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Month: July 2017

Jared is the son he never had

Jared is the son he never had

by digby

….and they know it:

“All the attention to Jared is a bit of a sore point and they feel left out of the fun in D.C.,” a friend of the family’s told People. “They miss being at the center of the action.”

“Don worked on the campaign and Jared gets the big Forbes cover and they make him out to be a big genius,” the friend continued. “and Don is like, ‘No, I worked on the campaign too!’”

“During the campaign, the brothers thrived on being the spokespeople and speaking at rallies and being very visible,” the friend added. “Jared was able to build much more influence and power by doing exactly the opposite.

The news comes one day after People reported Eric and Don Jr. are “miserable” and can’t wait for their father’s stint in the White House to end.

“[President Trump] doesn’t like failure and mistakes, and he doesn’t accept them,” a source told People. “You have to justify your existence to be in his realm.”

And with increased scrutiny surrounding Trump Jr.’s clandestine meeting with a Russian lawyer—which Kushner likewise attended—the president is reportedly growing “frustrated” with his eldest son, Newsweek reports.

They should be happy they’re not in Kush’s shoes right now. He’s in very serious legal jeopardy. Of course, Junior is too now that we know he was taking meetings with Russian lawyers to get dirt on Clinton he thought was coming from the FSB.

Baron and Tiffany are lucky they aren’t favored by their daddy. Maybe they’ll have a chance.

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A commission with a mission

A commission with a mission

by digby

I wrote about the voter fraud commission for Salon this morning:

President Trump had a very, very big day yesterday. In fact, he was almost manic running from one meeting to the other, speaking before cameras with what seemed to be barely contained rage and ending it with a devastating, incoherent, rambling interview with the New York Times. He must be all worn out.

But he also had photo-ops and made some remarks earlier in the day which were a bit more substantive, if no more coherent or prudent. After the failure of the latest iteration of Trumpcare, the Senate’s Better Care Reconciliation Act, the president dragged all the GOP Senators to the White House for lunch and then humiliated some of them before the cameras by threatening their jobs. This gives you the flavor of how it went:

But, Trump’s first meeting of the day had been his surprise welcome to his Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. You’ll recall that he promised to put that together after he made the ridiculous claim that Hillary Clinton hadn’t really won the popular vote because 3 million “illegals” had voted in California. It took a while but one of his biggest supporters, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who has made vote suppression his life’s work, came in board and it’s finally up and running. (I wrote about Kobach here, here and here.)

Trump named Kobach and Vice President Mike Pence as co-chairs and almost immediately the commission was embroiled in controversy. Kobach had instituted a plan that would kick eligible voters off the rolls in his home state of Kansas and he wanted to take it national so his first step was to cause a national firestorm by requesting all personal voter information from each state, which most secretaries of state of both parties refused.

Now lawsuits are rolling in from all over the country regarding the commission’s lack of transparency and violations of federal regulations and privacy laws. Kobach was served with a suit claiming that he’s illegally exploiting his position to promote his candidacy for governor of Kansas and is being investigated by the Kansas Supreme Court for ironically refusing to turn over documents to the court. Democratic lawmakers have sent an official notice requesting that Kobach be removed from the commission for violations of the Hatch Act and and the Federal Advisory Committee Act. All in all, it’s off to a terrific start.

Wednesday morning, Pence opened the proceedings by saying the commission “has no preconceived notions or preordained results. We’re fact-finders. And in the days ahead, we will gather the relevant facts and data, and at the conclusion of our work, we will present the president with a report of our findings.” But whatever hopes Pence had of keeping the pretense of nonpartisan fact-finding were blown to kingdom come when the president took the mic and started talking about the need for the states get with the program:

If any state does not want to share this information, one has to wonder what they’re worried about. And I ask the vice president and I ask the commission: What are they worried about? There’s something. There always is. 

This issue is very important to me because throughout the campaign and even after, people would come up to me and express their concerns about voter inconsistencies and irregularities which they saw, in some cases, having to do with very large numbers of people in certain states.

Trump said for months that the electoral system was rigged and even said at a presidential debate that he might not accept the results. Of course people come up to him and say they know about some instance of voter fraud.

His real gripe is that he didn’t win the popular vote and is driven by some egomaniacal need to be able to at least create the possibility that he actually did. Kris Kobach went on MSNBC yesterday and gave an astonishing interview that surely pleased him:

KATY TUR (HOST): Do you believe Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 3 to 5 million votes because of voter fraud?
KRIS KOBACH: We may never know the answer to that — we will probably never know the answer to that question, because even if you could prove that a certain number of votes were cast by ineligible voters, for example —

TUR: So, again, you think that maybe Hillary Clinton did not win the popular vote?

KOBACH: We may never know the answer to that question.

That’s an outrageous assertion. It is completely impossible that 3 million votes were cast illegally in 2016. In a world that makes sense he would have been fired immediately for casting such a shadow over the electoral results. There have been more than nine major investigations into alleged “voter fraud” and it just does not exist on even a small systematic scale much less something like what he’s suggesting.

One can only imagine what the boss had to say when he heard this follow up, though:

TUR: So were the votes for Donald Trump that led him to win the election in doubt as well?
KOBACH: Absolutely. If there are ineligible voters in an election, people who are noncitizens, people who are felons who shouldn’t be voting according to the laws of that state —

So Trump’s rather pathetic 77,000 vote Electoral College win is also in doubt? Oh my.

But Trump needn’t worry. Kobach is a conservative extremist whose life’s work is preventing people from voting. That’s what this is about. Trump’s victory will never be questioned by him.

There is one slight mystery about all this, however. With all this talk of our electoral system being vulnerable to fraud the commission isn’t the least bit interested in the subject of Russian interference in the election. That seems odd.

Of course if the goal of the hacking was to create chaos sow the seeds of doubt about the integrity of our democracy the Russian government is probably are wondering why they went to the trouble. Kris Kobach and his friends are doing a fine job of that all on their own. If he could manage to get all that voter information for them in one place that would be very helpful for future hacking. They’re pulling for his success if no one else is.

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Without rudder or keel by @BloggersRUs

Without rudder or keel
by Tom Sullivan

Our ain’t-right president’s hair-raising New York Times interview yesterday demonstrated for the nth time how unfit in every way Donald Trump is for the job he won last November. Trump is as Jack London might have described him:

… a magnificent atavism, a man so purely primitive that he was of the type that came into the world before the development of the moral nature. He was not immoral, but merely unmoral.

He has neither the skill nor the time for legislating. He will not lift a finger to pass the legislation he demands from his own caucus. He has no respect for the institutions of the government he took an oath to preserve, protect and defend, nor for the oath itself, nor for rule of law he believes himself above. In the interview, he all but formally asked for the resignation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions for not covering his rear on the Russia investigation. After months of whining about White House leaks, Trump leaked it in an interview with a newspaper he famously loathes rather than confront Sessions personally, man-to-man.

Donald Trump wouldn’t have any class if you gave him a room, thirty students, and a chalkboard. So when a dumpster fire gif was the first to appear in my Twitter feed this morning, it seemed only appropriate.

via GIPHY

But Donald Trump is merely a symptom of a country that has lost its bearings, a ship without rudder or keel. A new poll from Public Policy Polling finds that only 45 percent of Trump voters believe Donald Trump Jr. had a meeting with Russians he publicly admitted having. Thirty-two percent don’t believe the meeting happened and 24 percent are not sure. No, Not Sure is not their names.

A large fraction of our neighbors, in many places a controlling fraction, has abandoned the very notion of pluralism at the heart of the American experiment. As if e pluribus unum were some sort of crypto-Kenyan incantation against their personal freedom. For many across this country yet unconscious of it, metastasized capitalism and Randian teen fantasies of male dominance have brewed up a debased America that serves patriotism à la carte, an America for me but not for thee. Where government exists to stay out of my life and to keep Others in their place. Donald Trump is their patron saint.

Cooperation and communitarianism is replaced with dominance politics, not only among conservatives, but a sliver of the American left that has abandoned faith. Among Christian conservatives who long ago accepted as dogma that the country and its framework were handed to them by the Almighty, their own religious liberty is the only religious liberty government exists to protect. Recognition that non-Christian faiths and non-faiths fall under the same constitutional is “increasingly cast as bristling religious animus or even hate speech.”

Across the country, GOP-led state legislators have abandoned any pretense of regard for equal representation, opting for voter suppression tactics and radical gerrymandering to keep democracy from unmaking their rule. Inside the Beltway, the anti-vaxxers of public policy with their crackpot economics and science denial, have set about deconstructing the state that nurtured them.

The Trump administration and its enablers have climbed out on a limb and begun sawing it off. The question at hand is whether the falling branch will take the rest of us with them.

Today’s the day he decided to issue a warning to anyone who crosses him

Today’s the day he decided to issue a warning to anyone who crosses him

by digby

The president seems to believe that the job of the Attorney General is to cover up for the president:

This latest NY Times interview is astonishing:

WASHINGTON — President Trump said on Wednesday that he never would have appointed Attorney General Jeff Sessions had he known Mr. Sessions would recuse himself from overseeing the Russia investigation that has dogged his presidency, calling the decision “very unfair to the president.”

In a remarkable public break with one of his earliest political supporters, Mr. Trump complained that Mr. Sessions’s decision ultimately led to the appointment of a special counsel that should not have happened. “Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else,” Mr. Trump said.

In a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times, the president also accused James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director he fired in May, of trying to leverage a dossier of compromising material to keep his job. Mr. Trump criticized both the acting F.B.I. director who has been filling in since Mr. Comey’s dismissal and the deputy attorney general who recommended it. And he took on Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel now leading the investigation into Russian meddling in last year’s election.

Mr. Trump said Mr. Mueller was running an office rife with conflicts of interest and warned investigators against delving into matters too far afield from Russia. Mr. Trump never said he would order the Justice Department to fire Mr. Mueller, nor would he outline circumstances under which he might do so. But he left open the possibility as he expressed deep grievance over an investigation that has taken a political toll in the six months since he took office.

Asked if Mr. Mueller’s investigation would cross a red line if it expanded to look at his family’s finances beyond any relationship to Russia, Mr. Trump said, “I would say yes.” He would not say what he would do about it. “I think that’s a violation. Look, this is about Russia.”

While the interview touched on an array of issues, including health care, foreign affairs and politics, the investigation dominated the conversation. He said that as far as he knew, he was not under investigation himself, despite reports that Mr. Mueller is looking at whether the president obstructed justice by firing Mr. Comey.

“I don’t think we’re under investigation,” he said. “I’m not under investigation. For what? I didn’t do anything wrong.”

Describing a newly disclosed informal conversation he had with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia during a dinner of world leaders in Germany earlier this month, Mr. Trump said they talked for about 15 minutes, mostly about “pleasantries.” But Mr. Trump did say that they talked “about adoptions.” Mr. Putin banned American adoptions of Russian children in 2012 after the United States enacted sanctions on Russians accused of human rights abuses, an issue that remains a sore point in relations with Moscow.

Mr. Trump acknowledged that it was “interesting” that adoptions came up since his son, Donald Trump Jr., said that was the topic of a meeting he had with several Russians with ties to the Kremlin during last year’s campaign. Even though emails show that the session had been set up to pass along incriminating information about Hillary Clinton, the president said he did not need such material from Russia about Mrs. Clinton last year because he already had more than enough.

[…]
But Mr. Trump left little doubt during the interview that the Russia investigation remained a sore point. His pique at Mr. Sessions, in particular, seemed fresh even months after the attorney general’s recusal. Mr. Sessions was the first senator to endorse Mr. Trump’s candidacy and was rewarded with a key Cabinet slot, but has been more distant from the president lately.

“Jeff Sessions takes the job, gets into the job, recuses himself, which frankly I think is very unfair to the president,” he added. “How do you take a job and then recuse yourself? If he would have recused himself before the job, I would have said, ‘Thanks, Jeff, but I’m not going to take you.’ It’s extremely unfair — and that’s a mild word — to the president.”

Mr. Trump also faulted Mr. Sessions for his testimony during Senate confirmation hearings when Mr. Sessions said he had not met with any Russians even though he had met at least twice with Ambassador Sergey I. Kislyak. “Jeff Sessions gave some bad answers,” the president said. “He gave some answers that were simple questions and should have been simple answers, but they weren’t.”

Here’s he accuses Comey of blackmailing him — by briefing him on the Steele dossier:

The president added a new allegation against Mr. Comey, whose dismissal has become a central issue for critics who said it amounts to an attempt to obstruct the investigation into Russian meddling in last year’s election and any possible collusion with Mr. Trump’s team.

Mr. Trump recalled that a little more than two weeks before his inauguration, Mr. Comey and other intelligence officials briefed him at Trump Tower on Russian meddling. Mr. Comey afterward pulled Mr. Trump aside and told him about a dossier that had been assembled by a former British spy filled with salacious allegations against the incoming president, including supposed sexual escapades in Moscow. The F.B.I. has not corroborated the most sensational assertions in the dossier.

In the interview, Mr. Trump said he believes Mr. Comey told him about the dossier to implicitly make clear he had something to hold over the president. “In my opinion, he shared it so that I would think he had it out there,” Mr. Trump said. As leverage? “Yeah, I think so,’’ Mr. Trump said. “In retrospect.”

The president dismissed the assertions in the dossier: “When he brought it to me, I said this is really, made-up junk. I didn’t think about any of it. I just thought about man, this is such a phony deal.”

Mr. Comey declined to comment on Wednesday.

But Mr. Comey and other intelligence officials decided it was best for him to raise the subject with Mr. Trump alone because he was going to remain as F.B.I. director. Mr. Comey testified before Congress that he disclosed the details of the dossier to Mr. Trump because he thought that the media would soon be publishing details from it and that Mr. Trump had a right to know what information was out there about him.

Mr. Trump rebutted Mr. Comey’s claim that in a one-on-one meeting in the Oval Office on Feb. 14, the president asked him to end the investigation into his former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn. Mr. Comey testified before Congress that Mr. Trump kicked the vice president, attorney general and several other senior administration officials out of the room before having the discussion with Mr. Comey.

“I don’t remember even talking to him about any of this stuff,” Mr. Trump said. “He said I asked people to go. Look, you look at his testimony. His testimony is loaded up with lies, O.K.?”

Here’s where he goes after Mueller:

Mr. Trump was also critical of Mr. Mueller, a longtime former F.B.I. director, reprising some of his past complaints that lawyers in his office contributed money to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. He noted that he actually interviewed Mr. Mueller to replace Mr. Comey just before his appointment as special counsel.

“He was up here and he wanted the job,” Mr. Trump said. After he was named special counsel, “I said, ‘What the hell is this all about?’ Talk about conflicts. But he was interviewing for the job. There were many other conflicts that I haven’t said, but I will at some point.”

The president also expressed discontent with Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, a former federal prosecutor from Baltimore. When Mr. Sessions recused himself, the president said he was irritated to learn where his deputy was from. “There are very few Republicans in Baltimore, if any,” he said of the predominately Democratic city.

He complained that Mr. Rosenstein had in effect been on both sides when it came to Mr. Comey. The deputy attorney general recommended Mr. Comey be fired but then appointed Mr. Mueller, who may be investigating whether the dismissal was an obstruction of justice. “Well, that’s a conflict of interest,” Mr. Trump said. “Do you know how many conflicts of interests there are?”

As for Andrew G. McCabe, the acting F.B.I. director, the president suggested that he too had a conflict. Mr. McCabe’s wife, Jill McCabe, received nearly $500,000 in 2015 during a losing campaign for the Virginia state Senate from a political action committee affiliated with Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a close friend of Hillary and Bill Clinton.

Rosenstein lives in Bethesda, not Baltimore.

And here we have him talking about the 2nd meeting with Putin:

In his first description of his dinnertime conversation with Mr. Putin at the Group of 20 summit meeting in Hamburg, Germany, Mr. Trump downplayed its significance. He said his wife, Melania, was seated next to Mr. Putin at the other end of a table filled with world leaders.

“The meal was going toward dessert,’’ he said. “I went down just to say hello to Melania, and while I was there I said hello to Putin. Really, pleasantries more than anything else. It was not a long conversation, but it was, you know, could be 15 minutes. Just talked about things. Actually, it was very interesting, we talked about adoption.”

He noted the adoption issue came up in the June 2016 meeting between his son and Russian visitors. “I actually talked about Russian adoption with him,’’ he said, meaning Mr. Putin. “Which is interesting because it was a part of the conversation that Don had in that meeting.”

But the president repeated that he did not know about his son’s meeting at the time and added that he did not need the Russians to provide damaging information about Mrs. Clinton.

“There wasn’t much I could say about Hillary Clinton that was worse than what I was already saying,” he said. “Unless somebody said that she shot somebody in the back, there wasn’t much I could add to my repertoire.”

“Adoptions” means sanctions. He talked to him about sanctions. Privately, with no record of what was said.

And, oh, by the way, today it was announced that we’re pulling our support for the rebels who are fighting against Assad, Russia’s ally in Syria.

I don’t know what to say anymore. He’s at war with the entire Justice Department and the Intelligence agencies and he seems to be threatening to fire anyone who crosses him.

Is this the new normal? Is this America?

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Thug in chief

Thug in chief

by digby

HuffPost Hill:

PETULANT BULLYING HAVING FAILED, TRUMP TURNS TO … … more petulant bullying. Marina Fang: “President Donald Trump used a lunch with Republican senators Wednesday to jokingly threaten vulnerable GOP lawmakers who have opposed recent Senate attempts at repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act. ‘The other night, I was very surprised when I heard a couple of my friends — my friends,’ Trump said, looking around at the senators in the room. ‘They really were — and are.’ ‘They might not be very much longer, but that’s OK,’ he added. Seated next to Trump at the lunch was Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.), who is up for re-election next year. ‘This was the one we were worried about,’ Trump said, turning to Heller. ‘Look, he wants to remain a senator, doesn’t he?’ Heller laughed uncomfortably.

Truly nauseating:

In case you were wondering, the new CBO report on the bill Mitch McConnell is bringing up for a vote next week — the same bill that Obama vetoed in 2015:

”Thirty-two million fewer people would have health coverage, health insurance premiums would double and the insurance market would destabilize over the next 10 years under legislation the Senate may take up next week, according to a report the Congressional Budget Office published Wednesday…. About three-quarters of the country’s population would live in geographic areas with no health insurance providers by 2026, the report says.”

Sounds good. Cull the herd.

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Where the jobs at?

Where the jobs at?

by digby

Oh heck:

Donald Trump brokered a deal to keep roughly 1,000 jobs at a facility in Indiana from moving to Mexico. But it failed to live up to the hype while other firms have quietly continued to outsource — a trend that drained the state of 5,000 manufacturing jobs since February. For example, reports on former workers of Manitowoc Beverage Systems show many have been unable to find gigs as good as the ones they lost after the firm shipped 84 jobs to Mexico.

His photo-op at the Carrier plant didn’t really work out:

President Trump touted his deal to save jobs at a Carrier plant in Indianapolis last year as a win for the American manufacturing industry.

But that victory didn’t even extend to everyone at the factory.

Thursday marks the last day for more than 300 Carrier employees whose jobs have been eliminated in favor of outsourcing to Mexico.

It’s the first round of cuts at the plant, which last year epitomized the working-class grievances that Trump swore to fix.

Is it possible that Donald Trump is full of shit? Say it ain’t so!

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Poor lil’ rich boys

Poor lil’ rich boys

by digby

The boyz are unhappy. Waaaah.

According to a new report in People Magazine, friends of the Trump family revealed the president’s sons Don Jr. and Eric are miserable and want the next three years to be over.

In a family guided by their father’s need to win and avoid admitting mistakes, friends noticed when Don Jr. agreed he would have “done things a little differently” with the campaign meeting between higher-ups and Russian contacts.

“He doesn’t like failure and mistakes, and he doesn’t accept them,” one source who has done business with Trump told People. “You have to justify your existence to be in his realm.”

The ones who are most in his “realm,” however, are his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner, who have offices in the West Wing of the White House because Trump likes to keep their counsel close. For the children now heading up the Trump Organization, the transition to a larger spotlight has been a difficult one and they’re having a difficult time adjusting.

Most weekends Trump Jr. leaves Manhattan for a cabin in upstate New York with his wife and their five children. He can also be spotted at the Riverside Cafe in Roscoe, New York, where the manager claims Trump Jr. is a good person and doesn’t want to be in the spotlight. “He never has his hair slicked back like he does on TV,” the manager said.

The spotlight also brings about annoying transparencies for him.

“Don can’t do any deals because he’ll be overly scrutinized. He just goes to work every day and is miserable,” said one source in the boys’ circle.

It’s not over yet boys. And you both are right in the middle of all this. Fasten your seatbelts.

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Unsolicited advice for GOP Senators

Unsolicited advice for GOP Senators

by digby

I don’t usually do this. But here is a free bit of advice for Mitch McConnell and his Senate soldiers:

When Trump says that Republican senators must keep their health care promise to the American people, tell him to send them his “real change that once again puts Americans first,that begins with immediately repealing and replacing the disaster known as Obamacare that will deliver such great health care, at a tiny fraction of the cost—and it’s going to be so easy” plan.

Promise to look at it carefully and if it meets all those criteria you’ll write it up and send it back to him for signature.

You’re welcome.

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Rah, rah Rasputin. Bannon’s Russian connection

Rah, rah Rasputin. Bannon’s Russian connection

by digby

I wrote about Bannon for Salon today:

A few days ago, I noted that Steve Bannon seems to be the only member of President Donald Trump’s inner circle untouched by the Russia scandal, which is one reason that President Trump has turned to him to run his war room to fight all the “fake news” about Russia. He’s taken to the task with relish, apparently. According to an excerpt of “Devil’s Bargain,” the new book by Joshua Green about the Bannon-Trump relationship, Bannon is particularly focused on destroying the reputation of special prosecutor Robert Mueller. We haven’t seen any results as yet, but we can be sure he’s working on it.

But just because Bannon isn’t tainted by the current Russia scandal, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t any Russia connection.That seems to be almost a requirement in this administration. Indeed, Bannon has been called Trump’s Rasputin by more than a few observers and there’s a good reason for it. He’s got a lot in common with the famous mystic that goes beyond the fact that they are both known for their slovenly appearance and lack of normal social graces.

As usual, the media is busy pulling out the juicy quotes from Green’s book. And Green does seem to have had amazing access to many people, most especially Bannon himself whom he apparently interviewed at length. For instance, Green reported that “when Trump came under fire because his campaign hadn’t produced a single policy paper, Bannon arranged for [aide Sam] Nunberg and Ann Coulter, the conservative pundit, to quickly write a white paper on Trump’s immigration policies. When the campaign released it, Coulter, without disclosing her role, tweeted that it was ‘the greatest political document since the Magna Carta.’”

Think about that. They actually called on Ann Coulter to write a policy paper on immigration.

Bannon is also quoted calling House speaker Paul Ryan a “a limp-dick motherfucker who was born in a petri dish at the Heritage Foundation,” when he heard that Ryan was being floated as a possible replacement for Trump in the event of a contested GOP convention. It’s a colorful insult but it’s imprecise. Paul Ryan wasn’t born in a petri dish at the Heritage Foundation; he was spawned in the kitchen sink of the Ayn Rand institute. They are on related shores of the conservative movement fever swamp but they aren’t the same, and Bannon knows that. He gave a scathing critique of Rand’s Objectivism in a notorious speech he delivered to the Human Dignity Institute in 2014, a conservative Christian group that promotes the “Christian voice” in European politics. He said:

The second form of capitalism that I feel is almost as disturbing, is what I call the Ayn Rand or the Objectivist School of libertarian capitalism . . . that form of capitalism is quite different when you really look at it to what I call the “enlightened capitalism” of the Judeo-Christian West. It is a capitalism that really looks to make people commodities, and to objectify people, and to use them almost — as many of the precepts of Marx — and that is a form of capitalism, particularly to a younger generation [that] they’re really finding quite attractive. And if they don’t see another alternative, it’s going to be an alternative that they gravitate to under this kind of rubric of “personal freedom.”

It’s a little bit difficult to sort out exactly what Bannon does believe since he’s definitely a populist and nationalist. Mostly, it seems, he’s a sort of spiritualist, like the Russian Rasputin. According to Green, Bannon’s most important influences are René Guénon, a French writer whose 1929 book “The Crisis of the Modern World” stated that everything started to go to hell in 1312 when the Knights Templar were destroyed; and Julius Evola, an Italian writer whose 1934 book, “Revolt Against the Modern World,” influenced Mussolini. Interestingly, that book was also a seminal work for the Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin, Vladimir Putin’s most influential ideologue, and the man who once called Steve Bannon his ideological soulmate.

Alexandra Nemtsova at the Daily Beast reported:

According to Alexander Verkhovsky, director of Russian SOVA, a Moscow-based NGO monitoring ultra-nationalist groups, “Dugin is talking about creating some new cross-cultural nation of anti-Atlantic, traditional ideology—his theory often sounds like a pretty fascist approach. He said and wrote a lot, calling for a war in Ukraine; many Russian nationalists who listened or read Dugin’s texts actually joined the insurgencies in Ukraine afterward.”

So, while Bannon may not have any direct association with the current Russia scandals, in some ways he’s the one member of the administration who genuinely a close ideological affiliation with that country’s leader.

Bannon’s Weltanschauung is that we are living in a dark dystopian period of cultural disintegration and loss of tradition in which the West is in sharp, perilous decline. He is not an upbeat guy. His philosophy meshes nicely with Trump’s more shallow “get off my lawn” nostalgia, and plays well to the anxieties and insecurities of people for whom the modern world is changing much too fast.

Green recounted an episode late in the campaign in which Trump ran a TV ad full of anti-Semitic imagery. It was foul and many people complained. “Darkness is good, don’t let up,” Bannon told Trump.

Green told NPR, “the kind of tragic, Shakespearean irony of the Donald Trump-Steve Bannon relationship is that Bannon finally did find the vessel for his ideas who could get elected president . . . [but who] now doesn’t have the focus, the wherewithal, the self-control to even do the basic things that a president needs to do.”

Thank goodness for small favors.