Former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon was charged on Thursday with defrauding donors of a private fund-raising effort called We Build the Wall, which was intended to bolster the president’s initiative along the Mexican border. According to the New York Times, the fund-raising effort collected more than $25 million, and prosecutors said Bannon used nearly $1 million of it for personal expenses.
Bannon has been one of Washington’s most strident China hawks, addicted to selling his China-smearing remarks and outdated Cold War zero-sum game theories after he stepped down from the White House in August 2017, sparing no efforts to blackmail China for his own political gain.
As a far-right fringe extremist, Bannon has constantly been claiming that China poses a threat to the US in order to save his doomed political career, and gain wider attention. When Bannon reassured the public he would use the money for a project that could reduce illegal immigration, it turned out that he and his co-conspirators pocketed millions of dollars in donations and used it to pay for their lavish lifestyles and expenses, including "travel, hotels, consumer goods, and personal credit card debt”, according to the indictment.
His hypocrisy can explain the reason why he’s so keen on creating tensions between China and the US and causing trouble to bilateral relations between the world’s two major powers. The fraud he committed once again proves that he was involved in the so-called “anti-China” business to seek benefits for himself, regardless of the wider good for the US and its people. In an interview with Asia Times in June, Bannon even said Trump could increase the chances of getting re-elected if he focused on attacking China and criticizing Joe Biden’s “China connections”.
The China card is what he excels at to steer bilateral relations in the wrong direction. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Bannon was a bane to the global anti-virus fight. He exhausted all kinds of tricks to spread rumors and conspiracies, and attacked China to hold the country accountable for the losses incurred from the pandemic. In an interview with CNBC, he accused the Communist Party of China of trying to "protect it from spreading around China, but they didn't care about it spreading to the world."
He was trying to spread a political virus by claiming that China hid the truth of COVID-19, that the virus was man-made from a Chinese lab, and that China profited from the pandemic. By turning a blind eye to sufficient scientific evidence and international laws simply to sow discord between China and other countries, what Bannon did during the pandemic went against the health and welfare of people around the globe, and jeopardized the will of the human race to win the battle against the COVID-19.
In a speech that Chinese Ambassador to the US Cui Tiankai delivered on August 13, he warned individuals keen on launching the “new Cold War” in unprecedented ways, saying they “must weigh the costs they pay and the consequences to the world. For whom the bell tolls, there will be a day of reckoning.” China has actively promoted the healthy development of China-US relations regardless of what some US politicians have said and done. People from both sides with a vision should be aware that no matter how hard Bannon and his allies tried to sell the zero-sum game theory that goes against the trend of globalization, they are doomed to be despised by the public. When Bannon left the West Wing, he lost sway and influence in the United States. This time, the whole world will once again witness his downfall.