Many Republicans are eager to dismiss Steve Bannon’s
scorched-earth on-the-record assault on the Trump White House in Michael
Wolff’s shocking new book, Fire and Fury, as merely the bitter ravings of a
delusional pirate tossed overboard to save the vessel. Indeed, top Republicans
are downright gleeful that the crazy man behind Roy Moore has been publicly
shunned, seemingly once and for all, by Donald Trump. And if Bannon is cast adrift from his perch at Breitbart, then perhaps Republicans
are right to assume that Bannon will fade into irrelevance.
In the BTRTN post we wrote immediately after Trump fired Bannon in August, we offered this slight variation on an age old truth: “Hold your friends close, hold your enemies closer, and hold psychopaths
long enough and tightly enough so that someone can tie them up in a
straight jacket.” If you are going to take someone down, figure out how to finish the
job. The walking wounded can seek retribution.
Democrats can fling sticks and stones at Donald Trump.
The news industry’s efforts to bring Trump to task have been all but neutered by natural audience selection.
Robert Mueller may someday be ready to take Trump down through an orderly
constitutional process. But there is one
guy who can damage Donald Trump’s standing with his ferociously loyal base, and
that guy just pulled his rip cord.
It remains to be seen whether there are truly
game-changing implications in the declaration of independence Steve Bannon
launches in Fire and Fury. But a pissing contest about the rightful ownership
of the Trump base is the last thing the Donald anticipated or needs at this
juncture. There is so much kharma instantly coming around on this one that John
Lennon would need an entire album to cover it.
For starters, the Bannon canon relayed by Wolff is the
natural endpoint of a mythic narrative that there is a “Republican Party.” Ever
since the early days of the primaries, it has been clear that today’s
Republican Party is a loose confederacy of political philosophies that only
converged on the core belief that Barack Obama is the devil and that Hillary
Clinton is worse. The clans that comprised the party brought startlingly
different belief systems to the task of defeating Clinton. The Tea Party is
anti-Federal government; an estranged rural bloc wildly resents the entrenched
“establishment,” which encompasses Republicans and Democrats from the Beltway
to Wall Street; Christian conservatives narrowly focus on social issues and
Supreme Court appointments; fiscal Republicans merely seek far more conservative
economic policies, advocating free trade and deficit reduction; and traditional
Republican centrists are occasionally sighted, usually riding on unicorns.
Donald Trump was merely the empty vessel into which each
group could pour its hopes, hates, aspirations, and venom. He gave voice to
multiple octaves of rage.
The inability of Republicans to govern reflects their own
fractured belief system. After the inauguration, Republicans rapidly discovered
that they had no commonly held approach to replacing Obamacare, no unified
approach to immigration reform, no overarching foreign policy, and their only
legislative achievement was a tax bill that bore no relation to its original
objectives of simplification and relief for the middle class.
For the past year, we have watched as Donald Trump’s
support has eroded to a hardened, impenetrable kernel of zealous and
uncompromising acolytes. In these columns, we at BTRTN have repeatedly
documented how impervious this group has been to criticism of Donald Trump.
Trump’s base has been an inert, non-responsive dead zone of blind conviction.
Other than Donald Trump himself, the person most
responsible for the unflinching certainty of Trump’s base is Steve Bannon. Bannon
provided the thought leadership for the most central themes of populist appeal:
nationalism, and rage against the establishment. While he may physically appear
disheveled, slovenly, and unappealing, he has a real charisma, is an excellent
communicator, and is actually capable of casting a comprehensive strategic and
philosophical vision.
The Mercer family – Breitbart’s
ATM – is furious at Bannon for his outrageous indiscretion in the Wolff book.
But as long as Bannon retains his post at Breitbart and the communications might
of its reach, he is capable of speed-balling his own alt-right philosophy and cleverly
veiled anti-Trump rhetoric directly into the veins of the Trump base.
Republican legislators fear Bannon for very good reason: if they are found
wanting in their commitment to the cause, Bannon will find a “true believer” to
contest them in the next primary.
Given his zeal, his anger, and his megaphone, the possibilities
implicit in Bannon’s rebellion are wide-ranging and spell nothing but trouble
for Donald Trump.
First and foremost, Steve Bannon has just legitimized
Robert Mueller’s investigation far more profoundly than anyone in Washington
short of Trump himself ever could have done. As Trump and his loyalists
stonewall behind the contention that the entire Mueller probe is a baseless,
biased, politically motivated “witch hunt,” Bannon has just declared that the
President’s son and son-in-law engaged in “treasonous” behavior. In this juicy
quote, Bannon has actually gone farther than the most liberal constitutional
scholars, who define “treason” solely in military terms.
In so doing, Bannon has created a breach that could prove
hard to reconcile with the enraged Trump. The Donald wasted no time in
responding, saying that when Bannon lost his job at the White House, he also
“lost his mind.” If Bannon had indeed just declared war, Trump’s riposte
signaled that the battle had been joined. When Trump predictably rattles his litigious sword at Bannon, the author, and the publisher, he is only hyping book sales. The only relevant battleground on
which such a war will be fought is for the hearts and minds of Trump’s base.
On radio programming yesterday, an apparently contrite
Bannon attempted to re-assert his fealty to Trump, but let’s be real. The book hadn’t even gone on sale yet!
When Wolff’s chronicle goes platinum, Bannon will have no choice but to own his
quotes. Wolff, apparently, has tapes. How deliciously Nixonian! There are just too many
ironies in this fire.
All this Bannon fodder can be traced back to a simple
truth: Bannon and Trump have been in a ferocious competition to take credit for
Trump’s victory. Both absolutely crave that credit, and both are furious that
the other appears to have taken more than their just share. Perhaps at only a subconscious level, Steve Bannon knows that his best hope of proving that he deserves
credit for Donald Trump’s rise is to ensure that without Bannon, Trump falls.
Bannon has pointed his saber directly at the soft underbelly
of Trump’s bravado: his blood ties to his family members. Bannon has shrewdly
opted to not attack Trump personally – which would be rejected by the base –
but rather to eviscerate son Donald and son-in-law Jared Kushner. Bannon is
quoted as saying that “They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on
national TV,” which sure sounds like an accusation that the younger Trump is
guilty of something. Bannon seethed
with resentment at Kushner’s condescending manner and at the fact that the
children sought Bannon’s ouster. In the
accusation of treason, Bannon seems to be doing his best to shift Mueller’s klieg
lights directly on Kushner. This, in turn, would force Trump’s hand, with only
his choices being to pardon Kushner and risk triggering an impeachment process,
or abandoning his family by letting Kushner face the music alone.
Perhaps the most startling quote was Bannon's signal that Trump himself is already mortally
wounded. Wolff quotes Bannon as having said, “They’re sitting on a beach trying
to stop a Category Five hurricane.” For all intents and purposes, Bannon is saying
that the Trump presidency will not survive the Mueller investigation. It is
reminiscent of the scene in Titanic when captain gasps that the ship cannot possibly
sink, and the ship’s architect pronounces, “She is made of iron, sir. I assure
you, she can and she will. It is a mathematical certainty.” The message to the base has to be a shocking
insurrection against Donald Trump’s relentless dismissal of the Mueller probe.
Ah, the Mueller investigation. Perhaps the simplest
explanation of all is that Bannon, seeing the handwriting on the wall, is
ingratiating himself to Special Counsel Mueller. If you think Flynn had a story to tell, Bannon may well be telegraphing,
then come talk to the big dog.
Yes, all of this has Donald Trump publicly announcing
that Bannon is “losing his mind.” Those who have observed Donald Trump over a
very long period of time have noted his pattern of psychological projection: he
often accuses adversaries of the very thing he seems to feel most vulnerable
about himself. When major news outlets chronicled Trump’s serial deceitfulness,
Trump labeled those organizations “fake news.” Perhaps Trump’s characterization
of Bannon’s mental state is yet another instance of psychological projection,
as Wolff’s book is chock full of quotes from White House staffers who comment
graphically on the eroding state of Trump’s mental faculties.
The Wolff book and the internecine battle with Bannon are
exploding as the calendar flips into the year of what surely will be the most
consequential mid-term elections in American history. That day of reckoning is a mere ten months away… a time frame
that is both a lifetime and a heartbeat in Presidential politics. Many things
can and will happen… but there is already a well-formed core narrative in place
that just became a great deal harder for Donald Trump. He will increasingly find
himself running against a two-front war against energized Democrats
and Bannonized Republicans. Very likely, the latter will be highly critical of
the administration’s failure to capitalize on Republican legislative majorities
to turn the “Trump agenda” into law.
Steve Bannon has demonstrated a keen preference for
candidates who are driven by ideological purity rather than doing what needs to
be done to win. As such, they tend to be rhetorical firebrands with the
political half-life of plutonium. They are extremists who frighten the
centrists. They tend to lose, but they will go down swinging. The bad news for
Donald Trump is that as often as not, they will be swinging at him.
Hell hath no fury like a political consultant scorned. That
Steve Bannon would allow himself to be quoted so freely, so viciously, and with
such vitriolic hyperbole can hardly be considered a mere lapse of judgment. As
James Bond’s creator Ian Fleming so eloquently put it, “once is happenstance,
twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.”
Perhaps Trump’s base will turn on Bannon, and he will
become a mere footnote or curio, that unhinged man on the street corner with the
sign that the apocalypse is coming. But even if a small percentage of Trump’s
base actually believes that Bannon was the power behind the throne all along,
it could be devastating. At this point, a mere five percentage point decline in
Trump’s approval rating could turn it from merely low to flat-lining and uninhabitable
for human life. And the collapse of the base is what will send rank and file Republicans
racing for the exits.
Live by Bannon,
die by Bannon.
Instant kharma’s going to get you, Donald. Maybe this
time it wasn’t such a great idea to scream, “You’re fired.”
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