Much of what we saw from Donald Trump this week merely confirmed what we
already knew. He’s boneheaded. He’s a divider rather than a unifier. If
he’s not an outright racist—and many people would say that he is—he’s
always eager to exploit the racial prejudices that some of his
supporters harbor. And he hates being pressed to distance himself from
confirmed racist goons such as David Duke and Richard Spencer. But there
was also one thing that we did learn this week: if you work for Trump,
it’s not good news when he refers to you as “Mr.”
“Look, look, I like Mr. Bannon,” Trump said during his shameful press
conference at Trump Tower, on Tuesday. “He is a friend of mine. Mr.
Bannon came on very late. You know that. I went through seventeen
senators, governors, and I won all the primaries. Mr. Bannon came on
very much later than that. And I like him. He is a good man. He is not a
racist, I can tell you that. He is a good person. He actually gets a
very unfair press in that regard. We’ll see what happens with Mr.
Bannon. He is a good person, and I think the press treats him, frankly,
very unfairly.”
On Friday at lunchtime, after weeks of speculation, the White House
confirmed that Bannon was out. “White House Chief of Staff John Kelly
and Steve Bannon have mutually agreed today would be Steve’s last day,”
a statement from the press office said. “We are grateful for his service
and wish him the best.” With that, the rumpled controversialist who took
over Trump’s Presidential campaign last August—Trump was right that he
came on late—and subsequently became the chief political strategist in
the White House joined Michael Flynn, Sean Spicer, Reince Priebus, and
Anthony Scaramucci on the list of senior Trump aides to get the
chop.
There may well be more departures to come. Working for Trump is like
entering the haunted house at a fairground: you never know when the
trapdoor below your feet is going to open up. By lasting about a year in
Trumpland, Bannon actually did pretty well. As a self-styled
conservative revolutionary who had long seen his primary mission as
blowing up the donor-dominated Republican Party, he was always going to
be an awkward fit in a Republican White House. And when, during the
first days of the Administration, his mug
appeared on the front of Time magazine next to the headline “The Great
Manipulator,” he breached the first rule of the Trump world: never
overshadow the boss.
Despite that faux pas, Bannon lasted for another six and a half months.
However, he was never quite the Svengali character that the media
portrayed him as. In a White House that quickly divided into rival camps
that battled internally and sniped at each other publicly via leaks to
reporters, he had to contend with mainstream Republicans like Priebus
and Vice-President Mike Pence; Wall Street pragmatists like Gary
Cohn, the head of the National Economic Council; members of the military
and foreign-policy establishment, such as H. R. McMaster, who replaced
Flynn as the national-security adviser; and Trump family members,
particularly Jared Kushner, the President’s son-in-law. It’s been widely
reported that many of these people had been seeking Bannon’s ouster for
months.
For as long as he lasted, Bannon fought his corner and sought to
convert some of Trump’s campaign promises into actual policy
measures. As someone who had long proclaimed that the America of his
childhood was under grave threat from multiculturalism and what he
referred to as “Islamic fascism,” Bannon was perfectly comfortable with
Trump’s strident embrace of nativism and revanchism; indeed, he had
promoted this same approach during his tenure as the chief executive of
Breitbart News. In the early days of the Administration, he worked hard
to get some of Trump’s more incendiary proposals enacted, including his
crackdown on undocumented immigrants and his ban on Muslims entering the
United States.
But to hold Bannon responsible for Trump’s most offensive gestures and
utterances—including the President’s refusal, this week, to distance
himself from white nationalists and neo-Nazis—would be going too far. At
his Trump Tower press conference, Trump said that he hadn’t even talked
to Bannon about what happened in Charlottesville. His equating of
the “Unite the Right” marchers with the counter-protesters; his claim
that there were some “really fine people” on both sides; the comparison
he drew between the Founding Fathers and the leaders of the
Confederacy—these were all Trump’s own handiwork.
Far from being a ventriloquist’s dummy, Trump is a headstrong
lone operator, and he strenuously resists any efforts to constrain or
direct him. For a time, Bannon was useful to him because he had the
instincts of a political brawler and the ability to convert
rabble-rousing rhetoric into something that could be presented to the
gullible as a semi-coherent political philosophy. But now that Bannon
has departed, there is absolutely no reason to suppose that the
President will change his ways. Trump is Trump is Trump. That is how it
has always been. That is how it always will be.
In some areas, particularly foreign policy, the White House may even
have lost a restraining voice. A skeptic of U.S. interventionism, Bannon
opposed the Pentagon’s missile strike on Syria, and he was highly
dubious about the United States confronting North Korea. “There’s no
military solution, forget it,’’ he told Bob
Kuttner, of The American Prospect, a few days ago.
Another area where Bannon’s absence may make a difference is economic
policy. As Cohn and others in the White House steadily watered down
Trump’s aggressive campaign rhetoric on trade, Bannon tried to fight
back, particularly on the need to confront Chinese mercantilism. “To me,
the economic war with China is everything,” he told Kuttner. “And we
have to be maniacally focused on that. If we continue to lose it, we’re
five years away, I think, ten years at the most, of hitting an
inflection point from which we'll never be able to recover.” But pushing
this line inside the White House was a struggle, Bannon
conceded. “That’s a fight I fight every day here,” he said. “We’re still
fighting. There’s Treasury and Gary Cohn and Goldman Sachs lobbying.”
A former Goldman banker himself, Bannon had also recently pushed for
higher marginal tax rates on the rich—as high as forty-four per cent for
those earning more than five million dollars a year. Although such a
policy would probably prove popular among Trump’s core supporters, the
prospect of Cohn and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin incorporating it
into the tax-reform package that they are working on always seemed like
a long shot. Without Bannon there, a populist turn
seems even less likely.
If Trump is hoping that Bannon’s departure will ease the political
pressure on him, he is certain to be disappointed. Three months ago, it
might have had some impact, but today the focus is firmly on the
President himself, and whether he can repair any of the enormous damage
that he has done to himself, and to the country, with his loathsome
response to the tragic events in Charlottesville.
After all is said and done, Bannon was just another political operative,
albeit one with some grand ambitions and extreme views. Trump is the
head of state, and, as Mitt Romney pointed out in a Facebook post on
Friday morning, he owes it to the nation to say sorry for his appalling
behavior. “He should address the American people, acknowledge that he
was wrong, apologize,” Romney wrote. “State forcefully and unequivocally
that racists are 100% to blame for the murder and violence in
Charlottesville. Testify that there is no conceivable comparison or
moral equivalency between the Nazis—who brutally murdered millions of
Jews and who hundreds of thousands of Americans gave their lives to
defeat—and the counter-protestors who were outraged to see fools
parading the Nazi flag, Nazi armband and Nazi salute. And once and for
all, he must definitively repudiate the support of David Duke and his
ilk and call for every American to banish racists and haters from any
and every association.”
A cynic might point out that Romney’s intervention would be even more
laudable if he hadn’t interviewed, twice, for the job of Trump’s
Secretary of State. But that lapse in judgment on Romney’s part doesn’t
detract from the power of his statement on Friday, or from the reality
that Trump’s Presidency is in crisis, his very legitimacy in question.
(I wrote more about this on
Thursday.) Also
on Friday, another body of notables affiliated with the White House, the
President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, disbanded
itself,
saying in a public letter, “Ignoring your hateful rhetoric would have
made us complicit in your words and actions.”
Set beside this ongoing political earthquake, Bannon’s exit seemed
almost like a gossip item. The spin was that it all the work of Kelly,
who took up his post less than three weeks ago. “This was without
question one man’s decision: Kelly. One hundred percent,” an anonymous
senior White House official told the Washington
Post.
For a moment, let us go along with the fiction that Kelly, who is
ultimately another functionary, could force out Bannon without Trump’s
approval. Then the argument could be made (and Trump’s surrogates are
busy making it) that Kelly is steadily purging the most ineffectual and
incendiary elements from the White House, and that things are finally
getting on track. But what, pray, can Kelly do about the real problem:
the character of the man in the Oval Office? Very little.