Trump, Paula White, and becoming a shut-eye

When a con artist starts to believe her con, that’s know as becoming a shut-eye. She literally believes her own lies and shuts her eyes to reality.

This is different from the marks believing the con. You want the mark to believe the con.
(“Mark” comes from the chalk mark that midway workers would put on the back of a rube who was easily fooled. Today marks are distinguished by their red hats and TRUMP stickers.)
In addition to being a horrible person, President Donald Trump is a bad con artist who became a shut-eye decades ago. He can’t work a scam and let it go. A good con artist works the grift, scores, and walks away. Elizabeth Holmes, for example.
Trump is so emotionally damaged from the trauma of his childhood, that he has to humiliate others the way he was humiliated. He can’t work a con and live with the score. He has to laude it. That’s why he brags about breaking the law.
I can’t decide if he can’t stop breaking the law because he’s a shut-eye, and he’s forgotten that he’s actually a fraud, or he’s a compulsive sociopath and he can’t walk away clean.
Recently, prosperity preacher and public charlatan Paula White was named to Trump’s White House as an adviser to the Faith and Opportunity Initiative. A 2010 Senate investigation of White’s church found that she and her second husband purchased a $3.5 million condo in Trump Tower in New York City.
White is as much a con artist as Trump. Neither White nor Trump has the slightest bit of self-awareness.
Each thinks the other is a shill, helping to fool certain audiences — He needs the continued support of a particularly gullible type of Christian and she wants exposure to a larger, particularly racist American voting block.
Each of them has a tremendous following, because some people want to be conned.

“You can’t cheat an honest person,” is the old adage. But it’s pretty easy to cheat dishonest people.

A core 33 percent of the United States isn’t honest. They cheat on their taxes, lie, and cut corners. They break the law.
Another 33 percent are painfully, unabashedly honest. They follow the law.
And 33 percent of the country floats back and forth in the tension between the extremes. They want to be good people, but they don’t always live up to their own expectations. They don’t usually break the law, but they do occasionally bend it.
A portion of average Americans put their confidence in a grifter. They were conned by a life-long con artist. They believed the fantasy of a reality television actor and put him in the White House (with Russian assistance).
White sells an American-made version of God that is more fantasy than Biblical. She isn’t a Christian, but pretends to be one, just as Trump pretends he isn’t a bad businessman.
They represent everything wrong with the United States as we stumble into 2020.
It’s discouraging to learn that tens of thousands of people give Paula White money to subsidize her con artist life. Just as it’s difficult to believe there are still people who think that Trump was ever a good businessman.
Around 30 percent of the country will never admit they were conned. They are willing rubes who will continue to hand over their money and dignity, long after the con is exposed.
It’s important to extend sympathy to the many people who have been fooled by the most famous confidence man in history.
Between 33 and 44 percent of the Unites States knows they are both lying con artists.
Eventually, as much as 70 percent of the country will come to recognize that Trump is an empty con man.
Trump’s days working the long grift are numbered. A reckoning will come. It’s just a matter of time.