Steve Bannon is an awful father and a wife beater

[GreyhoundFan]

Rosie O'Donnell changed her profile pic to one of her as Bannon. How great. I do hope they get her on SNL.  I think that just might send the Orange Menace into the stroke we all know is headed his way.

 

[lawfulevil]

That'd be fantastic- but her skin is way, way, way too good.

ETA- did a quick mockup of what I think the makeup would actually look like (it's kinda obvious that Steve's got issues even through TV makeup and he looks like DEATH without).

Edited February 15, 2017 by lawfulevil

[GreyhoundFan]

6 hours ago, lawfulevil said:

That'd be fantastic- but her skin is way, way, way too good.

ETA- did a quick mockup of what I think the makeup would actually look like (it's kinda obvious that Steve's got issues even through TV makeup and he looks like DEATH without).

Yes, that's more like it.

 

All kidding aside, it looks like Bannon has Rosacea. I have it too. My skin gets very red and nasty easily. The thing is, there is a great skin gel for it, Finacea. It's terribly expensive, but I bet Bannon has the $$$ for it.  I'm not kidding when I say that my skin went from similar to the picture on the right to the picture on the left in two weeks. I despise Bannon, but if he does have Rosacea, there's no need to suffer with the pain. I'd rather he suffer the pain of being kicked out of power...NOW.

[fraurosena]

I have Rosascea too, and had the same idea about Bannon's skin. I use a skin gel called Rozex, which works incredibly well for me. I really feel for you, @GreyhoundFan, and anyone else that has to pay out of pocket for expensive necessary medication!

Although we might moan about the drawbacks of our system, compared to other countries' healthcare, we have an incredibly good system, and I don't have to worry about such expenses at all. It's one of the contributing reasons why my eyes roll so painfully in my head hearing about all the rabid anger about the ACA. I just don't get that at all.

[GreyhoundFan]

The WaPo published an interesting article about President Bannon: "During his political rise, Stephen K. Bannon was a man with no fixed address"

Quote

In the three years before he became Donald Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon lived as a virtual nomad in a quest to build a populist political insurgency.

No presidential adviser in recent memory has followed such a mysterious, peripatetic path to the White House. It was as though he was a man with no fixed address.

He owned a house and condo in Southern California, where he had entertainment and consulting businesses, a driver’s license and a checking account. He claimed Florida as his residence, registering to vote in Miami and telling authorities he lived at the same address as his third ex-wife.

At the same time, he routinely stayed in Washington and New York as he engineered the expansion of Breitbart News and hosted a live Breitbart radio program. By 2015, Bannon stayed so often at Breitbart’s townhouse headquarters on Capitol Hill that he kept a picture of a daughter on a mantle piece, beneath a portrait of Abraham Lincoln.

Bannon told a friend that year he was living in multiple cities, including Washington, New York, London and Miami, according to an email obtained by The Washington Post.

The issue of Bannon’s legal residency has been simmering since last summer, shortly after he became chief executive of Trump’s campaign. The Guardian reported in an Aug. 26 story that he was registered to vote at a then-vacant house and speculated that Bannon may have signed an oath that he was a Florida resident to take advantage of the state’s lack of state income taxes.

In California, where Bannon had lived and owned property for more than two decades, income tax can exceed 12 percent.

...

The Post learned that state prosecutors in Miami have an active investigation into Bannon’s assertions that he was a Florida resident and qualified to vote in the state from 2014 to 2016. In late August, investigators subpoenaed Bannon’s lease of a Coconut Grove home and other documents. They also contacted the landlords of that home and another that Bannon leased nearby, and sought information from a gardener and handyman who worked at one of the homes, according to documents and interviews.

...

Well, lying and cheating fit right in with the tangerine toddler. The article has quite a bit of good information.

[onekidanddone]

On 2/2/2017 at 11:18 AM, Ali said:

Cheeto really needs to see this. Perhaps he will fire Bannon due to his fragile ego.

Bannon and Cheese Puff = Brothers in Arms. Jews all over the world are celebrating Purim this week.  A cousin of mine made Banonntaschens.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamantash

[GreyhoundFan]

Interesting: "Bannon’s origin story doesn’t add up"

Quote

It is a story oft-repeated and, at first, quite moving. It is the story of Marty Bannon, father of the White House chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, and how he lost much of his nest egg when the financial system cratered in 2008. He had worked for AT&T for 50 years, buying the stock when it was as safe as gold (only gold paid no dividend) and was now watching it go south at such an alarming rate that he decided to sell it. In a flash, the system turned on Marty and a lifetime of savings was gone. For his son Steve, it was an unforgettable lesson. It made him the revolutionary he is today.

The story reappeared last week in the Wall Street Journal. “The only net worth my father had beside his tiny little house was that AT&T stock,” Steve Bannon was quoted as saying. “And nobody is held accountable? All these firms get bailed out. There’s no equity taken from anybody. There’s no one in jail.”

That day, that October day when Marty Bannon panicked and took Jim Cramer’s advice from the TV and sold his AT&T stock, was when Steve Bannon had an epiphany: “Everything since then has come from there,” he said.

...

At some point in the Steve Bannon story I started wondering: If his father got fleeced, if “nobody [was] held accountable,” how can the remedy be less regulation? If Wall Street picked his old man’s pocket, why has President Trump appointed tycoon after tycoon who think the fairest tax is none at all and, in some cases, got immensely rich by collapsing companies and squeezing employees?

Where is the Trump appointee who cares about Bannon’s father? Why don’t they go down the halls of the White House to reassure Bannon and tell him it will never happen again? Why don’t they name an executive action after his father: The Martin Bannon, You Will Never Lose Your Nest Egg Act of 2017? The government will see to it.

...

But the Trump administration is not for new laws and tighter regulation. It wants to roll back the Dodd-Frank financial reform, which, among other things, created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, whose name tells you all you need to know about its purpose. The president wants to hack nearly one-third out of the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget, and he appointed an administrator, Scott Pruitt, who hates the very agency he’s supposed to run.

Why cut the EPA budget? Is our water too pure? Is the air too clean? Shall we go back to where we once were? Look what Volkswagen did. It cheated on emissions standards and allegedly lied about it until the EPA outed it. Shall we leave these matters to the private sector?

Let them breathe nitrogen oxides.

I have heard too many people in business and finance complain about excessive regulation not to think there is something of a problem there. Maybe Dodd-Frank is too burdensome. Maybe class-action suits need to be limited. Maybe Obamacare really was a fiasco. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

But Bannon’s “administrative state” boogeyman is not what flattened his father’s nest egg. It was not excessive regulation that fleeced his father or, for that matter, changed AT&T from Ma Bell into just another business behemoth. Go home, Steve. You need to think.

I agree with the last line, but I would rather he go to an uncharted desert isle.

[GreyhoundFan]

Not directly about Bannon, but his closest staffer: "Who is Julia Hahn? The unlikely rise of Steve Bannon’s right-hand woman."

Quote

It was a warm August night last year when Ryan Williams, a well-connected Republican operative, went to a book party in Washington — and met a ghost.

The occasion, an overstuffed affair honoring arch-conservative provocateur Ann Coulter, was thrown by Breitbart News Network at its Capitol Hill headquarters. Donald Trump had just seized the GOP nomination, and Breitbart political editor Matt Boyle was kvelling to the crowd about the thrill of sharing a space with Coulter at the center of Trump’s nationalist movement.

In the midst of this excitement, a friend of Williams introduced him to a startlingly young, chestnut-haired woman.

Her name was Julia Hahn.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Williams recalled recently. “I told her I didn’t even know if she really existed.”

Over the previous year, Hahn’s name had topped some of the most sharp-edged anti-immigrant and anti-establishment stories in conservative media. In keeping with Breitbart’s growing mission as a scourge against any moderate strain in Republican politics, she had aimed her most pointed and brutal attacks at House Speaker Paul D. Ryan ­(R-Wis.), whom she had accused of being a “globalist” Hillary Clinton sympathizer.

In a typically provocative piece, Hahn last fall retold the grisly tale of a California woman who was raped and murdered by an “illegal alien” — and then pitted that in contrast to the uproar over Trump’s boasts about groping women on the “Access Hollywood” tapes. Ryan had denounced Trump’s lewd talk, Hahn noted, but “there is no public record that [he] has ever spoken out about [Marilyn] Pharis’s sexual assault.”

The kind of knife-wielding, in other words, that can earn a writer a Twitter following in the high six figures and a regular punditry gig on Fox News. But Hahn’s increasingly watched byline was all the more extraordinary for her utter anonymity. Not only did she never appear on TV, she had no public social-media presence whatsoever. Photos of her were hard to come by — and conspiracy theories about her true identity were beginning to circulate. (Hahn declined to comment for this article).

“I half-suspected she was really just Boyle writing under a different name,” Williams said. “But there she was. I was surprised by how nice and mild-mannered she was, given how loud and intense her stories were.”

And now, at 25, Hahn has taken her scorched-earth view of the world to the White House, where she was recently appointed a special assistant to the president — the right-hand woman to Trump’s right-hand man, Stephen K. Bannon, her former boss at Breitbart, whose brand of conservatism and nationalism attracts its fair share of white supremacists.

...

“She’s the most wonderful, brilliant, kind, principled human being I’ve ever met,” Coulter said in an email. “I want her to be president as soon as she’s old enough.”

It’s fair to say that nothing about Hahn’s time at Harvard-Westlake, a top prep school in Los Angeles, nor at the University of Chicago, one of higher ed’s great temples of liberalism, hinted at a future friendship with firebrands like Coulter, let alone a job with a president who pushed conspiracy theories about Barack Obama’s birthplace, who wanted to ban Muslims from entering the country, who called climate change a Chinese hoax, and who launched his campaign by saying he would build a wall to keep out Mexican rapists.

While her fellow Trump White House prodigy, 31-year-old Stephen Miller, spent his own prosperous Southern California youth gleefully trolling his left-leaning classmates at Santa Monica High School, Hahn seems to have blended in with her native terrain. At her high school — which has also graduated Candice Bergen, Jake Gyllenhaal and the children of Steven Spielberg — she was known for getting along with most people.

...

“I would have described Julia as smart, driven, insightful, but most of all compassionate,” said Joshua Oreman, a friend of hers from the mock trial team. “What on earth happened?”

In her junior year at the University of Chicago, Hahn had three male roommates, two of whom were fellow philosophy majors and one of whom was her then-boyfriend, Miguel Andrade. Bryce Poerter, who lived with Hahn for two years, said the housemates frequented a nightclub in a mostly black South Side neighborhood to listen to blues. Andrade wrote poetry on a typewriter; Hahn collected vinyl records and worked, for a time, at a nearby shooting range. The foursome watched presidential debates together, but were more likely to argue about the virtues of various philosophers — she was a Freud devotee while her boyfriend was more of a Jacques Lacan man.

Already, Hahn had a knack for shocking people with her writing. Josh Fry, a student in her small thesis-writing group, remembers eyeballing her early draft. Her erudite tract had turned quite lively as she mulled how our society’s notions of selfhood might feed into problematic attitudes about sex.

Fry thought the topic, which included a discussion on bondage and sadomasochism, seemed “a little out of left field,” he said, for this “quiet and reserved” classmate. Hahn’s thesis ended up focusing on Freud, Michel Foucault and the left-wing intellectual Leo Bersani, whose work includes the book “Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays.” In a video of a 2013 conference on “Consciousness and Society,” Hahn can be seen paying tribute to Bersani, the keynote speaker. She is baby-faced in a button-down shirt and pearl earrings as she confidently analyzes Foucault’s critique of Freudian psychoanalysis.

Her fondness for Bersani had come with a few “serious drawbacks,” she coyly told the room full of academics. “In the dating scene, you’ll end up with a lot of unwanted follow-up calls and offers of a second date when you casually mention over dinner that you’re currently reading a philosopher who encourages you to shatter your current form of experience by going out and having anal sex.”

After graduating in 2013, Hahn told friends she wanted a job in media, according to the New Yorker, and that she wasn’t picky about where.

She landed a gig with conservative radio host Laura Ingraham. According to three people who worked with her there, it sparked her political evolution: She came into the job holding many liberal views, including on immigration — but she moved quickly to the right as she rose to executive producer of the show.

“Laura will do that to people,” said a former Ingraham employee. “She can be very convincing.”

The job threw Hahn in with a feisty crowd of political outsiders. She struck up a rapport with Miller, a top aide for then-Sen. Jeff Sessions at the time and now an architect of Trump’s nativist policies. She left to work for Dave Brat, the insurgent congressman from Virginia who toppled former majority leader Eric Cantor in a primary, and from there joined Breitbart, whose editor in chief, Alex Marlow, graduated from Harvard-Westlake five years before she did.

But it was Bannon who became a real mentor for Hahn. She called him, in a Breitbart article, “one of the most supportive, kind, inspiring and selfless bosses a reporter could ask for.” (Bannon also declined to comment for this article.)

...

Which makes it easy for people to see whatever they want to see. When Hahn joined the White House, Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard told The Post that she would “make Bannon look moderate” by comparison. Yet her former liberal friends are desperately seeking a silver lining.

“I feel better having her in the room than not,” said Poeter, her old college roommate. “The Julia I knew was not a demagogue.”

So how, exactly, does an apolitical philosophy major from the Westside of L.A. end up working as a fire-breathing populist beside the most controversial figure in the most controversial White House of a generation?

...

“What she feels in this particular moment,” Honickman said, “could be different three days from now.”

Okay, this woman sounds hideous. And, if Ann Coulter things you're wonderful, that's not a good thing.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Stephen K. Bannon, architect of antiglobalist policies, got rich as a global capitalist"

Quote

Stephen K. Bannon was running an investment banking company in Beverly Hills when his partner called with urgent news: a potential $10 billion deal was about to unfold in New York City involving a company they hoped to continue representing — and they didn’t want to be left out of the action.

Bannon, then in his mid-40s, told his business partner to meet him at the Los Angeles airport in an hour. Soon, they appeared at the Manhattan offices of PolyGram, a worldwide music company that they had previously represented in a film deal and now was for sale.

Before long, Bannon came up with an angle. He had represented Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, in a prior deal, and now he proffered the royal-family member, one of the world’s wealthiest Arabs, as a bidder. PolyGram was impressed and eventually paid Bannon a sizable fee for work on the overall deal.

“Those out of the room are out of the deal,” Bannon, now 63, said in an interview, recalling the 1998 meeting. “Once you make your way into the room, you stay.”

Years before Bannon became the architect of an antiglobalist revolution — working as chief strategist under President Trump to weaken free-trade deals, restrict immigration from a number of majority-Muslim nations and slam corporations that move jobs overseas — he made his fortune as the quintessential global capitalist.

An examination of Bannon’s career as an investment banker found that the Bannon of the 1980s and 1990s lived what looks like an alternate reality from the fiery populist of today who recently declared that “globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia.”

With stints at Goldman Sachs and his own firm, Bannon was a creature of corporatism, wealth-building and international finance. His company received crucial financial backing from banks in Japan and France, and one of his key clients was the Saudi prince. It all was managed from the unlikely setting of an office steps away from the elite shopping district of Rodeo Drive.

..

The article is lengthy, but I was surprised because Darth Bannon himself agreed to be interviewed by a media outlet to the left of Breitbart.

[GreyhoundFan]

As a companion to the last article I posted: "Stephen Bannon earned nearly $1 million last year, more than half from Mercer entities"

Quote

President Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, earned at least $917,000 in the last 12 months, with more than half of his pay coming from Breitbart News and other entities backed by the conservative Mercer family, according to newly released financial disclosure forms.

The documents were part of a broader release by the White House of financial disclosures of 180 administration officials that began Friday night, a batch that included details about the holdings of Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, and son-in-law Jared Kushner.

The filings show that Bannon drew at least $545,000 in the last year from four ventures backed by the wealthy Mercer family, underscoring how deeply enmeshed he has been with the influential Trump mega-donors

He was paid $191,000 in consulting fees by Breitbart News Network, where he served as executive chairman until joining the Trump campaign in August. That is a significant drop from 2013, when Bannon reported on a rental application that he was making $750,000 at the website .

Last year, Bannon earned another $167,500 for consulting and directing by Glittering Steel, the production company he launched with Rebekah Mercer that financed the documentary “Clinton Cash.”

Cambridge Analytica, a data science company that worked for Trump’s campaign, paid Bannon $125,333 in consulting for his work as vice president and secretary of the board. And the Government Accountability Institute, an investigative think tank whose president wrote the book “Clinton Cash,” gave Bannon a $61,539 salary as chairman.

The disclosure form provides the first public window into the finances of Trump’s peripatetic strategist, who has continued to draw funds as a Hollywood producer and director.

Bannon was paid $100,000 in directing fees from a production company affiliated with the advocacy group Citizens United.

And he reported earning between $50,001 and $100,000 from Société Générale, stemming from a partnership Bannon formed with the French banking giant in 1996. Bannon, who specialized at the time in media investment banking, sold his firm – Bannon and Co. – to a subsidiary of the French bank in 1998. The French company worked closely with Bannon on a variety of deals, including one in which Bannon represented Polygram, a music and film company that was sold to Seagram’s.

...

The article also outlines Ivanka and Jared's finances.

[GreyhoundFan]

Breaking News!  "White House Chief Strategist Stephen Bannon no longer part of National Security Council"

Quote

A senior White House official said that the change is not a demotion, and that Bannon had accomplished what he'd set out to do on the National Security Council.
This is a developing story. It will be updated.

"not a demotion..." suuuuuuuure. Oh, I so hope this signals something better happening.

[Howl]

Hey, you beat me to it!  And Hey! it's only because he was there to keep an eye on Michael Flynn (figure that one out) and "de-operationalize" oh, just everything.  Heck of a job, Stevie.

From TalkingPointsMemo.com 

Quote

The emerging White House line on Bannon’s demotion is that he was appointed to the NSC specifically to keep tabs on Michael Flynn, who was ousted as national security adviser in February. MSNBC’s Kristen Welker reported, citing anonymous sources, that with Flynn’s removal, Bannon’s oversight role was no longer needed.

This reporting was backed up The Washington Post’s Robert Costa, who cited an anonymous official saying Bannon did not sit in on many NSC meetings and was there to “de-operationalize” the national security body.

This news follows on the heels of a Tuesday night report from The Hill claiming that Bannon’s Strategic Initiatives Group, initially described as his “internal White House think tank,” never really had any teeth.

The SIG was set up in late January as an internal policy shop focused on long-term strategy, staffed by deputy assistant to the president Sebastian Gorka and White House adviser Jared Kushner, among others. Bannon’s dual role running the SIG and sitting on the Principals Committee sparked fears that he would circumvent the latter body and create a “shadow NSC” on foreign policy.

The anonymous White House officials who spoke to The Hill, however, downplayed the group’s importance and said it did not accomplish much. Those White House officials said SIG had been superseded by the Office of American Innovation, a recently announced government modernization effort headed up by Kushner.

“I’ve never known [SIG] to exist,” one unnamed White House aide told The Hill. “There was a lot of speculation about this early, but it was never officially rolled out and if anything, the OAI is an evolution and realization of some of these initial ideas.”

There's still so much to know about Michael Flynn -- I think more crazy will be disclosed.  

 

Edited April 5, 2017 by Howl

[apple1]

I have no idea at this point what the actual truth is about all this -- but I am very sure there is more to this latest development than is being told.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Five reasons why Bannon leaving the National Security Council matters"

Quote

...

First, in conjunction with McMaster’s hiring of non-military foreign policy experts, ridding the NSC of Bannon can be seen as one more effort to normalize the NSC and make it functional. Considering how dangerous the world is these days, this is a good thing.

Second, it is a demotion for Bannon, who never should have been there. He has no foreign policy expertise but does have a fondness for right-wing nationalist European parties and their sponsors in the Kremlin. One reason why Bannon is spinning furiously is because a reduction in status tells other in the administration that Bannon can be quarantined. Perhaps that will embolden more mature, moderate voices in the administration.

Third, Bannon’s pro-Putin bent was as embarrassing as it was unworkable. Especially for an administration accused of benefiting from Russian meddling in our election, the president would be wise to put a whole lot of daylight between himself and Vladimir Putin. Even aside from the Russia scandal, President Trump’s chummy approach to Putin is evaporating in the gas of Syria, revealing Putin to be a war criminal with whom we cannot simply “get along.” The quicker that realization sinks in, the faster we can come up with an actual policy to check Russian aggression. Bannon’s NSC banishment helps accelerate that process.

Fourth, Bannon’s departure is a hugely reassuring sign that McMaster — perhaps with assistance from Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly and, if he perks up, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson — has the gravitas to take charge of the process of making and presenting foreign policy to the president. We badly need direction on everything, including Syria, Iran and China. Developing and implementing foreign policy will only work if these professionals cooperate and have a smooth process for raising issues and formulating policy.

Fifth, maybe, just maybe, the president is beginning to comprehend how difficult and serious foreign policy can be. Contrary to his ill-conceived and obnoxious statement rushing to blame Obama for Syria (rather than the murderous regime or Russia, and ignoring that Trump counseled against action in Syria), everything from here on out is his responsibility, and his fault if things go poorly. His national security team, with the exception of Tillerson who is on a steep learning curve, is impressive. Now he needs to let them do their jobs.

To the bolded: yeah, not likely.

[fraurosena]

I had a bad case of the spring cleaning bug the last couple of days ,  and am just catching up.

My first thought about Bannon being demoted, is that it leads credence to the rumors that there are (or were) competing factions - Bannon's and Jarod's -  within the administration.  The past couple of days Jarod has gotten more and more rather important tasks, and Ivanka is now also part of the administration.  So it would seem Jarod's faction has won that particular battle. We'll have to wait and see if they won the war, but I tend to think so.

Although I'm glad it seems Bannon is out for the count, I'm also appalled at the amount of power being amassed for the Toddler family in this administration.  

 

[fraurosena]

I'm not really sure where to post this. But there is a furore on twitter about this tweet:

Why? It's referencing an article by Breitbart. Yes, you read that correctly. The US Strategic Command is referencing a Breitbart article. There is a heated discussion going on in the comments section, as the actual writer of the article is joining in the fray, trying to defend Breitbart as a credible source of information, worthy of being quoted by the US government.

[GreyhoundFan]

"The knives are out for Stephen Bannon, and his scam is getting unmasked"

Quote

Stephen K. Bannon has proven remarkably talented at creating a media mystique around himself. With his diligent assistance, he has been portrayed as both a virtuoso of deliberately orchestrated disruption and an avenging angel to working-class people (such as his father) who have been betrayed by global and financial elites. Bannon cleverly wields chaos to destabilize those elite foes in service of an economic nationalist mission that borders on Messianism.

But now Bannon is being primarily viewed inside the White House as a destructive force, and other senior advisers are trying to undermine him in the eyes of President Trump himself, according to multiple reports out this morning. Those reports undercut the narrative of Bannon as a Maestro of Disruption, and they also provide an occasion to probe the true nature of his self-ascribed economic nationalism.

The New York Times reports that Bannon’s removal on Wednesday from his post at the National Security Council is part of a broader internal push that may “diminish” his role. His position has been “undermined” by the failure of the immigration ban, which has been blocked by the courts. Trump “initially supported” Bannon when he delivered an ultimatum to House Republicans that they must vote on the GOP health-care bill or else (they didn’t vote), but then Trump handed off health care to Vice President Pence. And Bannon is clashing with Jared Kushner and irritating the Big Man himself:

Mr. Kushner … has said privately that he fears that Mr. Bannon plays to the president’s worst impulses, according to people with direct knowledge of such discussions.

Moreover, Mr. Bannon’s Svengali-style reputation has chafed on a president who sees himself as the West Wing’s only leading man. Several associates said the president had quietly expressed annoyance over the credit Mr. Bannon had received for setting the agenda — and Mr. Trump was not pleased by the “President Bannon” puppet-master theme promoted by magazines, late-night talk shows and Twitter.

In practice, Bannonite disruption is upstaging the president and being blamed for the failure of the immigration ban. Recall that allies of Bannon initially cast the ban as a masterful coup. A senior administration official (gosh, who could that be?) recently told Bloomberg that Bannon deliberately arranged the release of the first ban on a Friday so that opponents could stage massive weekend protests that would draw maximum attention. Wow, disruption! In reality, Bannon made a hash of it.

What’s more, Kushner now allegedly believes that Bannon — presumably his combative nationalism — is aggravating Trump’s worst impulses. Politico’s reporting indicates a similar dynamic, in which Kushner sees Bannon as an “ideologue whose advice to Trump is making it harder for the president to win popular support,” and an ally of Bannon sees the clash as one between the “nationalists and the West Wing Democrats.”

Bannon himself has talked a great game about his “economic nationalism,” which is supposed to distinguish him from both the squishy globalists inside the White House and the Ayn Randian limited government Paul Ryan Republicans in Congress. But what has it really amounted to so far?

When the health bill was tanking, allies of Bannon leaked that he saw an opportunity to undermine Ryan, whose bill, Bannon believed, was “written by the insurance industry,” suggesting Bannon and Trump secretly harbor more populist impulses than Ryan on health care. But where’s the evidence of this? The White House fully embraced Ryanism at an absolutely critical moment, throwing in with a plan that would have hurt many lower-income Trump voters and rolled back coverage for millions, violating Trump’s pledge of “insurance for everybody” and his vow not to cut Medicaid, while delivering a huge tax cut for the rich. If Bannon has an actual plan or even a vague vision for a health-care alternative to the Ryanism that he supposedly disdains, we haven’t seen it.

...

Based on what we’ve seen so far, what evidence is there that Bannon’s “economic nationalism” amounts to much more than the nativist nationalism we’ve seen — the travel ban, the immigration restrictionism, the wall on the Mexican border, and the support for assorted right-wing nationalist movements worldwide?

 

[GreyhoundFan]

This is sobering. It shows how Bannon was able to manipulate the political conversation: "How Bannon’s multimedia machine drove a movement and paid him millions". The charts in the article are very interesting.

Quote

Stephen K. Bannon could barely finish his sentences as he implored the listeners of his Breitbart News radio show to see the new movie “Clinton Cash.”

It was July 20, the homestretch of the 2016 presidential campaign, and Bannon was describing Bill and Hillary Clinton as “scumbags” and “bandits” who had made millions of dollars through political connections.

“Hillary and Bill Clinton are the two single biggest grifters ever to run for president of the United States,” Bannon told his guest, Peter Schweizer, the author of the book behind the movie.

Bannon, now President Trump’s chief strategist, framed his radio show that day as an urgent effort to reveal important information for voters — but there was more to it.

The show and “Clinton Cash” were components of an intricate multimedia machine comprising nonprofit organizations and private companies that Bannon had leveraged to advance his conservative, populist agenda and bring in millions of dollars. That effort ultimately helped propel Trump into the White House and Bannon into national prominence.

A close look behind Bannon’s radio broadcast that day offers insights about how that machine worked.

As it happened, the research behind “Clinton Cash” had been funded by the Government Accountability Institute, or the GAI, a tax-exempt public charity that Bannon had created a few years earlier and that had paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars as executive chairman, documents show.

“Clinton Cash” had been produced by Glittering Steel and Bannon Film Industries, two companies owned by Bannon, who was one of the screenwriters.

Bannon also was an owner of ARC Entertainment, the firm listed as distributor of the film.

And he was receiving a six-figure salary as executive chairman of Breitbart News, which heavily promoted the film through Bannon’s radio program and its controversial website.

There’s no telling how many in his audience understood the connections. Many of the links are scattered among corporate, court and tax records, as well as in a financial disclosure report for 2016 that the White House released last week.

During the July broadcast, Bannon only hinted at the connections, saying: “We’re now going to put this film up for the whole world to see starting this weekend.”

...

 

[Childless]

17 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

This is sobering. It shows how Bannon was able to manipulate the political conversation: "How Bannon’s multimedia machine drove a movement and paid him millions". The charts in the article are very interesting.

 

Ha!  Like he should talk.  His boss is bilking the government for every dime they have.

[GreyhoundFan]

This is about both Bannon and Jared, so I flipped a coin about which thread to post it in. "As media executives, Stephen Bannon and Jared Kushner were very different"

Quote

Before they were two of the president's top advisers, vying for the ear of the most powerful man in the world, Stephen K. Bannon and Jared Kushner were media executives.

Bannon chaired Breitbart News, “the platform for the alt-right,” as he described the site last summer. Kushner was the owner and publisher of the New York Observer, which specializes in covering New York's elite. Their management styles were as different as their target audiences.

What separated Bannon and Kushner more than anything else was their views of the media's importance. Kushner seemed to regard the Observer as just another asset in his diverse portfolio, with no special significance; Bannon considered Breitbart a force for imposing his nationalistic vision on a disgruntled electorate.

As the two men compete for influence in the White House, Bannon's approach to running a media company would seem to be paying higher dividends than Kushner's. Though he no longer calls the shots at Breitbart, Bannon can rely on the site to undermine his rival by posting unfavorable news about Kushner, while dissing his “thin resume.”

Last week, when Bannon suffered through a bad news cycle, following his removal from the National Security Council, Axios quoted “a close Bannon ally outside of the White House,” who offered an ominous prediction: “I see some bad press in [Kushner's] future.”

The Observer has not mounted an equivalent campaign on behalf of Kushner against Bannon — nor could it. The newspaper, publishing online only since the election, does not carry the same clout among Trump voters as Breitbart does.

Kushner does have a key advantage in this West Wing power struggle, however: He is the president's son-in-law. One administration official told The Washington Post last week that Bannon is playing “a dangerous game” because it is “not a smart strategy to go up against the president and his family. That’s a game Steve will never win.”

...

I would love it if Bannon and Kushner ended up blowing each other out of government.

[fraurosena]

4 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I would love it if Bannon and Kushner ended up blowing each other out of  up this whole government.

There. Fixed that for you. Way more effective that way, don't you think? 

[Audrey2]

1 hour ago, fraurosena said:

There. Fixed that for you. Way more effective that way, don't you think? 

That's a cleaner fix than I came up with. I was afraid my fix would be too inappropriate for Free Jinger.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump just made some very strange comments about Stephen K. Bannon"

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We don't yet know what Stephen K. Bannon's fate in the Trump White House is. But judging by President Trump's own words, it doesn't sound particularly good.

In a brief exchange with the New York Post's Michael Goodwin on Tuesday, Trump seemed to deliberately place Bannon at arm's length, suggesting that his role as an adviser has been oversold and even appearing to threaten Bannon's job.

Goodwin says he asked Trump if he still has confidence in Bannon, who is reportedly feuding with Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner. And Trump didn't exactly disabuse Goodwin of the idea that Bannon is embattled. In fact, he did quite the opposite.

“I like Steve, but you have to remember he was not involved in my campaign until very late,” Trump said. “I had already beaten all the senators and all the governors, and I didn't know Steve. I’m my own strategist, and it wasn't like I was going to change strategies because I was facing crooked Hillary.”

Ouch. Bannon joined the campaign in August for the lion's share of the general election, taking on the role of campaign CEO. He and Kellyanne Conway, the campaign manager, were the titular heads of the campaign. Trump then kept Bannon on as his chief political adviser in the White House, serving alongside chief of staff Reince Priebus.

In his comments to Goodwin, Trump also nodded to the tensions that exist in the White House and appeared to place the onus on Bannon to make things right — or else.

“Steve is a good guy, but I told them to straighten it out or I will,” Trump said.

Trump is certainly an unorthodox and unpredictable politician, but these comments from basically any other politician would signify the beginning of the end for Bannon. Perhaps it's frustration speaking and we shouldn't read too much into them.

But the Trump White House also has a demonstrated history of distancing itself from and downplaying the roles of aides who turn out to be liabilities. And that sure seems to be the tree Trump was barking up here.

Shortly before national security adviser Michael Flynn was asked to resign over having misled the White House about his contact with the Russian ambassador, top Trump adviser Stephen Miller also declined to give him a vote of confidence.

...

Bannon has been a lightning rod from his first days at Trump's side, owing to his nationalist policies and his previous leadership of the news outlet Breitbart. Bannon once described Breitbart as a platform for the alt-right, a small, far-right movement that seeks a whites-only state.

And at the very least, the unsolicited marginalization of Bannon's contribution to Trump's campaign really has to sting Bannon personally.

 

I hope this means his days in the West Wing are numbered.

[GreyhoundFan]

I hope, I hope, I hope... "Is Stephen Bannon getting pushed out? The latest signs point to Yes."

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...

Bannon only got involved in his campaign “very late,” Trump says. But as Aaron Blake points out: “Bannon joined the campaign in August for the lion’s share of the general election, taking on the role of campaign CEO.” Indeed, Bannon reportedly co-wrote Trump’s dystopian convention speech, which he described as “an unvarnished declaration of the basic principles of his populist and nationalist movement.” Bannon’s blueprint currently remains the touchstone for Trumpist governance, if you can call it that.

Which raises a question: If Bannon is indeed seeing his influence wane, is there any evidence that the stench of Bannonism itself is any less prevalent in this White House? Perhaps Bannon is getting pushed out, but will that change the fact that the Trump agenda continues to reflect the ugliest aspects of Bannon’s nativist nationalism in as pronounced a fashion as ever?

The Trump administration is still fighting in court to try to rescue his ban on refugees (including from Syria) and migrants from Muslim-majority countries — even after Trump bombed Syria out of professed concern for Syrian civilians victimized by the government. The shift to mass deportations is underway: Anecdotal tales are coming in about parents who are yanking kids from day care out of fear of removal and about longtime residents with no other offenses who are getting deported. People who previously were low priorities for deportation now fear that routine check-ins with immigration officials will result in their removal. Trump’s vast expansion of the pool of targets for deportation is creating precisely the climate of fear — and, perhaps, the self-deportations — that it is designed to create.

Meanwhile, Politico reports that the administration is demanding that both funding for the Mexican wall and language restricting funding to sanctuary cities — thus punishing localities that don’t enforce the federal immigration crackdown — must be included in the upcoming spending bill, which could cause a government shutdown. CNN reports that immigration hard-liners are in the process of getting installed in key immigration posts. And Attorney General Jeff Sessions just announced that prosecutors must try to charge border crossers with a felony (even though the move’s impact on deportation efforts remains unclear), while declaring: “this is the Trump era.” Reminder: If Bannon does get pushed out, Sessions remains in the perfect position to carry out Trumpism’s worst impulses in the areas of immigration and criminal justice.

It is sometimes argued that Bannon’s decline can be seen in the fact that his “economic nationalism” is losing influence inside the White House. But this misses the fact that there has never been any evidence that his “economic” nationalism has led him to try to get Trump to adopt any particular policies. Bannon allies made a great show of leaking his disdain for House Speaker Paul Ryan’s health-care plan (when it collapsed), but the fact remains that the White House threw its lot in with Ryanism at a critical moment, backing a health plan that would roll back the coverage of millions, including untold numbers of lower-income Trump voters. Bannon pushed that plan among congressional Republicans, and if he has any populist health-care alternative to the Ryanism he supposedly disdains, we haven’t seen it.

We are supposed to believe that Trumpist economic nationalism — as shaped by Bannon — embraces a heterodox combination of hard-line immigration restrictionism and pro-worker trade policies and a decisive ideological break with Ryanism when it comes to spending and social insurance for the elderly. But the ambition of Trump’s actual trade agenda is withering, and we don’t even know whether it will help workers. And while Bannon early on talked a good game about infrastructure spending, there’s no indication of any actual plan beyond a tax break and privatization scheme. Meanwhile, White House budget director Mick Mulvaney declined to say in an interview with CNBC’s John Harwood whether Trump would veto a bill that contained the sort of cuts to Medicare that Ryan has long championed (and Trump opposed).

Perhaps Bannon objects to that posture on Medicare, and maybe future reporting will establish this. But the point is that there’s no particular reason to believe he has any problem with it. The strains of Bannon’s nationalism that have turned up in actual policy are mainly the nativist ones. And whatever happens to Bannon, there’s no indication that those strains won’t continue to shape Trump’s agenda.

...

We need to get rid of him and his crappy ideas.

[Cartmann99]

34 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I hope, I hope, I hope... "Is Stephen Bannon getting pushed out? The latest signs point to Yes."

We need to get rid of him and his crappy ideas.

If Bannon does get pushed out, will he turn on Trump and start talking about what he knows from his time inside the White House?