Steve Bannon’s arrest shows ‘grifts’ of Trump’s inner circle are catching up to them: columnist

Writing in The New Yorker this Thursday, Eric Lach says that while Steve Bannon's arrest for fraud connected to the "We Build the Wall" campaign caught a lot of people in the political sphere off guard, we should have seen it coming.

"It has been asked, repeatedly, whether the grifts of Donald Trump and the people around him would ever catch up with them. On Thursday, they caught up to Bannon," Lach writes.

Lach writes that indictments of Bannon and his cohorts raise questions about other members of President Trump's inner circle. "We Build the Wall’s board members included Kris Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state; Erik Prince, the Blackwater founder and a brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos; David A. Clarke, Jr., the former sheriff of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin; and Curt Schilling, the former major-league-baseball pitcher," he points out.

Trump has long enjoyed the mystique of being able to avoid accountability for his scandals. While Trump may ultimately avoid consequences for his actions, there's growing evidence that the mystique may soon start to wear off.

"Trump has not been able to browbeat and demagogue the coronavirus," Loch write. "The bottom has fallen out of the American economy, a hundred and seventy thousand Americans are dead, and the polls show that those still alive are souring on the President and his party. This week, even before the Bannon news, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report that detailed the relationship between another former Trump campaign official, Paul Manafort, and Russian intelligence during the 2016 campaign."

Read the full op-ed over at The New Yorker.