Luke Ford

I don’t think there is any significance to this feud. I think Bannon will run Trump’s 2020 campaign. This is drama like George Steinbrenner firing and hiring Billy Martin repeatedly.

I’ve yet to see anything in the George Mueller investigation that will hurt Trump.

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Funny to read all excited commentators trying to read complicated ideological disputes into typical personnel dramas that most of us have seen working in any other organizations.

This looks like a standard personnel drama, that happens when you have a few people with difficult personalities.

Bannon is such personality, as is Trump. When Bannon felt there wasn’t enough attention paid to him, or that people had slighted him – he started to create some kind of mischief.

Probably if job roles were reversed (not that Trump could even to contemplate working underneath somebody else), a similar story would have unfolded.

* Bannon didn’t win Trump the election, but he helped focus the campaign’s message into one that could resonate with all the right voters. For that he deserves recognition. Trump doesn’t seem to realize that it was his message that won the election, not him. Polls consistently showed that large numbers of his voters disliked him as a person and didn’t really trust him but voted for him anyway. Now he’s at 60% disapproval in Iowa and 52% approval in Mississippi. Not really a good place to be.

He needs to stop this shit. Focus on trade and immigration this year and forget about pointless tweet fights that the people hate and Paul Ryan’s retarded plan to cut Medicaid. Because otherwise you’re looking at a bloodbath in November and frankly I’m finding less and less reason to defend him as this garbage continues with no end in sight.

* I agree with Ann Coulter, Kris Kobach and others: Immigration is the number one issue. Lose on that, and all is lost. That’s why I supported Trump, despite the defects of his personality. (OK, I’ll admit I find the way he upsets Leftist race-baiters kinda funny–in fact the whole world of 4chan memes and stuff amused me in ways I never would have believed of myself a few years ago.) And this is why I hope and pray the Mueller investigation doesn’t uncover some nitpicky Russian connection or business deal of the sort no other politician would ever be indicted on. So on similar grounds, I’m not happy that Bannon seems to be undercutting the only hope we seem to have on at least stopping the bleeding on immigration. (I feel the clock is ticking so fast, that we can’t just wait another 4, 8 or 12 years for the “perfect” populist-Right candidate to come along.)

But I do agree with others that Bannon is probably way more of a thinker than Trump or most of his inner circle. In an absolute sense, I’m tempted to think that Bannon is more of a genuine right-wing populist, but the fact is he is not president and so only has the power of Breitbart–which is meaningless power without politicians to enact policy.

Also, to walk back a bit my first comment on Bannon messing things up: it’s not like he’s a lawyer. His opinion of it being treasonous doesn’t make it so. Putting him under oath to say he was upset with Don Jr. won’t make Don Jr’s actions suddenly illegal. Yes, Trump’s own kids and many in the WH staff seem to be neocons/neoliberals, and perhaps Bannon is genuinely upset at this. I’m not sure how this shakes out in any positive way, though. I think going after Trump’s family is a sure way to fall out of grace with Trump permanently (unless this is indeed an orchestrated PR effort.)

* Don Jr. retweeted Kevin MacDonald during the campaign, but he doesn’t seem like someone that would actually read the books. He and Eric have a typical jock mindset and don’t seem to be self-reflective at all.

Think of it this way, who would be better at running Breitbart, Bannon or Ron Unz? It could be worse, Ben Shapiro could be brought back.

Bannon is a good example of “appearance is ideology”. You can’t be serious when you are a thrice-divorced overweight slob. I don’t have much regard for Richard Spencer, but you can’t call the man unkempt.

Kevin MacDonald writes: The rancour between Bannon and “Javanka” – Kushner & Ivanka Trump – is a recurring theme of the book. Kushner and Ivanka are Jewish. Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state, is quoted as saying: “It is a war between the Jews and the non-Jews.”

From Michael Wolff’s new book:

On the afternoon of November 8, 2016, Kellyanne Conway settled into her glass office at Trump Tower. Right up until the last weeks of the race, the campaign headquarters had remained a listless place. All that seemed to distinguish it from a corporate back office were a few posters with right-wing slogans.

Conway, the campaign’s manager, was in a remarkably buoyant mood, considering she was about to experience a resounding, if not cataclysmic, defeat. Donald Trump would lose the election — of this she was sure — but he would quite possibly hold the defeat to under six points. That was a substantial victory. As for the looming defeat itself, she shrugged it off: It was Reince Priebus’s fault, not hers.

She had spent a good part of the day calling friends and allies in the political world and blaming Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee. Now she briefed some of the television producers and anchors whom she had been carefully courting since joining the Trump campaign — and with whom she had been actively interviewing in the last few weeks, hoping to land a permanent on-air job after the election.

Even though the numbers in a few key states had appeared to be changing to Trump’s advantage, neither Conway nor Trump himself nor his son-in-law, Jared ­Kushner — the effective head of the campaign — ­wavered in their certainty: Their unexpected adventure would soon be over. Not only would Trump not be president, almost everyone in the campaign agreed, he should probably not be. Conveniently, the former conviction meant nobody had to deal with the latter issue.

As the campaign came to an end, Trump himself was sanguine. His ultimate goal, after all, had never been to win. “I can be the most famous man in the world,” he had told his aide Sam Nunberg at the outset of the race. His longtime friend Roger Ailes, the former head of Fox News, liked to say that if you want a career in television, first run for president. Now Trump, encouraged by Ailes, was floating rumors about a Trump network. It was a great future. He would come out of this campaign, Trump assured Ailes, with a far more powerful brand and untold opportunities.

“This is bigger than I ever dreamed of,” he told Ailes a week before the election. “I don’t think about losing, because it isn’t losing. We’ve totally won.”

From the start, the leitmotif for Trump about his own campaign was how crappy it was, and how everybody involved in it was a loser. In August, when he was trailing Hillary Clinton by more than 12 points, he couldn’t conjure even a far-fetched scenario for achieving an electoral victory. He was baffled when the right-wing billionaire Robert Mercer, a Ted Cruz backer whom Trump barely knew, offered Trump’s campaign an infusion of $5 million. Trump didn’t turn down the help—he just expressed vast incomprehension about why anyone would want to do that. “This thing,” he told Mercer, “is so fucked up.”

Steve Bannon, who became chief executive of Trump’s team in mid-August, called it “the broke-dick campaign.” Almost immediately, he saw that it was hampered by an even deeper structural flaw: The candidate who billed himself as a billionaire — ten times over — refused to invest his own money in it. Bannon told Kushner that, after the first debate in September, they would need another $50 million to cover them until Election Day.

“No way we’ll get 50 million unless we can guarantee him victory,” said a clear-eyed Kushner.

“Twenty-five million?” prodded Bannon.

“If we can say victory is more than likely.”

In the end, the best Trump would do is to loan the campaign
$10 million, provided he got it back as soon as they could raise other money. Steve Mnuchin, the campaign’s finance chairman, came to collect the loan with the wire instructions ready to go so Trump couldn’t conveniently forget to send the money.

Most presidential candidates spend their entire careers, if not their lives from adolescence, preparing for the role. They rise up the ladder of elected offices, perfect a public face, and prepare themselves to win and to govern. The Trump calculation, quite a conscious one, was different. The candidate and his top lieutenants believed they could get all the benefits of almost becoming president without having to change their behavior or their worldview one whit. Almost everybody on the Trump team, in fact, came with the kind of messy conflicts bound to bite a president once he was in office. Michael Flynn, the retired general who served as Trump’s opening act at campaign rallies, had been told by his friends that it had not been a good idea to take $45,000 from the Russians for a speech. “Well, it would only be a problem if we won,” ­Flynn assured them.

Not only did Trump disregard the potential conflicts of his own business deals and real-estate holdings, he audaciously refused to release his tax returns. Why should he? Once he lost, Trump would be both insanely famous and a martyr to Crooked Hillary. His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared would be international celebrities. Steve Bannon would become the de facto head of the tea-party movement. Kellyanne Conway would be a cable-news star. Melania Trump, who had been assured by her husband that he wouldn’t become president, could return to inconspicuously lunching. Losing would work out for everybody. Losing was winning.

Shortly after 8 p.m. on Election Night, when the unexpected trend — Trump might actually win — seemed confirmed, Don Jr. told a friend that his father, or DJT, as he calls him, looked as if he had seen a ghost. Melania was in tears—and not of joy.

There was, in the space of little more than an hour, in Steve Bannon’s not unamused observation, a befuddled Trump morphing into a disbelieving Trump and then into a horrified Trump. But still to come was the final transformation: Suddenly, Donald Trump became a man who believed that he deserved to be, and was wholly capable of being, the president of the United States.