Thursday, March 7, 2019 | 2 a.m.
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Maybe the best book I read last year was “Bad Blood,” about the epic sham of the biotech startup Theranos and its delusional creator, Elizabeth Holmes. I had trouble shaking it, and it roared back into my mind last week when Michael Cohen testified publicly before the House Oversight Committee and retraced the mountain of lies buttressing President Donald Trump’s business empire and the clouds of fiction preventing any clear view of it. This country of ours doesn’t lack for frauds, I thought. We were probably bound to elevate one to the highest office in the land.
As anyone paying close attention in 2016 knew and anyone who finally woke up over these past few ugly days must now admit, we gave the supreme prize and ultimate compliment — leadership of the most powerful nation on earth — to a man who wouldn’t know the truth if it raced toward with him sirens blaring, ran over him, then backed up and did it again; whose loyalties stand as firm as a strand of overcooked linguine; whose vanity makes Narcissus look like a mere pretender; and who will sacrifice whatever and whomever he must on the altar of his own spurious magnificence. What he lacks in moral fiber, he makes up for in gilt. It sufficed to bring him his treasure and, for 72 years and counting, spare him his reckoning.
There are several kinds of success stories. We emphasize the ones starring brilliant inventors and earnest toilers. We celebrate sweat and stamina. We downplay the schemers, the short cuts and the subterfuge. But for every ambitious person who has the goods and is prepared to pay his or her dues, there’s another who doesn’t and is content to play the con. In the Trump era and the Trump orbit, these ambassadors of a darker side of the American dream have come to the fore.
What a con Holmes played with Theranos. For those unfamiliar with the tale, which the journalist John Carreyrou told brilliantly in “Bad Blood,” she dropped out of Stanford at 19 to pursue her Silicon Valley dream, intent on becoming a billionaire and on claiming the same perch in our culture and popular imagination that Steve Jobs did. She modeled her work habits and management style after his. She dressed as he did, in black turtlenecks. She honed a phony voice, deeper than her real one.
And for a good long while it worked, which was more than could be said of the product that Theranos peddled, a magical black box that was supposed to be able, with just a few drops of blood from the prick of a finger, to screen for scores of ailments and diseases. She spoke, with immaculate assurance, of a day when it might be on everyone’s bathroom counter: a time saver, a money saver and quite possibly a lifesaver. She sent early, imperfect versions of it to Walgreens pharmacies, which used it and thus doled out erroneous diagnoses to patients. She blocked peer reviews of it and buried evidence of its failures.
This went on not for months but for years, as Holmes attracted more than $900 million of investment money and lured a breathtakingly distinguished board of directors that included two former secretaries of state, George Shultz and Henry Kissinger; a former secretary of defense, William Perry; and a future secretary of defense, James Mattis. What they had before them wasn’t proof or even the sturdy promise of revolutionary technology. It was a self-appointed wunderkind who struck a persuasive pose and talked an amazing game.
She was eventually found out, and faces criminal charges that could put her in prison. But there’s no guarantee of that. Meantime she lives in luxury. God bless America.
Theranos was perhaps an outlier in the scope of its deceptions, but not in the deceptions themselves. In an article titled “The Ugly Unethical Underside of Silicon Valley” in Fortune magazine in December 2016, Erin Griffith tallied a list of aborted ventures with more shimmer and swagger than substance, asserting, “As the list of startup scandals grows, it’s time to ask whether entrepreneurs are taking ‘fake it till you make it’ too far.”
Interesting word there: fake. A president who’s a textbook study in the psychological phenomenon of projection — by which you attribute to others the flaws that you possess — uses it all the time. What did he call Cohen’s interchanges with House lawmakers? “A fake hearing,” of course.
Dangle the prospects of celebrity and riches, and plenty of charlatans rush forward. So it stands to reason that a country of supersize celebrity and riches would have a surfeit of charlatans, including some who see even the White House as fair game. Cohen’s testimony confirmed yet again how much pure bluster fueled Trump’s quest, and how heavily Trump’s entire career leaned on shady arithmetic, personal myth making and intimidation: all arrows abundant in the quivers of Holmes and her Silicon Valley kin.
But that testimony was also a reminder of how gullible their audiences are, how readily we all believe when we perceive some benefit in the transaction. This isn’t just the land of the fraud but the home of the knave, and Cohen implored Republican lawmakers and Trump supporters nationwide to learn from his own credulity. It takes two to bamboozle: the illusionist and the enraptured.
When Trump came down that escalator at Trump Tower, he didn’t just begin a presidential campaign. He pinched the edge of a scab on our body politic and began to tug, revealing all the racism, resentments and partisan fury beneath it. He gave us a fresh, jolting glimpse of just how much depravity and even criminality exist among the powerful (and the power-mad). Look at his own collaborators: Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, David Pecker and lesser reprobates who either still serve in his administration (Alex Acosta, Jared Kushner) or did until they went too far (Tom Price, Scott Pruitt).
They’re favor traders, corner cutters, rule breakers, perk hoarders. They’re notorious examples of types that many of us see all the time. How many people owe their success to exaggerating their talents, grabbing credit when it doesn’t belong to them and projecting a potency that’s really smoke and mirrors? How many depend on the continued support of people who bought the performance in the beginning and don’t want to admit that they were duped? Trump and Holmes are such achievers in extremis.
They also have a competitive advantage: They’re without shame. There’s a whole lot you can do once you’ve slipped that tether. To the unscrupulous go the spoils.
Trump’s amorality play contradicts our paeans to the Puritan work ethic. It’s not the script that we teach our children. But with Trump in the White House, validated by tens of millions of votes, it may well be what some of them are learning.
Frank Bruni is a columnist for The New York Times.
