Senator Mitch McConnell took a sarcastic shot on Friday at Stephen K. Bannon, telling reporters at an end-of-the-year news conference that Mr. Bannon’s “political genius” had cost the party a Senate seat in Alabama.
.. Complicating their charged relationship is the question of whose side Mr. Trump will take. Mr. McConnell expressed confidence that the president would back the candidates he picks, saying, “I believe the White House will be in the same place I am.”
.. Mr. McConnell still has painful memories of the 2010 and 2012 election cycles, in which Republicans nominated Tea Party candidates who could not appeal to a general election audience.
.. The bad blood between Mr. McConnell and Mr. Bannon is no secret — they have been publicly feuding for months. In November, Mr. Bannon vowed to oust Mr. McConnell as majority leader, saying in an interview, “I have an objective that Mitch McConnell will not be majority leader,” adding that Mr. McConnell “has got to go.”
How conservative media reacted to Roy Moore’s stunning loss
Despite the numerous allegations made by women that Moore had acted inappropriately toward them when they were teenagers, Bannon blazed ahead with his support for the candidate, stumping with him in the campaign’s final days.
“If they can destroy Roy Moore, they can destroy you,” he told a crowd in early December.
.. many prominent conservative voices, including the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, were quick to question Bannon’s importance to the party because of the loss.
On Breitbart, the site that Bannon serves as executive chairman, conservative writer Ann Coulter pushed back on the assertion that he deserved blame for the loss.
“Bannon is the least culpable!” she tweeted
.. Coulter’s piece served more as a broadside against Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) for fighting against one of Moore’s primary challengers, Mo Brooks, a view shared by far-right Fox News host Sean Hannity.
.. She said she believed that the election demonstrated the importance of harsh immigration policies for Republicans.
“Everyone who screwed the pooch on this one better realize fast: All that matters is immigration. It’s all that matters to the country, and it’s all that matters for winning elections,” she wrote.
.. The Daily Caller, a reliably conservative site with a large following, downplayed the election news entirely, with only scant references on its home page. Instead the site focused on negative stories about special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into possible Russian collusion: sound bites of Republican congressmen aggressively questioning Rod J. Rosenstein
.. One story, which later led the website, focused on the “pressure” facing Doug Jones to vote with the GOP, a push started by the Republican National Committee immediately after Moore’s loss.
.. A couple of conservative sites published stories saying the election was tainted by fraudulent voting, claims that were published with scant evidence.
.. “And they, as they do all over the country, had the dead people vote and had the folks bused in in those Democrat areas, and they stole the election,” he said. “So it really is biblical what we’re witnessing, and the dirty tricks of the Clintons and the dirty tricks of their systems in this country reaching down through into daily life. I mean, they come after you when you fight them.”
.. Right-wing site Big League Politics, which was started by former Breitbart employees, ran multiple stories that sowed doubt about the integrity of the vote.
For Trump, a Moment of Defeat but Maybe Not Recalibration
Behind the scenes, some advisers hoped the loss would persuade Mr. Trump to stop listening to Stephen K. Bannon, his former chief strategist who has vowed war against the Republican establishment. But Mr. Trump talked with Mr. Bannon for 15 minutes by phone on Tuesday, aides said, and seemed disinclined to cut the adviser from his circle.
.. For Mr. Obama, the special election forced a strategic re-evaluation. Some aides advised him to trim his ambitions for health care and seek a narrower bill. But Mr. Obama opted to push for his original, more sweeping legislation. Ultimately, he pushed it through without Republican backing, but it never developed bipartisan support and remains a target of efforts to repeal it.
.. “The reason I originally endorsed Luther Strange (and his numbers went up mightily), is that I said Roy Moore will not be able to win the General Election,” he wrote on Twitter on Wednesday morning. “I was right! Roy worked hard but the deck was stacked against him!”
.. For the rest of the day, Mr. Trump solicited the opinion of almost every adviser he encountered, asking what they thought of his tweet or whether he had made a mistake supporting Mr. Moore
..Mr. Trump is a reactive politician who relies on the sights and sounds of his rallies. With fewer such events these days, he is left more reliant on the reconnaissance of others.
.. Mr. Bannon serves as something of a human shield, absorbing criticism that otherwise might be directed at him
.. Mr. Stepien, who worked for Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and was a figure in the bridge-closing scandal, is well liked by most of the White House employees and seen by some as an unfair straw man for larger problems.
Alabama Sends a Message
Alabama evangelical Christians who supported Mr. Moore over appointed Sen. Luther Strange in the GOP primary should know that they have now made a conservative Supreme Court nominee less likely if Justice Anthony Kennedy retires in 2018. Senators Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins will hold the balance of judicial confirmation power, and watch the media lobby them in waves.
.. The Alabama result shows that Mr. Bannon cares less about conservative policy victories than he does personal king-making. He wants to depose Mitch McConnell as Majority Leader even if it costs Republicans Senate control. GOP voters, take note: Mr. Bannon is for losers.