A few weeks ago, I was standing in the lobby at CNN, catching up with a journalist I respect. And he said something that I haven’t been able to shake.
He’s a good man and a hard worker. A great reporter, in fact. We were talking about the conservative influencers who’ve been caught taking money from foreign governments to stake out lunatic positions online.
I made a wry comment, something like: “Must be nice. Wouldn’t it be great if people were getting paid big bucks to stand up to Trump?”
He smiled and said: “Well, isn’t that what you’re doing?”
He meant it jokingly. Or maybe half jokingly. But for a very long time, a comment like that would have struck a painful chord, because it was Donald Trump’s oldest and favorite accusation against me and everyone like me who quit his administration to warn the country about the danger of re-electing him.
The president worked hard to convince millions of Americans that his former cabinet members, hand-appointed officials, and administration aides couldn’t possibly believe their criticisms of him. All of us must have been doing it for some other reason. Our opposition must have been about money. The word Trump uses, and the word his whole movement adopted with the reflexivity of pull-string dolls, is “grifter.”
As I stood there with that journalist, I thought about sharing my wealth-building secrets. Free of charge, of course. A good grifter will always give a free sample first.
Step one of my grift: get fired from your first real job out of government for refusing to stay quiet about the president. Surely, there’s more money in dissent.
Step two: fill out the paperwork for welfare benefits. All the best con men are on unemployment while they make their big bet.
Step three, and this is where the scheme really accelerates: give away the majority of proceeds from your book, hundreds of thousands of dollars, at the very moment you’re struggling to figure out how to pay your own bills.
Step four: spend whatever else you have on security and lawyers, whether to protect your family or to fight MAGA stalkers. Every penny you drop on concealed weapons and lawyers will eventually make you richer. Trust me.
Step five: get placed under federal investigation by a vengeful president, then sit at the kitchen table with your wife and price out what it would mean to sell your house to cover what’s coming. Also, consider getting even more lawyers.
Step six: decide to fight back — and then hold your wife as she cries after the startup you built together, and the friendships that have mattered most to you, crumble before your eyes.
Follow those steps, friends, and you too can build generational wealth.
But I didn’t stop there, and neither should you.
My racket continues to this day. This year, I decided to accept a salary lower than the salary from my last job in government. Why? Because I want the anti-corruption organization I’m building to stay lean. We’ve given hundreds of thousands of dollars to other groups on the frontlines to counter Trump’s abuses of power, rather than line our own pockets. Meanwhile, I have personally put tens of thousands of dollars into the cause this year alone. You have to spend money to make money, right?
Stay with me here because the windfall is coming.
Just the other week, someone asked me how much I get paid when I go on television every week. For the millions of views and tens of millions of clicks. This must be where the money is, right? Well, here’s the invoice so that you, too, can see how lucrative it is to become a resistance superstar: zero dollars. That’s right. I’ve made zero dollars from television appearances. I drive hours back and forth to the city, or give up days with my girls when I have to fly to New York, because every appearance is a chance to show people that it’s okay to criticize a man who has branded you a traitor and who is waging an unprecedented assault on the First Amendment. We have to be visibly unafraid, or the threats will work and we will lose the republic.
So, are you ready to cash in like me?
Obviously I’m being facetious (though, to be clear, I am doing just fine). But the point I want to make is that the money-making would’ve happened down the proverbial “road not taken.” I actually did get to take it, briefly. Before Trump returned to office, I was on the path to building a multimillion-dollar business. Keeping my mouth shut was the lucrative option. It always was. The real profits in American life these days are earned by sitting comfortably on the sidelines. Yet it comes at a terrible price, which — at this point in my life, with what’s happening in our country — I decided was not a price worth paying.
To the poor souls who’ve bought into Trump’s myth about his enemies getting rich at his expense, I would say this: go find the people who blew up their careers to oppose the president… and just ask them how lucrative it’s been. Ask how enticing it feels to have your children threatened. Ask how famous they feel getting turned away from jobs while their ex-colleagues who kept their heads down rake in cash from the same institutions that now pretend they don’t exist. Then they should ask themselves where they’d do the same.
The “resistance grift” is the only grift in history whose mass of participants mostly end up with less money, fewer friends, and in more and more instances, a federal case file doled out by a vengeful president. To the handful of folks who’ve done better financially than they otherwise would have, I say, more power to them!
When defiance is more profitable — morally and actually — than compliance, we’ll know that we’re winning. So I welcome it. I hope that opposing a wannabe dictator becomes the wealth-generating path. And given how many of Trump’s pro-dictator podcasters are bailing on him, there are early signs we’re headed that direction.
In truth, it took me years to let go of anger about the “grifter” label, especially when I was counseling people who’d spoken out and were suicidal over the hate they’d received or the bleak financial prospects that befell them for doing what was right. They didn’t deserve the added hell of being accused of making out like bandits. Not when many were barely hanging on.
Then I had a revelation.
After I decided to resume fighting back against Trump, publicly, a close friend huddled with me in urgent conference. He wanted to know why I was doing what I was doing, he was mad at me for putting myself at risk (or so he said), and he accused me of selfishness. Was I just trying to get attention? Then, he explained in hand-wringing detail that he would need to step back from our friendship, lest he and his own business interests get caught in the crossfire. Ah, I thought, now I understand what’s happening here. He laid out the logic of disassociation. “I have to put my oxygen mask on first,” he said, which were among the final words we exchanged.
My anger was replaced by pity. When someone accuses you of self-aggrandizement or “grifting” for standing up for what you believe, they are telling you something about themselves. They cannot imagine sacrificing for a belief. They cannot fathom that a person would trade money, safety, and standing for a principle. So there must be a catch. There has to be an angle or a payout hiding somewhere.
Put another way, the accusation becomes a confession. It maps the exact boundaries of the accuser’s own character.
Donald Trump calls everyone who defies him a grifter because Donald Trump cannot conceive of a human being who isn’t one. He can only conceive of the motivations that have become second nature to him. In his world, there are only two kinds of people. There are those who are running a con and those falling for one. The idea of moral conviction, of doing a costly thing because it’s right, simply does not compute.
Accordingly, any time Trump uses the word “grifter,” it should be treated like self-incrimination. He unwittingly indicts himself when he reaches for the word. He’s telling us about a motive with which he’s all-too-familiar. Lately, he’s given us billions of pieces of proof — in the form of the questionable profits he’s made as president.
These days, I don’t feel angry at the people who are still echoing Trump’s “grift” claims, whether it’s against me or Hunter Biden or whoever they decide to take down. Mostly, I just feel sad because it’s a signpost that they’ve become full citizens of Trump’s America, which of late is a country where the founding ideals no longer register as honest motivations. Everyone is assumed to be making a buck, and everything is presumed to be a grift.
That cynicism is Trump’s truest legacy, and in some ways, it’s more deeply corrosive than any of his corrupt acts or anti-constitutional policies. A nation that cannot believe in sincere sacrifice will not ask it of anyone. And it certainly will not honor those who offer it.
The journalist in the CNN lobby is a good man, and his quip only stung because it got me thinking again about how the poison is now in all of our water. So here is the answer I should’ve given him, and the one I’ll give you instead:
The only way back to a country where doing the right thing is simply right, where it needs no hidden explanation, is for enough people to keep doing it… very loudly… publicly, whenever possible… and despite the risks... until the cynics run out of excuses for dismissing the only thing that matters, in the life of nations and of individuals alike: character.
Your friend, in defiance,
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