When I was a teenager, I learned the jewelry business from the most gifted swindler I would ever know. This was in Dallas-Fort Worth in 1983, when Texas was drunk on the high price of oil. Precious metals had been booming; the Hunt Brothers were trying to corner the silver market; and I—16 years old and freshly expelled from high school—was working the buy counter at a jewelry store, the Fort Worth Gold & Silver Exchange. We had lines around the corner when we opened the doors in the morning. People took a number, just like at a deli, to wait for a salesperson. My old boss, Ronnie Cooper—who eventually did five years in federal prison for mail fraud—ran full-page ads in Texas Monthly announcing FINE JEWELRY ROUTINELY 50–80% BELOW RETAIL! “Anything to pack the store,” he told me. His idea was to create a feeding frenzy, to use the crowd to convince each new customer that he or she shouldn’t wait to buy or what they wanted would be gone.

In the literature on fraud, this is called “social proof,” a crucial aspect of lowering the mark’s skepticism about “buying in” to a con. The second setup is what’s known as the “representativeness” heuristic: If a store looks like a place where the best people shop, buyers will assume it is trustworthy. Ronnie’s store had walnut-paneled walls and a Baccarat chandelier. When you walked through the brass and lead-paned front doors, the first thing you saw was a Louis XV table next to an enormous chair made of bull horns. When Ronnie came down from his upstairs office in his three-piece suit and Hermès tie, he bestowed prosperity upon us all.

Donald Trump has fashioned his worldview by the representativeness heuristic. The same year I began working the jewelry counter, Trump opened Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue between 56th and 57th streets. The skyscraper was widely expected to be not unlike its owner, pompous and shoddy. There had been squabbles about the height of the building—Trump advertised it as ten stories taller than it was, due to a lavish public atrium on the ground floor. “It has not been difficult to presume that the Trump Tower would be silly, pretentious, and not a little vulgar,” wrote Paul Goldberger, the architecture critic for The New York Times. “After all, what New York building has been surrounded by so much hoopla?”

But upon its unveiling, even Goldberger was impressed: “What is truly remarkable about this six-story atrium is the Breccia Perniche marble that covers its walls and floors, a rich, lush Italian marble with an absolutely exquisite color that is best described as a mixture of rose and peach and orange. It is not like any stone that has been used in such quantity anywhere else in New York, and it gives off a glow of happy, if self-satisfied, affluence.”

Trump replicated the con on the campaign trail. Anyone who walked into a Trump rally—and likely every public event he will hold as president—was confronted with a fold-out table covered in Trump steaks, bottles of Trump vodka, cases of Trump wine, and still-wrapped Trump water, a cornucopia of meat and booze worthy of a Dutch still life. Yes, it’s all unbelievably tacky—but it’s also somehow both irresistible and convincing. There is at the heart of every gaudy surface an isolated shimmer of something beautiful: the glint of a diamond, the clink of a wineglass, the hue of a marble surface. This is a part of the draw of a fraud, the self-satisfied affluence that holds up amid so much hoopla.