For Trump supporters, this is a battle between the populist nationalist movement on the right, for which Trump is a figurehead, and the more pragmatic, less ideological approach exhibited by Kushner and his allies. The result could determine whether the Trump White House stays, well, Trumpian, or whether it begins to morph into exactly what someone like Steve Bannon hates: a more mainstream Republican administration.
.. “Jared is a liberal Democrat,” the official said, accusing Kushner of trying to limit the role of some in Trump’s orbit—including Bannon, policy aide Stephen Miller, White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, Domestic Policy Council Director Andrew Bremberg, and Vice President Mike Pence—in making policy. Kushner, the official charged, is trying to “slow-walk” executive orders on trade, for example.
.. “Jared just doesn’t think that Trump will be successful with somebody like Bannon in there,” said one source close to the White House. “I know, for instance, that there have been meetings that Bannon would normally be in and he hasn’t been in recently.”
.. Kushner and Ivanka Trump have carefully managed their brand in the media, and Bannon’s hard-edged nationalism threatens their smooth public personae.
.. “I’m sure Jared and Ivanka are very embarrassed by Steve’s politics,” the source with inside knowledge of the White House said. “I know they’re not fashionable in Manhattan but those are the politics that got Trump elected. Clearly Jared wants the president to be a more mainstream political figure.”
.. Breitbart News, the right-wing nationalist outlet formerly run by Bannon, has published a string of stories critical of Kushner in the last few days, accusing him of having a “thin resume in diplomacy” and writing up Stone’s accusations.
.. a dynamic within this White House that has thus far proved unshakeable: You can’t bet against the family. And it speaks to a truth about Washington, which is that the establishment always seems to find a way to reassert itself—even in as unusual an environment as Trump’s White House.
“If the Trump administration becomes a pale copy of the Bush administration,” the source with inside knowledge of the White House said, “then there was no reason for this election.”
In Defense of the Freedom Caucus
It’s wrong for Trump to blame the conservatives.
Yet in this latest episode, the Freedom Caucus was mostly in the right (and it wasn’t just them — members from all corners of the House GOP found it impossible to back the bill). The American Health Care Act was a kludge of a health-care policy.
.. it probably would have further destabilized the individual market, while millions fewer would have been insured.
.. White House sent adviser Steve Bannon to tell obstinate Freedom Caucus members that they “have no choice” but to vote for the bill. It’s hard to imagine a less effective pitch to a group that has long accused Republican leaders of trying to coerce conservatives into falling in line against their principles.
.. for all their reputed rigidity, most of the Freedom Caucus had accepted the inclusion in the Ryan bill of tax credits for people without access to Medicare, Medicaid, or employer-provided insurance — a policy that they had previously tended to oppose.
.. For all of the praise heaped on the president’s negotiating acumen, he has yet to demonstrate it in his dealings with Congress. Trump’s tweet has all the hallmarks of ineffectually blowing off steam, since it’s hard to imagine the president and his supporters following through with the organizing and funding it would take to try to take out conservative members representing deep-red districts.
Steve Bannon Thought He Could Bully The Freedom Caucus. One Member’s Reply Was Awesome.
Steve Bannon, who dealt with the members of the reluctant Freedom Caucus with all the finesse and tact you’d expect.
According to Axios, he walked into the room and said, “Guys, look. This is not a discussion. This is not a debate. You have no choice but to vote for this bill.”
.. “You know, the last time someone ordered me to something, I was 18 years old. And it was my daddy. And I didn’t listen to him, either.”
Whoever this unnamed Congressman is, I wish to hug him or her, because that is the only acceptable response to someone trying to strong arm you into doing something you know is wrong. Bannon’s attempt was foolish, and it only shows his ability to deal with actual human beings leaves much to be desired.
Bannon’s origin story doesn’t add up
that October day when Marty Bannon panicked and took Jim Cramer’s advice from the TV and sold his AT&T stock, was when Steve Bannon had an epiphany: “Everything since then has come from there,” he said.
This could be Sen. Bernie Sanders speaking. This could be the indignant writers of the 2015 movie “The Big Short,” which ended by noting that almost no one went to jail for the giant scam. I also think of New York City cab drivers, many of them immigrants, who leveraged themselves for three generations to buy a cab and now have had their investment gutted by Uber. This is the human cost of disruption, which, if you don’t happen to be poor and drive a cab, is supposedly a wonderful thing.
If his father got fleeced, if “nobody [was] held accountable,” how can the remedy be less regulation? If Wall Street picked his old man’s pocket, why has President Trump appointed tycoon after tycoon who think the fairest tax is none at all and, in some cases, got immensely rich by collapsing companies and squeezing employees?.. But the Trump administration is not for new laws and tighter regulation. It wants to roll back the Dodd-Frank financial reform, which, among other things, created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.. But Bannon’s “administrative state” boogeyman is not what flattened his father’s nest egg. It was not excessive regulation that fleeced his father