Chief White House racist Steve Bannon quit/got fired/whatever last Friday. As has become customary in the Trump White House, this personnel move was immediately followed by a number of gossip-oriented news reports and interviews of varying levels of bonkers-ness. Here are the most important takeaways there from:
1. Bannon is going to war for Trump, which may mean impeaching Trump. Bannon, the former chairman of Breitbart News, almost immediately assumed his old job again as his former/current colleagues tweeted things such as this:
In a Bloomberg News interview, Bannon said this means he’s going to war on Trump’s behalf, as in, he still thinks of himself as Trump’s conscience and will try to amplify the president’s nationalist agenda from the outside. But a Breitbart staffer in Gabriel Sherman’s Vanity Fair piece says that if POTUS allows said agenda to be hijacked by the dreaded centrist-establishment-“globalist” ideologies of chief White House nepotist Jared Kushner and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, then Breitabrt is “prepared to help Paul Ryan rally votes for impeachment.”
2. Bannon will use any excuse to get out of work. From Vanity Fair:
In May, when Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas visited the White House, Bannon stayed home. “I’m not going to breathe the same air as that terrorist,” Bannon texted a friend.
Abbas was a member of the PLO in its early days but has been a moderate advocate of cooperation with Israel for four-plus decades. Bannon clearly just did not like having to not dress like a slob at the office.
3. The dream of Insane Fox News is alive! During the 2016 campaign, when it looked like Donald Trump would lose the election, it was speculated that he and Bannon and maybe Sean Hannity would subsequently go into the television business to launch an even-more-right-wing, even-more-conspiracy-oriented version of Fox. That got put on hold when Trump accidentally became president, but now Vanity Fair says Bannon’s ouster has put it back on the table (“Sinclair” is Sinclair Broadasting, a right-wing company that owns numerous local-news stations):
Last week in New York, he huddled with his billionaire benefactor, Robert Mercer, and discussed ways to expand Breitbart into TV, sources said. “Television is definitely on the table,” a Bannon adviser told me. A partnership with Sinclair remains a possibility.
4. Politico’s reporters could not find any good scoops for their article. Politico has done a lot of great White House-chaos reporting recently, but the outlet’s Bannon wrap-up was short on spicy detail and long on nonsensical generalizing:
Just who will be ascendant in Bannon’s absence—the more traditional conservatives, like Vice President Mike Pence and Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, or the moderates, like National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn and top adviser Jared Kushner—remains unclear.
Yeah, who knows?
It was difficult to explain Bannon, sometimes, because he was shrouded in mystery and enigma.
Mmm.
Yet he was different than many others in Trump’s West Wing — often fighting for the hardline position and embracing culture wars, working throughout the weekends, reading ancient historic texts.
Indeed, who else in the Trump White House would ever fight for or embrace a controversial position? Also, the perceptive cultural commenter David Roth has pointed out on Twitter, the idea that Bannon is well-read seems to derive solely from the fact that he occasionally mentions obscure racist books. Ancient historic texts, my ass.
6. The New York Times got the goods. Now this is a palace intrigue quote:
“Those days are over when Ivanka can run in and lay her head on the desk and cry,” he told multiple people.
That’s Bannon, allegedly, gloating that new chief of staff John Kelly is preventing Ivanka Trump from influencing her father’s policy in a moderate direction by, I guess, crying.
7. And yet. The Times piece also included this:
Mr. Bannon was notorious for maintaining his own, shadowy presence within the White House.
What? Who else’s presence would he maintain?
8. LOL. This is Bannon talking to the Weekly Standard:
“I feel jacked up,” he says. “Now I’m free. I’ve got my hands back on my weapons. Someone said, ‘it’s Bannon the Barbarian.’ I am definitely going to crush the opposition. There’s no doubt. I built a f***ing machine at Breitbart. And now I’m about to go back, knowing what I know, and we’re about to rev that machine up. And rev it up we will do.”
You haven’t heard the last from Steve Bannon (because he’s an insane person who will follow you down the street, his exposed torso protruding from a pair of unwashed cargo shorts, shouting about crushing you with his weapons), America!
