The Trumpian Chronicles — week 12 — where Bannon gets thrown under the bus and Trump reneges all his campaign promises
A pessimist-realist’s take on our changing world
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The Trump “presidency” continues to amaze by its amorphous nature, its shifting focuses and thus I’m trying a new version of these chronicles, delaying the analysis of each of the weeks by 1 week, to provide some perspective. My writing on the current French presidential election has also delayed these chronicles.
Let’s dive back into week 12 (April 10–14): that week will be remembered as the one where Trump, lying through his teeth as always, threw his campaign promises and Steve Bannon under the bus.
The major events of week 12:
1- Trump’s interviews are used to renege ALL his campaign promises
2- Steve Bannon appears to be thrown under the bus by the President, who barely acknowledges he was part of the campaign
Let’s unpack both series of events:
1- Trump’s interviews are used to renege ALL his campaign promises: Axios has the most complete summary of #Trump’s blatant flip-flops
my take: Trump thinks he got elected on his personality more than his promises and he may very well be correct in that assumption. The debates pitted 2 visions of the world and the wonky/bureaucrat version Hillary Clinton served voters ended up coming up short. William Easterly masterfully sums it up in Foreign Policy: “Hillary Clinton was the perfect case in point, a politician so technocratic that she even embarrassed other technocrats. Her campaign website listed bullet-point plans to solve 41 different measurable problems, each one containing multiple sub-plans to solve multiple sub-problems.” Trump correctly understood that in the age of the RealityTV Society the US is living in post-9/11, personality trumps experience. Remember 2000 and the famed “who would you have a beer with, W or Gore ?” ? The US is still very much in the same realm of glitter over substance, this is the fatal flaw of the direct election of a hyper-president. Trump is exposing the imbalance of the deviation from the Founding Fathers’ vision in the 20th century. Who remembers any US President of the late 19th century save for Lincoln and Grant ? Congress needs to re-assert its primacy with the power of the purse vis à vis an inefficient and blundering White House.
2- Steve Bannon appears to be thrown under the bus by the President, who barely acknowledges he was part of the campaign
The advantage of writing these chronicles with a minimum of perspective is the ability to decipher the BS served up by a wily Trump entourage. Remember when Steve Bannon was supremely thrown under the bus by Trump who told his paper of record, the NY Post this:
Then Vanity Fair published an account of the Bannon-Kushner “civil war”: “the backstabbing, the bullying, the distrust, and the buzzing flies.”
my take: 2 weeks later-as I write this-the “civil war” that was to undo the White House seems to have disappeared from media accounts. This could mean that: 1-Priebus and co have finally succeeded at clamping down on the “yuge” inside leaks; 2-that this “civil war” is a sideshow for media consumption only. I would come in the middle here and say that Bannon and Kushner are pragmatists who have found or will find a modus vivendi. They are both in the White House to further enrich themselves and their benefactors (Mercers, Trump), not govern at all. The record will show that this billionaire boys club, white dude-first White House never had a plan to govern, “blow up” the administrative state but is just a merry band of plutocrats/kleptocrats who envy how the Russian oligarchs managed to subvert a proud Nation by stealing their resources. When Trump signs an Executive Order allowing drilling in the near Arctic, whose bidding is he doing ? The next weeks and months will tell us, sadly.
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