Breaking Stephen Bannon

Thejust-released book about Donald Trump and his dysfunctional presidency(Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House) has left much ofWashington reeling. Despite the White House’s constitutionally dubiousthreat to try to quash the book, the publication date was moved up fourdays. But the bulk of Fire and Fury’s disclosures, though deeplydisquieting, aren’t all that surprising.It’s not yet clear howMichael Wolff, the book’s controversial author, obtained some of hisinformation, but it must be assumed that he taped many of hisinterviews, particularly those used for the long conversations foundthroughout the book. What Wolff has achieved is to get attributed quotesfrom high officials about how the president functions, or doesn’t. Butthe book mostly tells us what most of political-journalistic Washingtonalready knew: that Trump is unqualified to be president and that hisWhite House is a high-risk area of inexperienced aides. The onlysurprise is that more calamities haven’t occurred – at least not yet.Agood portion of what was released before the book’s publicationconcerns a battle between two of the most talkative, argumentative,self-regarding braggarts US politics has ever seen: Trump and hisone-time chief strategist, Stephen Bannon. In the summer of 2016, withhis campaign lacking a leader, Trump made Bannon – a scruffy, scrappyformer businessman who was then the executive chair of Breitbart News, awebsite preaching white nationalism – the campaign’s chief executive.Bannon was full of big ideas about what a right-wing “populist” campaignwould look like.In many ways, however, Bannon’s ideal campaignclosely resembled what Trump was already saying and doing: appealing toblue-collar workers by attacking immigration – for example, saying thathe’d build “a big, beautiful wall” along the border with Mexico, forwhich the Mexicans would pay – and trade agreements that Trump allegedwere unfair to the US. These voters came to form the core of Trump’sbase, and his success in wooing them, combined with Hillary Clinton’sstunning failure to do so, goes a long way toward explaining why he ispresident and she is not.The problem for Trump is that the citizenshe was wooing have never added up to a near-majority of voters. Hisfamous “base” is well under 40% of the public. But Trump and Bannonapparently preferred not to think about that.Trump is prone totaking out his frustrations on others – he is never to blame for hisfailures – and inevitably these landed on Bannon, who bragged more thanwas good for him about his power in the White House and asserted morethan he should have. Bannon was ousted from the administration and leftin August. Though he and Trump stayed in touch, in retrospect, aneventual falling out seems to have been inevitable.Trump and Bannonwere like two overweight men trying to share a single sleeping bag.Their political world wasn’t big enough for both. They disagreedbitterly over whom to back in the race to fill a Senate seat fromAlabama; but, at Bannon’s urging, Trump ultimately backed the erraticformer state Supreme Court judge Roy Moore, who’d been removed from thebench twice, and who lost the race. Bannon was seeking to shake up theRepublican “establishment” by backing similar “outsider” candidates inthis year’s midterm elections, which, if successful, could make it allthe harder for Trump to obtain victories in Congress. Despite hisdenials, it was Trump who more or less agreed to allow Wolff, whosereputation for slashing his subjects Trump presumably would have knownfrom his years in New York City, to interview the White House staff for abook. Some aides say they believed they were talking to Wolff “off therecord,” meaning that they wouldn’t be publicly associated with theirremarks. But, even if that were true, it was hardly soothing to afurious president: they had said these things.In Trump’s view,Bannon’s great sin with regard to Wolff’s book was to say highlynegative things about the president’s family. Trump was particularlyinfuriated by Bannon’s description of a now-famous meeting that his son,Donald Jr., and other senior campaign staff held in Trump Tower in June2016 with some Russians who said that they had “dirt” on HillaryClinton. Bannon told Wolff that the meeting was “treasonous.” But,depending on what actually transpired in that meeting, Bannon might nothave been so far off. (Trump himself participated in a meeting aboardAir Force One, as he returned from his second presidential trip abroad,to draft a statement to cover up what happened in that Trump Towermeeting.)Trump was also reportedly furious that Bannon had describedthe president’s favourite child, Ivanka, as “dumb as a brick.” Wolffalso reports that Ivanka and her husband, White House senior adviserJared Kushner, had agreed that after their expected smashing success atthe White House, it would be Ivanka who would run for president.Overstatingmatters, as is his wont, Trump claimed, in effect, that Bannon hadnothing to do with his election victory, and that the two had almostnever talked one on one. And, as is his wont, Trump threatened to sueBannon. Trump has a long track record of threatening lawsuits withoutever filing them, but even the threat can be costly to the putativetarget.Yet the momentary obsession with the feuding within the Trumpcamp shouldn’t obscure other realities. Behind the drama, Trump hascertain clear goals, and cabinet and agency heads who share them – andwho don’t get distracted by the publication of a juicy account of thepresident’s behaviour.While much of Washington and its press corpswere discussing the latest revelations, the Department of Justice, whichis supposed to be somewhat independent of the White House, was beingturned into a partisan instrument for pursuing the president’s grudges.Indeed, last week, it was disclosed that the DoJ was reopening aninvestigation into the already thoroughly investigated matter of HillaryClinton’s e-mails. The FBI, it was also disclosed, would be lookinginto the Clinton Foundation. The use of a government agency topunish a president’s previous opponent recalls the behaviour for whichRichard Nixon was impeached, and suggests a very different form ofgovernment than a democratic one. –  Project Syndicate* ElizabethDrew is a contributing editor to The New Republic and the author, mostrecently, of Washington Journal: Reporting Watergate and Richard Nixon’sDownfall.