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UPDATE: ย Steve Bannon has been fired.
President Trumpโs controversial advisor, Steve Bannon, emulated his departed enemy Anthony Scaramucci, for some inexplicable reason, by calling up a journalist toย vent about his co-workers!
But Bannonโs behavior is even more inexplicable than what Scaramucci did. ย He called up the arch-liberal journalist Robert Kuttner, editor of the โprogressiveโ magazine the American Prospect,ย who has written upย the interview in his articleย Steve Bannon, Unrepentant.
In his conversation, Bannon bragged about how he was going to get rid of his opponents in the State Department and the Defense Department, mentioning them by name. ย And in line with Scaramucciโs crudeness, he said his administration enemies are โwetting themselves.โ ย Bannon even criticized Trumpโs respected economics advisor Gary Cohn. ย ย (The presidentโs top economic advisor, Cohn, who is Jewish, is reportedly furious about the Charlottesville debacle.ย The stock market dropped nearly 300 points on the rumor that he was resigning. ย He now says that he wonโt.)
Bannon even contradicted his boss, saying there is really no military solution for North Korea, despite Trumpโs โfire and furyโ threats, which seem to have caused Kim Jong-un to back down.
Bannon also said that the white nationalists in Charlottesvilleโwith whom he is often rightly or wrongly associatedโare โclownsโ and โlosers.โ ย He thus distanced himself from President Trumpโs refusal to condemn them unequivocally. ย So perhaps the phone call had to do with his need for self-justification.
But why say all of this to such a liberal publication, one explicitly dedicated to resisting the Trump administration? ย The immediate reason Bannon called Kuttner was in thanks forย an article he wrote in the Prospectย criticizing Chinaโs economic policies, one of Bannonโs pet causes.
At any rate, to go on as he did, airing the administration in-fighting in public, was unprofessional in the extreme. ย ย Itย is also incompetent.
President Trump has problems with being undisciplined and careless with his words. ย This is evidently a problem with his staff as well.
Could Bannonโs phone call to Kuttner be an act of hara-kiri to get himself fired, as Scaramucci was?
If so, maybe his departureโand possibly that of some other staffersโwould help get the office of the presidency back on track.
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Photo of Steve Bannon by Don Irvine [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons