There’s a line in David Mamet’s film “House of Games,” a labyrinthine story of a complicated criminal scam, in which a con artist explains how he works.
“It’s called a confidence game. Why? Because you give me your confidence?” the con man says. “No. Because I give you mine.”
The mark believes that he is the person in control, the person moving the pieces on the board. And that drops his defenses, leaving him open to being misled.
That line sprang to mind Thursday morning when the Senate Judiciary Committee released a report documenting a post-election attempt by President Donald Trump to install a sycophantic election-fraud advocate atop the Justice Department. The attempt collapsed thanks largely to a concerted and righteous agreement by numerous officials that they would resign en masse if it happened. But it took hours of conversation before Trump backed down, reinforcing how close we were to a scenario of a depleted Justice Department actively promoting unfounded allegations of election fraud and encouraging reconsideration of the results in multiple states. It was probably too late to change the outcome of the election, but it was still best that it was avoided.
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For an outside observer, a denizen of this comfortable world we call reality, it’s hard to understand how any rational person could have gotten to a point of thinking that replacing the acting attorney general to goose nebulous fraud claims made sense. But then we consider the position in which Trump sat and what it is that he wanted to accomplish.
By the end of his presidency, Trump lived in a bubble. Over the course of his time in office, he’d narrowed his circle of advisers to hard loyalists, a function both of his increased self-confidence in his role and of it having become obvious that taking a gig with his team necessitated unyielding fealty. His media diet was largely cable news and, within that narrow lens, mostly Fox News or further-right networks such as Newsmax. He was still immersed in social media, particularly Twitter, where what he saw was almost certainly largely celebratory and approving. Trump had settled comfortably into a world where there was little dissent.
Then came his election loss. Trump didn’t want to hear Joe Biden had won and that overlapped and intertwined with his claims that maybe, somehow, Biden hadn’t. It was like a valve was suddenly added to Trump’s bubble: Claims about the election having been undermined or stolen were allowed to pour in where they sloshed around freely.
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One thing that stands out in the Senate report is the addendums, a sheaf of reports and legal documents that purport to show oddities and dubious behavior about the election. None have been substantiated and, in fact, nearly all have at one point or another been debunked. Some had been debunked by the time they made their way to Trump. If you’ve been paying attention to the claims being made since the election, they will look familiar — the presentation about purported anomalies in Pennsylvania, the statistical assertions about the results.
But now imagine that you’re Trump, sitting in the Oval Office, leafing through this thick packet. Even if you wanted to treat the information skeptically, which Trump didn’t, where was the judicious voice to weigh in? He wasn’t going to hear skeptical assessments or learn how claims had been debunked by watching Fox News or from his aides. Chief of Staff Mark Meadows tried to get the Justice Department to treat seriously an utterly ridiculous claim about interference in the election using “military satellites located in Pescara, Italy,” an odd location for a satellite. Nestled into that sheaf of documents was a letter from an Italian man identifying himself as “The Director,” in which he claims that these satellites were used to change votes. It is absolutely ludicrous to any observer with any real understanding of how elections work and who is not enmeshed in a world of conspiracy theories — qualifiers that do not apply to Trump.
Trump had all of this information and saw none of the asterisks. If all you saw and heard were complicated assertions about election fraud and you were never exposed to the ways in which those assertions couldn’t be trusted, where would you land? Trump had actively worked to create a safe space in which he wasn’t challenged and, at the moment he most needed to be challenged, no one was there to do so.
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Until that meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 3 when the Justice Department officials took their stand. We should not assume that Trump was guileless and believed the claims of fraud out of innocence, but it still must have been jarring for him to be confronted with senior officials unwilling to play along. He’d already been through that; Jeffrey Rosen, the senior attendee at that meeting, was the acting attorney general because Trump’s Senate-confirmed attorney general, William P. Barr, had resigned after publicly admitting that Trump’s fraud claims were unfounded. (Trump did not appreciate this, as he made clear to Barr.) Trump had all of this “evidence” in hand but had at last hit unmoving bedrock in his efforts to dig deeper.
Imagine being Rosen and the others in that moment. They knew what was coming. They’d been receiving emails (including Meadows’s one about the Italian satellites) and understood Trump’s position. But then they were there in the Oval Office, among the few outsiders to make it to the most insulated part of Trumpland. And here was the most powerful man in the country, their boss, demanding that they accept his worldview and not the world’s because of this clutch of documents he had in his hand.
The president wanted to believe. Here were all of these people handing him information for weeks and months, asking him for help. These were people motivated by ambition (in the case of elected officials), error (in the case of many of those who made later-debunked claims) or lunacy (in the case of the Italian satellite crew), but all wanted something back. Trump was running the con but he was also its mark, and he placed his confidence in every hustler and hopeful that came into his Twitter feed or across the White House transom.
And, save for moments like that meeting Jan. 3, there was no one there who could tie him back to reality.