Trump promised to “drain the swamp.” But his campaign attracted a carnival of corrupt influence peddlers and conspiracy mongerers. He pretended to be in a holy war against the “deep state” but his administration was defined by cronyism and long-time amoral operatives who groomed him to enable their own enrichment.
Now he’s finally, hopefully, being held to account—but who were those swamp creatures who slithered around his ankles and whispered in his ears? In this new Bonus series, Julian tells the intersecting stories behind the news of the 7 years that culminate in Trump’s latest slew of criminal indictments.
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The 37 million dollar super yacht off Westbrook, Connecticut belonged to exiled Chinese billionaire and conspiracy theorist Guo Wengui.
In June of 2020, in Upper New York Bay, on that same yacht, Guo and his business partner in GTV Media Group had signed a contract in blood declaring allegiance to the so-called New Federal State of China.
The anti-communist conspiracy-peddling wing of the Falun Gong cult, Epoch Times, reported that loud peals of thunder sounded over the Statue of Liberty as the two made their auspicious declaration.
Like Epoch Times, GTV has spread QAnon, COVID, and Donald Trump's election fraud misinformation over its airwaves, and pushed unproven COVID cures, artemisinin and ivermectin.
Wang Gui would end up being arrested in March of 2023 on charges of fraud and money laundering, having cheated his followers out of hundreds of millions of dollars via fake stock offerings.
But in August of 2020, it was Guo's business partner in GTV and blood brother in the new federal state of China who would be arrested on the $37 million superyacht, which Wang Wei had bought with his ill-gotten riches.
And that business associate and blood brother to the Chinese exiled billionaire conspiracy theorist is none other than Steve Bannon.
And he was arrested on that summer day for likewise lining his pockets with money from trusting followers.
Bannon came into the Trump campaign right as Manafort was leaving, under the cloud of lucrative secret connections with Ukraine becoming revealed.
When Trump swept to power, in part due to the guidance of then chief strategist Steve Bannon, he promised to drain the swamp.
But the truth is his presidency was a magnet for the ambitious bottom feeders that lived there.
He framed his tenure as a war against the deep state, but the truth is that as much as he embodied unprecedented corruption and criminality himself in that office, he was groomed and enabled and advised by self-serving operatives with a decades-long history of swimming in the deepest, darkest, slimiest waters of power.
Trump promised he would lock Hillary up for what he characterized as her failure to protect top-secret classified documents.
Now he stands indicted amongst his total of 91 current criminal charges for exactly that crime and worse.
He also whipped up anti-immigrant sentiment and promised he would build the wall on our southern border.
Now that border stretches over 1,900 miles and the Trump administration was able to complete 452 miles of the wall, roughly 25%.
But even then, a December 2020 Customs and Border Protection report said that only about 40 of those miles were built where there had previously actually been no wall.
In 2018, an Air Force veteran named Brian Colfage started a GoFundMe campaign called We Build the Wall.
Prior to the Trump presidency, Colfage ran several conspiracy theory-promoting fake news clickbait websites that he claimed, in private text messages, earned him around $200,000 a month.
The names of sites that he either owned or was closely associated with included Freedom Daily, Keep America First, Right Wing News, Trump Republic, and Veteran as Fuck.
He also wrote for conservative media company, The Blaze.
Colfage was very active as part of that right-wing social media blitz that melted the brains of boomers on Facebook in the run-up to Trump's victory.
You remember that time.
He's also well-known for smearing and threatening opponents online, which has at times led to death threats against his opponents from his supporters.
In one particularly egregious incident, he baselessly accused the Catholic priest of the La Lomita Chapel, an historic site whose land was threatened by the border wall, of, you guessed it, sex trafficking and abuse of women and children.
When the National Butterfly Center, that's a real thing, raised concerns about a piece of the wall being built in the Rio Grande floodplain, Colfage smeared them, saying online that they did a roaring sex trade.
The We Build the Wall GoFundMe raked in $25 million from the MAGA faithful.
It operated with an advisory board chaired, you may be unsurprised to discover, by Steve Bannon.
The campaign claims to have used between $6 and $8 million of the $25 million it raised to build one fence less than a mile long in El Paso and another of around 3 miles in Rio Grande.
According to ProPublica, the latter was used by its builder, Tommy Fisher, to secure more than $1.7 billion in federal building contracts in Arizona, despite that
fence faring very poorly only months later when inspected by engineering experts and
hydrologists. Those inspections may well have been an omen for the campaign itself, as in
August of 2020, the We Build the Wall principals, including Colfage and Bannon, were
arrested and charged with a scheme to divert money from We Build The Wall.
into their own bank accounts. Bannon's arrest of course would happen in the Long Island Sound on
the superyacht of Gua Wen Gui. His three co-defendants were all convicted and imprisoned.
But on Donald Trump's very last day in office, January 20 of 2021, four months
before Bannon's trial date, he was pardoned along with 140 others, including multiple corrupt
former Republican officeholders who'd been jailed for fundraising, tax evasion, bribery,
and racketeering offenses.
All of them were released back into the rancid muck of the swamp they call home.
