Grift made Donald Trump. Grift made the modern-day Republican Party. It seems almost inevitable that the two would eventually come together to present the greatest threat to the nation in more than a century: January 6, 2021.
Few of the revelations unveiled by the Jan. 6 committee on Monday about Trump’s fundraising were really new. After all, months after the event, former Trump fixer and attorney Michael Cohen declared Trump’s claims of election fraud the “greatest grift in U.S. history.” He said that Trump “has made it very clear that he is grifting off of the American people, these supporters, these individuals that are just sending money to him at record levels.”
But the connection the committee made to that grift—the Big Rip-off, as Rep. Zoe Lofgren termed it—to the violent and horrifying events on Jan. 6: that clicked. As did the case the committee seems to be making for felony wire fraud. That’s the takeaway from one prosecutor, anyway: New York state Attorney General Letitia James. “The new details revealed tonight related to January 6 are disturbing,” James tweeted Monday. “It’s my duty to investigate allegations of fraud or potential misconduct in New York. This incident is no exception.”
James is already investigating the Trump family and the Trump Organization for fraud in New York real estate practices. The bar in that investigation is relatively high: “James will need to show that the three eldest Trump children and their father knew what they were doing was wrong—and did it anyway.”
The Jan. 6 committee arguably has met that bar so far, presenting testimony from various members of Trump’s own team that they told him he had lost, that there was no fraud, that there was no basis for continuing the Big Lie and—this is the fraud part—for continuing to fundraise on it. There’s the financial fraud.
Then there’s the fomenting violent sedition part. Al Schmidt, former Philadelphia city commissioner, spoke to that Monday. He stressed that the city took “seriously” every claim the Trump campaign raised about fake ballots cast in dead people’s names. “Not only was there no evidence of 8,000 dead voters voting in Pennsylvania, there was not even evidence of eight,” Schmidt said.
For his efforts, Schmidt and his family were inundated with death threats from the MAGA crowd. “The threats became much more specific, much more graphic, and included not just me by name, but included members of my family, their names, ages, address, pictures of our home, every bit of detail you could imagine,” he said.
That’s the very dangerous side of the tradition of grift that the Republicans have been perfecting for the past 60 years, as author and historian Rick Perlstein told The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent. “This phenomenon of conservative Republican leaders seeing their constituencies as a pool of marks to squeeze money out of really does go back to the beginnings of the conservative takeover of the Republican Party in the 1960s,” Perlstein said. “As is so often the case in the Republican Party under the Trumpist reign, it takes normal historical patterns of behavior and turns them up to 11.”
“Right-wing voters are acclimated into an understanding of the world in which they are being victimized by dark forces,” he continued. “That’s a great way for conservative leaders to get money shoveled in their direction. But it’s also a great way to form what Marxists used to call a ‘cadre,’ a group of fanatically dedicated followers.”
“Now we face the phenomenon of millions of people, many of them armed, who are identifying their own safety, comfort and flourishing as human beings with the political success of Donald Trump and his allies. […] If you think the stakes are whether civilization itself survives, and that you’re dealing with a cabal of shadowy enemies, of course you’re licensed to use any means to stop them,” Perlstein said.
“If the stakes are racial replacement, and the shadowy enemies are the Jews said to be controlling the replacement of Whites, then it’s okay to kill Jews. It’s okay to shoot up Black churches. It’s okay to shoot up a Walmart.”
Or it’s okay to attack the U.S. Capitol and attempt to overthrow Congress and threaten to kill the vice president.
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