Tag Archives: Steve Bannon

Parts of the mainstream media have been in a tizzy about Donald Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon. Allegations with little or no support have been thrown around that he’s a racist, an anti-Semite, or both. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Moments ago, the Hollywood Reporter released the much anticipated Michael Wolff interview with Steve Bannon, the controversial president-elect’s chief strategist. As a preface, Wolff reveals that Bannon – unlike virtually anyone else in the “credible” media – predicted exactly how things would play out:

In late summer when I went up to see Steve Bannon, recently named CEO of the Donald Trump presidential campaign, in his office at Trump Tower in New York, he outlined a preposterous-sounding scenario. Trump, he said, would do surprisingly well among women, Hispanics and African-Americans, in addition to working men, and hence take Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan — and therefore the election. On Nov. 15, when I went back to Trump Tower, Bannon, promoted by the president-elect to chief strategist for the incoming administration, and by the media as the official symbol of all things hateful and virulent about the coming Trump presidency, said, as matter-of-factly as when he first sketched it out for me, “I told you so.”

Perhaps Trump naming Bannon “chief strategist” is not a bad idea.

Below we picked a few of the most notable excerpts from the interview, starting with Wolff’s description of what he saw on the day he visited Trump. He writes “the New York Times, in a widely circulated article, will describe this day at Trump Tower as a scene of “disarray” for the transition team.” It appears the NYT was being a source of fake news again:

“In fact, it’s all hands on: Mike Pence, the vice president-elect and transition chief, and Reince Priebus, the new chief of staff, shuttling between full conference rooms; Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and by many accounts his closest advisor, conferring in the halls; Sen. Jeff Sessions in and out of meetings on the transition team floor; Rudy Giuliani upstairs with Trump (overheard: “Is the boss meeting-meeting with Rudy or just shooting the shit?”), and Bannon with a long line of men and women outside his corner office. If this is disarray, it’s a peculiarly focused and organized kind.”

Why did Wolff pick Bannon as the subject of his interview: simple – he is the brains of the operations, the man whose job is to make the Trump regime “intellectually and historically coherent.”

The focus on Bannon, if not necessarily the description, is right. He’s the man with the idea. If Trumpism is to represent something intellectually and historically coherent, it’s Bannon’s job to make it so. In this, he could not be a less reassuring or more confusing figure for liberals — fiercely intelligent and yet reflexively drawn to the inverse of every liberal assumption and shibboleth. A working class kid, he enlists in the navy after high school, gets a degree from Virginia Tech, then Georgetown, then Harvard Business School. Then it’s Goldman Sachs, then he’s a dealmaker and entrepreneur in Hollywood — where, in an unlikely and very lucky deal match-up, he gets a lucrative piece of Seinfeld royalties, ensuring his own small fortune — then into the otherworld of the right wing conspiracy and conservative media. (He partners with David Bossie, a congressional investigator of President Clinton, who later spearheaded the Citizens United lawsuit that effectively removed the cap on campaign spending, and who now, as the deputy campaign manager, is in the office next to Bannon’s.) And then to the Breitbart News Network, which with digital acumen and a mind-meld with the anger and the passion of the new alt-right (a liberal designation Bannon derides) he pushes to the inner circle of conservative media from Breitbart’s base on the west side of liberal Los Angeles.
Incidentally, Bannon appears to be a fan of “darkness”:

To continue reading: Steve Bannon Interviewed: “It’s About Americans Not Getting F—ed Over”