the former White House chief strategist made a breathtakingly candid admission in the hours after his exit on Friday.
“The Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over,” Bannon told the Weekly Standard. “We still have a huge movement, and we will make something of this Trump presidency. But that presidency is over. It’ll be something else. And there’ll be all kinds of fights, and there’ll be good days and bad days, but that presidency is over.”
What, exactly, did Bannon mean? Well, he got specific:
- “I just think his ability to get anything done — particularly the bigger things, like the wall, the bigger, broader things that we fought for, it’s just going to be that much harder,” Bannon said of Trump.
- “I think they’re going to try to moderate him,” Bannon said. “I think he’ll sign a clean debt ceiling; I think you’ll see all this stuff. His natural tendency — and I think you saw it this week on Charlottesville — his actual default position is the position of his base, the position that got him elected. I think you’re going to see a lot of constraints on that. I think it’ll be much more conventional.”
The short translation is that Trump’s campaign was a fraud. The ideas that Trump sold and his supporters bought are unlikely to turn into actions, according to Bannon.
It sounds like Bannon, who will return to Breitbart News, will pin the blame on everyone around the president, rather than the man himself. The question is whether the voters who put Trump in the Oval Office will be so charitable.
All the President’s Advisers
Steve Bannon all but dares Trump and Kelly to fire him.
Some conservatives deride Mr. Cohn as a Wall Street Democrat, but he has assembled a first-rate policy team with free-market views. They are crucial to pulling off tax reform in the autumn and to holding off destructive ideas like withdrawing from Nafta.
.. Then there’s the national-security team that is trying to navigate the dangerous world they inherited from Barack Obama. Jim Mattis at Defense, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, CIA Director Mike Pompeo and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley are clear-eyed about the threats posed by Russia, Iran and North Korea. Whatever their policy differences, they know the value of alliances and diplomacy backed by military power.
They’re also reassuring to a world that doesn’t know how to read Mr. Trump’s Twitter outbursts. There’s no evidence they plan to leave, but if they did it would send a political shock that would ignite calls for Mr. Trump’s resignation.
.. Mr. Bannon has a Manichean view of politics, at home and abroad, that is sure to become destructive. “To me,” he told Mr. Kuttner, “the economic war with China is everything.”
.. Most striking is Mr. Bannon’s willingness to undercut Mr. Trump’s policy of pressuring China by saying there’s “no military solution” on North Korea. He said he’d consider a deal in which North Korea freezes its nuclear program with verifiable inspections in return for U.S. withdrawal from the Korean peninsula. But this would be a strategic windfall for China and North Korea, leveraging the nuclear threat to push the U.S. out of East Asia.
.. Mr. Bannon says he didn’t realize his chat with the journalist was on the record, which is hard to believe given his years of media experience. We almost wonder if it’s a dare to Mr. Kelly to fire him.
If Mr. Trump retains Mr. Bannon after such a public declaration of disdain for his colleagues, the President will risk other departures. And if Mr. Trump rejects such a request from Mr. Kelly, the chief of staff will have to wonder whether he can do his job.
- They see a rare moment of united Republican government to move in a better direction on domestic policy.
- Or they want to correct the erosion of American power and influence that accelerated during the Obama years.
Every person has to decide how long he or she can serve in good conscience. But we hope the best stay as long as they can for the good of the country.
Trump Can’t Win the Blame Game
Like any president, he’ll be judged by his results. So far, he’s failed to deliver much.
.. Mr. McConnell said the president had shown “excessive expectations about how quickly things happen in the democratic process.”
This is accurate. Mr. Trump frequently says things like “We are moving very quickly” (referring to health care, on Feb. 27), “We are going to have tax reform at some point very soon” (April 12), and that his administration’s infrastructure plan will “take off like a rocket ship” (June 8).
.. Blaming others may be cathartic for Mr. Trump, but it weakens the presidency and inhibits his agenda... So where are the administration’s focused efforts to use the presidential megaphone to explain the GOP agenda and persuade voters? An early-hours tweet may enthuse true believers, but 140 characters won’t sway most Americans and may even repel them.Where are the speeches explaining the plan to replace ObamaCare and why it would be better? Where are the Oval Office addresses on why tax reform would produce better jobs and bigger paychecks? Where are the choruses echoing the president’s arguments for an infrastructure bill? They are nowhere to be found.
The Trump-McConnell Spat
If the GOP Congress fails, so does the Trump Presidency.
The damage from the GOP’s health-care debacle has only just begun, and the latest evidence is this week’s public spat between President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. The big potential winner here is Democratic leader Chuck Schumer.
.. But Mr. Trump didn’t help the Senate by failing to make a public case for the GOP reforms. Not once did he explain, for example, that paring back ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion for able-bodied adults would protect health care for the truly needy. His failure to master even basic policy details made him useless as a public advocate.
.. a major political risk from the health-care defeat is that Mr. Trump concludes he should start running against the GOP majority.
They might prefer to run in 2020 against Mr. Schumer than with Mr. McConnell.
.. They need each other in particular this autumn to
- raise the debt ceiling,
- press deregulation, and
- pass a budget and
- tax reform.
Failure on that agenda after the health-care fiasco will open the door to a Democratic House—which means nonstop anti-Trump investigations and perhaps impeachment. The best defense against mutual assured political destruction is legislative success in the fall.