Trump dumps on Friday and removes Steve Bannon, now confirmed by the WH.
Bannon had submitted his resignation two weeks ago, during the John Kelly review of staff.
Which MSM outlet will get his “exit interview”. If he’s strategic, he’ll pick a Sinclair affiliate rather than FoxNews, as Tucker Carlson would be the optimal choice of idiot savant, but who knows.
This move does explain why Bannon spoke last week to the American Prospect on the record, to reach out to a different audience, perhaps building that Beltway portfolio if he goes to the Heritage Foundation and making him a better get for MSM punditry.
He may actually have a bigger media platform especially at Breitbart. Perhaps this also firewalls some of the Mercer connection to where #TrumpRussia should go with the Cambridge Analytica side of the 2016 data laundering.
Bannon had a recent meeting in NYC with Bob Mercer, in anticipation of going back to “that killing machine” Breitbart. Speculation about Mercer influence in the WH will coalesce around Kellyanne Conway, but what of the Breitbartists who have been attacking Gary Cohn as a “globalist”.
More interesting is whether Bannon’s departure actually changes any WH policy, given the chaotic nature of Trumpian actions/inactions.
Senior staff had finally turned against Bannon, since Priebus had left or rather since Kelly took over. Trump apparently believed that Bannon was a leaker but more importantly the recent book Devil’s Bargain made Bannon look like a self-aggrandizer, which is fatal for Trumpists.
MSM is trying to see this “firing” as a response to Charlottesville, which could have been OK had not Trump gone on what now seems to be a tweet-bender.
Trump definitely failed when going off-script in MSM meatspace, signaling perhaps that elusive beginning-of-the-end of the regime, as he revealed his inner Bannon.
Trump apparently has only been in charge of his thumbs but not much more. Wagons continue to circle … when Ivanka and Jared leave, the end is nigh.
Amidst a nationwide debate over the decision to remove Confederate monuments — which Trump sees as "beautiful" pieces of history — from the country in wake of the deadly rally in Charlottesville, the people all over the web can't help but make one big joke about Bannon's exit:
That joke, of course, is that Bannon has become an ousted Confederate statue himself.
mashable.com/...
Expect greater Breitbartian activity on college campuses during the fall … perhaps an emergent RW third party from the Trumpian dregs. Maybe hire this budding Log Cabinist who needs a Milo makeover:
even the RW is having trouble with Trump’s tweets
Today’s pivot...
and as usual with a Trumpian move, comes the bullet point in a foot: as Donald Trump Jr begins to follow Assange on Twitter.
Trump’s worst messages comes from his ad libs, since he does only think in small, simplistic message blocks as others have noted. For example, today he returned to white supremacy and Islamophobia but 140 characters made him craft some interesting false inferences from statues to Pershing.
One does wonder where Trump gets his mistakes since his biggest message errors recently have been ones not well thought out, much like the tendency for writing students to paraphrase from already abridged material because of digital technology.
There’s a twitter-bot (@trumps_feed) that retweets the twitter items that Trump’s twitter regularly gets, so what Agent Orange might be choosing to retweet is available to the Twittersphere.
What is remarkable is that he seems incapable of reading original sources, much less in depth, although one assumes he reads MSM like the NYTimes and WaPO but perhaps in hardcopy form.
Otherwise his media has been filtered by this sub-group retweeting items to the god-emperor, except for all that TiVo’d television.
But we should have already guessed that, considering his short-attention span theater problem and that NPD anger.
Much of what Trump learns about the world is filtered through two lenses: what he watches on cable news (particularly Fox) and what he sees on Twitter.
Wired’s Ashley Feinberg linked the arguments from Trump’s Tuesday news conference about the violence in Charlottesville last weekend to rhetoric that he may have picked up from Twitter or from watching Fox.
The liberal site Media Matters put a fine point on that latter connection, pairing Trump’s language with similar statements that had previously aired on Fox…
Whom does he follow right now? Twitter allows us to see all 45 of those accounts right now, and, interestingly, the order in which he followed them.
That order, from earliest to most recent follow, goes like this:
- Ivanka Trump
- Donald Trump Jr.
- Piers Morgan
- Greta Van Susteren
- Bill O’Reilly
- Eric Trump
- Seven Trump properties
- The personal account of Dan Scavino, his social media director
- Vince McMahon, head of the WWE
- Golfer Gary Player
- Producer Mark Burnett
- Fox News’s Eric Bolling
- Geraldo Rivera
- Rivera’s wife (whom he followed after he followed Geraldo)
- The account for “Fox and Friends”
- His attorney Michael Cohen
- Former spokeswoman Katrina Pierson
- TV personality Katrina Campins
- The duo of Diamond and Silk
- Ann Coulter
- Former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski
- Fox Nation, a Fox News social account
- Sean Hannity
- Lara Trump, Eric Trump’s wife
- Vanessa Trump, Trump Jr.’s wife
- Drudge Report
- A campaign account called Team Trump
- Vice President Pence
- Laura Ingraham
- His other daughter, Tiffany. (He followed his own daughter after Pence — whom he obviously started following only last summer.)
- Two more Trump Organization accounts
- Actress Roma Downey
- Reince Priebus
- Kellyanne Conway
- Dan Scavino’s White House account
- The White House
- Fox News’s Jesse Watters
- Fox News’s Tucker Carlson
https://t.co/5jCeLJ6ZXC
www.washingtonpost.com/...
On the 'good' white supremacists.
Donald Trump said: “And I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally—but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, OK?”
Fox News said: On Sunday, Fox News personality Pete Hegseth celebrated President Trump's initial, vague condemnation, and offered support for white people who feel disenfranchised: “There’s a reason those people were out there. Some of it is outright racism and needs to be condemned. A lot of it, though, is, ‘I feel like my country is slipping away and just because I talk about nationalism — not white nationalism — doesn’t mean I’m talking in code that I’m a racist.’”
So the next time you hear the president say something that makes you catch your breath, remember: There's a good chance he got it from Twitter, or from the country's number-one rated news network in the prized 25- to 49-year-old demographic.
www.wired.com/...
Experts did a linguistic analysis of the way Trump talks and found that his speech corresponds to a fourth grade reading level (the lowest of all presidential candidates, with Bernie Sanders on top at a high school level). And it turns out, that's what people like. This video by writer/producer Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter, explains that Trump's manner of speech might be responsible for his popularity.
[...]
About 98 percent of thought is unconscious. "Trump is using what's going on in your unconscious framed brain, he's using it against you for his purposes," George Lakoff said. "Using language that activates unconscious neural processes [get you to] unconsciously believe what he says. You believe it because it's repeated and it becomes part of your understanding. That's why this is so dangerous."
motherboard.vice.com/...