Bannon, basically: Trump’s campaign was a fraud

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.”
  •  But the bigger takeaway here is that Bannon believes Trump will fail.
  • The wall? Probably not going to happen.
  • Sweeping tax cuts? Bannon predicted “they’ll do a very standard Republican version of taxes.”
  • Repealing Obamacare? Please. Bannon called the GOP plan that Trump backed “a half-hearted attempt at Obamacare reform.”

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.

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.

Missing also are the administration’s legislative proposals, such as an actual infrastructure bill. Although the White House website touts a trillion-dollar price tag for Mr. Trump’s program, it devotes just 314 words to outlining its provisions. As a reference point, that is fewer than half the words in this column—not enough for a major piece of legislation.

What is the Trump administration’s greatest accomplishment to date?

  • average monthly job growth in 9 months since Trump’s election: 179K
  • average monthly job growth in 9 months before Trump’s election: 199K

Both Harwood and Drum are correct, and yet this misses the larger point. Before Trump’s November victory, economic experts were petty dire in their predictions of what would happen to the global economy if Trump won.

.. And here we arrive at the biggest dog not to bark in the Trump era. It’s not that economic progress has accelerated — it hasn’t. But there hasn’t been a slowdown either, globally or in the United States. The global economy has not imploded with Trump sitting in the Oval Office. That is a pleasant surprise.

.. If there is anything that pleases Trump supporters, it is pointing out when experts have been wrong. Experts have not been wrong about the garbage fire that is the Trump White House, but they have been wrong about the effect of Oval Office incompetence on the global economy.