Of course I think that Donald Trump should fire Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, Jared Kushner and Jeff Sessions. I just don’t focus on any of those #FireThatGuy campaigns because A) I don’t think much will come of it and B) it’s like shutting the barn door after the horses have bolted. The jig is up: the only people enthusiastically working for Donald Trump are the ones who share his views about everything. Firing Steve Bannon or Stephen Miller wouldn’t solve the fundamental problem that a neo-Nazi (or, at the very least, a neo-Nazi sympathizer) is the president of the United States. This has been my fundamental argument about Trump’s bitchfest about Jeff Sessions too: let him fire Jeff Sessions, let him try to get another attorney general confirmed by the Senate, let him nominate someone even more deplorable. It will all be the same, because Trump is the cancer on the republic, and until he’s gone, he will metastasize, spreading his evil on everyone around him, and on the country as a whole.
Now, all that being said, I find it interesting that there’s a renewed interest in firing Steve Bannon specifically this week. Many have claimed that Bannon is the one whispering white supremacist sweet nothings into Donald Trump’s ear. That may be the case, but we should also acknowledge: Trump had been a racist jackass long before he ever met Steve Bannon. Axios has a new story about what Bannon’s reaction has been to this week’s unfolding neo-Nazi catastrophe. Apparently, Bannon is totally jazzed. Shocking, I know.
On Tuesday night, Steve Bannon was excitedly telling friends and associates that the “globalists” were in mass freakout mode. Wednesdayy, Bannon reveled in the disbanding of the president’s business council, seeing this as yet more evidence that the Trump administration is at odds with the “Davos crowd,” as Bannon often calls these corporate elites, in a voice dripping with contempt. Bannon saw Trump’s now-infamous Tuesday afternoon press conference not as the lowest point in his presidency, but as a “defining moment,” where Trump decided to fully abandon the “globalists” and side with “his people.” Per a source with knowledge: “Steve was proud of how [Trump] stood up to the braying mob of reporters” in the Tuesday press conference.
Bannon has not meaningfully advised the president about his response to Charlottesville. He’s still on the outs with Trump, who has been calling him a leaker for weeks, though the president described Bannon as a good person on Tuesday. They spoke by phone on Saturday, Sunday and Monday, according to a source with knowledge of the calls, but the response to Charlottesville has been all Trump, and Trump at his purest. On the phone to Bannon, Trump asked his chief strategist “where does it end?” according to a source with knowledge of their conversations.
Trump wasn’t referring to the white supremacists, but to the counter-protesters whom the president believes are on a slippery slope towards “changing history” by tearing down monuments of Confederate heroes and potentially, he has said, the Founding Fathers like George Washington, who owned slaves. Unlike some of Trump’s other top aides — who have varied on a spectrum between frustration and disgust since the president’s Charlottesville remarks — Bannon has unapologetically supported Trump’s instinct to apportion blame to “both sides.”
Sources who’ve spoken with Bannon since Charlottesville say he views this moment as analogous to the campaign moment when Hillary Clinton condemned half of Trump’s supporters to a “basket of deplorables.” Bannon believes that if Trump condemned all the people who protested the pulling down of the Robert E. Lee statue then he’d fall into a trap set by leftists, the establishments of both parties, and the mainstream media.
Bottom line: Both Trump and Bannon are of one mind, and, within the White House at least, theirs is a minority view. They saw the backlash to Charlottesville as an example of political correctness run amok and instinctively searched for “their” people in that group of protesters. Bannon has told associates that Trump, on Tuesday afternoon, took it to the next level for the country by asking where does it end? He especially loved Trump’s line: “I wonder, is it George Washington next week?”
What else is there to say? Granted, I’m not sure if Donald Trump really cares about the “Deep State” conspiracies or even acknowledges the “Davos crowd.” Those are more of Bannon’s pet projects – all Trump knows is that people don’t like him, and that he’s just being himself, and that leads him to feelings of pettiness and contrarianism. He’s very much like the “very fine” neo-Nazis he defended on Tuesday: angry, sad, confused, bitter, hateful, ignorant and convinced that he is the most misunderstood and most aggrieved person in the world. All Bannon has to do is stroke those feelings which already exist within Trump.
Also: Bannon did an “interview” – he claims not to know he was on the record – with the American Prospect, a left-leaning magazine. Go here for the piece. It’s quite… something.
Photos courtesy of Getty.
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