Scammers and cheats are the paradigmatic figures of our age, and not just because a con man is president of the United States. Again and again in recent years, people who’ve scaled the cultural heights have been revealed as audacious frauds. The systems and institutions that confer status in our society keep being exposed as Ponzi schemes. Grift is turning into our central national narrative.

There are cons in every period — in the 2000s we had Enron, Bernie Madoff, and James Frey’s pseudo-memoir “A Million Little Pieces.” But there’s something distinct and era-defining about the current crop of high-profile scams. They hinge on the buying, selling and stealing of cultural capital, taking advantage of preconceived ideas of what success looks like. They’re made possible by the ephemerality of an economy where, to quote Ivanka Trump, heiress to a scamming dynasty, “If someone perceives something to be true, it is more important than if it is in fact true.”

Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the biotech start-up Theranos, raised hundreds of millions of dollars by styling herself as a beautiful distaff Steve Jobs, a Stanford dropout who promised to disrupt the medical field. She incarnated an unattainably ascetic Silicon Valley ideal; as The New York Times T magazine once described her, “She only pauses in her work to run — seven miles a day.”

Elites adored her — Bill Clinton interviewed her on stage at the Clinton Global Initiative in 2015, and Rupert Murdoch and Betsy DeVos invested in Theranos. But her company’s core technology didn’t work, and she’s now facing up to 20 years in prison on fraud and conspiracy charges. Her story is the subject of a best-selling book, a hit podcast and a feature film that’s set to star Jennifer Lawrence. A documentary directed by Alex Gibney premieres on HBO next week.