There are Three Pillars of Political Thought in the white house:
- Economic nationalists: Steve Bannon, Stephenen Miller, Peter Navarro
- Moderate Globalists: Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Gary Cohn, Dina Powell
- Establishment Republicans: Reince Priebus, Sean Spicer
‘He’s not a good influence on the president’
Elliott Abrams sounds off on Steve Bannon, Trump’s about-face on Syria and the boss he almost had.
No one really knew what Trump’s foreign policy was before the Syrian strike, and it’s even less clear now—“unpredictable” is the most anyone’s come up with. “It matters,” Abrams warns when I ask him whether people should care that they don’t know what the president stands for on any given day.
.. there was always a conflict inherent in that line about not getting involved in all of these things on the one hand and ‘Make America Great Again’ on the other, because making America great, to me, is going to require some involvement around the world,” Abrams says.
.. Tillerson, a former oil-company CEO who has failed to impress many in the Washington foreign policy establishment during his first few months on the job
.. Abrams chided Tillerson for insisting that last week’s strikes didn’t represent a change in posture or policy: “It certainly changes our posture in the sense that we’ve now said, ‘We will attack you if you use chemical weapons,’”
.. “It’s not true that having lots of great press coverage makes you an effective secretary of state,” Abrams says. “The mistake is thinking that the converse is not true. That is, that having zero press coverage or good press coverage makes you an effective secretary.”
.. “There’s this sort of view out there he never listens, but he listened to Tillerson,”
.. “You just hope to get everybody through before the August recess.
.. Abrams, a man who’s got both the Iran-Contra affair and the Iraq War on his résumé.
The Post Pours Some Sugar on Gary Cohn
Trump’s economic adviser is faster than a speeding bullet and can leap tall buildings in a single bound, we’re told.
.. Known inside the trade as “beat sweeteners” or “source greasers,” such praiseful articles lavish flattery upon officials in hopes that the subject will come to trust the reporter and return the favor in the future by leaking inside skinny or providing other access.
.. Conservative press critics can’t shut up about liberal media bias, but for my money the enduring bias in the Washington press is for moderation, centrism and bipartisanship. If a politician or policymaker signals a willingness to make deals in Washington—no matter what the deal—the press will treat him like a wise and worldly figure.
.. Wall Street Journal editorial in Friday’s edition pegs Cohn—accurately, I think—as a “pragmatic Wall Street Democrat
.. Cohn’s smartest move has been to position himself inside the Trump administration as the anti-Bannon
.. Cohn has already convinced willing scribes that he’s an effective power broker.
.. struggled with dyslexia
.. If Cohn makes that leap—and given current White House disarray, that’s more than possible—he would make a most excellent source.
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.”