If Trump Fired Bannon, Would He Seek Revenge?
Friends and foes imagine his options for brutal payback.
.. leaking personal dirt on his enemies to the tabloids, using the megaphone of Breitbart News to exacerbate divisions inside the administration, and siccing an army of internet trolls on his adversaries to harass and defame them. It ends with Bannon using Cambridge Analytica data to identify and primary their vulnerable allies in Congress, then releasing a “Where Trump Went Wrong” documentary on the eve of the November midterms
.. Steve King, a steadfast Bannon ally .. the mere discussion of Bannon’s potential revenge could be enough to set off Trump while also acknowledging that it could have the opposite effect of making the White House think twice about firing him.
.. “Do you really want to gamble with this in your first 100 days?”
.. blame Breitbart coverage for stirring up a tsunami of threats and intimidation from its readers
.. Rick Wilson, for example, reportedly endured anonymous threats to rape his daughter and nearly shot a man he found snooping on his back porch
.. “The hit pieces on Breitbart will increase, for sure,”
.. one recent 24-hour period in which the site published four anti-Kushner pieces.
.. “There’s sex scandals people are sitting on,
.. identifying his enemies’ most vulnerable allies in Congress and encouraging challengers to run for their seats.
.. “It will be Eric Cantor-style warfare.”
.. unlikely to take on Trump directly, preferring instead to shift blame toward others while leaving the door open to a rapprochement
.. “In Steve’s dream scenario, he would depart, things would fall apart even more so, and Trump would beg him to come back to fix it,”
.. Bannon is more than just a man. He is honestly something of an idea
.. he represents something that both the establishment and the left-wing media hate.”