Y’all are forgetting Trump’s Razor. The stupidest possible explanation is the true one. There’s no scheming here.
Photographic proof!
We don’t have to imagine it. We’re seeing it right now. Trump is their baby - the Mercers paid for Trump’s campaign, and Bannon was the PR brains for it.
So the bad news is that they can get even a fuckup like Donnie elected. The good news is that they have terrible judgement, so they’re apt to pick a fuckup like Donnie for their machinations.
Bannon is Chaotic Evil.
Trump is Chaotic Stupid.
Kelly and McMaster hated Bannon, who was doing everything possible to undermine them. With Bannon gone, they’ll have about as much power as possible considering they can’t do much about Trump or his kids. But getting Bannon out of Trump’s ear on a daily basis is a big win.
It would be like all that stuff the right claims George Soros does right now, only FOR REAL.
You know what would be really sweet? If Trump tarnished the Trump brand so much by being a terrible President that he loses his hotels after he leaves office because everyone universally hates him now. Instead of elevating his brand name, he destroys it. That would be sweet ironic justice.
Gorka might be next.
Sebastian Gorka, a Bannon ally who previously worked with him at Breitbart News, also faces possible removal from his post as a counter-terrorism aide to the president, said two people with knowledge of the situation.
Bannon had Gorka’s back. He’s as good as gone. You can tell the military guys (Mattis, Kelly, McMaster) are trying to get the insane element out of national security.
Edit: Who’s Julia Hahn, you ask?
Say what you will about Manchin, but he’s not an idiot.
There was a convoluted scheme to get Manchin in as Energy Secretary. This would net the GOP another vote in the Senate for Obamacare repeal and “tax reform.” Then they’d move Perry over to Homeland Security - or in the supersized version, Justice, so that Trump could fire Sessions.
There were many, many flaws with this plan, not the least of which that it assumed Manchin would cross party lines just for the honor of snagging a berth aboard a rapidly-sinking ship.
Trump resigned the presidency already — if we regard the job as one of moral stewardship, if we assume that an iota of civic concern must joust with self-regard, if we expect a president’s interest in legislation to rise above vacuous theatrics, if we consider a certain baseline of diplomatic etiquette to be part of the equation.
By those measures, it’s arguable that Trump’s presidency never really began. By those measures, it’s indisputable that his presidency ended in the lobby of Trump Tower on Tuesday afternoon, when he chose — yes, chose — to litigate rather than lead, to attend to his wounded pride instead of his wounded nation and to debate the supposed fine points of white supremacy.
He abdicated his responsibilities so thoroughly and recklessly that it amounted to a letter of resignation. Then he whored for his Virginia winery on the way out the door.
Trump knew full well what he should have done, because he’d done it — grudgingly and badly — only a day earlier. But it left him feeling countermanded, corrected, submissive and weak, and those emotions just won’t do for an ego as needy and skin as thin as his. So he put id before country and lashed out, in a manner so patently wrong and transcendently ruinous that TV news shows had to go begging for Republican lawmakers to defend or even try to explain what he’d said.
On Tuesday he “relinquished what presidents from Roosevelt to Reagan have regarded as a cardinal duty of their job: set a moral course to unify the nation,” wrote The Times’s Mark Landler, in what was correctly labeled a news analysis and not an opinion column. Landler’s assessment, echoed by countless others, was as unassailable as it was haunting, and it was prompted in part by Trump’s perverse response to a question that it’s hard to imagine another president being asked: Did he place the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Va., on the same “moral plane” as those who showed up to push back at them?
“I’m not putting anybody on a moral plane,” Trump answered.
Indeed he wasn’t. And if you can’t put anybody on a moral plane, you can’t put yourself on Air Force One.
A president is supposed to fill important posts. Trump dallied. A president is supposed to be involved in lawmaking, but members of Congress who met with Trump about the repeal-and-replace of Obamacare were aghast at his ignorance of the legislation and of the legislative process itself.
A president is supposed to safeguard the most sacred American institutions, repairing them if need be. Trump doesn’t respect them. He has sought to discredit and disempower the judiciary, the free press, the F.B.I., the Congressional Budget Office. He even managed to inject politics into, and pollute, the Boy Scouts. This is the course of a tyrant.
I haven’t mentioned Russia. How astonishing that it can be left out and there’s still a surfeit to rue.
The whole piece is great.
Wasn’t sure where to put this, so this seemed as good a thread as any. ;)
fffuuufufuck cognitive dissonance
they ARE the fucking establishment.
So… what happens now? Bannon brings down Trump and other GOP? Or does he target Dems, Antifa, etc?
The latter.