The American Con

The Rainmakers 2026

When I crossed the border into Canada, I was, by then, a college graduate in spotting fraudsters. The American Book of Jive was already firmly planted in my head. I knew the language, the gestures, the long pause before the pitch. I understood how a man could sell you an empty box and have you thank him for the privilege of carrying it home.

Then came my first encounter with rockabilly wild man Ronnie Hawkins. From the downbeat, I understood the preacher-man fleece. The words poured forth like a Southern rainmaker lecturing from the dressing room, every sentence dressed for Sunday and looking for a pocket to land in. Both of us understood the game. Ron called me Tennis Shoe Billy King.

We would talk for hours about the grifting masters who had passed through our lives. The crazy cons. The captured and released. The hustlers who disappeared through one door and returned through another wearing a better suit. Most of them owned record labels.

That is why an early-morning episode of The Ezra Klein Show from a while back resonated with me. The subject was The Odyssey and the ancient role of the trickster. Odysseus is the central trickster figure in Homer’s story. He is known for his cunning intelligence, surviving through deception, disguise, and carefully engineered plans. Most famously, he tells the Cyclops Polyphemus that his name is “Nobody,” turning language itself into an escape route.

The goddess Athena also plays a trickster’s role. She changes appearances, manipulates circumstances, and moves through the story in disguise, guiding and protecting Odysseus while keeping everyone else a step behind. In The Odyssey, deception is not simply a moral failure. It is a weapon, a shield, and sometimes the only bridge home.

The most hilarious modern contribution comes from Elon Musk, who posted: “Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer.”

Historically accurate? We are talking about a poem filled with gods, monsters, witches, giants, prophecies, shipwrecks, enchanted islands, and a one-eyed Cyclops with a taste for sailors. Yet Musk promises historical accuracy, as if he had recently returned from Troy carrying production notes from Homer himself. It is the confidence of the trickster: declare the impossible, dress it in technology, and wait for the believers to applaud.

Musk and Trump are the archetypes of the modern-day trickster. Evil twins playing a shell game on the world. They are ripping every fibre of decency, every cornerstone of law, and every trace of humanity from the guts of civilization. These walking dead are the soulless leaders of a movement that preys upon the ignorance of its believers—people never battle-tested by facts and rarely troubled by evidence.

Musk is a brilliant genocidal technocrat. He can kill indiscriminately at a distance, according to his personal beliefs, without ever seeing the faces of those who suffer. He sits above the fray on a mountain of money that can be dispensed to produce untold pain and devastation. The money creates distance. The technology erases fingerprints. The faithful call it progress.

Trump is merely a show-business version of that evil fuck Roy Cohn. He learned the lighting, the timing, the threat, and the lie. He understood that if you keep the cameras rolling, cruelty can be sold as strength and ignorance can be marketed as instinct. Musk and Trump work in tandem. The 2026 tricksters. Liars on the world stage. Opportunists with immense appetites, forever reaching for the next wallet, country, institution, or human weakness.

What began with a tent wagon—a lone man carrying a Bible and armed with a convincing delivery—has become the norm. The medicine show now travels by satellite. The revival tent is a digital platform. The collection plate is the public treasury, and the preacher owns the network carrying the sermon.

If this story plays out like a seventy-million-dollar box-office production, the trickster either dies at the stake or ends up behind bars. But this is not a movie, and no screenwriter has promised us a satisfying final act.

In real life, the November elections will tell.