the former White House chief strategist made a breathtakingly candid admission in the hours after his exit on Friday.
“The Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over,” Bannon told the Weekly Standard. “We still have a huge movement, and we will make something of this Trump presidency. But that presidency is over. It’ll be something else. And there’ll be all kinds of fights, and there’ll be good days and bad days, but that presidency is over.”
What, exactly, did Bannon mean? Well, he got specific:
- “I just think his ability to get anything done — particularly the bigger things, like the wall, the bigger, broader things that we fought for, it’s just going to be that much harder,” Bannon said of Trump.
- “I think they’re going to try to moderate him,” Bannon said. “I think he’ll sign a clean debt ceiling; I think you’ll see all this stuff. His natural tendency — and I think you saw it this week on Charlottesville — his actual default position is the position of his base, the position that got him elected. I think you’re going to see a lot of constraints on that. I think it’ll be much more conventional.”
The short translation is that Trump’s campaign was a fraud. The ideas that Trump sold and his supporters bought are unlikely to turn into actions, according to Bannon.
It sounds like Bannon, who will return to Breitbart News, will pin the blame on everyone around the president, rather than the man himself. The question is whether the voters who put Trump in the Oval Office will be so charitable.
Is the Ivy League’s Admission Bias a ‘Trade Secret’?
In 2006 Jian Li filed a complaint with the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights after he was denied admission to Princeton University. Mr. Li, who emigrated from China at age 4, had a perfect score on the SAT and graduated in the top 1% of his high school class. He alleged that Princeton violated civil-rights laws banning discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin.
.. The judge in that case has ordered Harvard to turn over six years of admissions records, and Mr. Blum suspects that the data will show that Harvard is unlawfully capping Asian enrollment.
.. America’s Asian population has exploded in recent decades, and Asian attendance at highly selective schools with colorblind admissions, such the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley, reflects this demographic trend. At Harvard, however, the percentage of Asian undergrads has remained remarkably consistent for an institution that claims race is not a determining factor in who is admitted. Mr. Blum suspects that Princeton engages in similar shenanigans
.. The school also maintains that releasing the data would compromise student privacy, and it likened its admissions process to “trade secrets” that, if exposed, would put Princeton at a competitive disadvantage in attracting students.
.. Asians have long been the forgotten victims of liberal affirmative-action schemes, subject to unwritten “just for Asian” admissions standards that recall the treatment of Jews in the first half of the 20th century.
How Colleges Can Again Be Levelers of Society
Most highly rated colleges say they seek qualified low-income students. But a vast majority enroll very few. At the most competitive colleges, only 17 percent of students are poor enough to receive the federal education stipends known as Pell Grants. That’s just one percentage point higher than in 2000.
.. At Vassar, by contrast, 24 percent of the student body qualifies for Pell grants.
.. At the country’s most selective schools, three percent of students come from families in the bottom economic quartile, while the top economic quartile supplies 72 percent. A high-achieving poor student is only one-third as likely to go to a competitive school as her wealthier counterpart.
.. A student who could get into a top school is nearly twice as likely to graduate there than if she goes to a noncompetitive school. The top colleges are the only ones where students of all income levels graduate at the same rates. The reason is money: Selective colleges are richer. They can afford to provide specialized counseling and lots of financial aid. And running out of money is the most common reason people drop out.
.. the share of low-income students at highly selective colleges could rise by 30 to 60 percent with no decrease in academic quality
.. Tied to money is the death grip of U.S. News & World Report’s much-criticized college rankings. Colleges seek to move up in the rankings by competing on selectivity, student test scores, alumni giving and academic spending, among other metrics on which colleges do best when they stick to privileged students.
.. The college ranking system of The Washington Monthlyprovides a valuable alternative. It rates colleges for their contribution to the public good, considering (in addition to graduation rates, which U.S. News also looks at) the percentage of students from low-income families, innovative research and the percentage of students who do national service.
.. Harvard’s admission rate for these legacies, for example, is four times higher than for regular applicants. There is no more direct way to perpetuate privilege.
.. Most controversially, even affirmative action can discriminate against the poor, the report said. Nearly 90 percent of African-American students at selective colleges, some of whom were admitted through racial preferences, are middle- or upper-class.
.. Vassar was founded to serve another group that wasn’t accepted at elite colleges: women. Traditionally, white, wealthy Protestant women.
.. Part of the aid for needy students came from ending merit aid, which often went to students who didn’t need it.
.. American colleges get large government subsidies to help them provide social mobility for all. They benefit from Pell Grants and federal loans. Colleges get huge tax breaks for their nonprofit status. “Some 25 to 35 percent of our revenues probably come from these privileges,”
.. need-blind is the wrong approach: instead, colleges should givepriority to low-income students. The True Merit report argues that it is relatively easy for a wealthy student at a prep school to get top grades and test scores. A poor student from a poor school who does so must be someone with unusual amounts of grit and tenacity. “Current admissions fail to acknowledge this difference,”