisions made on the Court's so-called shadow docket. These were cases where the Court had to grant or deny a stay or rule on an otherwise interim procedural matter while the actual case moved forward. Earlier this week, and without ruling on the merits of the case itself, the Court issued an unsigned decision staying a lower court order prohibiting Trump from eliminating over half the employees at the Department of Education. Because Trump's Secretary of Education explained that her lay-offs were "the first step on the road to a total shutdown" of the Department, and because the Department itself was created by an act of Congress and thus cannot be shut down unilaterally by any president, the lower court had issued an order granting a preliminary injunction stopping the lay-offs while the parties litigated the executive's right to do so.
The Supreme Court stayed that order.
We do not know the reason the Court did so. None of the six justices who granted the stay explained why. Presumably, however, they concluded, as the government had argued in its briefs, that the lay-offs would not interfere with the Department's ability to perform its statutory functions, were not intended to shut the Department down, and were just designed to "cut bloat." In other words, the stay would be cost free.
This move by the government -- and then by the conservative majority on the Supreme Court -- was a street hustle on steroids.
As pointed out in Justice Sotomayor's lengthy dissent, in which both Justices Kagan and Jackson joined, the administration was just plain lying in claiming no intent to close the Department given both Trump's and the Secretary's explicit public statements to the contrary. And as she also noted, the overwhelming record evidence from the court below was that the lay-offs already were in fact interfering with the Department's performance of its duties. Among the effects were funding delays that forced schools to fire teachers and certification delays that made it impossible for college students to obtain federal financial aid. One former Secretary of Education stated point blank that "the Department cannot meet its statutory obligations at the level of staffing proposed by the Defendants."
Like the pea under the shell that is gone once the shell is lifted, the "cut bloat" claim disappears upon inspection.
But the gullible -- on the Court and in the country -- still believe it.
And on the Court, unfortunately, this has now become a habit.
As reported by Adam Liptak in The New York Times yesterday, "In the last ten weeks alone, the court has granted emergency relief to the Trump administration without explanation seven times, according to a tally by Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown and the author of the book about the court's emergency work called 'The Shadow Docket.'" Using "terse provisional orders meant to remain in effect only while the courts consider the lawfulness of the challenged actions," the report continued, the orders "[i]n practice . . . effectively resolve the case." With them, "[t]he court has allowed the administration to fire tens of thousands of government workers, discharge transgender troops, end protections for hundreds of thousands of migrants from war-torn countries and fundamentally shift power from Congress to the president -- often with scant or no explanation of how it arrived at those results".
As the Times also noted, "the Trump administration's use of emergency applications in the first half of 2025 represented an all time high of 15 as of June 18".
The previous high for an entire year was 11 . . .
In the last year of the first Trump administration.
Trump is using emergency orders on the shadow docket to disguise the costs of his cons . . .
And six justices on the Supreme Court -- either oblivious to the harm or taken in by the the administration's strained (even absurd) denials -- are helping him.
The shell game hustle works because the con man actually uses two peas. The first is under the shell he shows you at the outset. The second is tucked in a band-aid he wears on the end of his ring finger. The initial pea disappears through a small slit the money on the table disguises as the shell is rapidly moved. The second is then snuck under another shell the loser isn't following.
The con can't work without two peas.
And as the Supreme Court's shadow docket orders show . . .
Neither can Trump's.
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