Per the pool, the White House is banning staff and guests from using their personal phones in the West Wing starting next week. Does that include Trump’s?
Is there such a thing as Trumpism without Bannonism? At her White House press briefing today, Sarah Hucakbee Sanders asserted that they are distinct political forces, alluding to the “President’s base” as a different entity from Bannon’s Breitbart media bubble.
But how separate are these two theoretical entities? I’ve argued that the biggest loser of the 2016 election was the establishment GOP, who, after collectively and unsuccessfully stopping Trump in the primary, find themselves bound to a president they privately despise out of fear he will tweet at them. Trump and Bannon may have eviscerated the GOP, but that’s not the same as building up a durable political infrastructure (a lesson Obama taught the Democrats). And today’s split, shows just how fractured and dissolute the Republican Party is and will remain for years.
Between Trump and Bannon, there’s no question about who has more political pull or star power. Still, since Bannon was fired, it’s clear that he views Trump as an imperfect vessel for his program of economic ethno-nationalism. And tactically, at least, you can read his incendiary quotes about where he thinks the Russia investigation will go as a way to protect Bannonism if Mueller brings down Trump.
But what about Trump? His agenda has never been much more than self-gratification of his enormous ego and spiting his enemies (of whom Bannon is now near the top of the list). This vacuum has been eagerly filled by people with other ideas — Bannon first among them — but no one should mistake them as Trumpism.
It’s no mystery where Trump will go from here: the same place he always go, which is narcissism. Trump the egoist may simply overestimate how much of his political appeal is due his own personal brand versus how much of it has been channeling Bannonism.
But if he feels the need to renounce Bannon, what does that look like? Mitch McConnell may be enjoying today’s fireworks, but it’s hard to imagine Trump pivoting his political capital to someone like Martha McSally in the race for Jeff Flake’s Arizona Senate seat at the expesnse of a Breitbart-friendly candidate like Kelli Ward. He might do it just to spite Bannon. But imagine you are Ward: how do you thread the needle now of trying to appeal to the Breitbart crowd without risking Trump’s wrath?
Manafort, Flynn, Spicer, Priebus, Bannon, Sessions, Tillerson, Mattis, Omarosa … it may not be an exaggeration to say that the most effective check on Trump’s authoritarian impulses has been his own inability to maintain relationships with other people for any significant length of time.
The Trump-Bannon divorce is official. GOP primaries in the 2018 midterms are going to be wild.
Bannon sounds like anyone who’s ever been forced to work with (or worse, for) the boss’s idiot kids.
“The seat is now going to go to the Democrats.†This brief dispatch on the GOP’s failure to find a candidate to run for a Miami congressional seat indicates a bleak future for Republicans in Little Havana in the Trump era.
It’s quite striking how many of Trump’s policies are simply “the opposite of what Obama did.” Why is he tweeting about the Iran protests?
No grand plan, or principled strategy — just not what Obama did. President No-bama has been one of the most accurate predictors for an otherwise unpredictable president. (And of course, the idea that Obama was “silent” during the 2009 Iran protests is itself an old conservative talking point that was debunked as far back as 2012.)
In 2018, there’s a magazine called Broccoli that’s about marijuana while Bake It Up! is a magazine about cooking. [Mr. Magazine]
Prosecutors will be busy for years combing through the sheer volume of favors Trump has done for corporate supporters and the money shoved at him by foreign governments.
Specific promises like A.G. Sulzberger’s are going to have significance to future budgets. Unlike other newspaper owners, the Sulzbergers display a very practical understanding of how great journalism happens.
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