Catch him if you can
Many of you are no doubt familiar with the name Frank Abagnale Jr. If you’re not, perhaps you’ve heard of the Steven Spielberg film “Catch Me If You Can.” If you’re still drawing a blank, permit me to fill you in.
The story goes like this: Frank Abagnale Jr was a clever imposter who began his odyssey of deception in his prodigious teenage years. By the time he was twenty-two he’d already successfully posed as an airline pilot, medical doctor, assistant attorney general for the state of Louisiana (where he passed the bar without any formal education) and cashed millions of dollars in bad checks.
After a turn in prison, the consequence of his one and only arrest, Frank saw the error of his ways. He wound up working for the FBI for 32 years as a consultant exposing fraudsters. These days Frank writes books and tours the country telling his story in prestigious venues, everywhere from “Talks at Google” to “60 Minutes Australia.”
It’s a moving story brilliantly and poignantly related in a masterful style, a redemption tale rivalling “A Christmas Carol.” To watch Mr. Abagnale tell his story on YouTube is to be moved to tears. Frank Abignale Jr is truly a man transformed from a life of criminality to the very quintessence of righteous rectitude.
There’s just one problem. It’s all a lie. Frank Abignale Jr began his criminal career as a punk who quickly accumulated a long rap sheet from multiple arrests and convictions. He did, once or twice, wear an airline uniform as a disguise to pass bad paper, but he never jetted around the world for free, never worked as a medical doctor, never had anything to do with the Louisiana state AG’s office, never passed the Louisiana Bar and never worked a single solitary day for the FBI.
Despite all that, to this day Frank still enjoys the life of a celebrity. Even so, his is a story easy to refute. Five minutes on Wikipedia or a modest search on Google will tell you all you need to know. Mr. Anagnale’s biggest and only real con was what he told you and me. He had us fooled for a long time. I know he had me fooled. He still has most people fooled. Everywhere he goes he’s universally received as a prodigy con artist turned good guy.
We believe him because we want to believe him. His story is irresistible. It reinforces the appealing idea that eminent doctors and big shot lawyers aren’t so special after all because what they do is easy to imitate. His narrative is that the real con is the idea of a hierarchy of skill. In short, we want to believe that, on some level, most people are all the same, and the advantages brought by education and hard work are largely an illusion.
It is this kind of Dunning-Kruger thinking that makes it possible for a nation as large and sophisticated and scientifically advanced as the United States to elect a man like Donald Trump president. For some reason many of us make the mistake of thinking that the job is mostly all for show, that it requires no real expertise at all. That’s why we are so quick to anoint people with no experience as “the next president” just because we happen to like them and, rightly or wrongly, they’ve earned our trust.
Every now and then an old video clip of a very young Ivanka Trump re-emerges. In it, Ivanka tells the story of how she was coming out of Trump Tower one day with her father when they saw a homeless man. “I remember my father pointing to him and saying, ‘You know that guy has 8 billion dollars more than me,’ because he was in such extreme debt at that point.”
And yet the con continues to be believed. For decades Donald Trump has conned us into believing he is rich when in fact he is poor. It’s all a lie. Trump has cultivated the appearance of a successful businessman and wealthy entrepreneur but all he’s ever done is spend his money and cheat people out of theirs. The hundreds of millions of dollars his father gave him he either squandered or invested in horrible, crack-brained business ventures. He is so bad a businessman that he couldn’t even make money running casinos, the one business idea that is almost guaranteed to succeed.
It is now all unravelling for Donald Trump. He can’t borrow another buck from Deutsche Bank. His accountancy firm has fired him and declared the last decade of his financial statements worthless. His hotels and resorts are losing millions of dollars every day. The whole huge Trump edifice is a giant facade buttressed and preserved by a bodyguard of lies.
The story of Donald Trump is as ordinary and unremarkable as Frank Abignale Jr’s is, artificially made similarly intriguing by pure fiction and a bald-faced, unembarrassed, sociopathic willingness to sustain it in public against all evidence to the contrary. For decades Donald Trump has been daring us to catch him if we can. I think it’s time we do just that. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.