The movie American Hustle focused on the scam activities of Irving Rosenfeld and Sydney Prosser. As fate would have it, America is now witnessing the return of a scam artist the likes of Rosenfeld, whose dramatic combover and clandestine financial dealings strongly resemble our ostensible President-elect, Donald Trump.

The similarities are striking on many fronts. Trump’s refusal to release any type of financial information about his business dealings have raised suspicions about the nature of his relationships and his true net worth. All these questions he dismissed with a wave of his hand as if there was nothing to see behind the man that has left a long trail of bankruptcies, lawsuits and business failings in his wake.

His claim instead is that “I am rich.” But he forgets that the word has an ironic as well as a literal meaning. When someone questions your integrity, and your response is that your integrity is unassailable simply because you have money, the appropriately cynical response is, “Oh, that’s pretty rich.”

In other words, something stinks about the claim of absolute integrity. It deserves to be questioned, because Donald Trump is a scam artist the likes of Irving Rosenfeld.

Facts have now emerged that Donald Trump may well have been helping to scam America to win the election. His associations with the Russian government and the favoritism he has expressed toward its President, Vladimir Putin, are now exposed as scam designed to shift results in favor of Trump. Russian hackers stole information and dumped it into the public sphere through Wikileaks.

This was all designed to damage the reputation of Hillary Clinton. If this was a true collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, the scam may well constitute treason. It would almost certainly provide justification for the Electoral College to dump Trump on grounds that he is unfit for office.

Let’s face it: Even the Republican Party itself feels scammed by its President-Elect. There is a fair chance that even if Trump were installed as President, the Congress might move to impeach Trump on whatever grounds it can establish. The goal would be to install Vice President-Elect Mike Pence as President.

But that too would constitute a scam on the American people. It is likely that the arch-conservative Pence was approved by the GOP with the plan to replace Trump somewhere along the way. This entire ordeal is an American Hustle that is, according to all standards of political ethics, highly un-American at its source.