Steve Bannon out at the White House

BREAKING NEWS

SOURCE: STEVE BANNON OUT AS WHITE HOUSE CHIEF STRATEGIST

WHITE HOUSE

Steve Bannon out at the White House, source says

Published August 18, 2017 Fox News

http://a57.foxnews.com/images.foxnew....jpg?ve=1&tl=1In this photo taken April 29, 2017, Steve Bannon, chief White House strategist to President Donald Trump is seen in Harrisburg, Pa. (AP)


Steve Bannon, the chief strategist to President Trump, is expected to leave the White House, a source tells Fox News.

The New York Times also reported Friday that Trump has told aides he's decided to remove Bannon, though it's unclear when that might happen.

The populist Bannon formally joined Trump’s team a year ago, when the former head of Breitbart News was tapped as chief executive of the campaign. After Trump won the presidential race, Bannon was appointed to a senior adviser role at the same time Reince Priebus was named chief of staff.

The Drudge Report first reported Bannon’s exit, saying he could return to Breitbart. The New York Times then reported Trump has decided to boot Bannon.

Bannon had become increasingly isolated inside the White House following the ascension of John Kelly as chief of staff, sources inside the White House and outside advisers recently told Fox News.

Earlier this week, he gave a candid interview to a liberal magazine where he slammed some of his adversaries inside the administration.

Bannon has long been a target of mainstream Republican ire – and until now had survived even as top Trump lieutenants like Sean Spicer and Priebus have resigned.

Trump briefly addressed the speculation about Bannon's future during a wide-ranging Q&A with reporters at Trump Tower on Tuesday afternoon.

“I like Mr. Bannon, he’s a friend of mine,” Trump said, while downplaying his impact in the 2016 campaign. “I like him. He’s a good man. He’s not a racist … but we’ll see what happens with Mr. Bannon.”

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017...urce-says.html

Bannon calls far right 'clowns,' says enemies are 'wetting themselves

Chief Strategist Steve Bannon Out at White House: ‘Get Ready for Bannon the Barbarian’

16

http://media.breitbart.com/media/201...38-640x480.jpgNICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images

by Adam Shaw Aug 18, 2017


White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon — the former Breitbart News executive chairman who helped guide then-candidate Donald Trump’s flagging presidential campaign to a historic victory — is on his way out of the White House, with a source close to Bannon telling Axios: “Get ready for Bannon the barbarian.”

Axios first reported that Bannon, who was brought on to the campaign in August to replace Paul Manafort as campaign chairman, was expected to depart from the White House imminently.


Soon after, the Drudge Report issued a siren on the site’s front page, declaring: “Bannon Out at White House” adding that he was “moving on after an impressive run.”


Meanwhile, the New York Times also reported that President Trump had decided to remove Bannon, but Trump and senior White House officials were debating “when and how to dismiss” Bannon.


The Times reported that a person close to Bannon insisted that a departure was Bannon’s idea and that a resignation had been submitted on August 7 — but the protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, had delayed his departure.


The White House later partly confirmed the reports: “White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and Steve Bannon have mutually agreed today would be Steve’s last day. We are grateful for his service and wish him the best,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement. No further details were immediately available.

Bannon was widely reported to have feuded with a number of the globalists White House officials within Trump’s administration, as he sought to get Trump to stick to the campaign promises that had helped carry him to his win in November.


The Times reported that Bannon had clashed with members of Trump’s family. Axios reported that Bannon was suspected of leaking about colleagues and that Trump “resents the publicity Bannon has been getting as mastermind of the campaign.”


However, while it was unclear what Bannon’s next move would be, a source close to Bannon told Axios: “Get ready for Bannon the barbarian.”



http://www.breitbart.com/big-governm...the-barbarian/

A Reminder:

MAY 3, 2017, 2:31 P.M.

Here are Steve Bannon's white-board goals, transcribed and annotated

Colleen Shalby

When Rabbi Shmuley Boteach tweeted images from the White House Tuesday, he gave the world a behind-the-scenes glimpse at what appears to be Steve Bannon's to-do list.


Displayed on a large white board in a room believed to be Bannon's office — though the White House has not confirmed that — are outlines on immigration, national defense, Obamacare, tax reform and infrastructure with no less than 38 items. Several under the heading "Pledges on immigration" include a checkmark. Whether that symbolizes that a task was completed, remains in progress or something else is unclear.


Nothing mentioned on the white board reveals anything the White House hasn't already discussed, so this likely isn't the same situation as November, when a photo of Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach accidentally revealed the deportation planshe shared with Trump.


Nonetheless, it's worth taking a gander. Below is a list of the most interesting points that we could decipher. Many of them speak for themselves, as they've been ongoing topics of conversation. We've added annotations to some.



Pledges on Immigration

• Cancel all federal funding to sanctuary cities
• Suspend immigration from terror-prone regions ✔️
  This proposal has been blocked by a federal court.
• Implement new extreme immigration vetting techniques
• Suspend Syrian Refugee Program ✔️
  This proposal has also been blocked by a federal court.
• Create support program for victims of illegal immigrants
• Expand and revitilize the popular 287g partners
  The 287g program allows state and local governments to enter a partnership with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
• Issue detainers for all illegal immigrants who are … for any crime and they will be placed into ...removal proceedings ✔️
• End “catch-and-release” ✔️
• Hire 5,000 more Border Patrol agents ✔️
  The Trump administration has asked Congress to provide extra money for the hiring of 5,000 Border Patrol agents, but the amount they'll actually be able to hire this year remains uncertain.
• Restore the Secure Communities Program ✔️
  Donald Trump signed an executive order in January that restored this George W. Bush-era deportation program.
• Triple the number of ICE agents ✔️
• Build the border wall and eventually make Mexico ...
  If we were to fill in the blank, we'd guess "pay for it."
• Sunset our visa laws so that Congress is forced to periodically revise and revisit them
• Finally complete biometric entry-exit tracking
  The plan to track the departure of foreign visitors was first introduced in 1996, but no administration has successfully implemented it.
• Propose passage of Davis-Oliver bill
  The immigration bill, proposed by then Sen. Jeff Sessions in 2015, is named for two California police officers who were killed by an immigrant living in the U.S. illegally.
• ...pass “Kate’s Law”
  "Kate's Law," also known as the Establishing Mandatory Minimums for Illegal Reentry Act of 2015, was proposed following the death of Kate Steinle, who was shot and killed in San Francisco by a Mexican immigrant living in the U.S. illegally.

Pledges on Obamacare

• Repeal and Replace Obamacare

Pledges on Tax Reform

• Create a 10% repatriation tax
  A possible clue into what Trump's tax reform plan entails.

The biggest takeaway here is that whoever wrote these items has clear penmanship.



http://www.latimes.com/politics/wash...htmlstory.html

Ann Coulter
@AnnCoulter·1h


To prove that he didn't get all the good stuff from Bannon, @realDonaldTrump better start the wall pronto!


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Ann Coulter
@AnnCoulter·1h


.@realDonaldTrump needs to hire @CLewandowski_ immediately, so there's SOMEONE in the White House who isn't from Goldman Sachs.


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Ann Coulter
@AnnCoulter·1h


If @realDonaldTrump didn't like the media giving Steve Bannon all credit, instead of firing him, he should've hired 10 more like him.



https://mobile.twitter.com/AnnCoulte...Ctwgr%5Eauthor

Stephen Bannon resigned as White House Chief Strategist two weeks ago, ABC News confirms

http://cdn.abclocal.go.com/content/k...87_800x450.jpg

Updated 15 mins ago

Steve Bannon has resigned from his role as White House chief strategist, ABC News has learned.

A source close to Bannon told ABC News the resignation was effective on Aug. 14, exactly one year after he joined the Trump campaign. Trump had grown increasingly frustrated with Bannon, according to one senior White House official.

Bannon has clashed with virtually every top official in the White House. Atop his list of in-house detractors are senior adviser Jared Kushner, national security adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster and the new chief of staff, Gen. John Kelly.

RELATED: Notable firings and resignations under the Trump administration

One of McMaster's first moves was to remove Bannon from his seat at the National Security Council, a move that angered Bannon. And his appointment as the council's chief political strategist was hugely controversial when it was first announced via executive order at the start of the administration.

Over the weekend, McMaster refused to say whether he would continue to work with Bannon.

The former executive chairman of Breitbart News joined the Trump campaign last August. He would become known as a fearless and critically influential adviser to the president.

On Tuesday, the president told reporters at Trump Tower that Bannon was a "good man" and "not a racist."

"I like Mr. Bannon. He's a friend of mine. But Mr. Bannon came on very late. You know that. I went through 17 senators, governors, and I won all the primaries. Mr. Bannon came on very much later than that," Trump said before adding, "but we'll see what happens with Mr. Bannon."

Bannon is the latest high-profile aide to leave the White House. On July 21, press secretary Sean Spicer resigned, followed by Chief of Staff Reince Priebus. White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci was fired a few days later, serving just 11 days in that role.

This is a breaking news story. Please check back for updates.

http://abc30.com/politics/stephen-ba...firms/2322097/

Mark Krikorian Retweeted



Gabriel Sherman
@gabrielsherman·1h


Bannon friend says Breitbart ramping up for war against Trump. "It's now a Democrat White House," source says.




Mark Krikorian
@MarkSKrikorian·40m


(On DACA)


Without Bannon, let's see if the liberal Democrats running the White House decide to defend DACA's legality in court (link: http://go.shr.lc/2uYGF6u) go.shr.lc/2uYGF6u



https://mobile.twitter.com/MarkSKrikorian

Laura Ingraham
@IngrahamAngle·2m





YOU GIVE AN INCH: Clearly @NancyPelosi is ready to work with @realDonaldTrump post-Bannon firing.
Fox News
@FoxNews

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DHiB_g-X...g&name=240x240






.@NancyPelosi Statement on Firing of Steve Bannon

With Steve Bannon Gone, Donald Trump Risks Being Arnold Schwarzenegger 2.0


Joel Pollack

August 18, 2017

President Donald Trump’s decision to part ways with Steve Bannon can be understood as an effort to save his presidency after Charlottesville. It may turn out to be the beginning of the end for the Trump administration, the moment Donald Trump became Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Like Trump, Schwarzenegger ran for high office as a celebrity outsider, promising to reform a corrupt, wasteful and lethargic political system, reaching across party lines.


When he took office in 2003 as Governor of California, “The Terminator” carried the hopes of conservatives in the Golden State, who saw him as a vehicle for their ideas, even if he was not a doctrinaire conservative himself. The faltering California Republican Party looked to Schwarzenegger to reverse its long-term decline, and Republicans elsewhere saw his success as a model from which they could learn as they courted moderate, swing-state voters.


But after struggling with intense media criticism, and after losing a key referendum on reforms to state government, Schwarzenegger gave up on his agenda, and abandoned the political base that had brought him into office. He re-invented himself as a liberal, embracing policies such as California’s controversial cap-and-trade program, which had zero effect on climate change but has chased businesses, jobs, and middle-class families out of the state.


Politically, Schwarzenegger’s gambit was a success. He won re-election in 2006. But his second term was a disaster. When he left office in 2010, the state was in a financial shambles and the California Republican Party had begun a decline from which it still has not recovered.


Bannon was not just Trump’s master strategist, the man who turned a failing campaign around in August 2016 and led one of the most remarkable come-from-behind victories in political history. He was also the conservative spine of the administration. His infamous whiteboard in the West Wing listed the promises Trump had made to the voters, and he was determined to check as many of them off as possible. Steve Bannon personified the Trump agenda.




With Bannon gone, there is no guarantee that Trump will stick to the plan. That is why — too late, in retrospect — conservative leaders wrote to the president Friday to advise him that Bannon and campaign manager-turned-counselor Kellyanne Conway were too valuable to lose. Bannon had delivered for the movement, reportedly convincing President Trump to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accords, and to visit Israel on his first trip abroad.


Bannon was also probably the only person who could deliver honest advice and criticism to the president, because he did not need the job. He is a self-made man, and not a Washington climber. Thus it was that Bannon reportedly told Trump that firing former FBI director James Comey would be more trouble than it was worth. He was right.


Trump voters have been patient, but they will soon know if Donald Trump is really Arnold Schwarzenegger 2.0.


http://www.breitbart.com/big-governm...rzenegger-2-0/

Whiteboard article mentioned:

http://www.breitbart.com/big-governm...omises-voters/

Related:


‘Killing Machine’: Bannon May Return to Breitbart As Outlet Plots ‘Thermonuclear’ War Against Trump ‘Globalists’


https://www.alipac.us/f9/killing-mac...92-war-349799/

Steve Bannon out at White House

Posted By Garth Kant On 08/18/2017


WASHINGTON — It’s official: Stephen Bannon is leaving the White House.


The exit of President Trump’s top adviser has been long rumored but it became a reality Friday when the White House press secretary issued this statement:


“White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and Steve Bannon have mutually agreed today would be Steve’s last day. We are grateful for his service and wish him the best.”


It was not clear whether Bannon resigned or was fired.
But he remained defiant and optimistic, telling WND earlier this week, “I have not yet begun to fight.”


A source told the New York Times the departure was Bannon’s idea and that he actually resigned on Aug. 7. The resignation was to be announced at the start of this week, but was reportedly delayed because of the raging controversy over Charlottesville.


However, CNN claimed a White House source said Bannon was fired, and was forced out after he refused to resign.


That source said Trump was going to fire Bannon two weeks ago but had second thoughts about firing him and former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus at the same time.
The source also claimed that Trump was persuaded to keep Bannon by the influential chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., and other conservatives.


But Meadows reportedly dropped his opposition to dumping Bannon after he gave a freewheeling interview to a left-leaning reporter earlier this week that flatly contradicted some of the president’s positions, such as the viability of a military option against North Korea, which his top adviser ridiculed.


On Friday, Matt Drudge, the founder of the influential website the Drudge Report, said Bannon “had one hell of a run.”


Drudge also speculated that Bannon might return to Breitbart News, which he ran as executive chair before joining the Trump presidential campaign.


Political observers considered Bannon instrumental in forming the anti-illegal immigration and anti-globalization strategies that helped elect the president.


Trump was said to chafe at that notion, because those were positions he held long before Bannon joined the 2016 election campaign.


But the president also recognized Bannon’s unique value to his success by creating the position of White House chief strategist especially for him, and making the man who had been his top campaign adviser his top presidential adviser.


Bannon, however, encountered significant opposition within the White House in his new role. He was often reported to have bitterly feuded behind the scenes with presidential advisers who did not share his policy goals.
The president’s top adviser is considered to represent the views of the GOP base voters who elected Trump, so jettisoning him has been seen as politically risky for the president.


But Bannon apparently became increasingly isolated in the White House as conservatives such as former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn were replaced by moderates such as his successor, H.R. McMaster.


Bannon has long been accused of racism and white nationalism by leftist critics who have provided no evidence that he has ever actually expressed or supported such views, merely citing the strong anti-illegal immigration stance of the former chief of Breitbart News.


House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., seemed to think Trump fired Bannon to deflect the intense criticism the president has received after accurately claiming, as demonstrated in video footage, that both far-right and far-left groups were responsible for violence that turned deadly last weekend in Charlottesville.


Pelosi tweeted: “Steve Bannon’s exit does not erase @realDonaldTrump’s long record of lifting up racist viewpoints & advancing repulsive policies.”


However, Pelosi has been finding racism in unlikely places, issuing a confused call for the National Park Service to revoke a permit for what she called a “white supremacist rally” set for late August in San Francisco.
It’s actually a prayer rally.


Joey Gibson, the organizer of the “Patriot Prayer” rally, pointed out that not only is it not a white supremacist rally, he himself is not white.


“We have about eight speakers and only one speaker is white. We have a couple black speakers, a hispanic (speaker), we have a transexual speaker, we have a woman speaker, it’s very diverse,” Gibson told a San Francisco paper.


“It’s frustrating because right now we have these politicians who believe it is OK to lie, you know we let them get away with it. She’s going to make such a ridiculous lie, like even the fact that I’m brown, she’s going to say that I’m a white supremacist,” he added.


“You know what she’s doing,” Gibson continued, “she’s making it more dangerous for San Francisco. She’s trying to rile up her citizens so that they come down there and try to chase us out. She’s using that rhetoric. It’s just going to cause more violence and put more people in danger.”


Developing story ~

http://www.wnd.com/2017/08/steve-ban...white-house-2/

Steve Bannon Out At White House…

Posted on August 18, 2017 by sundance


This was not unanticipated. Those who have read CTH in the past two months will have noted the writing was clearly on the wall. Especially in the aftermath of the American Prospect article and the downstream consequence that Secretary of State Tillerson and Secretary of Defense Mattis were fielding questions from media about why Bannon was undermining them -and President Trump- on national security policy via North Korea.


In the American Prospect article Steve Bannon also undermined U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson directly, and was far out of line with this:

“I’m changing out people at East Asian Defense; I’m getting hawks in. I’m getting Susan Thornton [acting head of East Asian and Pacific Affairs] out at State.” ~ Steve Bannon

This type of statement was so over-the-top arrogant, and exhibits a ridiculous level of power-lust and expressed self-importance, I asked the question: ” Who exactly is Steve Bannon to think that he can marginalize the cabinet? And against the division narrative within the White House why the heck would he push that opinion publicly? Is he trying to push the envelope and get fired?“.


Well, the White House Press Office has confirmed that political strategist Steve Bannon is no longer working at the White House.


https://theconservativetreehouse.fil...pg?w=640&h=427



On timing, it makes sense Mr. Bannon would exit today given the full national security meeting in Camp David attendance by: President Trump, VP Pence, General John Kelly, HR McMaster, Secretary Tillerson, Secretary Mattis, Secretary Mnuchin, ODNI Dan Coats, CIA Director Pompeo, AG Jeff Sessions, Ambassador Haley, Joint Chief Chairman General Dunford, etc.


Can you imagine the awkwardness of Steve Bannon being in the room, amid the administration team, given the nature of his public outline? No way.

(Via Reuters) A source close to Bannon said he was not expected to resign on his own. “Bannon is going to make them fire him,” the source said. “He’s not going to officially resign. He’s still been doing the work. He’s been working on projects.”


The New York Times, however, cited a person close to Bannon as saying he had submitted his resignation on Aug. 7 and that it was to be announced this week, but had been delayed by the fallout from a rally by white nationalists in Virginia over the weekend.

Bannon damaged his standing by giving an interview to the liberal American Prospect this week in which he was seen to be undercutting Trump’s position on North Korea.


Bannon told associates he thought he was talking to an academic and thought he was off the record. He has told friends he could go back to Breitbart News outlet if he were to leave the White House. (link)

Both Steve Bannon, and Kellyanne Conway came into the Donald Trump campaign as an outcome of billionaire Robert Mercer and his politically active daughter, Rebekkah Mercer, switching support from Senator Ted Cruz to Donald Trump after the GOP Primary. Bannon and Conway joined team MAGA mid-August for the final two months of the 2016 campaign.


https://theconservativetreehouse.fil...nway.jpg?w=640



Most of the predictable angst toward President Trump for Bannon’s release will most likely come from Breitbart and Bannon allies within the “conservative” sphere of Ted Cruz media and associated support groups.
In the final analysis, Steve Bannon was staff, always staff; simply staff.


Political Strategist Bannon did not create any of President Trump’s policies or platform issues. The political policy from President Trump is directly from President Trump.


As I said before:

President Trump is the wave, the Tsunami wave. Steve Bannon is the surfer…. you already know how this story ends.

https://theconservativetreehouse.com...t-white-house/

Pence Spearheading Coup to Remove POTUS Trump

I don't know Steve Bannon and can't speak for his character or issue positions. But if Trump pushed Bannon out over pressure from the socialist press over Charlottesville where the Dems caused violence by ordering police to mix the protesters together... if that's what happened Trump is completely lost and can never win these battles against the left.

W

Just Announced: Steve Bannon is back to head Breitbart. Chaired the evening meeting.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ALIPAC

I don't know Steve Bannon and can't speak for his character or issue positions. But if Trump pushed Bannon out over pressure from the socialist press over Charlottesville where the Dems caused violence by ordering police to mix the protesters together... if that's what happened Trump is completely lost and can never win these battles against the left.

W

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Reading Steve Bannon's whiteboard gave us great insight into his thinking. His list generally aligns with Alipac on illegal immigration. He is one of the only conservative Republicans that had the President's ear. Trump is surrounded by elite liberal globalists. He is surrounded by open border thinking.


General Kelly is not on our side on certain issues. DACA for one. The fight is on to remove Stephen Miller and Sebastian Gorka.

'Populist Hero’ Stephen K. Bannon Returns Home to Breitbart

https://www.alipac.us/f9/populist-hero%92-stephen-k-bannon-returns-home-breitbart-349805/

Question being asked by some - Would most of those in the Trump White House be uncomfortable in a Hillary Clinton Whitehouse?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by GeorgiaPeach

Question being asked by some - Would most of those in the Trump White House be uncomfortable in a Hillary Clinton Whitehouse?

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My answer: Probably not.

August 18, 2017 3:24PM EDT

US: Bannon’s Exit Opens Door for Policy Reversals

Reduce Toxic Impact of White Nationalist Politics


(Washington, DC) – The Trump administration should use the announced departure of Stephen Bannon as chief White House strategist to quickly distance its civil rights and immigration policies from white nationalist politics, Human Rights Watch said today. The White House announced that Chief of Staff John Kelly and Bannon have “mutually agreed” that August 18, 2017 will be Bannon’s last day.


https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/fi...?itok=b6vJlsTk
EXPAND
White House Senior Advisor Steve Bannon attends a roundtable discussion held by U.S. President Donald Trump with auto industry leaders at the American Center for Mobility in Ypsilanti Township, Michigan, March 15, 2017.

© 2017 Reuters“Steve Bannon’s departure from the White House could reduce the toxic influence of white nationalist politics in the White House, but only if coupled by a real shift in administration policies on civil rights and immigration,” said Jasmine L. Tyler, US Program advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. “But President Donald Trump himself needs to shift his rhetoric and commit his administration to protecting the human rights of everyone in the United States, across the racial spectrum, if he hopes to regain credibility and distance himself from the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who have embraced him.”

Human Rights Watch opposed Bannon’s appointment because of his longstanding affinity for the white nationalist movement and has repeatedly called for his removal.

Going forward, the Trump administration needs to uphold the fundamental values of equality and nondiscrimination, Human Rights Watch said. The Trump administration should reverse its decision to eviscerate the mandates and budgets of US civil rights institutions; end its attempt to exclude white nationalism from the federal government’s Countering Violent Extremism programs; and end immigration and refugee policies based on anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant sentiment.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/08/18/...licy-reversals


The author of this article obviously feels the firing of Steve Bannon could bode well for illegal immigrants and immigrants from terrotrist countries.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by MW

The author of this article obviously feels the firing of Steve Bannon could bode well for illegal immigrants and immigrants from terrotrist countries.

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Yes, they seem to imply that. We will see.

Carl Icahn Steps Down as Adviser to President Trump

I am very interested to hear what Steve Bannon has to say once he is clear from his obligations to the Trump administration.

https://twitter.com/ALIPAC/status/898712866978758656


William Gheen‏ @ALIPAC 49s49 seconds ago




I am very interested to hear what @SteveKBannon has to say once he is back at @BreitbartNews clear from his obligations to @realDonaldTrump




W

Related:

Bannon: 'The Trump Presidency That We Fought For, and Won, Is Over'

https://www.alipac.us/f9/bannon-trum...n-over-349814/

Charlie Spiering
@charliespiering·6h


Senior Republican advisors left in the White House - @KellyannePolls and Stephen Miller

Excerpt:

Quote:

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With Trump’s presidency floundering and his legislative agenda in shambles, administration officials said his empowered new chief of staff, John F. Kelly, moved to fire Bannon in an effort to tame warring factions and bring stability to a White House at risk of caving under its self-destructive tendencies.

A combative populist on trade and immigration, Bannon was arguably Trump’s ideological id on the issues that propelled his candidacy. He served as a key liaison to the president’s conservative base and the custodian of his campaign promises.

---

https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...496_story.html

Secretary Kelly really wasn't our friend as Secretary of DHS and it looks like that has carried over to his new position as Chief of Staff.

Yep, I still remember Kelly saying he was the best friend DACA has. He also kept harping at congress to pass legislation to protect those enrolled in the program.

https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5...eve-Bannon.jpg
With most of his policy proposals blocked, Steve Bannon’s legacy will likely be one of xenophobia and hostility to nonwhites.

Photograph by Mandel Ngan / AFP / Getty


In March, I went to the White House to visit Steve Bannon, who today was fired by President Trump. After Bannon showed off his office and his famous whiteboard, we sat down at a wooden conference table in the large corner office of Reince Priebus, who was then the White House chief of staff. Moments earlier, Priebus had left the building, and Bannon seemed to use the chief of staff’s office as if it were his own, roaming around while he talked, and flinging a Coke can in Priebus’s trash bin, as if he were marking territory. Despite the show of confidence, Bannon felt like he was beset by enemies.

Since the day after the election, Bannon had been fighting against forces that he believed were trying to roll back the promises of the Trump campaign. The whiteboard was so important to Bannon because it represented the policy ideas that he had been instrumental in foisting on Trump. And Bannon wanted everyone who came into the West Wing to know precisely what Trump was elected to enact: a Muslim ban, a border wall, a protectionist trade agenda (especially with China), and a more isolationist foreign policy. Bannon was obsessed with defeating the elements in the White House who hadn’t worked on the campaign and didn’t understand those policies.

“Did you see the lead story in today’s Financial Times?” Bannon asked me. He summoned an aide to retrieve it and threw the pink broadsheet, the paper of record for what he calls the global élite, on the table.

“The lead story is ‘explosion of civil war in White House, fiery debate in Oval Office,’ ” Bannon said. The story was one of many then detailing the internal combat between Gary Cohn, Trump’s top economic adviser, and Bannon. What was somewhat unusual was that Bannon was bragging about it. In previous White Houses, officials downplayed this sort of internal combat, insisting that everyone was united around the President’s agenda. But in the Trump White House there is no Trump agenda. There is a mercurial, highly emotional narcissist with no policy expertise who set up—or allowed his senior staffers to set up—competing ideological fiefdoms that fight semi-public wars to define the soul of Trumpism.

The March meeting in the Oval Office was a pivotal battle between the two main factions: what the Financial Times called the “economic nationalists close to Donald Trump” and the “pro-trade moderates from Wall Street.” Bannon had spent every hour since Election Day fighting to preserve the Trump of the campaign—raw, populist, unapologetically nativist, anti-corporate. And Bannon, at least back in March, before he ran afoul of Jared Kushner and Trump and was almost booted out of the White House, seemed to be succeeding. At Bannon’s direction, Trump hung a painting of Andrew Jackson, a hero to the nationalists, in the Oval Office. Bannon installed himself on the National Security Council as principal, putting himself on par with the Secretaries of Defense and State. The President issued a series of decrees from Bannon’s punch list: the travel ban on majority-Muslim countries, a budget with vast new funding for a border wall and ice agents, withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Everything seemed to be going according to plan.

In January, 2013, Bannon, Stephen Miller, and Jeff Sessions had dinner in Washington to talk about the 2016 Presidential campaign. Barack Obama had just won reëlection, and the reigning explanation for his victory was that an unstoppable demographic surge of nonwhite voters had given Democrats a lock on the Electoral College. Most political strategists argued that the Republican Party was doomed unless it could crack the Hispanic vote, and that the only way to do that was for the G.O.P. to embrace comprehensive immigration reform that included a pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants living in America—amnesty. The three men plotted a way to stop the coming push for immigration reform.

That same month, there was another dinner happening in New York. Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes met with Senators Marco Rubio and Chuck Schumer, who pleaded with the Fox News leaders to soften the network’s coverage of the immigration debate, and Fox eventually did that. The four men plotted a way to help Republicans pass immigration reform.

Bannon’s path to nationalism is famously circuitous. He grew up near Richmond, Virginia, in a big Irish Catholic family of Kennedy Democrats. Although he came of age in the late sixties, his high school, a religious military academy where he was taught by monks, kept him away from the mass protests happening in nearby Washington. He went to college at Virginia Tech, where he became the student-government president after attacking his opponent for offering only “Platitudes, Promises and Slogans.” Bannon says it was during the first years of an eight-year stint in the Navy, from 1977 to 1985, that he became reliably conservative, because of the way Jimmy Carter dealt with the Iran hostage crisis. A military-history buff, he took night classes at Georgetown and earned a master’s degree in national-security studies, in 1983, and then a degree from Harvard Business School, in 1985. In the nineties, he was deeply entrenched in New York finance, as a Goldman Sachs mergers-and-acquisitions executive, and then in Hollywood, as a somewhat marginal producer who tried, and failed, to move from the deal-making side of the business to the creative side.

In 2008, at the dawn of the Tea Party, Bannon was in Shanghai working on one of his numerous side projects, creating a virtual market inside the popular online game World of Warcraft. He persuaded Goldman to invest sixty million dollars in the effort, but it tanked, and Bannon was looking for his next reinvention. “I came back right before the 2008 election and saw this phenomenon called Sarah Palin,” he told me last year. The neo-populist movement that Trump eventually rode to victory was being born in the waning days of that campaign. Bannon thought that Republicans, who had become the party of tax cuts and free-market libertarian philosophy, exemplified by people like Paul Ryan, didn’t yet have the right vocabulary to speak to its own base. “The Republicans would not talk about anything related to reality,” he told me. “There was all this ****ing Austrian school of economic theory.”

Bannon started making what are essentially crude propaganda films about people and issues on the new populist right, including ones about Palin, Ronald Reagan, Michele Bachmann, Phyllis Schlafly, and the Tea Party. He became a fixture on the conservative-conference circuit and befriended Andrew Breitbart, a former blogger and then a new-media entrepreneur who was the hidden talent behind the success of both the Drudge Report and the Huffington Post. Bannon helped Breitbart raise money for Breitbart News Network, including a ten-million-dollar investment from the Mercer family, which during this period emerged as a crucial patron for the populist right. When Breitbart died, in March, 2012, Bannon took over editorial control as well. Traffic exploded, from eleven million page views per month to two hundred million. “Frankly that’s why, when Breitbart puts its ****ing gun sights on you, your life changes,” Bannon bragged to me once.

His main target became the Republican establishment. After Obama’s reëlection, when the G.O.P. started to organize itself around immigration reform, Bannon was desperate to find someone who could become the face of the populist resistance. He was hoping it would be Sessions. Meanwhile, Sessions and Miller, his top aide, were desperate to find a conservative media platform that would help them oppose immigration reform. They were all running out of time. The Republican National Committee itself, then led by Priebus, was about to release a formal report calling on the Party to adopt comprehensive immigration reform.

The Sessions-Bannon-Miller dinner in Washington in early 2013 lasted five hours. Bannon tried to convince Sessions to run for President in 2016. “You’re not going to win the Presidency, and you’re not going to win the Republican primary,” Bannon recalled telling him. “But we are going to be able to get these ideas into the mainstream. Trade is the No. 100 issue right now. We’ll make immigration the No. 1 issue, and we’ll make trade the No. 2 issue.” Sessions told Bannon and Miller that he didn’t want to run.

In the following months, during the debate over immigration, Breitbart became a crucial platform for anti-reform efforts, and Miller fed the site a steady stream of leaks from the Senate. It was also when the site started to attract white nationalists who saw restrictionist immigration policies as a weapon to keep nonwhites out of America. The site used a tag called “black crime” for some stories and brought in Milo Yiannopoulos, who wrote an infamous essay celebrating the alt-right, for which Bannon later bragged Breitbart had become “the platform.”

Miller and Bannon teamed up again, in 2014, when Eric Cantor, then the second-highest-ranking Republican in the House, faced an unexpectedly strong primary challenge from David Brat, a politically conservative Virginia professor. The immigration bill had passed the Senate, and Cantor was considered a champion of the legislation in the House. It was the last chance to stop it. Miller worked as an adviser to Brat in his spare time, offering him attack lines against Cantor. Miller’s favorite quote was a comment that Cantor had made about children who had been brought to the United States. “One of the great founding principles of our country was that children would not be punished for the mistakes of their parents,” Cantor had said. Brat turned the comment into a cudgel about Cantor’s weakness on immigration, and Breitbart highlighted the quote in stories. Cantor thought that he was on safe ground highlighting one of the most popular aspects of immigration reform. Brat won, and immigration reform in Congress was now dead.

Now Bannon and Miller just needed to find a Presidential candidate for 2016. After Sessions declined to run, they backed Trump.

In one of his first acts as President, Trump hung a famous portrait of Andrew Jackson, elected in 1828, on the wall behind the desk in the Oval Office. Jackson, the seventh President and a Tennessean, was the first who hadn’t been born in Virginia or Massachusetts. He was a war hero and, at least for his era, had radical views about democracy. Having lost the Presidency in 1824, when the vote was thrown to the House of Representatives, Jackson favored using the popular vote to decide the Presidency. Scholars once treated Jackson’s victory as a fluke—he was elected by a “mob of malcontents,” one historian wrote. But Arthur Schlesinger’s Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the era, “The Age of Jackson,” published in 1945, resuscitated the former President, and the movement that helped him upend the Eastern establishment, as one of ideas rather than just impulses.
Bannon was enormously proud of restoring the Jackson portrait to the Oval Office. Franklin Roosevelt was the first President to hang it, and his successor, Harry Truman, kept it there for most of his Presidency. Lyndon Johnson restored it, but Richard Nixon removed it. Carter put it back, and it remained through the Presidencies of Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, before being removed by George W. Bush. By the time Obama became President, Jackson’s legacy as a working-class hero who fought the New York banks had become less relevant to liberals than the fact that he owned slaves and pursued a near-genocidal policy against Native Americans. Before Trump, sixteen years had passed without Jackson’s portrait hanging in the Oval Office. “It’s just like Schlesinger,” Bannon liked to say. “They named it the Age of Jackson. This is gonna be the Age of Trump.”

Like Schlesinger, Bannon saw it as his role to infuse Trump’s victory with more meaning than the random result of the rise of a mob of malcontents. During the campaign last year, Trump would frequently ask Bannon and Miller, now Trump’s top policy adviser in the White House, for quotes from the Founding Fathers or nineteenth-century Presidents that link them to Trump’s policies. Aside from Jackson, they frequently leaned on Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln.

Bannon reveres Lincoln as an economic nationalist, and likes to remind people that, aside from saving the Union and freeing the slaves, Lincoln’s great accomplishments were the Transcontinental Railroad and the Homestead Act.

When Republicans cite Lincoln, the Party’s first and greatest President, they usually draw on his well-known speeches from when he was trying to preserve the Union. In February, when Miller was writing Trump’s address to Congress, he pored over Lincoln speeches to find something that would connect Lincoln with Bannon and Miller’s views on economic nationalism. Miller found what is surely one of the least-quoted Lincoln lines in speech-writing history, and Trump picked a spot in his speech to add it. “This will be the first time Lincoln is ever referred to in the service of a nationalist economic agenda and not slavery,” Bannon told Trump.

“The first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln,” Trump said in the address to Congress, on February 28th, “warned that the ‘abandonment of the protective policy by the American government . . . will produce want and ruin among our people.’ Lincoln was right—and it’s time we heeded his advice and his words.” Republican members of Congress, who generally disagree with and disparage the idea of protectionism, applauded the line. It was a small victory for Bannon and Miller in forcing Trumpism on the President’s adopted party.
Other Bannon rhetorical flourishes backfired. Trump’s most controversial campaign speeches, the ones that caught the attention of the Anti-Defamation League, were laced with anti-“globalist” rhetoric. Earlier this year, when the papers were filled with stories about infighting between the two camps, the Wall Street Journal asked Trump which one he was. He replied, “I’m a nationalist and a globalist. I’m both.”

Voices on the nationalist right now fear that, with Bannon gone, Trump will be guided by the globalists. After the news of Bannon’s sacking became public, an editor at Breitbart tweeted, “#WAR.” I’m skeptical that Bannon’s exit will mean much. His policy legacy is mixed. He and Trump have mostly stamped out the immigration-reform wing of the G.O.P., though the business class and important leaders, like Paul Ryan, are still sympathetic.
But on economic policy, such as trade, and his recent attempt to push Republicans to raise taxes on the super-wealthy, Bannon made no progress to win allies in Congress. He failed to secure Trump’s repeal of Obamacare, and the nationalist trade agenda, including Bannon’s effort to pull out of nafta, has been stymied. The travel ban is still tied up in the courts. Trump’s recent attacks on the Republican senators Mitch McConnell, John McCain, Jeff Flake, and Lindsey Graham have made the Senate more hostile to any Presidential proposals and more interested in driving its own traditional Republican agenda. Trump’s remarks on Charlottesville further eroded any influence he has, both in Congress and with Americans outside his shrunken base.

The lasting legacy of Bannonism is the xenophobia and hostility to nonwhites that emanates from the White House and has remained a political fire that this Administration is constantly fanning. But, as we learned this week, Trump doesn’t need Bannon to keep those flames alive.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/ryan-lizza/the-rise-and-fall-of-steve-bannon

How Steve Bannon became the face of a political movement with roots in Los Angeles

Steve Bannon totally supports President Trump and the Trump Agenda. Steve Bannon isn't going to abandon Donald Trump so it really doesn't make any sense for any fan of Bannon to abandon Donald Trump because Bannon left the White House and returned to Breitbart.

Something for Ann and Laura to think about in future tweets.