Oh, my golly, as this is written it has just been announced that Trump guru Steve Bannon has been indicted and arrested on two counts of mail fraud.

Bannon is charged as having been involved in a scheme that extracted $25 million from contributors who were told the money would be used exclusively to privately finance construction of President Trump’s big beautiful wall on the Southern border to protect us from being overrun by those nasty brown people.

As detailed in the criminal indictment, big chunks of the amounts collected from supporters of the wall found its way into the pockets of the four men indicted, including Mr. Bannon. While the defendants claimed in their solicitations that all the money would be used for the wall, the indictment charges that much of it went to support what was described as the accused’s “lavish lifestyle.”

All together, with feeling: Surprise! Surprise!! Surprise!!!

Putting on my Carnac the Magnificent turban (Note for younger readers: generational reference to fictional character made famous by late night talk show host Johnny Carson), I can predict the probable response from cloud cuckoo land, “Nothing in the charges pertain to Mr. Bannon’s relatively short tenure with the Administration, during which the president had only limited contact with him. If the charges in this liberal witch hunt turn out to be true, the President would, of course, be shocked and appalled, although it should also be said that Steve Bannon is a ‘good’ man.”

Whereupon Mr. Bannon will be thrown under a bus that has proved to have room beneath it to accommodate any number of malefactors who have turned out to be inconvenient to the administration.

To be fair, and what a concept that is in our current political climate, our president is not involved in this this bit self-aggrandizement, but that is not the point. The folks who were separated from their money did so because they believed and trusted in our president and in his representations that a wall was necessary for their own protection. This trust made them sheep ready for the shearing. In Trump world, and among the bottom feeders who can be found there, the shears are always kept in good working order.

There is very little new under the sun. Even the latest bruhaha over QAnon, an internet-based conspiracy movement implicitly having presidential approval, that, among many other theories, holds that evil liberals are killing and cannibalizing babies to extract life-extending chemicals from their blood, has more than a passing resemblance to Johnathon Swift’s (of Gulliver fame) early 18^th century “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burthen to their Parents or the County, and for Making them Beneficial to the Publick”, or “A Modest Proposal” for short.

Mr. Swift’s thesis was that the children of Ireland’s extremely poor should be fattened up and taken to market in order provide a new source of nutrition for those higher up the socioeconomic scale.

Mr. Swift was, of course, being satiric and sarcastic. Sadly, if a similar “Modest Proposal” came today from the mouth of Donald Trump, and was reported by certain right-wing media outlets, it seems it could be taken as gospel by perhaps 35 percent of our adult population.

Such is the degree of trust placed by his followers in Donald Trump.

That trust has, like the folks hoodwinked into the “Build the Wall” scam, been abused repeatedly since January 20, 2017. It is likely being abused today and will be abused in the future.

Perhaps as the campaign zeroes in on November 3, 2020, there will be a growing recognition that we are being taken for ride that could spell the end of our democracy.

In a state as red as Indiana, it would take a miracle to wean folks from their fascination with Mr. Trump and their willingness to be repeatedly scammed by his blandishments.

Providentially, miracles have been known to happen, but I am not holding my breath.

In the meantime, please pass the gravy.