The Grift Bubble

A Political Theory of American Collapse

How does a country burst? To answer this questions, it helps to see matters as do the president and the vice-president: from inside a grift bubble.

As I traveled around the United States these last few weeks -- Columbus, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, DC, Boston, Chicago -- , I tried to explain that I worry more about the disintegration of the United States than about a regime change in which Donald Trump exercises autocratic power from coast to coast.

The effort to create authoritarianism is more likely to lead to a breakup of the state than to a total regime change.

This end of the United States is possible, in part, because our president and vice-president think that it is impossible. Because they are inside a grift bubble, they push for authoritarianism in their own interest, without reckoning with the possibility that their actions can wreck the country. For them, America is a limitless passive resource.

Your perspective is probably different than theirs. To help us understand this risk, it helps to try to see the world from inside a grift bubble.

Imagine that you are a first-rate grifter: the president of the United States, say. Your grift is that you pretend to be a successful businessman, and use that supposed expertise to make your case for the presidency, which office you then use to make money. Or imagine instead that you are the vice-president. Your grift is that you claim to understand poor people, whose problems, you say, are the fault of gays, immigrants, and billionaires; and then you rise to power thanks to the money and support of a gay immigrant billionaire.

Given that these are their shticks, and that they have worked, you can see how Trump and Vance might conclude that Americans are gullible and that all things are possible.

The initial claim, the wild lie, is like the air the gets a balloon started: Trump is a rich person; Vance cares about the poor people. The big lies work! And then there is more lying, more hot air, a growing space, a sense of comfort, a safe space for fascist oligarchy.

You grift on and you grift on, and the bubble just gets bigger. It seems like you know everything that you need to know, and that the grift, the graft, and the gruffety-gruff can go on forever. When you have lived for a long time inside a grift bubble, you think you have seen it all, but this is not the case. From inside a grift bubble, you do not see the outside.

You do not grasp that your grift actually depends upon something larger, something better, which it is sapping, weakening, bringing to ruin.

You have fooled the world, and so you think that you understand it. Indeed, as a grifter, you become contemptuous of how other people make their living and live their lives. And yet your knowledge is actually limited. You know things that those outside the grift bubble do not know; but they also know things that you do not know.

You can take away what belongs to people without knowing how they achieved or attained it. The guy who cheats the farmer at the county fair does not know how to farm. The guy who profits from curated crypto scams does not understand the world economy.

Trump and Vance imagine, because it has worked thus far, that they can grift endlessly. They do not understand that their grift depends upon what I will unashamedly call the honest labor and decent convictions of millions of Americans. Were there not Americans who actually worked and cared and tried to live right, there would be nothing and no one to grift.

In an instructive article that he wrote in 1990, the American novelist David Foster Wallace said that cynicism is a form of naïveté. When you dismiss everything, you feel like you can do anything; but then you don’t believe in some things that are real: like love, or law, or patriotism. For you, such things are just tools of the trade, manipulable handles, just the way to enlarge the grift. That they have some other sense, that they are the building blocks of some other reality -- this you do not see. And in that way you are naïve.

Trump and Vance are indeed naïve, in the precise way that corresponds to their cynicism. They think that the United States will continue to exist, for their sake, no matter what they do. From inside the grift bubble, they see only grift, and think they see the whole country. As the bubble grows bigger, they confuse their own profit with the well-being of the whole.

The fact that Trump and Vance do not believe in real things such as love and law and patriotism makes them strong in one way; it makes them weak in another. They cannot foresee the larger consequences, because they do not understand how the world works or how a country is constructed. And as they break things, their naïveté prevents them from seeing what is happening, and indeed forces them to snarl harder -- I suspect that this is why, in some social media thing somewhere, the vice-president lashed out at me on this very point.

And so here we are. The bigger the grift bubble grows, the less healthy material remains beyond it. It sucks away what it productive. As personal connections become the basis of business, the economy slows. It sucks away what is ethical. As corruption comes to seem normal, citizens lose trust in one another. As basic institutions are scorned and destroyed, people cease to believe in the law. The material which builds a nation -- moral, institutional, economic -- starts to give way.

I am worried about the disintegration of the republic for other reasons, of course.

The goal of this administration seems to be to show that government does not work. The appointment of utter incompetents to positions of high authority, the firings of qualified civil servants, and the elimination of crucial agencies -- all this will likely bring epidemics and terror attacks and other disasters. At some point amidst the federal dysfunction the states will have to take on more responsibilities. But why then should their citizens pay taxes to a useless -- but oppressive -- federal government? ICE provoke people who live in cities; that does not mean that cities will concede. The threat to use soldiers against cities will likely create rifts inside the armed forces and the federal government more broadly. We are not so far away, I fear, from some branches of the federal government turning against other branches of the federal government.

Trump also seems to be contemplating a war against Venezuela (or whomever) to distract attention from his activities inside the grift bubble. But any land war, which is what it would take to generate such a distraction, will be difficult and unpredictable. He and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth are unfathomably ignorant about modern warfare. Such a move could lead not just to a lot of pointless death but to unpredictable chaos.

All of these factors are connected with the grift bubble. Indeed, they prove its existence. Some of these actions, like the destruction of government agencies, are meant to make grifting easier. Others are designed to generate cover for profiteering and corruption. None of these policies, not one, was made with an eye to something outside the grift bubble. Such actions only make sense to people who are inside the grift and confuse their own position with reality.

The president and vice-president do not know the history of people like themselves, or that of other republics that were needlessly brought down by men of their particular sort. They think that the magic of words will always save them, that there will always be a next grift, that no crisis is so great that it cannot be turned to personal profit. This is true right up until the moment when it is not.

The republic can break, but it need not. Those who work against the grifters, who reinforce the reality beyond the bubble, are doing right. They are not only holding back authoritarianism, but giving the republic a chance. They may be acting from love, or from law, because they know that these things are real. And so they should also know, in acting thus, that they are the patriots.