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Steve Bannon

Apparently Bannon has a fearsome temper. I can't imagine that recent events are helping much with that.
 
In Politico ‘He’s not a good influence on the president’
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Step one, says Elliott Abrams: Get rid of Steve Bannon.

“He’s not a good influence on the president,” Abrams, no man to mince words, tells me. Having the White House’s chief political strategist on the National Security Council “was a terrible mistake,” and booting him was a good start to what needs to happen. A giant smile spreads across his face at the thought of Bannon being forced out of the White House completely.
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One of the great understatements of our time and boy does The Donald need help in the not being vile department. Doubt Abrams would be a great influence either but there are degrees in these things.
 
CrabbedOne said:
In Politico ‘He’s not a good influence on the president’
One of the great understatements of our time and boy does The Donald need help in the not being vile department. Doubt Abrams would be a great influence either but there are degrees in these things.
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It's interesting that so much focus is being placed on Bannon and so little on Gorka. Either way, I am sceptical as to whether either are any worse than the rest of the ghouls, including the 'globalist cucks', advising Trump.
 
J Ed said:
It's interesting that so much focus is being placed on Bannon and so little on Gorka. Either way, I am sceptical as to whether either are any worse than the rest of the ghouls, including the 'globalist cucks', advising Trump.
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By this I should clarify that I'm talking about outcomes - Kushner might have superficially less offensive beliefs, and he certainly seems to have the right sort of bourgeois tastes, than Gorka and Bannon but when we are talking about overall outcomes of governance there is likely to be little difference at all except perhaps the superficial acceptability of Kushner as 'globalist cuck' might mean that he is more successful in pushing policy than other openly racist and nativist members of the Trump Whitehouse. Liberals are already talking about Kushner's apparent victory over Bannon as a victory, and that looks like it could be used as a way of legitimating Trump.
 
On The Hill Budowsky: Why Bannon must go
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Trump must abandon Bannonism to avert disaster. He should not be attacking our intelligence services, showing contempt for democratic allies, falsely accusing former officials of the Obama administration of crimes, demonizing Democrats, threatening the free press, or undermining European unity. Those notions all follow Bannon’s extreme views of world affairs and democratic institutions.

Trump should abandon the destructive Bannon-like concept of “America First,” which leads to his repeated vow that if allies do not join us defending our security he will “do it alone.”

How many wars does Trump believe we should or can wage without allies whose democracies Bannon deplores with his dystopian world view?

Leading a divided nation in a dangerous world, Trump must end the civil war within his presidency and seek peace through strength, not division from extremism.
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Trump was doing most of that before he ever met Bannon.
 
How many wars does Trump believe we should or can wage without allies whose democracies Bannon deplores with his dystopian world view?
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The answer to that question for anyone asking it presumably is 'not enough for me'.
 
..on the other hand...

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Why Donald Trump still needs Stephen Bannon

The sidelining of his chief of staff leaves a strategic gulf around the president

Edward Luce

Well that was a relief. It took less than a hundred days for Donald Trump to put the generals in the driving seat. Stephen Bannon, the grand architect of the impending clash of civilisations, has already been sidelined. America’s allies in Europe are audibly exhaling. Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, is no longer Mr Trump’s best friend. Democratic and Republican hawks alike are still showering Mr Trump with praise. Another salvo of Tomahawk missiles should cement the deal. All is now forgiven. Goodbye Mr Bannon. Welcome to Trump 2.0.

Alas, there is a flaw in this near-universal view. Mr Bannon is still around. Indeed, the White House chief of staff is the only person in the Trump administration who comes close to having a strategic brain. Jared Kushner, like his father-in-law, is a Manhattan realtor with a talent for connections. But he has no worldview. James Mattis, secretary of defence, has a shrewd military brain. But battlefield nous should not be confused with strategy. Ditto for HR McMaster, national security adviser, who joined forces with Mr Kushner to sideline Mr Bannon. Rex Tillerson, secretary of state, remains an unknown quantity. He is also bound to a see-saw. After last week’s strikes on Syria, Mr Tillerson said the Trump administration’s goal was to remove Bashar al-Assad. The week before, he said precisely the opposite. It is hard to keep up with Mr Trump. Like him or loathe him, Mr Bannon’s perspective is consistent. It also comes closest to Mr Trump’s. Moreover, Mr Trump still needs him. The Bannon worldview is clear. The US has spent too long following the strictures of the Washington foreign policy establishment, which rarely hears of a missile strike it does not like. Mr Bannon was reportedly opposed to last week’s attack. He had his reasons. The first is that the US cannot afford to be sucked into another Middle Eastern quagmire. It is quite possible — even probable — that Mr Trump’s actions took place in a strategic vacuum. He saw the Syrian carnage on television and reached for his remote control. Those 59 Tomahawks could have been the munitions equivalent of a tweet. The next one might be different.

On the other hand, it could be the first part of a new phase in which Mr Trump takes ownership of Syria’s future. Good luck with that. It would take the wiles of Henry Kissinger and the luck of Ronald Reagan to fix Syria. Mr Trump might be better off listening to Mr Bannon the next time the urge strikes him. No doubt, he is equally capable of giving incendiary advice in different circumstances — a clash with China, for example. But on the Middle East, Mr Bannon’s instincts are sound.Mr Trump is also sidelining Mr Bannon’s economic advice. In the coming weeks the Trump administration will unveil plans for US tax reform. The piece that most matters to Mr Trump’s voters is the promise of a $1tn infrastructure modernisation. It was the core of his vow to the so-called forgotten American. He would bring jobs to the midwest and restore pride to the welders. Here too, establishment voices have been getting the better of the argument. Mr Trump is surrounded by conventional tax-cutting advisers from Wall Street and the Republican party. Were Mr Trump to focus instead on a middle-class fiscal package, he would need to make common cause with the Democratic party. All the signs are that he is heading in the opposite direction. Washington is moving rapidly back to the kinds of policies that were so angrily rejected by voters last year. Just as the generals are squeezing out Mr Trump’s America First foreign policy, so Wall Street is winning the economic debate.In both cases Mr Bannon is the loser. Of course, in many big instances he deserves it. The wall with Mexico was always an expensive irrelevance. The travel ban on citizens from six Middle Eastern countries is a needless provocation that deserves to be shut down by the courts. The winks to the thugs of the alt-right are unforgivable. US foreign policy hotting upPlay videoBut we should not confuse those who voted for Mr Trump with fascists, or even a “basket of deplorables”. Millions of Americans who voted Trump had also voted for Barack Obama. As the saying goes, the Trump voter base took him seriously but not literally. What they heard was a promise to put the US middle class back into the limelight. That meant no more reckless wars. Mr Trump’s attack on George W Bush’s Iraq war was a seminal moment in his campaign. It also meant no more pandering to the super-rich. The Trump campaign was the first successful pitch to blue-collar voters in Republican history. Mr Bannon was one of its architects.It is impossible to shed tears for Mr Bannon. It would also be premature. He is still a stone’s throw from the Oval Office. Moreover, not all of his advice is outrageous. A politician should at least try to redeem some of what he promised to the voters. If Mr Trump’s election signalled anything, it was that the Washington establishment was a busted flush. American politics deserved to be disrupted. It still does. Mr Bannon’s fortunes are the best measure we have of whether Mr Trump remembers why he was elected.
 
J Ed said:
It's interesting that so much focus is being placed on Bannon and so little on Gorka. Either way, I am sceptical as to whether either are any worse than the rest of the ghouls, including the 'globalist cucks', advising Trump.
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Oh be serious these guys are far right propagandists peddling hate speech larded with the odd right-on idea borrowed from Occupy to sucker the really gullible. They offered only a darker dose of probably rapidly disastrous economic nationalism, race warrior creative destruction and behind the noxious smoke screen a neoliberal stripping of the administrative state (i.e. state) plus the same old voodoo economics. Really the sort of people that peddle tales of sinister (probably Jewish) international cabals and a MB US take over to some angry schmuck whose 401Ks and Fannie&Freddie mortgage their Hedge Fund owning masters intend raiding as they get rich off alt-right induced volatility in the globalised system. Bannon has utterly cynical manipulator written all over him but Dr Gorka appears to be both entirely unqualified and quite potty. It's insane having such folk around a vulnerable child man with the codes to the nuclear football.

It is an impressive cluster of Goldman critters Trump assembled. I doubt Clinton would have dared hire such a crew of sharks. But that was predictable with Trump. The man's nothing if not an eager exploiter of leverage on government to enrich himself and his chums. I'm not actually sensing much outrage from his supporters about that. The alt-right folk only went loopy when Trump hit Assad's airbase which is rather revealing about their authoritarian priorities if you think about it.
 
On TDB Forget Spicer, Is There a Real Fascist in the White House?
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Here is a man who has encouraged the inference that he is in open sympathy with the Nazis of his native Hungary. He wears the medal of the Order of Vitez, a Hungarian society of “merit” that the State Department still lists as having operated “under the direction of the Nazi Government of Germany.” The Nazis didn’t officially occupy Hungary until late 1944, but once they did, the puppet government helped Adolph Eichmann and his henchmen round up hundreds of thousands of Jews and send them off to…Holocaust centers. Some key figures in that government were members of the order.

Now, lest you say all that is guilt by association on my part, I reply by reminding you that Gorka wore the group’s pin to an inaugural ball! In other words, he announced the association himself about as gaudily as one could announce it. Imagine. You’re at home, you’re getting dressed for a presidential inaugural party. You slap on the cuff links, straighten your jacket. You look down on the dresser at that pin. What on earth makes you decide to put it on? Occam’s Razor would suggest to us that the most obvious reason may be that you’re a fascist.

He and his defenders say the pin was his father’s, given to him in the late 1960s, and as such dates to an era when the order was battling communism, so it merely represents Gorka’s love of homeland and hatred of the Soviet jackboot. That’s all fine. After the heroic 1956 uprising, the Soviets clamped down especially hard on Hungary. And in 1989, its brave foreign minister Gyula Horn all but ended the Cold War. Hungary has a noble anti-communist history, and if Gorka takes pride in that, and his father’s role in it, he should.

But at the very least, Gorka’s politics are… murky. My paternal grandfather is Croatian (I think; there is some confusion on the matter, and unlike Gorka I don’t care very much). Some Croatians fought against the Tito variety of totalitarianism. But back during the war, Croatians were enthusiastic Nazi allies. If I had been handed down a pin that might make people think I was celebrating Nazi collaboration, I can promise you I wouldn’t be wearing it to the Safeway, let alone an inaugural gala.

And to bring it back to Spicer, his comments yesterday help us understand a little bit about why Gorka’s appointment raised no flags. He was in heavy apology mode Wednesday morning as I wrote these words, and that’s nice, but he can’t un-reveal what he inadvertently revealed the previous afternoon. The history of the order whose pin Gorka wears isn’t of any interest to the people who hired him. So they walk in ignorance, and because of the power they have, they make the rest of us follow.
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Speaking of Dr Gorka.

That Trump some of whose kids are Jewish ended up hiring this twit is a little bizarre. You'd think a chap with a PHD would adjust his behaviour a little just to avoid risking offending what appears to be Trump's most trusted man Kushner. It's all a bit we are the masters now. But then his strongly held views on shall we say "identity politics" got him a gig on Breitbart under Bannon and he got to be a talking head on Fox spouting garbage about Islam. For Trump having had a a Fox appearance is vetting enough.
 
CrabbedOne said:
The sort of people that peddle tales of sinister (probably Jewish) international cabals and a MB US take over to some angry schmuck whose 401Ks and Fannie&Freddie mortgage their Hedge Fund owning masters intend raiding as they get rich off alt-right induced volatility in the globalised system.
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:thumbs: You've made the whole thing seem quite reasonable.
 
On Politico If Trump Fired Bannon, Would He Seek Revenge?
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“In Steve’s dream scenario, he would depart, things would fall apart even more so, and Trump would beg him to come back to fix it,” Bardella said.

Otherwise, Trump could eventually find himself directly in Bannon’s crosshairs, some said.

“We would see House and Senate races in 2018 to, you know, go after Trump’s agenda,” said internet troll Charles Johnson, an ally of Bannon who worked for him at Breitbart. “Everything would slow down. His presidency would essentially be over. Bannon is more than just a man. He is honestly something of an idea because he represents something that both the establishment and the left-wing media hate.”

In years past, Bannon produced several political documentaries, an experience that one Breitbart insider suggested he could call on in a scorched-earth campaign against Trump.

“He does have skills, like high-end skills,” said the insider. “One of his high-end skills is he could actually put together a documentary. What if he came out with something before the 2018 midterms, ‘Where Trump Went Wrong’?”

If it does come to open conflict with the president himself, right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, a former Breitbart tech editor hired by Bannon who often calls Trump a “God Emperor” and “Daddy,” made no bones about where his loyalties lie.

“It will be my very great honor to manage the Bannon 2020 campaign,” he said, before sending over three mock logos for the hypothetical presidential run.
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Steve is really not a good loser. That's if big daddy Bob Mercer's unleashes his easily offended minion.
 
On Vanity Fair THE INSIDE STORY OF THE KUSHNER-BANNON CIVIL WAR
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When asked about Miller, one of his classmates noted that stories about Ted Cruz as a student at Princeton made him out to be “really smart, really conservative, and a huge asshole.” Cruz’s conservatism, though, seemed rooted in a deep sense of constitutionalism. Miller, by contrast, was animated by “purity, traitors, immigration, and being an oppressed minority on campus.”

Miller was a Trump supporter as early as 2011, according to one current West Wing official. For that reason, this person said, it’s wrong to think of him as part of the Bannon camp—his roots with Trump go deeper. Miller is “growing more and more in importance because he is liked and respected by everyone,” according to a senior official close to the president, in a comment that made me realize Miller was being saved even as Bannon was being savaged. It is Miller, not Bannon, this official says, who is the true keeper of the policy agenda at the White House, and he has been for some time: “We had a whole campaign with 15 policy speeches before [Bannon] showed up for the last 72 days.”
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Goes over the warring camps of a chaotic Whitehouse. Miller's set of visceral campus grudges here may be more key to understanding Trump's appeal than the more colourful recovering Dead Head Bannon with his magpie tendency to pilfer shiny Occupy tropes.

Here we have Bannon being grafted onto along with a Conway by the Mercer's rather late on after the favoured Movement horses they backed have fallen. Bannon then greedily takes probably far too large a slice of the credit for the unexpected Trump victory. Pompously seeding rumours that he's the real power in the Whitehouse. Which you might see as clever self aggrandisement by the Breitbart propagandist or terminally stupid given Trump's green eyed ego. The inexperienced Bannon's then is involved in a series of cack handed unforced policy errors. Trump being essentially an ideological empty vessel starts to drift away from risk ladened positions he's little attachment to. Doing what most Presidents do: just bowing to the real world and picking up much of the last guy's policies as shaped by it. Finally Bannon resorts to leaking bile against the "globalists". The beloved Ivanka and Trump's emerging consiglieri Kushner. This is about as smart as beating up on a Corleoni Familly daughter.
 
In The New York Magazine Steve Bannon’s Biblical Fall
Steve Bannon is a devout Catholic who believes in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. But it’s the story of Christ’s descent into hell that occupies his mind most this Easter weekend.

The embattled chief strategist to President Donald Trump is a student of Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich, a 19th-century nun and German mystic whose visions, documented in The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, served as inspiration for The Passion of the Christ, the 2003 film by Mel Gibson (who, incidentally, Bannon once reportedly tried to work with on a movie about, among other things, Adolf Hitler and eugenics).

In that book, in a chapter favored by Bannon, this is how Emmerich describes hell: “All in this dreary abode tends to fill the mind with horror; not a word of comfort is heard or a consoling idea admitted; the one tremendous thought, that the justice of an all-powerful God inflicts on the damned nothing but what they have fully deserved, is the absorbing tremendous conviction which weighs down each heart.” Those poor souls in hell are notable not for their misfortune, but for their deservedness. (Coincidentally, I’m sure, Emmerich also predicts that Lucifer will be “unchained for a time fifty or sixty years before the year of Christ 2000”; Trump was born fifty-four years before, in 1946.)
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16-bannon-thorns.w710.h473.2x.jpg

"Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, That this night, before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice." -- Matthew 26:34 KJV
 
In Vanity Fair HOW HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL HELPED TURN STEVE BANNON INTO A MONSTER
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But Bannon’s nationalism may have itself emerged from the case study system. “I think his perspective is that there’s a rational way to think through something and have an impact,” says Tom Meredith, a fellow alumni and Internet entrepreneur. “He saw Breitbart as a way of making his views known and grabbing the attention of the neglected, largely white middle class. You could paint this in racist terms, but it doesn’t have to be anti–the other race; white people have felt marginalized over the past eight years. He saw that as a disenfranchised large voting block that could be harnessed through social media, which Breitbart did very well.” The old white guy who got laid off from his job because it went overseas, he continues, “or because the mill got shut down from excessive E.P.A. regulations, doesn’t want to hear about how caribou might get killed from the pipeline. He simply wants his job back.”

Meredith defends Bannon, and remembers him fondly. “He was affable and social,” he says. “He’d have a beer or two, there was no doubt. But he wasn’t a racist.”

There’s a natural procession of the business-school ego, from making boatloads of money to changing the world. Bannon and Mitt Romney are ideologically dissimilar, but their shared career progression suggests their Harvard Business pedigree. Bannon’s late-career megalomaniac ambitions are, seen in this way, a form of Harvard Business School noblesse oblige—the sacred duty of wielding great power to questionable ends. “He goes into the military, then H.B.S., then Goldman,” says the female classmate. “He spent a lot of time collecting all these badges of prestige, that I’m assuming made him feel more adequate. Now that he’s made all the money, and can take care of his dad and his kids and grandkids, he can now look at it all with disdain and say, ‘I’m really about the people.’ And having already won in business, his next step up is the nation itself.”
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All those badges of prestige but he failed to make Partner at Goldman at just the point when that made "globalist" colleagues very wealthy men. The raging at parts of the establishment that he tried so hard to be at home in may start from that point.
 
Idris2002 said:
Every time I see this thread has been bumped, I suddenly hope that he's died, or had an incapacitating stroke, or something.
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I seem to recall that when Briebart died we had a thread on him for a while. Someone suggested that he looked like a heart attack waiting to happen. Sure enough, he had a heart attack. Bannon looks like an even better candidate with that red, puffy cast to his skin. If you walk around with all that hate and anger, it will get you eventually.
 
phillm said:
A Hitler / Churchill "art watercolour off competition" would be a close run thing but both of course would beat Bush raised arm down.

30AA078900000578-0-image-a-107_1453994827882.jpg
Winston-Churchill-Villa-on-the-Nivelle-%C2%A3200-300k-%C2%A35052501.jpeg
churchill-paints-chartwell2.jpg
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That painting by Bush of his dad is fucking awful. I would recommend he stick to his day job but he was a shit president too.
 
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