The right-wing grift machine blows up in Steve Bannon’s face
By Greg Sargent
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Bannon pleaded not guilty, but Trump’s pardon is what enabled him to escape prosecution. And Trump’s pardon left three others involved in the scheme out on a limb facing prosecution. Two of them pleaded guilty, with one admitting to conspiring to scam donors.
What makes all this so heinous is that this grift was built atop a foundation of still more Trumpist grift. The fundraising scheme appears to have preyed on donors who were “frustrated” with the failure to complete Trump’s core campaign promise of a wall on the southern border.
The promise of the wall was itself largely grift. The role of a wall in keeping out migrants is negligible: Many migrants that Trump targeted had the legal right to apply for asylum and get a hearing in the United States, which wouldn’t be undone by any wall. Trump slashed migrant flows by restricting that legal right, even as his wall mostly wasn’t built. That latter failure was largely irrelevant.
Yet Bannon’s scheme sold the unbuilt wall as some sort of major and unforgivable betrayal of Trumpism. Millions who had been seduced into believing our civilizational fate turned on the building of this wall were invited to open their wallets to remedy this historical injustice.
Indeed, Trump himself slammed Bannon’s project after his initial arrest, calling it “showboating.” That’s the perfect illustration of the “no honor among thieves” principle, but it also shows that the supreme grifter himself knew a con job when he saw one (not to mention one that wasn’t giving him a cut).
The bigger story here is that Trumpism itself presents numerous ripe opportunities for grifting. The Trumpist grift is outlasting the Trump presidency: The Jan. 6 House select committee has shown that Trump and his allies used the lie of a stolen election to raise as much as $250 million from right-leaning voters.
Much of that money, the committee showed, went to Trump’s “Save America PAC” and not to “election related litigation.” The committee probe also demonstrated that millions were funneled back to organizations run by top Trump allies.
Meanwhile, candidates running for secretary of state on the idea that President Biden’s victory was illegitimate have raised millions of dollars this cycle, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. It’s the grift that will keep on giving, probably for years to come.
Historian Rick Perlstein has documented how such grifting has long been a feature of right-wing politics, back through the direct mail chicanery of the 1970s.
“What Bannon is doing here is very much of a piece with 50 years of grifting,” Perlstein told me. “The pattern has always been corralling fleeceable marks and separating them from their cash.”
Perlstein noted that these schemes are built atop a bedrock layer of grift. Underlying promises such as the vow to reverse the “stolen” election, or to finish the unbuilt wall, tap into people’s anger and disappointment by telling them they’ve been deprived of something they should have justly received (a Trump election victory, a border wall).
As Perlstein put it, the key is to “manufacture this feeling of helplessness, so you can ride to the rescue.” In other words, it’s grift all the way down.
Bannon, who is denouncing the expected charges against him as “phony,” will have his day in court, and perhaps he will be found innocent. Still, even if the scheme is not found to be illegal, it was plainly in line with right-wing grift going back decades.
But now the grift machine appears to be blowing up in Bannon’s face.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/07/steve-bannon-indictment-trump-wall-right-wing-grift/
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