Working at home today, my Arts Editor has been shouting news throughout the house to me, starting with the announcement of the resignation, or perhaps firing, of Mr. Bannon from the Administration. The New York Times reports on Mr. Bannon’s various clashes, but this is what caught my attention:
Mr. Bannon, whose campaign against “globalists” was a hallmark of his tenure steering the right-wing website Breitbart.com, and Mr. Kushner had been allies throughout the transition process and through the beginning of the administration.
But their alliance ruptured as Mr. Trump elevated the roles of Gary D. Cohn, his top economic policy adviser and a former official at Goldman Sachs, and Dina Powell, a former Bush administration official who also worked on Wall Street. Mr. Cohn is a registered Democrat, and both he and Ms. Powell have been denounced by conservative media outlets as being antithetical to Mr. Trump’s populist message.
So we’re served up the vision of Mr. Bannon, an alleged white supremacist, Leninist, and all around bad guy, losing out to Mr. Kushner, son-in-law to President Trump, whose portfolio is enormous, his competence unproven at best, and he achieved his position through … nepotism. It’s like watching The Joker get his butt kicked by Mr. Freeze, where the winner of the fights gets to work for The Riddler[1]. It’s all fun and games when it’s in the corporate sector, but not when nuclear weapons are involved.
The bigger question, though, is how this is all going to play with the President’s base. Mr. Bannon, as former editor of Breitbart News, was definitely an icon for the far-right, even as he bad-mouthed them:
Of the far right, he said, “These guys are a collection of clowns,” and he called it a “fringe element” of “losers.”
Will his loss result in a hit for the President? Or are they such a small segment that their loss will be immeasurable? Perhaps more interesting will be the ascension of Mr. Cohn. If President Trump is ignoring ideological strictures in favor of his Wall Street idols, it may eventually kill his support among Republicans in general, although the Trumpists won’t hold it against him.
Speaking of, prominent Trump supporter Julius Krein wrote an article of apology for The New York Times Sunday Review:
It is now clear that my optimism was unfounded. I can’t stand by this disgraceful administration any longer, and I would urge anyone who once supported him as I did to stop defending the 45th president.
Far from making America great again, Mr. Trump has betrayed the foundations of our common citizenship. And his actions are jeopardizing any prospect of enacting an agenda that might restore the promise of American life.
So what dragged him down the rabbit-hole?
Although crude and meandering for almost all of the primary campaign, Mr. Trump eschewed strict ideologies and directly addressed themes that the more conventional candidates of both parties preferred to ignore. Rather than recite paeans to American enterprise, he acknowledged that our “information economy” has delivered little wage or productivity growth. He was willing to criticize the bipartisan consensus on trade and pointed out the devastating effects of deindustrialization felt in many communities. He forthrightly addressed the foreign policy failures of both parties, such as the debacles in Iraq and Libya, and rejected the utopian rhetoric of “democracy promotion.” He talked about the issue of widening income inequality — almost unheard of for a Republican candidate — and didn’t pretend that simply cutting taxes or shrinking government would solve the problem.
Sure he did. I remember him stating that he’d cut taxes and drive up military spending during the debates.
He criticized corporations for offshoring jobs, attacked financial-industry executives for avoiding taxes and bemoaned America’s reliance on economic bubbles over the last few decades. He blasted the Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz campaigns for insincerely mouthing focus-grouped platitudes while catering to their largest donors — and he was right. Voters loved that he was willing to buck conventional wisdom and the establishment.
What conventional wisdom? All of these are well-known problems. But here’s what Julius apparently missed – too often, Trump wanted to wind the clock back.
That is emblematic, and it’s diagnostic – diagnostic of Trump’s search for votes, not his innovative solutions. All he offered was a return to a mythical Golden Age, rather than looking ahead at new solutions, new challenges, and how to make it all work. This is where Mr. Krein shows he’s a novice.
But it’s a convenient focus for me to vent. Trump didn’t offer solutions, he just offered a look back at what used to work – but no longer does. From big, big Military to coal to denying climate change to Bannon’s retreat into provincial nationalism. Add in the lies, lies, lies, and Trump was the joke on the stage – and enough Americans bought it.
1All Batman adversaries. Sorry if my reader isn’t a Batman fan. Neither am I.
