“He’s going nuclear,” said another friend. “You have no idea. This is gonna be really fucking bad.”
.. he has expressed to friends that he feels the administration is failing and is a sinking ship. And last week, he told people in a meeting that he would have 10 times more influence outside the White House than inside it.
.. Bannon’s next steps are being worked out with Robert and Rebekah Mercer
.. “First he’s gonna figure things out with Bob and Bekah,” said one Bannon ally earlier on Friday. “Breitbart’s certainly the likely landing spot.” This ally said that Bannon may also move to a Mercer-funded outside group, or even start a new one. .. “Why would he help them from the outside at this point? Run the outside group and then Jared Kushner takes credit?” Two sources close to Bannon said that he has for some time complained about Kushner being an issue in the Russia investigation; one of the sources said Bannon regards Kushner as “the weak link” in the White House when it comes to the investigation... Bannon told The Daily Mail it was done intentionally to take heat off of the president during the Charlottesville controversy. He then went on the record twice more with different publications, which is rare for him.. In his departure, the nationalists lose their leader while some of Trump’s key campaign promises—the border wall, for example—still go unfulfilled. Bannon famously kept a whiteboard full of those promises in his office, checking them off as they were fulfilled.
Bannon in Limbo as Trump Faces Growing Calls for the Strategist’s Ouster
Rupert Murdoch has repeatedly urged President Trump to fire him. Anthony Scaramucci, the president’s former communications director, thrashed him on television as a white nationalist. Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, the national security adviser, refused to even say he could work with him.
.. So far, Mr. Trump has not been able to follow through — a product of his dislike of confrontation, the bonds of foxhole friendship forged during the 2016 presidential campaign and concerns about what mischief Mr. Bannon might do once he leaves the protective custody of the West Wing.
.. Despite his marginalization, Mr. Bannon consulted the president repeatedly over the weekend as Mr. Trump struggled to respond to the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va. In general, Mr. Bannon has cautioned the president not to criticize far-right activists too severely for fear of antagonizing a small but energetic part of his base.
.. Mr. Bannon also has admirers, including Representative Mark Meadows, the North Carolina Republican and the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, who said that without Mr. Bannon, “there is a concern among conservatives that Washington, D.C., will influence the president in way that moves him away from those voters that put him in the White House.”
And Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa and an immigration hard-liner, said that shoving out Mr. Bannon would leave conservatives “crushed.”
.. Mr. Bannon, who adamantly rejects claims that he is a racist or a sympathizer of white supremacists, is in trouble with John F. Kelly, a retired Marine general and the new White House chief of staff. Mr. Kelly has told Mr. Trump’s top staff that he will not tolerate Mr. Bannon’s shadowland machinations, according to a dozen current and former Trump aides and associates with knowledge of the situation.
Mr. Bannon’s alleged crimes:
- Leaking nasty stories about General McMaster and other colleagues he deems insufficiently populist,
- feuding bitterly with Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and
- creating his own cadre within the West Wing that operates outside the chain of command.
.. One of his main sins in the eyes of the president is appearing to revel in the perception that he is the mastermind behind the rise of a pliable Mr. Trump. The president was deeply annoyed at a Time magazine cover
.. Others say Mr. Bannon’s continued presence in the White House is not serving the president’s interests.
“He’s got to move more into the mainstream, he’s got to be more into where the moderates are and the independents are,” said Mr. Scaramucci
.. Top administration officials like to joke that working for Mr. Trump is like toiling in the court of Henry VIII.
.. Mick Mulvaney, the president’s budget director, recently handed out copies of the play “A Man for all Seasons,” about the last years of Sir Thomas More, Henry’s chancellor, who was executed for failing to endorse Henry’s split with Rome.
.. From the start, Mr. Bannon, 63, has told people in his orbit that he never expected to last in his current position longer than eight months to a year, and hoped to ram through as much of his agenda as he could
.. Mr. Bannon’s ability to hang on as Mr. Trump’s in-house populist is in part because of his connections to a handful of ultrarich political patrons, including Sheldon G. Adelson, the pro-Israel, Las Vegas-based casino magnate.
.. He is especially close to the reclusive conservative billionaire Robert Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah, who is a frequent sounding board for Mr. Bannon.
.. has suggested that he might direct his energies at creating a movement to challenge mainstream Republicans too timid to pursue the president’s agenda, like Speaker Paul D. Ryan.
.. Mr. Bannon’s cause is being damaged, people close to the president say, by a war he is waging against General McMaster.
.. the national security adviser, whom he believes to be prodding the president toward possible war with North Korea and Venezuela.
.. Mr. Bannon’s protégé, chief speechwriter and policy director, Stephen Miller, shares his populist agenda — centered around a controversial immigration crackdown — and has become one of the president’s favorite aides.
.. Despite his image in the news media as a confrontational ideologue, Mr. Miller has proved to be a deft operator who has ingratiated himself to Mr. Kushner.
Jim DeMint Is Said to Be Out at Heritage Foundation
Mr. DeMint’s abrupt ouster, described by people as a “coup” against him, was the result of a larger debate among conservative donors who fund the group. One of its board members is Rebekah Mercer
.. Ms. Mercer was described by people with knowledge of the events as helping drive the effort toward a shake-up. Another person close to the discussions, who asked not to be identified, said that Mr. DeMint was not seen as sufficiently pro-Trump by some members of the board.
A likely candidate to take over, said one person with knowledge of the situation, is Edwin J. Feulner, a former president of Heritage who has worked closely with the Trump administration.
.. The foundation and its political arm, Heritage Action for America, pushed aggressively for a full repeal, which would have left none of the original 2010 law in place. That was further than Mr. Trump and Republican congressional leaders wanted to go.
.. Heritage, which rose to prominence during the Reagan administration and remains a home for many Reagan-era aides like Edwin Meese III, the former attorney general, has come to represent the hard-line, uncompromising vision for conservatism associated with the Tea Party movement and its leaders in Congress.
.. Under President Barack Obama’s administration, Heritage shifted to become more engaged in direct political combat. After decades of producing mountains of high-fiber white papers, the think tank became more defined by a political arm that sought to hold Republican lawmakers accountable rather than just supplying them with the raw materials for legislation.
.. Mr. Trump leaned heavily on Heritage to help steer his agenda and staff his administration. The group was one of the players working on the president’s team that led to the selection of Neil M. Gorsuch
Inside The Wealthy Family That Has Been Funding Steve Bannon’s Plan For Years
Jane Mayer writes in the New Yorker about Robert Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah, who have poured millions of dollars into Breitbart News, and who pushed to have Bannon run Trump’s campaign.
.. MAYER: Among the theories that Robinson has propounded and that Bob Mercer has accepted is that climate change is not happening. It’s not for real, and if it is happening, it’s going to be good for the planet. That’s one of his theories, and the other theory that I found particularly worrisome was they believe that nuclear war is really not such a big deal. It’s survivable, and – they think.
And they’ve actually argued that outside of the immediate blast zone in Japan during World War II – outside of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – that the radiation was actually good for the Japanese. So they see a kind of a silver lining in nuclear war and nuclear accidents. And he co-authored a book in 1986 that I took a look at that describes ways that Americans can survive nuclear war by basically digging fallout shelters all across the country. And he believes that radiation is potentially good for people’s health.
DAVIES: And do the Mercer’s seem to have embraced Robinson’s views about nuclear war and climate change?
MAYER: Well, Bob Mercer has certainly embraced the view that radiation could be good for human health – low level radiation. And he’s been in arguments with people that I interviewed about it, so, yes, very much. He seems extremely influenced by Arthur Robinson’s scientific findings.
.. they have very extreme views, and they’re impatient – both of them. They want action fast. And what was a question for me as I was reporting this was, so how did they get what they wanted? What did they do? And they couldn’t really do it on their own because, like many wealthy people who have strong political ideas, they have no idea how to sort of manipulate politics. They need some kind of professional help. And the person they turned to for that was Steve Bannon.
.. Yet, when Trump’s campaign started to really fall apart last August, it was Mercer’s daughter who met with Trump’s people and with Trump and said, I’ll put money in, but you’re going to have to basically put my people in charge of your campaign.
.. MAYER: Well, now, Trump and Steve Bannon go way back. And that’s a different story. Steve Bannon saw Trump speak at CPAC – the Conservative Political Action Conference – years ago, maybe 2013 or 2014, and was blown away by Trump. And so he’s been actually quite helpful to Trump for years. He – when he was running Breitbart, Bannon gave Trump tons of great coverage and really boosted his visibility. So yeah – so Bannon and Trump have been in touch for quite some time.
.. MAYER: Well, according to people I interviewed such as Sam Nunberg, who was an early, early member of the Trump campaign, Breitbart was enormously helpful in providing a platform for Trump, a national platform. And it gave Trump space to sort of test out his narrative and see which storylines worked best and promoted him so much so that Steve Bannon wrote an email to a friend that eventually leaked out – and this was way back in – in 2015 – saying that he was secretly Trump’s campaign manager.
.. DAVIES: You actually spoke to Steve Bannon for this piece.
MAYER: I did speak to Steve Bannon.
DAVIES: What did he tell you?
MAYER: And he was fascinating. He’s very articulate, and he said – he minced no words about the Mercers. He said they laid the groundwork for the Trump revolution. He said irrefutably that when you look at the donors in the past four years, he said they’ve had the single biggest impact of anybody, including the Kochs.
.. Rebekah Mercer who met with Trump and said – your campaign’s a mess. I would like to support you, but you’re going to have to straighten out the way you’re running it. And she suggested that he put Steve Bannon in charge of the campaign as campaign chairman, Kellyanne Conway in charge as campaign manager and that they also put in David Bossie, who runs the group Citizens United, as deputy campaign manager. And Bossie is someone else who the Mercers have supported financially through his group for quite some time. In essence, they were circling Trump with their own people.
.. She had mixed success, but she had some serious successes with Mike Flynn who she wanted to have become national security adviser. And of course, Trump did choose him. He didn’t last very long, but he was in there. And she pushed very hard for Jeff Sessions to be the attorney general, and she got success with that. And she pushed very hard to have Bannon play a major role in the White House. And of course, he is now Trump’s strategic adviser. And at first, she was hoping that Kellyanne Conway would not go into the White House but would stay outside and help Rebekah Mercer run an outside group that would support Trump, but that didn’t happen. Kellyanne Conway went into the White House.
So her people did quite well. I mean, there’s some people that she wanted that didn’t get jobs. She wanted John Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to be the secretary of state, and she was very disappointed when he didn’t get that. And she has touted this very odd scientist that her family has supported, Arthur Robinson, to be the national science adviser. And so far, that hasn’t happened.
.. And I think if you sort of step back, one of the things that interests me about what Trump is doing is I think you can see that he is – on questions having to do with the health care fight and the budget, he’s taking positions that are very much aligned with the super-rich donors, particularly things that the Mercers would have liked and in some ways, taking policy positions that hurt many of the middle-class and lower middle-class voters who supported him.
.. Rebekah Mercer’s got a game plan in mind. What she’s hoping to do is start an outside group that’s outside of the White House that’s going to be a powerful voice pushing Trump to take her point of view. And so when – it will trumpet his moves when they – when she thinks they’re good and attack him when she thinks that he’s, you know, not following a tough enough line. And I – you know, so we will start probably seeing commercials and a lot of social media coming from this group.
.. He said that Mercer wanted to shrink the government to the size of a pinhead and that he doesn’t think that – he basically has a philosophy, according to Magerman, that values people on the basis of what they earn. He doesn’t think human beings have intrinsic value. He thinks that if you are a schoolteacher and you earn 2 million times less than Mercer earns, then you’re 2 million times less valuable than Mercer is. And he believes that if you are on welfare, you have negative value. And what Magerman said was, and he’s not talking about economically. He means as a human being.
So he has this kind of very mechanistic, almost kind of Ayn Rand-like, objectivist philosophy.
.. since the Citizens United decision and the others that were part of that was – is that you can now have people – a few people with an incredible amount of money who the rest of the country doesn’t even know their names, let alone who they are or what they want. And they can have this outsized impact. And I think that that’s what’s different.
You know, before Citizens United, there was still a lot of money in politics, but because there were limits on how much any single person could give at any time to PACs, there were bundlers, and they were known to people. And they were – kind of the parties had much more influence which had much more consensus.