“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.
Cisco’s Feud With Former Star Executive Turns Personal—and Costly
Arista Networks’s CEO Jayshree Ullal, who was once close to John Chambers, is grabbing Cisco’s networking business and winning over customers
Mr. Chambers, 67, now Cisco’s executive chairman, is credited with the company’s extraordinary growth phase in the 1990s, largely by buying smaller companies, including Crescendo Communications where Ms. Ullal worked.
Ms. Ullal, who rose to become one of Cisco’s most valuable executives over her 15 years at the company, ran the switching division, which allows companies to shuttle data at high speeds. By the time she left, switching was Cisco’s biggest business, with more than $10 billion in annual revenue, a big reason why Cisco recovered from the dot-com bust.
.. Ms. Ullal, raised in India, was an outspoken engineering and marketing whiz who disliked rigid rules.
Ms. Ullal grew frustrated as Cisco began moving beyond its core switching and routing business into areas such as high-end videoconferencing and consumer electronics, former executives who worked with her said. About a year before she left, Mr. Chambers had created dozens of internal councils and boards, which was at odds with her command-and-control approach.
.. Ms. Ullal urged her employees to avoid attracting Cisco’s attention at first, said a person familiar with her thinking. As the giant in the field, Cisco could have “destroyed us with a stray thought,” this person said.
.. Arista’s technology was faster, more flexible and less expensive than Cisco’s
.. Facebook engineers described Cisco as “behind the curve and on target to become irrelevant” in the data center
.. Other customers started complaining. An email from a customer support engineer in August 2013 to dozens of senior managers, including Mr. Robbins, the future CEO, said Morgan Stanley had lost confidence in one of the switching products “after more than 12 months of ongoing software defects, instability and a lack of needed features.” The bank halted plans to use 400 Cisco switches and said it might turn to Arista.
.. Cisco interviewed dozens of executives to understand the problem. The brutal conclusion in a September 2013 report: Cisco had good ideas and talented employees but a risk-averse culture, indecisive leaders and too big a focus on incremental products.
.. Inside Cisco, a “Beat Arista” document in January 2014 warned that the impending IPO would provide the upstart the cash to strike Cisco’s most profitable product lines. “Time is now to target their top 100 accounts—slow momentum, impact revenue & market share and help drive an unsatisfactory IPO,” one slide said.
.. Arista prevailed over Cisco in a trial late last year over copyright claims and one patent claim in one of the lawsuits.
.. Arista’s share of the overall data-center switching market has grown from nothing in 2010 to over 9% in 2016, while Cisco’s share has fallen from about 80% to about 58%, according to research firm International Data Corp.
Trump attacks on McConnell bring rebukes from fellow Republicans
In demeaning tweets and public statements, Trump blamed McConnell (Ky.), who remains popular among GOP senators, for the party’s inability to muscle through an overhaul of the Affordable Care Act. The president also urged McConnell to “get back to work” on that and other campaign promises, including cutting taxes and spurring new infrastructure spending.
.. Trump associates said the attacks, which began Wednesday night and resumed Thursday, were intended to shore up Trump’s outside-the-Beltway populist credentials and would resonate with core supporters frustrated by a lack of progress in Washington.
.. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.), a Trump adviser, said on Fox News Channel that the president bears some responsibility for the Republican failure on the health-care legislation.
.. Even some Republicans close to the president suggested that the attacks on McConnell would hurt him on Capitol Hill, where relations with GOP leaders have seriously frayed as Trump’s agenda has stalled.
.. “Discerning a particular strategy or goal from these tweets is hard,” said Doug Heye, a former Republican National Committee communications director and a former Capitol Hill staff member. “It just doesn’t help enact any part of his agenda, and it sends a further troubling sign to Capitol Hill Republicans already wary of the White House.”
.. McConnell has been one of the most steadfast supporters of Trump’s agenda in Congress, and, at least publicly, Trump has had a smoother relationship with McConnell than he has with House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and other congressional leaders.
.. In April, McConnell orchestrated the confirmation of Neil M. Gorsuch, Trump’s Supreme Court pick, changing the Senate rules so that Democrats could not block the nomination. The Gorsuch confirmation is Trump’s largest victory on Capitol Hill.
.. Politico first reported that Robert Mercer, a hedge-fund billionaire heavily involved in Trump’s political ascendancy, is making a donation to a group supporting former Arizona state senator Kelli Ward, who is challenging Flake in a Republican primary next year.
.. However, inside the White House, Trump has a collection of advisers who have had antagonistic relationships with McConnell and Senate GOP leaders.
- Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, came from Breitbart, a news organization that regularly antagonized McConnell’s leadership team.
- Stephen Miller, chief policy adviser to Trump, was not considered an ally to the Senate leader’s staff when Miller was a top adviser to Jeff Sessions (Ala.) in the Senate.
- .. Moreover, one of Trump’s top legislative affairs advisers is Paul Teller, who served as Sen. Ted Cruz’s top aide during a period when the Texas Republican accused McConnell of lying about trade legislation.
- And Mick Mulvaney (S.C.), Trump’s budget director, was a constant critic of the Senate during his three terms in the House, regularly opposing fiscal compromise deals that McConnell brokered with the Obama White House.
McMaster and the Commander
Policy brawls are routine in any White House, and Lt. Gen. McMaster can surely handle his corner. The issue for Mr. Kelly—and Mr. Trump—is what to do when disagreement inside the White House turns into vilification of his staff from the outside.