Laughing All The Way To The Bank

 

Steve Bannon has been arrested and charged with fraud. Michelle Goldberg writes:

According to a federal indictment, Bannon, along with his associates Brian Kolfage, Andrew Badolato and Timothy Shea, ran a crowdfunding campaign, We Build the Wall, ostensibly to help fund Trump’s promised southern border barrier. The project became, said prosecutors, a source of illicit personal enrichment.

We Build the Wall was run as a nonprofit, and assured donors that “100 percent of funds raised” would go toward wall construction. Some donors, said the indictment, wrote to Kolfage that “they did not have a lot of money and were skeptical of online fund-raising campaigns,” but they were “giving what they could” because they trusted his promises.

According to the indictment, Bannon used a separate nonprofit to siphon off over $1 million, some of which was used to pay Kolfage, who also received money through a shell company set up by Shea.

Among other things, the indictment says, Kolfage used the funds to pay for “home renovations, payments towards a boat, a luxury S.U.V., a golf cart, jewelry, cosmetic surgery, personal tax payments and credit card debt.” (He seems to have used the boat, called the Warfighter, to sail in one of Trump’s beloved boat parades.)

Donald Trump Jr. lavished praise on Bannon and his associates: 

“This is private enterprise at its finest. Doing it better, faster, cheaper than anything else, and what you guys are doing is pretty amazing.”

Maybe Trump Jr. was a sucker who believed this, or maybe he just didn’t care. The truth is that We Build the Wall is what Trumpist private enterprise looks like — a gaudy scam that monetizes grievance.

That's what Trumpworld is all about -- monetizing grievance. Trump and his associates leave the poor worse off than when they found them. And they laugh all the way to the bank.

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