What Has He Done Now? Put Bannon Above All Others

Photograph by Jeremy Liebman
for Bloomberg Businessweek

Steve Bannon, the former Breitbart gunslinger and officially Trump's chief strategist, has been named to a "principal's seat" on the National Security Council, while the Director of National Intelligence and the Chair of the Joint Chiefs have been kicked out of those meetings, except by invitation.

Bannon is calling all the shots. National security is now in the hands of a political operative with no scruples. Reports from the White House are saying that Bannon and his deputy Stephen Miller are behind most of the executive orders (including the one yesterday banning Muslims from certain countries). Bannon and Miller also wrote Trump's inauguration speech, and Bannon is gleefully gas-lighting the national media. Screw the fact-checkers!

This is Bannonland now, where "fact-checking becomes an act of war by the media,” said Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity and the author of “935 Lies: The Future of Truth and the Decline of America’s Moral Integrity,” a book about presidential deception.

Without scruples? Bannon told The Daily Beast last August, "I’m a Leninist ... Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment."

Heck of a job, Stevie Baby!

Another president, George W. Bush, much in thrall to his famous policy advisor, was a smarter man than Trump. George W. decreed that adviser Karl Rove not attend meetings where national security issues were discussed.

"It wasn't because he didn't respect Karl's advice or didn't value his input," Joshua Bolten, Bush's chief of staff, said. "But the president also knew that the signal he wanted to send to the rest of his administration, the signal he wanted to send to the public, and the signal he especially wanted to send to the military is that the decisions I'm making that involve life and death for the people in uniform will not be tainted by any political decisions."

We're going to be in a new war before this year is over, because Steve Bannon thinks fear is the best motivator of the people.