At any rate, the scheme collapsed, and thousands of people were left holding the bag, and basements full of cheap cosmetics you couldn’t give away.

There’s nothing new about this sort of thing, although the marketing model is legitimate and is used by many real companies, this one was just too good to be true. The organizer and a few of his cronies at the top got rich and thousands of others took a financial bath.

I was a graduate student at the time, but I was earning my living as a blue-collar worker, drawing contour maps from aerial photos. When the news broke that the State had busted this guy’s operation and the extent of the fraud was exposed, my fellow workers were delighted, not that he had been stopped, but by how he had conned his marks and taken them for a fortune. I was appalled, thousands of hard working people, blue collar workers like us, had mortgaged their homes and borrowed thousands to get a chance at being big-time operators. And they were wiped out. My co-workers were rooting for the con man, fantasizing about how they would have run things differently—and not gotten caught. They were not celebrating a successful business gone awry, they were applauding how this “businessman” had managed to con working people out of millions.

I learned a big lesson out of that. The American Dream of owning your own business and getting rich by providing a great product for your customers and a great living for your employees coexists with the fantasy that people are stupid and greedy so they DESERVE to be conned. And the guy who cons them is someone to be emulated and respected, a hero. And my co-workers weren’t greedy bourgeois capitalists, they were solid proletarians, real working class heroes. You won’t find these guys in Ayn Rand’s fiction.

Also hearing a lot of chatter about the old movie “A Face in the Crowd” , which I have never seen.

The con man has an interesting role in pop culture. I love The Sting and all those Rockford Files where he is pulling a con. But you’d think with all this exposure folks would be better able to spot one.

Guess not.

However, all the other similarities and parallels between the TV character and the current President are very difficult to explain by just “coincidence”. This is why I invoked “prophecy”, as of the Biblical ilk. Other commenters on the Youtube page even mentioned “time travel”. Maybe there is something to this synchronicity thing!

White collar criminality, businessmen-gangsters, criminal families, confidence men, hucksters and other similar aberrations have always been associated with American business, and openly tolerated (even admired!) by its practitioners, but this case stretches credulity.

But the fact the man was named Walter Trump is hard to think about without a theremin soundtrack in the background.