If you’re looking for comfort in a week of dispiriting news that included a horrific chemical attack, the confirmation of a right-wing ideologue to the Supreme Court, and our uncertain entry into escalating tensions on the world stage, there’s this: even the ever-delusional Trump appears to know his presidency is in tatters.
True to form, Trump told pool reporters Thursday he had “one of the most successful 13 weeks in the history of the presidency”—a pretty fantastical pronouncement given he’s only been in office 11 weeks.
But the removal of Steve Bannon from the National Security Council and reports Friday that he might even be “reassigned” revealed a recognition within the White House that Trump is flailing. It also bolstered the proposition that this White House is indeed susceptible to outside opinion. That’s good news for progressive activists across the country who helped hand Trump two of his most wounding defeats to date: failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act and indefinitely stalling the Muslim ban.
Of course, Bannon was the architect of some of Trump’s most nefarious actions, including the Muslim ban and the parade of ghouls who are now gutting the very agencies they are charged with leading. Notably, his approach to governing flaunted an imperviousness to public perception. He wasn’t concerned with Capitol Hill or establishment Republicans, Democratic voters or independents, analysts or intellectuals. If anything, Bannon was singularly focused on one audience—the fiercely loyal right-wing voters that represented Trump’s core base.
Bannon’s insolence and the policies that flowed from it left the impression of an impenetrable White House, immune to outside influence. But reports that emerged of fissures between the Ivanka-Kushner faction of the White House—or what some staffers call the “West Wing Democrats”—and Bannon’s bloc of far-right nationalists showed that a wide array of criticism is motivating both the White House and Trump.
In fact, Kushner has reportedly been searching for answers about Trump’s flagging performance:
In recent weeks, Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, has asked searching questions — sometimes for hours — of inside and outside advisers about the White House's performance and complained about Bannon in particular, according to people who have spoken with Kushner.
And press coverage, in particular, has caught the eye of Kushner and his allies.
Mr. Kushner and the others are said to be especially concerned about the geyser of bad headlines that have marked the president’s first two and a half months in office. They have resisted many of the more polarizing policy initiatives favored by Mr. Bannon’s side, including the travel ban and rollbacks of environmental regulation and of protections for transgender students, arguing that they undercut Mr. Trump’s election night pledge to be a president for all Americans.
The Kushner wing clearly lost the battle on all three of those initiatives, suggesting that Trump is as erratic and impulsive as his next policy initiative. But if he really thought Bannon had been hitting home runs, it’s doubtful he would have rewarded him with such a public demotion.
Of course, Trump’s only true loyalty is to himself and we know that he feasts on a steady diet of cable news. On Twitter, he continually plugs Fox News’ flattering coverage while simultaneously obsessing over the “failing New York Times,” his hometown newspaper whose coverage has been a little too clear-eyed (i.e. critical) for his tastes.
But whatever his public pronouncements, Trump is plagued with insecurity and desperate to know what’s going wrong with his infant presidency, which hasn’t produced any key legislative victories he can boast about. It’s a sore point for Trump—one he’s keenly aware of—and it’s cast a pall over his entire White House.
Mr. Priebus remains in a hot spot. Mr. Trump is fond of asking visitors, “How do you think Reince is doing?” and he expressed anger at the collapse of the health care overhaul, telling a longtime associate last week that he believed that Mr. Priebus was partly to blame.
Not to suggest that Trump’s ire over healthcare has been laser focused on chief of staff Reince Priebus. Trump’s censures on the failed effort have taken more of a scattershot approach aimed at anyone who touched the thing and even those who didn’t: Democrats, Paul Ryan, the Freedom Caucus. Basically, everybody but Trump.
But blame aside, Trump’s two biggest black eyes have come from his implosion on the Muslim ban and his inability to broker a deal that pushed health care repeal through. The two plague him for different reasons. The ban was his first major policy roll out and it looked a lot like a biker rolling over a cluster of nails at warp speed. The judiciary’s swift and near unanimous rejection of it may have been Trump’s first clue that presidents aren’t kings, and governing actually requires skill and finesse.
But the healthcare collapse torments Trump because it has become a direct measure of his success as compared to that of President Obama, and Obama is winning. It’s killing Trump and much of his legislative agenda with it.
Progressive activists and Trump diametrically disagree on why his presidency’s a disaster—him because he can’t pass repeal and them because he tried, for instance. But it was largely Democrats across the country who turned out at town halls and gave pause to some of Washington’s most reliably far-right lawmakers. When Arkansans get into the head of someone like GOP Sen. Tom Cotton and he starts putting the brakes on repeal, you know you’re doing something right.
We cannot stop every terrible thing this White House and the GOP will do, but upending the travel ban and Obamacare repeal delivered the entire Republican agenda a body blow that has vexed Trump and his inner circle. And if Steve Bannon also becomes a casualty of those progressive efforts, much of the white supremacy wing of the White House might walk out the door with him.