The Grifter Era

By Christine Rosen

Wednesday, March 18, 2026

 

American culture has always had a place, even a soft spot, for the grifter. P.T. Barnum became rich convincing 19th-century audiences that the desiccated, stitched-together corpses of a monkey and a fish was an exotic “FeeJee Mermaid.” Herman Melville warned of the seductions of the manipulative fraud type in his 1857 novel, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade.

 

Unlike the common thief, the grifter was understood to be a small-scale swindler who relished preying on people’s emotions and trust to trick them out of money. “Have you the confidence to trust me with your watch until tomorrow?” the notorious 19th-century New York trickster William Thompson was purported to have asked his many victims. Unlike common thieves, who stole from you when you weren’t looking, grifters were understood to enjoy the act of human manipulation and of making their victims feel complicit in their own victimization.

 

And yet, according to Google Ngram, after a brief spike in the appearance of the word “grifter” in the 1920s, its use in print and in the culture remained relatively low until the year 2000, when it began rising precipitously. Why is the grifter enjoying new and broader cultural significance in the 21st century?

 

For one, grift has expanded into new territory. Until recently, it was generally not rewarded in politics. Graft was the problem, not grift. Criminal acts of fraud and influence peddling by elected officials are as old as politics itself, but grift in public life—the manipulation of the public’s trust and of public institutions for personal gain—is a more recent phenomenon. Grift typically was pursued by outsiders—petty criminals, social outcasts—but not the powerful themselves.

 

No longer. Grift is now happening inside political institutions. Consider George Santos, who won election in 2022 to represent New York’s third congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives as the first openly gay Republican in the House. The careful edifice he had constructed about his life soon came crashing down. Santos engaged in traditional fraud—misusing campaign funds to buy Botox treatments and luxury vacations for himself—but he also stole the identities of many of his political supporters and spent their money on campaign donations to himself. He lied about having attended college and inflated other aspects of his résumé. He had used many aliases throughout his life and had done a turn as a Brazilian drag queen named Kitara. He even set up a GoFundMe ostensibly to raise money for a person’s sick dog to get surgery, then absconded with the money. He was ousted from Congress by his fellow Republicans, was found guilty of wire fraud and identity theft, and was sent to federal prison.

 

That should have been the end of the Santos story: a felony conviction and public ignominy. But in today’s culture, you can’t keep a dedicated grifter down. Santos was released from his seven-year prison sentence after only three months when President Trump commuted his sentence in 2025. In a Truth Social post, Trump wrote, “George Santos was somewhat of a ‘rogue,’ but there are many rogues throughout our country that aren’t forced to serve seven years in prison,” citing as an example Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal’s stolen-valor claims about military service. “At least Santos had the Courage, Conviction, and Intelligence to ALWAYS VOTE REPUBLICAN! . . . Good luck George, have a great life!” When a reporter caught up with post-prison Santos, he was hosting a caviar-fueled party with fellow famous grifters, including con artist Anna Delvey and “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli, and boasting about his cultural influence.

 

Grift has adapted to the cultural mood of the moment as well. Consider the victim grift, widely used online for years by “Nigerian princes” and catfishers looking for easy marks but now integrated into many common cultural practices. A few years ago, Disney World theme parks had to tighten restrictions on their disability-accommodation procedures because so many people were abusing the system, even going so far as to hire disabled people for the day to pretend to be family members so they could skip the lines. Similarly, the lineups for early boarding of flights are becoming so full of clearly able-bodied people in wheelchairs claiming disability that they are cynically referred to as beneficiaries of “Jetway Jesus” miracles, since most are suddenly able-bodied again when the plane lands.

 

In politics and popular culture, grift is becoming institutionalized in disturbing ways. Writing in the Times UK, Stanford University student Elsa Johnson recently outlined the way of the grift on elite college campuses. After realizing that many of her peers were claiming disabilities to score perks on campus, she joined in. “I decided to claim my legitimate illness—endometriosis—as a disability at Stanford,” she revealed. And why not? After a quick Zoom call with an administrator, she was approved to receive a private dorm room, “extra absences from class, some late days on assignments and a 15-minute tardiness allowance for all of my classes.” Johnson added, “I’ve heard of a girl who got a single [dorm room] because she was gluten intolerant.” Her attitude is reflective of the nearly 40 percent of students at Stanford who claim a disability: “The system is there to be gamed, and most students feel that if you’re not gaming it, you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage.”

 

This leads students not to reflect on their own moral choices but to claim, “The system made me do it!” This is the battle cry of the morally coopted person. A friend “wasn’t proud of gaming the system and she wasn’t ashamed either,” Johnson wrote. “She was simply rational. . . The students aren’t exactly cheating and if they are, can you blame them? Stanford made gaming the system the logical choice.”

 

Similarly, cheating has come to be viewed as a kind of this-is-how-you-play-the-game grift. Writing in the New York Times recently, an Ivy League academic administrator noted that after an undergraduate at Columbia University “bragged about developing an A.I. tool to cheat his way through online tech job interviews,” he was rewarded, not publicly shamed. “The venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz expressed admiration for his ‘bold approach’” and invested in the student’s start-up company, which has as its stated purpose helping people “cheat on everything.” Other AI companies, knowing how many students use ChatGPT and other tools to cheat on assignments, have offered free subscriptions during finals weeks or premium subscriptions for reduced rates, effectively incentivizing the mass cognitive outsourcing in which students are now engaged. OpenAI created a tool that can identify with nearly perfect accuracy writing created using ChatGPT—a boon to teachers struggling to manage the use of AI by students. As the Times reported, “Senior executives had internal debates about whether to let educators have access to the tool. They opted not to.”

 

Both in politics and the wider culture, we are institutionalizing, incentivizing, and justifying grift—and shamelessly so. As Johnson notes matter-of-factly, “At Stanford, almost no one talks about the system with shame.” She and her cohort see themselves as “savvy optimisers,” who understand that “if you aren’t getting accommodations, you haven’t tried hard enough.” As another student acknowledged, the accommodations grift “effectively only punish the honest.”

 

A few years ago, a New York Times Magazine piece went so far as to argue that grifting is an understandable and even justifiable response to “a structural flaw in the free-market economy. . . the tendency for wealth to accrete to those who already have it, who can wield the power to generate more.” Yet today it is often the successful elite at prestigious institutions, not disaffected outsiders struggling under the oppressive weight of capitalism, who are running the grift.

 

Our elected officials and celebrities reflect this cynical new reality. Both former President Joe Biden’s extended family and President Donald Trump’s family have made vast sums of money trading on proximity to the White House. Influence peddling that once happened in smoke-filled back rooms is now done entirely in the open, prompting little more than a weary shrug from most Americans. The country that was once scandalized by the Teapot Dome scandal barely pays attention to a sitting president issuing his own $TRUMP meme coin, netting him billions on paper. Biden’s last-minute pardons for his grifting family members sparked momentary outrage among Republicans, but little moral struggle among Democrats.

 

Grifting is not a victimless crime. It rots the moral fiber of the grifter, of course, but grifting has social consequences as well. As the Stanford example demonstrates, systematic grifting breeds cynicism about the institutions that allow it to flourish. It also cultivates a Darwinian impulse to “get yours” regardless of how that might harm others. It transforms serious things into playgrounds for performative profit-seeking, such as when grifter-influencers descend on the scene of crimes to seek money and fame for themselves—most recently, in the kidnapping of Savannah Guthrie’s elderly mother, Nancy. “Brazen, scantily clad streamers turn Nancy Guthrie crime scene into ‘disrespectful’ content circus as they feud for best view of her house,” read one headline.

 

The current populist moment, with its mistrust of elites and declining faith in institutions, was supposed to usher in new ways of doing things—draining the swamp, removing the cultural gatekeepers, taming the power of the unelected bureaucrats. What it has brought us instead is a political and popular culture awash in cheap moral grandstanding and leaders who govern by way of AI slop and memes—and whose own actions suggest that grifting is not only acceptable but necessary for success. Virtue is out; grift is good.