Oh, my my my. Thursday is turning out to be one for the books. And Trump is supposed to fly to Scranton and explain to the folks there why having their home boy Joe Biden in office will be such a “disaster.”
In the wake of Steve Bannon being arrested today on allegations of misappropriating funds for Trump’s signature vanity project wall, Trump is of course minimizing his enthusiasm for the project and denouncing it. But last summer he was gangbusters for the project, according to the New York Times. Kris Kobach had just lost his race for governor and had a find another way to pillage the public coffers and so he got involved with Bannon’s scam and Trump thought it was a great idea.
With President Trump’s border wall tied up by his fight with congressional Democrats, and public opinion about the wall mixed, Kris Kobach wants to take matters into his own hands.
Fresh from his defeat in the race for Kansas governor, Mr. Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state, is involved in an audacious new project — a privately-funded wall along the Mexican border.
Mr. Kobach, a hard-line ally of President Trump known for his strident stand on immigration, has long advocated a tough border policy.
He is currently an advisory board member of “We Build the Wall Inc.” a nonprofit group that has collected more than $12 million toward the effort. Mr. Kobach says the group has obtained the presidential seal of approval for the private initiative.
President Trump gave the undertaking his “blessing” in a telephone conversation Wednesday night, according to Mr. Kobach.
And a lot of other people gave their blessings as well. Erik Prince, serves on the We Build the Wall advisory board, so does former U.S. Congressman and anti-LGBTQ and anti-immigrant extremist Tom Tancredo and “Sheriff” David Clarke, Jr., and former MLB pitcher and anti-LGBTQ extremist Curt Schilling. Quite a cast of RWNJ characters.
The Department of Homeland Security, at the urging of President Trump, awarded a $400 million contract to a company affiliated with Steve Bannon’s "We Build the Wall" effort.
We're demanding answers. https://t.co/481EB7Jk8a
— ACLU (@ACLU) August 20, 2020
And Don Jr. in particular was all over it. He thought it was simply swell.
Donald Trump Jr. praised We Build The Wall and Brian Kolfage at a 2018 event: "This is private enterprise at its finest. Doing it better, faster, cheaper than anything else. What you guys are doing is amazing.” pic.twitter.com/hOL25JoZPI
— andrew kaczynski? (@KFILE) August 20, 2020
And now Junior is running away as well. And he’s got a great defense.
So their defense is @DonaldJTrumpJr is too stupid to know any better. https://t.co/2Wyf1yIUdV
— ?????? ??????? (@JM_Doherty) August 20, 2020
In a nutshell, Bannon, like Trump, saw a chance to fleece the rubes and did so, because that’s what these people do. And Kobach jumped on board, because this is right up his alley, grift and racism mixed together. Totally his dish. Tim Miller at The Bulwark made this comment:
I experienced the most glorious schadenfreude as Steve Bannon was arrested for defrauding The Forgotten Man™ taking seven figures from a phony Build The Wall campaign in order to fund his lavish lifestyle as a resident of an Italian castello who flies private with his friends from Vanity Fair. Bannon’s populism origin story was based on supposed rage over his dad losing his shirt in the financial crisis (unclear if that’s why Steve wears all his shirts at once). Turns out what really made Steve mad is that it was other people robbing poor stiffs like his dad, not him, and that those masters of the universe weren’t throwing a dollop of racial grievance incitement on top. The orange prison gear will blend with your new skin nicely, man!
And this theme is brilliantly amplified and delineated by Paul Waldman of the Washington Post:
If you’re keeping score, the group of people around the president who have been charged with crimes now includes Trump’s campaign CEO, Trump’s campaign chairman, Trump’s deputy campaign chairman, Trump’s personal lawyer, Trump’s national security adviser and Trump’s longtime friend and political adviser.
Why in the world would all these people find their way into Trump’s inner circle? It’s a mystery.
But the story of Bannon’s arrest isn’t just a reflection on Trump — though it certainly is that. It’s also an extremely common story on the right and has been for decades, long before Trump came along.
Conservative operatives such as Bannon have always viewed the right’s rank-and-file with utter contempt, as little more than a collection of fools to be taken advantage of. Their perspective is that of the con man who looks at his marks and says: These people are so dumb, it would almost be a crime not to separate them from their money.
And Bannon didn’t dream this up, how to get donations for a cockamamie scheme. He didn’t have to. This is a right-wing scam as old as the hills and twice as dusty.
Its roots go all the way back to the 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign, out of which grew a nationwide grass-roots network of conservative activists and supporters. Innovators such as direct-mail king Richard Viguerie realized that these people — or more specifically, lists of these people and their addresses — could be a powerful tool to collect money, a few dollars at a time. Viguerie later called one of his first lists of conservative donors “my treasure trove, as good as the gold bricks deposited at Fort Knox.”
You could raid that trove to aid conservative causes, but you could also use it to get rich. It wasn’t hard to figure out which buttons to push — the liberals are destroying the country, please send a check to save America! — and the donations would pour in. As the technology changed, the list miners adapted, moving the operation onto email and websites.
What you’ve got is a hand in glove operation, “unethical right-wing operators and gullible right-wing multitudes.” And the supreme irony is that the very people that Trump despises, who he wants nothing to do with, are the ones that dive for the quarters in the couch so that they can send Trump money. I like Waldman’s bottom line:
And come January, Trump himself may rejoin the game. If he loses, he’ll no doubt find some new scheme to try to convince his devotees to turn over their life savings to him. They might wise up and realize that they’ve been victimized again and again. But I doubt it.
So do I. These people are not big on facts, they’re too busy living in delusion. Come November 3, we’re going to find out if the majority of Americans are awake or comatose. That may sound black and white, but unfortunately, on these facts, I believe it to be accurate.
What is DHS doing with a private concern? Is it a building contract? Or just more grifting?
That’s what the ACLU wants to know. Trump has attempted to use DHS as his personal PR group — as Miles Taylor pointed out. My take on it, is that there’s a lot of dirt we don’t know about, but that will be uncovered, and ACLU has just latched onto a big chunk.
Was that a serious question, Tin?
Why, is blackwater Erick Prince involved there is a lot of stuff to uncover and big fish like ex-gov on up. Boy, I hope this a swamp that’s just plugging a hole and it gets lays out so we can see the garbage that has been in our gov.
Prince being there is kind of a surprise, you know? You’d figure his mercenary company would keep him rolling in dough and that he’d have more sense than his sister in keeping a low profile. Apparently I gave him too much credit.
They’re all now trying to pretend they didn’t know anything about this and they didn’t really know Bannon either, he was just Some Guy.
Well, of course, and they’re going to do the same with anything with Trump’s involvement once he loses in November. That this is the best defense they have says how little they were prepared for everything to fall apart.
pj, how many “coffee boys” does it take to run a presidential campaign…or the White House…or a scam operation? You’d think tRump would’ve lost a few pounds with all the “distancing” he does when his “very fine people” get arrested. ?
TY ACLU. This begins to look like a front for yet another fraud. Bannon et al. set up the go-fund-me bit, skim what they can from the $ 25 million in private donations, and then wait for DHS to flood an affiliate with $ 400 million to do something or other. We will soon learn the name of that affiliate, what the something or other was, and where the money leads. The two Donnies must be sitting in puddles of sweat.
Should not equal praise go to Berman, who stood up to Barr and maintained SDNY’s independence with his actions? I daresay we NOW know why Barr suddenly pulled that stunt all those months ago.
Waldman is overlooking one small setail: this game only works if you’re out of the spotlight. Do ANY of you see Trump being that careful, even with multiple criminal prosecutions aimed at him? Yeah, me neither. Further proof as to why NONE of these people were ever worth the fear too many of us put into them.
As far as Trump is concerned the entire federal government is another subsidiary of the Trump Organization. He sure as hell has been acting like it. He gets so pissy because he can’t just mainline money directly from the U.S. Treasury into his own bank account but he’s working on it!
If by “working” you mean “misapplying everything he learned from business to politics”.
Denis, not tor lack of trying on tRump’s part! He’s no better at bilking the government than he was with bilking private enterprise!
Of course some people will continue to send DJT money. There are people still sending money to Jim Bakker and Robert Tilton. There’s some folks you just can’t do anything with.
There’s nothing one can do for the Irredeemables.
To be fair, embezzlers keep their activities hidden as long as possible, and usually get caught when they get greedy. So in most cases, the embezzler’s associates will not be aware of the embezzler’s crime On the other hand, in this case we are talking about Trump and his associates. They have squandered every last bit of the benefit of the doubt.
There are more people thrown under the bus thn in the bus in Rump’s America
OH very well done piece. A purely 100% Homegrown AMERICAN scam of ConsRubes. Thanks for part on #Goldwater starting the Rube lists.. presumably some Republicans will understand this .. and may even remember it all. Still want more on how $400 MILLION of ALL TAXPAYERS $$ got authorized.