Steve Bannon Finally in Handcuffs, If Only Briefly

Sure he's done plenty of other horrible shit, but even Al Capone only went down for tax evasion

ONE BIG THING

There is an axiom that, for reporters and news junkies especially, the Donald Trump era is akin to getting blasted in the face with a fire hose twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. This past week has illustrated that point nicely.

In the Before Times, the Democratic National Convention would have been enough to dominate a few news cycles. In 2020, the DNC had to share space with the ongoing Trump-induced chaos with the United States Postal Service, the Senate Intelligence Committee releasing the final volume of its report on Russia’s interference with the 2016 election (more on that in a minute), colleges that had just reopened having to very predictably shut down thanks to coronavirus outbreaks, the massive fires in California and the ongoing post-derecho disaster in Iowa, the United States claiming the right to enforce the Iran nuclear deal it pulled out of two years ago, the President of the United States embracing from the lectern in the White House press room an insane conspiracy theory that claims he was secretly hand-picked for the presidency so he could destroy a worldwide ring of pedophiles and cannibals run by Democrats and celebrities who like to eat children…

No, really, that last one happened.

But the story I can’t take my eyes off of is the arrest of Steve Bannon, Stupid Caligula’s 2016 campaign chair and, briefly, chief strategist in the White House.

In case you somehow missed it, Bannon was arrested on Thursday with three others on charges that they defrauded donors to We Build the Wall, an online fundraising campaign to raise money to build a very small chunk of the president’s border wall privately. The men stand accused of skimming millions in donations on personal expenses like luxury SUVs, plastic surgery, paying off credit card debt, a forty-foot speedboat, and who knows what else.

All four men were charged with one felony count of conspiring to commit wire fraud and a second count of money laundering. They could face up to twenty years in prison each, assuming Trump doesn’t pardon them first.

I will fully cop to enjoying this story. Steve Bannon is human garbage. His early recruitment of and support for Trump to run for president will go down as one of the most reckless and destructive actions in American history. His brand of right-wing nationalism, with its attendant racism, has now been responsible for incalculable suffering for millions and millions of people in America and around the world. His push to make common cause with far-right groups in Europe and around the world has only fueled the rise of a dangerous xenophobia and authoritarianism.

Worst of all, his anti-liberal democracy worldview was given a thin veneer of legitimacy simply by virtue of his presence in the White House. There were worshipful magazine cover stories in the early days from reporters seemingly blown away by Bannon being so widely read that he could quote political philosophers, even if they were fascists. Not that there was ever anything special about this skill. It just made Bannon an asshole with a library card. Hell, I have a library card.

So yes, seeing Bannon revealed unmistakably as a standard-issue right-wing grifter hoovering up cash from his poor fans so that he could spend weeks living in the Julius Evola suite at the Genoa Four Seasons is undoubtedly satisfying, and I’ve spent the last twenty-four hours guzzling schadenfreude like a drunk let loose in a distillery. Yes, yes, yes.

But to the people who fell for this horseshit, it is no laughing matter. The indictment notes that some of the people sending Bannon and his co-conspirators money were also sending letters stating that they could barely afford even the tiny amounts of money they donated, but they believed that strongly in the wall. The Huffington Post reported on Friday that a seven-year-old kid in Texas set up a hot chocolate stand specifically to raise money for the effort. Boosted by publicity from local media that helped the story go viral, the boy, Benton Stevens, allegedly raised $25,000 for We Build the Wall. Bannon even featured him at a symposium on border security.

For all the well-documented grifting in conservative politics, it is rare to find such a pure specimen that can be well-publicized. The tendency of conservative media figures to suck money out of rube pockets by hawking miracle brain pills or survival seeds is so widespread that we barely notice it anymore, though it is no less shady than ever. But the Bannon case is so blatant, so brazen, that I can’t help feeling a weird sort of admiration for the pure remorselessness and moral bankruptcy required to pull it off.

And it’s still ongoing. As he left court after his arraignment on Thursday, Bannon implied to a crowd outside that his whole arrest was part of a plot to stop the wall from being built. Whether this gambit to deflect his fans’ attention from his own misdeeds will work is another question. Being a giant cynic, I’m guessing it will.

AND ANOTHER THING…

This was the week the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a nearly 1,000-page report documenting in excruciating detail contacts between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian operatives meddling in the election. By at least one account, there were no particularly startling and new revelations. We already knew from the Mueller Report that Trump probably lied to investigators. We already knew that Roger Stone had helped bring about the Wikileaks dump of stolen Democratic emails immediately after the “Access Hollywood” tape dropped. We already knew most of the extent of Paul Manafort’s relationship with Konstantin Kilimnik, though the report does go further than Mueller in stating plainly that the latter is a “Russian intelligence officer.”

What is seriously frustrating is that after writing nearly a thousand pages laying out all the ways in which Trump’s inner circle colluded on these and other actions, the Republican members of the committee had the gall to write a conclusion in which they plainly stated that “the Committee found no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government in its efforts to meddle in the election.” (Bold and italics theirs.) The committee’s acting chair, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Jellyfish) put out a video stating the same thing while expressing more concern over how the FBI handled the investigation. (Yelling about the FBI has been a years-long distraction tactic by Republicans.)

Science has not yet invented a scale that can measure the outrageous amount of gaslighting here. Senate Republicans take two pages to ask you to pretend that the hundreds of preceding pages do not say what they say. The GOP members are perhaps relying on a very narrow definition of either collusion or who counts as a member of the Trump campaign or the Russian government. (Wikileaks being an alleged asset of the Russian government rather than a formal organ of it would, I suppose, technically fit this bill.) Or else they are counting on the gullibility of the president’s—and thus their own—supporters the same way that Steve Bannon and his alleged co-conspirators appear to have exploited these rubes to scam them out of wall-building money so the former Trump strategist could get regular manicures or buy a new copy of The Camp of the Saints to replace his dog-eared old one.

We’re all being held hostage by the right’s delusions, which are either being cynically exploited by its elected representatives or have swallowed them whole. Whatever the case, it’s a frustrating and scary state of affairs.

Your Shearwater Song of the Week:

In honor of the appalling screaming shit-fest that will be next week’s Republican National Convention, here’s a song with a title I can only wish was accurate:

Back next week, if I haven’t run headfirst into a brick wall.