Month: August 2017

by digby

Why are young white men radicalized by white supremacy? German Lopez at Vox delves into the question and it’s interesting. But it always comes back to this, doesn’t it?

If radicalization is a result of messaging that extremists deploy to attract people with specific grievances, then one way to prevent radicalization may be to develop countermessaging that addresses those grievances in a way that avoids radicalization.

In the context of white supremacists, part of addressing this may mean expanding the Overton window — meaning what’s acceptable to talk about in public discourse. “The more we put things off limits, the more we empower bad actors who will talk about things other people aren’t willing to,” Gartenstein-Ross said.

For instance, right now it’s difficult for a white man to bring up concerns about changing racial demographics without getting labeled as racist. But maybe his concerns don’t have anything to do with race. He may be concerned that as the group he belongs to loses status, he will as well — economically, socially, and so on. A good response to this could point out that, for example, New York City is very diverse and still people, including white men, lead prosperous lives (and it has a below-average crime rate, contrary to what some dog whistles may suggest).

But if that person never has that kind of discussion because he’s dismissed as a racist, his concerns about changing demographics won’t go away. So he might search for answers outside the mainstream, and that might lead him to an extremist group. That is especially true if he experiences what sociologists call “white fragility”: When white people are asked to answer for potential racism, some become defensive — pushing them into denial that they’ve done anything wrong and, in some cases, hardening their racist attitudes. (Much more on that in a previous piece I wrote about this research.)

I know I’m supposed to be empathetic toward all this. But racism has been with us forever and it’s really hard for me to believe that if we only allow racists to express their hatred without passing judgment and then offer them some statistics about how they’re wrong, they’ll come over to the light. But that’s just me — I’m not terribly tolerant of this idea that we have to be kind to racists because nobody know the trouble they’ve seen.

When I see these young dudes sneering at the Korean immigrants who work 14 hour days 7 days a week down at the corner store in my neighborhood or condemning Latina maids sending most of their paychecks home to their families or treating hard working middle class African American men like lackeys I’m not inclined to feel sorry for them because their granddads lost their factory job back in the 1970s. We are at 4% unemployment right now. I know there are still places where the jobs are scarce but those white college boys and their KKK pals shouting “Jews will not replace us” the other night don’t live there.

Maybe we could offer more mental health care, better schools, and drug treatment to communities full of hopeless, directionless people. I’ve always been for that. But racism didn’t cause those problems and coddling people in their belief that their lives have gone to hell because people of color, foreigners and uppity women have ruined everything isn’t going solve them.

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He was always a hawk, folks

by digby

I’ve been reading a lot about how Trump firing Bannon means that his alleged isolationism will now be subsumed by the generals’ hawkish desire to take over the world. I thought it might be a good idea to reprise this piece I did at the beginning of Trump’s term to explain why I think that’s nonsense. Trump was never an isolationist and to the extent Bannon had an influence it wasn’t in this regard, no matter how much he claimed it was:

Donald Trump’s inaugural address produced yet another torrent of commentary about his “populist, isolationist” ideology and what it means for the future of the republic and the world. Unfortunately, he is all about neither of those things.

It’s true that he deployed the voice of a demagogue to rant about elites and powerful politicians and repeatedly evoked “the people.” But considering that his hires include six Goldman Sachs alums, three billionaires and several more vastly wealthy multimillionaires for his Cabinet, his alleged populism seems a bit strained. After all, to the extent the hellscape he described in that speech exists, it was created by the very people he is now empowering.

Calling Trump an isolationist rests mostly on his use of the archaic term “America First,” which was associated with attempts to keep America out of World War II (and also came with strong undercurrents of anti-Semitism.) But there is no evidence that Trump had a clue about that association when he started using the phrase.

Recall that when journalist Michael Wolff interviewed him in June, just before the big vote in the U.K., Trump clearly hadn’t heard of Brexit. Granted, he subsequently become fast friends with Brexit architect and right-wing provocateur Nigel Farage. But his idea of “isolationism” in this case is a simplistic belief that any nation “run by smart guys” can “make better deals” without having other countries represented at the table.

As far as security is concerned, Trump’s threats to withdraw from NATO and other alliances aren’t really about wanting to pull America to remain within its borders. He never says that. In fact, he wants a huge military and wants to show it off so everyone in the world will be in awe of American power. He just wants NATO and other alliances to pay protection money to the U.S. for whatever price he sets.

Trump has repeatedly made the fatuous claim that he’s going to make the military so massive that “no one will ever want to mess with us” but never has actually suggested that he would have any reluctance to use it. Indeed, he’s made it clear that he intends to do just that, telling his rowdy crowds during the campaign:

ISIS is making a tremendous amount of money because of the oil that they took away, they have some in Syria, they have some in Iraq, I would bomb the shit out of them. 

I would just bomb those suckers, and that’s right, I’d blow up the pipes. I’d blow up the refineries. I’d blow up ever single inch. There would be nothing left. 

And you know what, you’ll get Exxon to come in there, and in two months — you ever see these guys? How good they are, the great oil companies. They’ll rebuild it brand new. . . . And I’ll take the oil.

This has been his promise from Day One. Yesterday, press secretary Sean Spicer, reacting to Russian reports that the U.S. military was already engaged with Russia’s forces in bombing Syria, offered up this startling answer:

Spicer: I know it’s still developing and I would refer you back to the Department of Defense. I know that they’re — they’re currently monitoring this and I would refer you back to them on that. And I think . . . 

Question: Generally open? 

Spicer: I think, the president has been very clearly. [sic] He’s gonna work with any country that shares our interest in defeating ISIS. Not just on the national security front, but on the economic front. If we can work with someone to create greater market access and spur economic growth and allow U.S. small businesses and companies to . . .
Question: [inaudible] to doing joint military actions with Russia in Syria? 

Spicer: I — I think if there’s a way that we can combat ISIS with any country, whether it’s Russia or anyone else, and we have a shared national interest in that, sure we’ll take it

The Pentagon adamantly denied that the U.S. military was currently helping Russia in Syria, where the Russian military has been accused by the U.N. of committing war crimes by using bunker-busting and incendiary bombs on civilian populations. Spicer didn’t mention any of that, but Trump is undoubtedly unconcerned since his strategy is the same: “Bomb the shit out of them.”

As for “taking the oil,” which is a suggestion Trump has repeated for months (including as recently as Saturday when he told the CIA officials they “might get another chance at it”) even conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer was taken aback, correctly noting that “seizing the oil is a war crime.”

If you have listened to Trump talk about China over the past 18 months, it is clear that he is not simply talking about a potential trade war but is prepared to confront the world’s largest nation militarily. In his confirmation hearings, secretary of state-designate Rex Tillerson made it clear that he agreed with Trump that the U.S. would not allow China to build military bases on islands in the South China Sea, and Spicer made that official yesterday:

I think the U.S. is going to make sure that we protect our interests there. If those islands are in fact in international waters and not part of China proper, then yes, we’re going to make sure that we defend international territories from being taken over by one country.

Does that sound like any definition of “isolationism” you’ve ever heard?

When Donald Trump says “America First,” he really means “We’re No. 1.” He talks incessantly about “winning,” so much we’ll be begging him to stop. He openly declares that he believes in the old saying “to the victors belong the spoils,” either suggesting that he has no clue about the West’s colonial past and how that sounds to people around the world or simply doesn’t care. He’s not talking about isolationism but the exact opposite — American global dominance without all those messy institutions and international agreements standing in the way of taking what we want.

No, Trump is not an isolationist. He’s not a “realist.” Neither is he a liberal interventionist or a neoconservative idealist. He’s an old-fashioned imperialist. He wants to Make America great again by making it the world’s dominant superpower, capable of bullying other countries into submission and behaving however we like. He doesn’t seem to understand that the world won’t put up with that.

Trump Embodies Conservative Ideals

by tristero

There’s a whole new literary genre, as yet unnamed, that’s sprouting. It’s theme is:

In the Seattle mist with Confederate Dead

by Dennis Hartley

A friend and I were commiserating the other day about how demoralizing the events in Charlottesville were. Being a couple of old lefty Seattle hippies, we were of course feeling the need to “do” something; how to make a counter-statement to this brazen display of racism and hate? I joked, “It’s not like we can go out and pull down a Confederate statue…good luck finding one in this town, amirite?”

In Seattle, you’re more likely to bump into a public statue of Lenin:

Or Jimi:

Or a troll under a bridge, crushing a VW bug in his huge maw:

Seattle is funky. Whimsical. Confederate memorials? Nah! Well, shit:

[via The Seattle Times]

Seattle Mayor Ed Murray expressed “concerns” about a monument to Confederate soldiers in Capitol Hill’s Lake View Cemetery, which closed Wednesday afternoon for security reasons.

A statement issued by Murray’s office said he called a cemetery representative Wednesday regarding the monument, which was erected in 1926. The cemetery is privately owned.

Lake View Cemetery closed Wednesday afternoon after receiving threats related to the monument, said Craig Lohr of the Lake View Cemetery Association. Seattle news media recently reported on the existence of the monument.

The cemetery — best known as the final resting place for martial-arts star Bruce Lee and his son Brandon, as well as Seattle’s founders — will likely reopen Thursday morning.

The mayor’s statement said:

“We must remove statues and flags that represent this country’s abhorrent history of slavery and oppression based on the color of people’s skin. It is the right thing to do. During this troubling time when neo-Nazis and white power groups are escalating their racist activity, Seattle needs to join with cities and towns across the country who are sending a strong message by taking these archaic symbols down.”

The mayor’s office couldn’t be reached to clarify Murray’s statement. A petition on Change.org calling for the removal of the memorial had more than 3,200 supporters late Wednesday afternoon.

Also on Wednesday, a small group of protesters gathered around the Vladimir Lenin statue in Fremont to demand its removal. The statue, located on private property, has been for sale for years and has been vandalized with red paint on one of its hands.

What our mayor said. And I’m sure Bruce Lee would concur.

And OK, I “get” what the handful of protesters calling for removal of the Lenin statue are trying to say…in theory. And if it was any other week, I’d give ’em a fair hearing. But you know what? In the context of the events of this past weekend, that’s a false equivalency. I don’t believe I spotted any overt Leninist marchers carrying (and beating people with) tiki torches in Charlottesville. I believe some of those fine people were self-avowed, oh, what are they called again…Nazis?

In this case, what the mayor (and most of the other people of the world who aren’t Donald Trump) are saying is, that if the first step in purging this legacy of violence, bigotry, and (oh yes) sedition against the United States of America is to take these archaic symbols down…then by all means, take all these fucking archaic symbols down.

The president stated that history and culture are being “ripped apart” by tearing these statues down. That is just an extension of the tired old argument that’s been used in the past by individuals and organizations who concern troll about “historical preservation” when attempting to legally block Confederate flags from being removed from government property. The Jim Crow laws are also part of the south’s history and culture…is anyone clamoring to have those resurrected and preserved as well? (I’m sure there’s some.)

It is possible to purge such symbols of hatred while keeping your democracy intact. Just ask any German. From The Washington Post:

Steffen Seibert, a spokesman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, said Monday that the violence that unfolded in Charlottesville was “sickening.” He described the symbols and slogans employed in “the right-wing extremist march” — including swastikas and chants of “Blood and soil,” a Nazi-era motto — as “diametrically opposed to the political goals of the chancellor and the entire German government.”

[…]

“Most people in Germany have difficulty understanding that gatherings like in Charlottesville are possible in the U.S., because we have drawn a different lesson from history,” said Matthias Jahn, chairman of criminal law at Goethe University in Frankfurt. “Our German law centers on the strong belief that you should hinder this kind of speech in a society committed to principles of democratic coexistence and peace.”

Those Germans sound like a bunch of old lefty Seattle hippies.

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The fight continues
by Tom Sullivan

Confederate memorial statue, Statesboro, Georgia, U.S. Photo by Jud McCranie via Creative Commons.

A small “free speech” rally scheduled for Boston Common yesterday by men wearing Trump hats and flags drowned in a sea of as many as 40,000 peaceful counterprotesters:

As the crowd grew, Superintendent in Chief Willie Gross of the Boston Police Department worked the crowd. He thanked marcher after marcher, individually, for coming out to make their voices heard. He complimented people on their creative signs. He took dozens of pictures with marchers who looked relieved to discover that the police weren’t there to give them a hard time.

“This is how we do it in Boston,” he said. “We exercise our right to free speech, but we do it peacefully. If anyone starts anything [at the Common] we’ll get them right out.”

The guy who starts talking halfway through this video gets America so much better than our president. https://t.co/xHcIKDVFtn— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) August 20, 2017

But white nationalism and Confederate statuary at the center of the violence last week in Charlottesville are distractions. The Washington Post Editorial Board this morning cautions that voter suppression is this era’s civil rights issue:

Yet even if all 1,500 Confederate symbols across the country were removed overnight by some sudden supernatural force, the pernicious crusade to roll back voting rights would continue apace, with voters of color suffering its effects disproportionately. Pushing back hard against those who would purge voter rolls, demand forms of voter ID that many Americans don’t possess, and limit times and venues for voting — this should be a paramount cause for the Trump era.

In statehouse after statehouse where Republicans hold majorities, the playbook is well established, and the tactics are becoming increasingly aggressive.

Coming in for well-deserved criticism is of course the president’s voter fraud commission led by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, described as “the nation’s most determined, litigious and resourceful champion of voter suppression.” A close second might be Republicans in control of North Carolina’s statehouse.

After 50 weeks of foot-dragging in redrawing 28 state House and Senate districts ruled racial gerrymanders, and after asking for an additional three and a half months, three federal judges in Greensboro took Republican leaders to task on July 27.

“You don’t seem serious, so what’s our assurance that you are serious about remedying this?” asked District Judge Catherine Eagles. The judges gave Republican legislators in charge of the redraw a September 1 date for approval of new maps. They presented the new House map on Saturday. Release of the Senate map is expected today. Supporting data will follow on Monday, officials say. The machinations echo with history.

Ryan Cooper writes for The Week how briefly freed slaves enjoyed voting rights after the Civil War:

After the war came Reconstruction. Disgruntled ex-Confederates, assisted by the deeply racist President Andrew Johnson, attempted to return their states to a condition as close to slavery as possible — in essence overturning the result of the war (in which some 200,000 black Union soldiers had constituted one key to victory) through terrorism. Enraged Radical Republicans, with the strong support of President Ulysses S. Grant after he was elected, occupied the South with federal troops and enforced protection of black suffrage. From 1867-1876, while ex-slaves did not get meaningful economic help, their voting rights were protected.

But a financial crisis and a return of racist Democrats to power ended Reconstruction and ushered in the myth of The Lost Cause. The South’s effort to rewrite its history succeeded, and the Jim Crow of racial oppression continued until the 1960s. The Civil Rights era merely drove white supremacist culture underground. Cooper concludes:

If the federal government had beaten ex-Confederate terrorists into submission for as long as it took — particularly in the crucial two years after the war, when Johnson’s stubborn racism allowed them to regroup and regain some initiative, we would not be having this crisis. Instead tyranny displaced democracy in the American South, white Americans swallowed a lot of comforting lies to cover up that fact, and open racism continued to thrive — only partly beaten back by the civil rights advances of the 1960s. Violent white supremacy lives today, as does political racism from conservative Southern politicians, who are to this day working feverishly to disenfranchise as many black Americans as possible, because of that moral failure.

Let us remember this the next time some conservative argues, as Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts did when he gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, that measures to protect American democracy from racist tyranny are “based on 40-year-old facts having no logical relationship to the present day.” White terror today grows up the frame of a historical trellis well over 150 years old. Perhaps someday America’s history of racism can truly be buried. But first, it must be killed.

Like kudzu, another southern bane, efforts to keep power in the right hands, white hands, are harder to eradicate for not having been yanked up by the roots a century and a half ago.

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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Music to my ears

by digby

I just can’t get enough of the right wing crazies rending their garments over Trump. It’s actually making me feel better about life.

This is Ann Coulter talking to gossip columnist Lloyd Grove, of all things:

In a conversation that amounted to a primal scream, Coulter repeatedly attacked her former hero for betraying his constituency, belittled White House aides such as Kellyanne Conway and Stephen Miller, accused the president of kowtowing to the same news media he professes to loathe, and otherwise raged at the dying of the wall along with any number of other populist policy prescriptions that Trump touted to beat the Republican establishment and Hillary Clinton.

“The millions of people who haven’t voted for 30 years and came out to vote for Trump, thinking ‘finally, here’s somebody who cares about us’—Nope!” Coulter declared. “Republicans, Democrats—doesn’t matter! Jeb exclamation point, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton—doesn’t matter. Goldman Sachs is running the country!”
As for Stephen Miller, the former Jeff Sessions aide who briefly became the architect of the president’s anti-Muslim ban and occasionally jousts in the White House press room, “he’s just a speechwriter for the White House staff,” Coulter said. For a good part of the 2016 presidential campaign, Coulter insisted, Conway was a diehard Ted Cruz supporter.

“As late as the summer [of 2016], Kellyanne was saying that Trump built his business on the backs of the little guy,” Coulter continued. “You know I love the Emperor God, but he does have flaws. And one of them is his vast, yawning narcissism. He just seems to be obsessed with the fact that people give Bannon credit. And we all know that [Jared] Kushner is the one who won the White House for him.”

Coulter claimed it’s interim communications director Hope Hicks and former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski—whom Kushner pushed out of the campaign—who really deserve the credit for Trump’s political success. Coulter added that it was Kushner, along with former Goldman Sachs executive Gary Cohn and national security adviser Gen. H.R. McMaster, who finally got Bannon’s scalp and are probably targeting Conway and Miller as well.

Coulter added: “The Time magazine cover [a big-headed portrait of the man headlined as “President Bannon”] and the Saturday Night Live sketch [in which “Bannon,” wearing the black shroud of Death and carrying a scythe, sat at the Oval Office’s Resolute Desk while “Trump”/Alec Baldwin was vanquished to a tiny kindergarten desk]—every time he’s asked about Bannon, the Emperor God goes, ‘He didn’t win it for me! He only came in August! I already wrapped up the nomination!’ You don’t have to be a very sensitive person capable of reading body language to understand that Trump is obsessed by that. It’s driven him crazy.

“So did Kellyanne [arrive late to Trump’s campaign] and Trump gives her credit.”
With Bannon, however, “his little tiny ego explodes,” Coulter went on. “All you have to do with whatever White House staffer the media would like to get fired—just put him on the cover of a magazine and call him ‘President Whatever the Guy’s Last Name Is.’ It’s not good to show the media that you are so easily manipulable… The media is running the staffing at the White House now.”

Lulz… I love it.

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The Big Kahuna has always been in charge

by digby

I rarely agree with anything Matthew Continetti says but this op-ed in the NY Times sounds right to me:

Mr. Bannon’s reputation is overrated. Yes, he transformed Breitbart from an irreverent blog into the iconoclastic tribune of nation-state populism, the anti-elitist ideology of border walls, travel bans and political incorrectness.

But his career as a political consultant has been short and checkered. As the president has observed, Mr. Bannon did not join Mr. Trump’s campaign until August 2016, by which time Mr. Trump had secured the Republican nomination. Mr. Trump’s general election victory was remarkable. It was also something of a black-swan event. There is a tendency, especially among Mr. Trump’s supporters, to overlook the fact that, had some 79,000 votes in three states gone the other way, the winner of the popular vote would now be in the White House.

Since his inauguration, President Trump’s numbers have steadily declined. He is at 39 percent approval and at 55 percent disapproval in the Real Clear Politics average of polls. The low standing depletes Mr. Trump’s political capital and his leverage over Congress. It endangers Republican control of one or both legislative chambers. Perhaps it is time to take advice from someone else.

Of course, Mr. Trump does not seem inclined to listen to anyone at all. That is even more reason not to exaggerate Mr. Bannon’s influence. Mr. Bannon may have encouraged Mr. Trump to follow his instincts, but that is precisely the point: Mr. Trump’s natural inclinations are in perfect harmony with the voters he refers to in casual conversation as “my people.” Mr. Bannon may have encouraged Mr. Trump not to back down from his positions on the violence in Charlottesville and on the place of statuary memorializing the Confederacy. But the final decision, like all decisions in this White House, was Mr. Trump’s alone.

Mr. Bannon has flitted through an eccentric career in the Navy, on Wall Street, in Hollywood and in the populist faction of the conservative movement. He has a reputation as a well-read autodidact whose syncretic worldview is the result of years of independent and wide-ranging study.

But he is a terrible colleague. His unprompted interview last week with the editor of a liberal magazine not only demonstrated a naïve willingness to forge alliances with the economic left on trade and infrastructure. It also confirmed everything that has been said about Mr. Bannon: He disparages his co-workers behind their backs; he postures as the force behind personnel decisions; and he pretends to know more about national security than James Mattis, John Kelly, H. R. McMaster and Joseph Dunford (not to mention Donald Trump).

The conflicting reports about the timing and method of Mr. Bannon’s fall, whether he was fired or resigned, whether he knew he was on his way out or was suddenly expelled, are additional signs of his habit of manipulating the press for his personal benefit.

“The Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over,” Mr. Bannon said in an interview with The Weekly Standard on Friday. “We still have a huge movement, and we will make something of this Trump presidency. But that presidency is over.”

“President Trump has told close associates that he believes Steve Bannon is behind damaging leaks about White House colleagues,” Axios.com reported last week. The American Prospect interview made Mr. Trump’s suspicions impossible to doubt.

The costs of Mr. Bannon’s presence in the West Wing outweighed the benefits. You can’t have an underling raise the white flag in the middle of a nuclear standoff with North Korea. You can’t tell Mr. Kelly to impose order on the staff while allowing Mr. Bannon to run around D.C. impugning the men and women who stand in his way. You can’t begin to rebuild your presidency with Mr. Bannon on payroll.

Between May 9, when he fired the F.B.I. director, James Comey, and Aug. 15, when he said there were good people “on both sides” of the clash between racists and antifa, or anti-fascists, Mr. Trump has done more damage to himself and to his office than any president in memory. Whatever hopes he has of salvaging his presidency begin in suppressing the infighting, factionalism, subversion, dysfunction and flirtations with extremism within his inner circle.

The myth of Steve Bannon’s power may live on. But the reality is that Mr. Trump no longer needs him and is unlikely to be harmed by Mr. Bannon’s sniping.

The connection between Mr. Trump and the forces Mr. Bannon represents is visceral and durable. To save his presidency, though, Mr. Trump must join with another, far larger constituency: the American people.

Yeah, that’s not going to happen.

Trump’s relationship with his base is secure. They see him as besieged by all the same forces they feel are victimizing them: political correctness, elites of both parties, racial and ethnic minorities, foreigners, liberal hippies, uppity feminists and the media. They don’t care about his policy agenda. He’s their Jesus being crucified for them.

Breitbart is a powerful megaphone. But it’s far more likely Bannon is going to use it to blow up the GOP congress and take on the media than Trump. Bannon’s overrated as a thinker and a strategist. But he’s a good propagandist for this cause. He’ll keep at it and Trump will thank him for it.

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They had the time of their lives

by digby

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Trump does not have a “philosophy”

by digby

According to Mike Allen at Axios:

At the end, Trump was beyond fed up, viewing Bannon as a self-aggrandizer who had built a personal narrative as the grand puppetmaster.

“Who the f**k does this guy think he is?” Trump has said incredulously to associates. 

Axios’ Jonathan Swan tells me it’s no surprise Trump didn’t issue a farewell message on Friday: The president can’t stand Bannon at the moment. (Trump tweeted a belated “Thanks S” about Bannon on Saturday morning.) 

But few people are ever really gone from Trumpworld, and we bet it won’t be long before Bannon is regularly gossiping with Trump and counseling him.

That’ll produce a huge tension: Bannon is more ideologically aligned with Trump than are the other members of the inner circle. So Bannon will be in his head and in his ear, while top advisers are counseling moderation.

A big irony: Bannon got personally crossways with the president at a time when nationalist policies were ascendant with POTUS. Trump agreed with Bannon’s formula for confronting China on trade, although he later succumbed to the effort of other officials to dial that back. And Bannon egged on Trump with the view of Charlottesville that later drew such a backlash.

The post-Bannon presidency: West Wing sources expect that with Bannon gone, the administration will be less likely to use trade as a weapon, and more likely to flex military muscle against bad actors.

Be smart: A huge tension that’ll unfold beginning this fall is that Trump is more ideologically aligned with Bannon than he is with the more moderate officials who now surround him in the West Wing.

So Steve Bannon will remain in the president’s ear and in his head, telling Trump to be Trump. And that’s a message this president has never been known to resist.

Some of this sounds right to me. Bannon will be back in Trump’s good graces and will tell him to be himself.

But Trump is not ideological in the way Allen seems to think he is. His beliefs on both “trade” and national security are based on his simplistic worldview that says the United States needs to be “respected” and if it isn’t he’s going to do something about it. He’ll torture, kill and steal if that’s what it takes. That has always been the case.

Bannon is a self-professed chaos agent who is happy to use Trump’s simple-minded vacuousness for his own purposes, one of which is obviously to “let Trump be Trump.” But they are not on the same page, not really, and the fact that people still think that Trump is some kind of an economic populist or an isolationist in any way is frustrating. He has no philosophy, he has domination impulses. That’s it.

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Soulless cult

by digby

This Bannon postmortem by Ryan Lizza is very good and well worth reading. This is a particularly great insight:

But in the Trump White House there is no Trump agenda. There is a mercurial, highly emotional narcissist with no policy expertise who set up—or allowed his senior staffers to set up—competing ideological fiefdoms that fight semi-public wars to define the soul of Trumpism.

Of course Trumpism has no soul so that fight will never end.

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