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QOTD: Steve Bannon

This came from NY Times reporter Jeremy Peters, flogging his new book “Insurgency” on MSNBC, who said that Trump wants to prove that he’s the only person who can lead the GOP. He related a conversation he had with Bannon a couple of years ago in which he asked if Bannon thought Trump was grooming Pence as a successor.

Bannon said, “No, Trump wants the person who comes after him to lose by 40 points.”

I hadn’t thought of that but, of course, its exactly right. It’s all he cares about.

In a way, that’s lucky. The man Bannon thought he resembled had much grander ambitions:

When Donald Trump rode a golden escalator down to announce his presidential candidacy in 2015, the carefully choreographed scene before TV crews reminded a soon-to-be Trump advisor of scenes from one of the most effective propaganda films ever made.

That’s Hitler!, Bannon thought, as the opening scene of Leni Riefenstahl’s seminal work of Nazi propaganda, ‘Triumph of the Will,’ flashed through his mind,” New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters writes in his new book, “Insurgency: How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted.”

In his notes on sourcing — which involved interviews with over 300 people, mostly while Trump was still in office — Peters explains that quotes presented in italics and in the past tense indicate “material from interviews conducted with the author on-the-record.”

Bannon’s immediate connotation to the Nazi propaganda film comes from the Trump 2016 campaign chief executive officer and former White House chief strategist’s longstanding fascination with the aesthetic techniques of Riefenstahl.

“He meant it as a compliment,” Peters writes. “As a documentarian himself who had studied and admired Riefenstahl’s work, Bannon saw some of her visual techniques in Trump’s production. To create the illusion that Hitler towered over everyone around him as a figure of superhuman proportions, Riefenstahl would keep him tight in her frame, often placing him on a higher plane than his adoring subjects.”

Naturally, Bannon jumped at the chance to join his campaign.

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