Bannon may be correct in the sense that as much as Trump tried to execute some elements of the Bannon whiteboard’s list of things to destroy, Trump screwed the pooch seemingly at every turn.
Bannon knows he’s done the best he could considering the resistance from fairly conventional military and the the screw-up from the various compromised characters now under investigation. Putting the worst possible heads of administrative agencies was his best contribution to his attack on the administrative state.
Much like the surprise of the Electoral College victory, Bannon was the beneficiary of the Perfect Storm election of 2016- that confluence of data mining, racial animus, TV-clown candidate, media sycophancy, polling over confidence and perhaps even money laundering. He says he didn’t think he’d last this long at the WH. Bannonism will last longer, even if anti-globalism won’t.
His final “insubordinate” act of doing an interview to push his agenda item of a US-China trade war was called by some a last act of defiance. Perhaps it was just another feint brought on by drink or cigars. Charles Krauthammer calls it a “classic Scaramucci”.
We’ll see when Trump next tweets about this.
Bannon knows he can do more from his comfy seat at Breitbart … farther from the subpoenas.
Now left to _____ his own ______ in the private sector, yesterday Bannon made a quick transition back to Breitbart Media, having an editorial meeting only hours after leaving the WH. He never really left.
“Bannon openly admits he will be working for Trump but in a more ruthless, unchecked capacity at Breitbart”
The triggering event for the dismissal was Mr. Bannon’s interview with the left-wing American Prospect in which he trashed his colleagues and undermined Mr. Trump’s policy toward North Korea. After that show of insubordination, either Mr. Bannon had to go or Mr. Trump might have lost his new chief of staff John Kelly, among others. Mr. Bannon has been telling people privately that he never expected to last even this long, so maybe he was trying to get fired to fulfill his prophesy.
Mr. Bannon will get historical credit for getting Mr. Trump elected, joining the campaign late with Kellyanne Conway and giving it more discipline and focus. At the White House, he was among the advocates for Mr. Trump’s two main achievements—deregulation and Neil Gorsuch’s elevation to the Supreme Court.
Yet by any measure the rest of the Bannon Presidency was a colossal failure. The former Breitbart publisher was a major source of White House dysfunction as he brought his brawling campaign style indoors. His Manichean, almost apocalyptic view of politics—us vs. them, patriots vs. “globalists,” America has only a short time to avoid self-destruction—might work in an election campaign. It isn’t suitable to building a coalition to govern.
Mr. Bannon presided over some of Mr. Trump’s biggest debacles, starting with the rushed and legally unvetted travel ban. That began his Presidency with a needlessly polarizing debate when the White House should have been reaching out to persuadable Democrats and wary Republicans, and it set up Mr. Trump for a legal and political defeat.
Mr. Bannon gets credit in some quarters for focusing on the white working class, but he did so in ways that too often trucked with a white version of identity politics. This has played out in destructive fashion since the Charlottesville riot as Mr. Trump catered too much to Mr. Bannon’s “base” and not to the larger duty of a President to provide unifying moral leadership. Mr. Trump was elected President of the country, not the Breitbart readership.
Why was Prince even invited to this meeting?