200 WORDS ON - The Double Bluff Fraud

When you misrepresent who you are, what is happening, what other people need to do, you commit fraud, a con upon an individual, community or country. It's most commonly financial fraud, but can be political, sexual or institutional. It is lying for personal advantage. Fraud is corrosive because it not only betrays trust but undermines faith in what is true.

When fake news, fraud and brazen lying becomes as endemic as they are now, it is harder to ascertain exactly what is true. It corrupts political discourse when political leaders spread stories they know to be untrue, deliberately deploying misinformation into the public sphere.

The effectiveness of a fraud depends on the conviction with which the perpetrator tells the lie and how easily other individuals believe and spread it. Human kind is so easily self deluded, we often so want something to be true we'll turn the tables on the truth bearers and say it's they who are the fraudster's. But such delusion is different in intent to the double bluff fraud that's perpetrated by Trump and his political ilk. To knowingly spread malignant untruths to maintain political power, lays the foundations for the democratic fraud that is fascism.