For two months, President Trump lied to his own supporters that he had actually won the presidential election. After feeding his following a saccharine diet of conspiracy theories involving midnight ballot theft and collusion with dead dictators, he egged on his supporters to storm the Capitol and terrorize Congress into overturning the democratically decided result of 2020, resulting in the death of four of his supporters and a police officer bludgeoned to death. While he was reportedly “delighted” looking at the first siege of the people’s house in centuries and refusing to authorize the National Guard to stop it, Trump did lament how “low class” the followers running to their deaths in his name looked on television.
Trump built his tawdry carcass of a persona for a quarter century by lying to those he aimed to charm. He lied to the tabloids under the pseudonym John Barron about his sex life as a headline hedonist. He lied to his business partners as he tried to cosplay as a successful entrepreneur. He lied to his NBC minions trying to reinvent him into a celebrity on “The Apprentice.” And for the past half decade, he’s lied to his followers.
We’re going to build a wall, and Mexico is going to pay for it. We’re going to not touch entitlements and end the national debt. We’re going to beat China in a trade war.
And he lied to his followers because he thinks they’re stupid.
In his final insult to his fans, he has decided to pardon the most ignominious former cast member of his entire presidency. Steve Bannon, the former Breitbart News chairman who incinerated the company founder’s legacy by fully committing to his promise that the website would become “the platform for the alt-right,” famously faced time in federal prison for conning Trump supporters out of cash through a fraudulent GoFundMe claiming to fund building the aforementioned wall. Bannon spent his short tenure at the White House driving Trump’s early presidency into the ground with the horrifically executed travel ban executive order and alienating the eventual architect of Trump’s eventual signature foreign policy achievement: Jared Kushner, who crafted the Middle East peace plans that Joe Biden has signaled he will build upon.
And because Trump thinks so little of his supporters, so little of the ordinary folks who actually believed him when he promised a wall, he decided to pardon his common criminal of a friend.
Bannon is a Harvard educated Goldman Sachs alum who ran his own boutique investment banking firm before becoming a Hollywood producer. He’s every bit as “elite” as the establishment Trump — himself a silver spoon billionaire and television star — promised to dismantle. Some of Trump’s policies may show promise, but in his final hours, Trump once again proves that his base needs to let him descend to the ash heap of history while they find another hero.
