Trump’s grifters come to the fore as charges leveled

The grifters of Donald Trump’s GOP have been busy lately.

They’re scrambling to save themselves as their street hustles are being called out and challenged in legal proceedings.

The latest to be accused is Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist and the architect behind his 2016 election. Bannon, along with three others, is charged with bilking hundreds of thousands of donors eager to help fund that big beautiful wall at the southern border that Trump is so enamored with constructing (and that it should be painfully clear, Mexico is not helping to build or pay for.) In small donations gathered mostly online, We Build The Wall raised $25 million.

Bannon and his co-conspirators are accused of diverting over $1 million of those funds and using it to pay for personal expenses and concealing those funds through a shell company.

The allegations leveled in a federal indictment paint a picture of a crew of swindlers, including an Air Force veteran, a triple amputee who preys on the public’s sympathies for wounded soldiers.

In some ways, the accusations against We Build The Wall are in a similar vein to those Wayne LaPierre,

head of the National Rifle Association, is facing.

Take a hot topic of public interest, play to people’s fears, outrage and misinformation all the while ensuring a nice profit for yourself.

LaPierre and other top executives of the National Rifle Association are accused of using the gun rights organization to fund lavish lifestyles as they shifted the organization from predominantly being concerned with the Second Amendment as it pertained to personal safety, hunting and fishing, to a highly charged political machine adept at opposing what the vast majority of the general public think of as common sense reforms to gun laws.

With Bannon’s indictment, the count of former advisers of the president have been criminally charged is seven; including Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn and Michael Cohen, all once pivotal figures in the Trump circle.

Are their sympathizers within the voting public taking note and doing a bit of soul searching?

The U.S. is at a crossroads. Come November it will choose to either continue on the path that Trump is leading or choose a new direction with Democratic nominee Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as his vice president.

We Build the Wall always reeked of hubris and bravado. As donations poured in, the organizers promised that all of the money would go toward the project, that they were selfless volunteers in the process.

They kept insisting this as they lined their own pockets, as the charges of wire fraud and money laundering detail.

Fairness dictates pointing out that legally, none of the four men indicted for this latest border wall caper are currently employed by Trump.

All of the accused were doing Trump’s bidding, following the same damnable playbook with fearful talk of drug cartels and an “open” border that doesn’t actually exist.

Let the courts sort out guilt and innocence and appropriate penalties.

This much is indisputable: The president has a long dossier filled with associations and the employment of people who later are accused of taking the general public for a wild ride ...

That’s a formula. That’s a pattern.

It’s among the many sins that America will need to reflect on post Trump. But first the nation must choose to get beyond this president who continuously invites shame and ridicule into the White House.