“Shaggy, pretentious and endlessly cynical, Bannon presented himself as a man with a limbic connection to Trump’s base. But few people had more disdain for the members of the right-wing grass roots — whom Bannon sometimes referred to as “hobbits.”

In “The Brink,” a 2019 documentary about Bannon, there’s a scene in which he speaks to supporters in a modest living room stuffed with furniture and bedecked with crosses. As his small audience sits rapt, he lauds the room’s similarity to one in his grandmother’s house and pays homage to the “working-class, middle-class” people who make up nationalist movements everywhere.

Then he and a young man traveling with him walk out and step into their chauffeured car. “You couldn’t pay me a million dollars a year to live in that house,” sneers Bannon’s associate. They head to a private airport. Bannon starts to make a crack about the luxurious locale: “This is the populist …” Then he thinks better of it and shoves some popcorn into his mouth.

So it’s fitting that when Bannon on Thursday became the most recent member of Trump’s 2016 campaign staff to be arrested, it was on charges of defrauding gullible Trump supporters. According to a federal indictment, Bannon, along with his associates Brian Kolfage, Andrew Badolato and Timothy Shea, ran a crowdfunding campaign, We Build the Wall, ostensibly to help fund Trump’s promised southern border barrier. The project became, said prosecutors, a source of personal enrichment.”

I would add that Fox News celebrities like Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham are in the same sphere.  They use Trump’s  “marks, suckers, and patsies” as a base to enrich themselves and their cable news company.