The GOP is now just grifters grifting each other

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson doesn’t know much about technology. To be fair, very few of his colleagues in Congress do either. Which is why Congress routinely misunderstands laws governing technology, or gets caught up in tech-focused moral panics.

But Mike Johnson is also the House of Representatives leader of a political party whose leader is Donald Trump, a man of no actual skill, and even less knowledge, except for an instinct for branding, and for triggering grievances in a way he can take advantage of for personal gain.

And Trump’s set the tone, from the top down. The GOP isn’t so much a political party anymore, not in the sense of having a unified ideology or policy agenda. Instead, it’s the political home for the kinds of people who have right-wing cultural preferences, yes, but also for people who fall for scams.

Back to Mike Johnson. Here is is talking credulously about his party’s current leader, Elon Musk.

What stands out about this is how Mike Johnson, who at one time managed to secure a law degree from LSU, is all-in on buying his town a monorail.

Elon Musk has very clearly not cracked any code. He’s not a computer science guy, he’s not a data scientist. He’s a salesman. But Mike Johnson doesn’t know enough about computer science or data science to know that. What he does know—and this gets to the heart of the contemporary GOP—is that Elon Musk is telling him what he wants to hear: The federal bureaucracy is bad, needs to be destroyed, and there’s suppressed knowledge that only he has, but which aligns with Johnson’s far right prejudices, that will enable him to save the country from the forces of the woke left.

Of course, the federal government in fact is too big. It tries to do too much. And much of what it does, even those tasks appropriate for it, it could do more efficiently. But that’s not what DOGE is about. Instead, it’s about selling a narrative of an evil swamp out to wreck America, and its chaotic, unfocused, and unproductive destruction is actually a sophisticated plan to achieve better government.

It’s a story of right wing heterodox “knowledge they don’t want you to know” against corrupt conventional wisdom. But it’s a story told by people lacking any genuine expertise in the system they want to reform (or destroy), being told for and to people without any genuine expertise, and no desire to acquire any. And it’s a narrative that exists not to make America better, let alone great, but instead to serve the personal interests of Elon Musk.

It’s also the story of the GOP itself. There’s a reason crank wellness influencers migrated right. Or why COVID conspiracists, even those whose politics used to be liberal, turned reactionary. Or why Trump is able to pump-and-dump meme coins to fleece his supporters. The GOP has become the home for people who felt out of step with the mainstream consensus, which meant the expert consensus, and their response wasn’t to acquire expertise to find faults in that consensus (which there are plenty to find), but instead to simultaneously reject the value of expertise while also elevating to the role of infallible expert anyone who could, in their ignorant assessment, convincingly talk the talk of an expert while not challenging their preexisting beliefs and prejudices.

As I wrote on Bluesky:

What makes the GOP’s circular con game circular is that everyone is simultaneously conning each other while being conned. Every new conspiracy theory or grift becomes part of the right-wing media ecosystem’s lore, and to signal membership in that lore to your audience (and the targets for your grifts), you need to believe all of it. Which means believing other people’s grifts, too.

This leads to an increasingly unhinged epistemic spiral. And it’s made worse by the fact that much of it is happening on social media, which has strange structural features that cut against correcting for bad information.

It’s not clear how people lost in this environment get out. A basic feature is that anyone who tells them they’re wrong, that they’ve got something incorrect, that they don’t know as much as they think they know, is speaking not from superior knowledge, but from ideological motivation. This short circuits the primary way most of us have for giving up mistaken beliefs: learning from people who are not themselves mistaken.

And because, right now, the system looks to be working—the grifters are still successfully grifting, and the party control the White House and Congress and is able to put its favored grifters in positions of power—no single person caught up in it has much incentive to fix it. Rather, success comes from doubling down.

Even if Mike Johnson wasn’t to learn enough about data science to know that Elon Musk is full of it, what would he do with that information? Stand up to Musk? Risk looking like a fool who got conned? Tell his constituents they don’t know anything about this stuff, either?

No, Mike Johnson, and the rest of his party, are in this for the ride. Where that ride ends up is an open question, and maybe it ends up somewhere that keeps them ahead. But it seems inevitable the circular con has to collapse at some point.