The two most jarring events in the past decade of American life both had the whiff of a grand con about them. One was the crisis of 2008, after which a lot of ordinary Americans turned their attention to the financial-services industry and discovered something that looked, on the surface, uncannily like a classic bilking: There was a lot of hard-to-follow shifting about of who owned what and who owed what to whom, and in the end a lot of people found that their retirement savings had vanished. The other was the election of Donald Trump, who has always been fairly open about his talent for old-school hucksterism. To the very end, many people were convinced his entire campaign had been a long-game self-promotional exercise — a man wandering past real estate, casinos, reality television, mail-order steaks and wealth-building seminars to arrive at right-wing politics as a high-quality grift.

“Grift” and “grifter” are old-fashioned words, but ever more useful ones. “Grift” evokes not so much specific criminal acts as a broad, opportunistic racket, executed with a bit of cunning and panache. “Grifter” captures the kind of person who takes up such ploys as a trade, an art, a way of being. Both labels are constantly attached to Trump and his retinue. This year, Salon labeled the president the “grifter in chief,” and the late-night host Seth Meyers called him “a grifter who surrounds himself with other grifters.” A Daily Beast headline gallantly allowed that “Trump Is Not a ‘Moron’ — He’s a Grifter, and He’s Created an Administration of Grifters.” Representative Ted Lieu of California warned of the steady “drip, drip, drip of grifting from Trump’s appointees,” and when Forbes looked into Wilbur Ross’s business history, it concluded that “the current United States secretary of commerce could rank among the biggest grifters in American history.” In Slate, Jacob Weisberg invented a parlor game to keep things straight: Which administration figures were grifters, and which were grafters? Grafters are stolid and conventional, lining their pockets and then quietly retreating to one of their several homes. Grifters are the ones with flair and ambition, who seem to delight in the con itself — the cleverness of the scheme, the smooth ease with which the marks were gulled.

The grifter is a lot more entertaining, and this summer, con stories seemed to be everywhere — not because of any sudden renaissance of fraud, but because the media had tapped into a bottomless appetite for hearing about it. The blockbuster was the tale of Anna Sorokin, a.k.a. Anna Delvey, a European 20-something who managed to persuade New York socialites that she was a wealthy heiress, living out of Manhattan hotels on, reportedly, a series of forged documents and an air of general blitheness. (Both Shonda Rhimes and Lena Dunham are at work on TV adaptations.) And this was nearly nothing compared with Anthony Gignac, an orphan who spent decades impersonating a Saudi prince. According to an October story in Vanity Fair, he was exposed when, during the slow negotiation of a multimillion-dollar business deal, he raised suspicions by ordering prosciutto.

The appeal of these stories is hardly mysterious. There you are, stuck at work, while others somehow declare themselves to be billionaires or airline pilots or Stanley Kubrick. We admire the gall, and often the craft — the cinematic complexity of a well-developed con, whether it involves high-wire role-playing or just chiseling petty cash out of passers-by. If you ever feel like the old-fashioned grift has gone the way of fast-talking men in hats and three-card Monte on street corners — the way of Harold Hill in “The Music Man,” commencing his 1912 grift with a rousing patter song about moral decay — all you have to do is Google terms along the lines of “elaborate Walmart returns scheme” to witness the American ingenuity still on offer. It was a treat to read the story, this summer, of how a security worker for the McDonald’s Monopoly contest spent years filching winning tokens and finding co-conspirators to redeem them. We deplore this stuff, in theory, but under the right circumstances we are entranced by the audacity — at the hacker’s skill of spotting the weak spots in the systems that bind the rest of us, and bluffing straight through them.