Steve Bannon’s Gravy Train Gets Derailed

T he prophetic Idiocracy is a film with many true lines, but the truest of them is: “I like money.”

I like money. You probably like money, too. Most people do. It can’t buy happiness, but it does give you some options. One of my favorite stories involves the secretary to a billionaire businessman in Texas, a job that often required her to accompany the boss on his business travels. It was a family-oriented company, so she often brought her little daughter with her on these overnight trips, meaning that the little girl had, in the first years of her life, flown exclusively on private jets. When it came time to take a regular vacation with the family and fly coach, the girl took in the economy-class scene and asked: “Mommy, is this . . . last class?” Yes, yes it is — but that doesn’t mean you have to like it.

Steve Bannon likes money.

Bannon is facing charges in New York involving fraud at one of the nonprofits he operated, one that supposedly was raising money to help fund a border wall. The case is pretty straightforward: Prosecutors maintain that Bannon and his allies conspired to shift money from one entity to another in order to channel the nonprofit’s funds to a partner, Brian Kolfage, while maintaining the pretense that Kolfage was not being paid for his work. Kolfage and another partner, Andrew Badolato, already have pleaded guilty to fraud charges.

According to the New York Times:

In a December 2018 text message to Mr. Bannon, Mr. Badolato wrote that the claim Mr. Kolfage, who had lost both legs and part of his right arm while serving in Iraq, “will not be paid a dime” would be “the most talked about media narrative ever.”

“But,” he added, “we gotta find an end around to get him stuff.”

Who doesn’t like getting stuff?

There are many animating spirits in the movement that brought Donald Trump to power in 2016: legitimate frustration at the lack of national action on or responsible Republican attention to immigration and border security; anxiety and disappointment related to what we call, for lack of a better word, “globalization”; nihilism; racism; Jew-hatred; envy; primitivistic wealth-worship; stupidity; ignorance; boredom. But another factor that should not be underestimated — because it remains such a lively influence — is the desire to simply get paid.

In that, Trumpism and anti-Trumpism often are mirror images: For Bannon and his ilk, it’s a payday here and there, a steady stream of surprisingly lucrative grifts of diverse and sundry kinds; for the Lincoln Project, it’s that infamous “generational wealth.” Smaller institutions that are dependent upon a small number of donors — or one big sugar-daddy — are particularly vulnerable to changes in their benefactors’ whims, and if you have paid much attention to the conservative movement and conservative media, you’ve seen a few formerly sober-minded men take off the bow tie, put on the red cap, and bark at the moon. That isn’t the only reason people change their stripes: Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson doesn’t need the money. Accounting for the opportunity cost, former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson’s 14 months as secretary of state probably cost him more money than most of us will earn in a lifetime. Not everybody does it for the money.

Steve Bannon, though? That guy does it for the money.

I don’t mind people getting paid. But I mind the fraud. I mind the lies. I detest the sanctimony.

And I’m also not a very big fan of the incompetence, either.

If you’ll forgive me for noticing, these guys aren’t actually very good at this stuff. I follow this world pretty closely, and, best I can tell, far from becoming “the most talked about media narrative ever,” the false claims that Brian Kolfage wasn’t being paid for his work on behalf of Bannon’s nonprofit escaped public notice almost entirely. The only reason most people will ever remember Kolfage now is that he was a central player in this fraud case. These so-called masterminds and media manipulators talk about themselves as though they are a little platoon of Machiavellis, but they kind of suck at politics. They won a surprise victory in 2016, and then lost . . . everything: the House, the Senate, the presidency. Joe Biden is Hillary Rodham Clinton minus about 45 IQ points, and he unseated Donald Trump — an incumbent president — while campaigning mostly from home.

Trump’s denials of the legitimacy of the 2020 election are the usual weak man’s vain need to fortify his ego against the reality of failure, but the Bannons of the world live only to keep the gravy train going: If they admit that the 2020 coalition and effort were a losing coalition and a losing effort, then Republicans are going look for something else next time around. The fiction of the stolen 2020 election is basically marketing copy for the campaign to keep getting Steve Bannon paid.

Brian Kolfage could go to prison for as long as 20 years — over $350,000. Spread the payday over the possible sentence and that’s only $17,500 a year — less than you’d make working a full-time minimum-wage job in Ohio. I get that these guys like money. But aren’t they a little embarrassed at selling themselves so cheap?