ONE strand of the American character, popularised by America’s first novelist James Fenimore Cooper, is that of the rugged but honest pioneer, hewing to a homespun truth that in its simplicity permits no obfuscation.

The other side, also prevalent in American literature, is a duplicitous, lying, cheating, conning American who will go to any ends to deceive his fellows. This side is particularly well represented in the work of Herman Melville, Mark Twain and the crime novels of Jim Thompson.

This side of the US character is rabidly on display in the conduct of our leaders, with Trump turning the US casino economy into his own personal cash cow.

Melville’s last novel, aptly named The Confidence Man, features a boatload of characters heading from Saint Louis to New Orleans with its pilgrims constituting a kind of American Canterbury Tales. They are split between both types: con artists, and gullible though stalwart and sometimes straight-talking victims.

A stranger boards the boat and, in several guises, solicits money for charitable causes though we know the charitable cause is himself. It’s possible that all the con men are one con man or that the boat is made up of several con men, but the point is the same, namely: by the mid-19th century when Melville is writing, this, or these, characters now dominate the American landscape.

He meets his match though in the ship’s barber who, when the scammer suggests the barber trust him to pay later for a shave, declines this offer first with “Sir, you must excuse me, I have a family,” and later with the simpler and more elegant “Ah sir, I must live.” Melville is here invoking Shakespeare’s ordinary characters who speak simple truth to loquacious power. The barber’s bare eloquence also echoes Bartleby’s refusal of degrading work in Melville’s Bartleby The Shrivener: “I prefer not to.”  

Twain’s The Gilded Age, which gave the era of the robber barons in the latter part of the century its name, mocked the hypocrisy of the US Senate where lobbyists use sexual intrigue to pass Bills supposedly aimed at “helping the Negro” but actually aimed at enriching themselves.

When the plotters are exposed as Senator Dilworthy (who is pushing their Bill) is revealed to have unsuccessfully attempted to bribe another legislator (appropriately named Noble) to secure the vote, the Senate, instead of investigating Dilworthy, investigates Noble the truth teller for impugning “the reputation of a United States senator.”

Noble responds to these charges by asserting that the people of the country hold “three-fifths of the United States Senate in contempt — three fifths of you are Dilworthys!” — an assertion even truer in our own time than in Twain’s as in the last Gallup poll only 10 per cent of US citizens trust or “have confidence” in Congress.

In the tradition of Twain and Melville, the crime fiction writer Jim Thompson chronicled American scamming and conning, both high and low. For the lower form of conning, The Grifters is a detailed analysis of the con artist’s ethos, including their self-proclaimed code: “It’s a grifter’s job to take the fools.”

Roy, a budding con man, finds himself in the financial capital, New York, “the logical objective of a young man whose only assets were good looks and an inherent yen for the fast dollar.”

Lord, the protagonist of another novel, The Transgressors, is scammed by an oil company man, McBride, who has absorbed the values of the company owners. McBride hews to the letter of the law to cheat Lord out of the oil on his land.

Lord accuses him of drawing up a contract “with intent to defraud.” McBride answers in the “flat, dull tones” of the righteous. “The contact was entirely legal,” abiding by the principle — as proclaimed in Donald Trump’s Art of the Deal — that in every transaction “there is a loser and a winner” and it was his job “to see that the employers were not the losers.”

Lord’s answer is Thompson’s ultimate indictment of a class whose scamming knows no bounds: “Been a lot of people like you around… right from the beginning of history. Burnin’ and torturin’ and killing—slappin’ other people into the gas ovens. And it’s always done legal.”

The legitimisation of crime and scamming and its blending with government reaches its apogee in our own time with Donald Trump, the Scammer-in-Chief using his office to accumulate personal wealth. Trump has so far acquired $1.4 billion, including profits from 20 overseas real estate projects involving foreign governments, money from Amazon for the Melania “documentary” (not a film but a sham exercise in branding) and from major tech and media companies, as well as from cryptocurrencies he and Melania have founded for — or foisted on — the public.

Trump is a real-life scammer in a hollowed-out country that, instead of producing, embraces the ultimate con of fictitious capital as scamming becomes the currency of the day.

Dennis Broe’s latest Harry Palmer LA  Mystery, Pornocopia, details the 21st-century scam of pornography and gambling, and their effects on the American psyche.