Remember how 2018 was the year of the grifter? We were inundated with juicy stories of amazing con artists, from Anna Delvey’s rich girl scam to Elizabeth Holmes’s other rich girl scam. The summer of that year was christened “scam season” by The New York Times’ Amanda Hess. If 2018 was the year of charlatans scamming each other out of their money, 2020 is the year of presidential candidates scamming us out of our limited, precious attention. And just like in 2018, it’s the rich people who are perpetuating the biggest frauds.

The now-departed Marianne Williamson and still-in-it Andrew Yang both have the air of a grift about them—the former having hawked a The Secret-style psychic salve to our political problems, the latter pitching a bad version of universal basic income with gimmicks like handing out $1,000 a month to 10 people, as if his campaign were the Monster Energy Epic Presidency Raffle. (Yang’s campaign raised $1 million and harvested 450,000 email addresses from the contest, it said, the day after he announced it.) But it’s unfair to focus just on these two, since there are much less successful, lower-profile weirdos who have oozed in and out of the ranks of both parties’ primary fields. Bill Weld. Wayne Messam. Joe Walsh. Mark Sanford, briefly. Deval Patrick, who announced a run for the Democratic nomination in November and might as well have announced a campaign to become a Fortnite champion.



I call these people grifters not because they are necessarily trying to directly scam people out of money—though politics is rife with this—but because they attempted to use the opportunity of 2020’s wide-open field and unpopular incumbent to raise their profile, despite never believing they could become president. People like Seth Moulton or Steve Bullock might not have been trying to get paid using their campaigns, in the way that Trump so brazenly directed his campaign spending back to his businesses. Nevertheless, it’s not hard to imagine how the attention, however minimal, of being included on a debate stage can be leveraged into a better paycheck down the line—whether it’s hopping on a corporate board, or grabbing a luxe lobbying gig, or being absorbed within cable news’ elite coterie of green-room layabouts. In politics, prominence is currency, and the 2020 race represented a get-prominent-quick opportunity.



But the current election cycle has also enabled a second category of grifter: The Already Rich Grifter, specifically former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and California rich man Tom Steyer. These two are far more troubling—not least because it’s unfathomable that one could be wealthy enough to never have to work again and still decide that the best course of action is to try to get elected to do the hardest job on the planet. (Fellas, you realize there’s, like, video games? You could play Mario Kart while on a helicopter flying back and forth over the Great Pyramids. Be more imaginative.) There is actually something even more disturbing about not doing this for the potential windfall: We can all relate to wanting more money, but can you imagine being so egomaniacal that you spend hundreds of millions of dollars on running for president? And yet, what’s spookier still: They are rich enough that it could actually work.



The night before the deadline to qualify for this week’s debate in Iowa, two polls from Fox News vaulted Steyer to the debate stage. In South Carolina, Fox News had Steyer in second place, with 15 percent of the vote; in Nevada, Steyer placed third, with 12 percent. As The New York Times pointed out, Steyer “had never before exceeded 5 percent in a debate-qualifying poll.” These polls could be outliers—or they could be a horrible sign that Steyer’s strategy of pulverizing the airwaves with advertisements is working.

