Sean Spicer may try to sneer away the media’s interest in “palace intrigue,” but what’s happening within the Trump regime is more than just a change of favor among courtiers. In a White House as devoid of soul as the one that Donald Trump visits for a couple of days each week, the people whose spaces cluster around the Oval Office are far more important than they would be if the president held firm beliefs.
And Steve Bannon isn’t just another adviser. His very position—chief strategist—was created especially for Bannon. It marks the special level of influence he’s held both before and after the inauguration. He’s not just another guy in the White House: he’s the ambassador to the alt-right. His office is the embassy of the white nationalist movement that’s gnawing at the heart of Europe and driving noxious hate in America. Bannon isn’t a celebration of the banality of evil. He’s just evil. There’s nothing banal, or hidden, about it.
Now Bannon is in decline, and no one should be sorry about it. But the reason most are giving for his fall …
But for Bannon, the day’s routine obscured the reality that he is a marked man — diminished by weeks of battles with the bloc of centrists led by Trump’s daughter and son-in-law and cut down by the president himself, who belittled Bannon in an interview with the New York Post.
… isn’t likely the driving factor. The Kushner up/Bannon down narrative simplifies the larger story: Bannon’s strategy wasn’t working. Steve Bannon was steering the White House into historically bad ratings, epic ineffectiveness, and declining power at home and abroad.
Throwing Steve Bannon overboard isn’t an inside baseball play. It’s a matter of survival.
Bannon’s ouster mirrors that of Paul Manafort. When Manafort’s many Russian connections began to drag at the Trump campaign, Trump didn’t dismiss his campaign chair right away. Instead he shuffled the campaign, bringing Bannon on as his “campaign CEO,” before pushing Manafort out the door.
Jared Kushner’s rising position isn’t likely a direct response to wrangling with Bannon. Rather it’s Bannon’s failures that led to Kushner being elevated. But it’s also very likely that these moves are a prelude to Bannon getting a nice “That guy? I barely remember him.”
The man not long ago dubbed the “shadow president” — with singular influence over Trump’s agenda and the workings of the federal government — is struggling to keep his job with his portfolio reduced and his profile damaged, according to interviews Wednesday with 21 of Trump’s aides, confidants and allies. Some colleagues described Bannon as a stubborn recluse who had failed to build a reservoir of goodwill within the West Wing.
If Trump had been riding high in the polls and making his jagged scribble on a new health care bill, Steve Bannon could have been conducting KKK meetings in his flip-flops. No one in the White House would have cared. But that’s not how it worked out.
Instead, Trump has glommed onto positions that are not part of Bannon’s alt-right white nationalist agenda in an effort to prevent the slide before he finds the sub-basement. But that doesn’t mean those positions are one bit better. Rather than crazy faux-populist economic positions lifted from Breitbart, Trump is moving toward standard hard-right conservative positions taken from Fox News … the same standard conservative positions that sent the economy into a death spiral last time, requiring President Obama to pull the nation out of the ditch.
On the environmental front, Trump continues to press the worst of the right, treating the EPA not as a tool to protect the health and resources of the nation, but as a hated source of regulations. That’s not an alt-right thing. It’s just the regular hard-right thing. Trump’s move from white nationalism to conservative corporatism offers no relief on this front. In fact, Trump holds an anti-environmental position so extreme that a whole new set of Overton windows needs to be installed just to see it.
Likewise, on the core issue of immigration, Trump has flipped not one awful inch from the anti-immigrant positions that have defined the Republican Party for more than two decades. While the alt-right is explicitly racist, Republican positions have be scarcely less so since the 1960s. Trump hasn’t retreated one inch on his hatred for anyone Other. He’s just doing what Republicans have threatened since the civil rights era.
And when it comes to the biggest change between the Bannon presidency and that of 45 and 1/2, it’s a switch from the isolation that said “let Putin and Assad do what they want” to a George W. Bush style militancy that calls for striking first and coming up with a policy later. That is not an improvement.
Trump’s “flipped” positions still include all the worst features of traditional Republican policies, taken to the most extreme positions. The worst of trickle-down economics. The worst of climate denial and environmental degradation. The worst of chicken-hawk militancy for the sake of getting a pop at the polls.
The positions that have changed are just that, changed. That doesn’t mean they’re better.
For Trump the question will be whether it turns out there are more numbers to be mined from the radical right than the alt-right. Does Bannon carry more support out the door than a flight of tomahawks and embracing the Export-Import Bank brings in? If not, expect another fall guy soon.
Keep an eye on the polls.