President Trump has long been the target of the liberal media, Democratic politicians, and the academic left, all of which are scathing in their contempt. But now the unkindest cut of all is coming from Steve Bannon, the alt.right populist who had been Trump’s key advisor and strongest supporter!
Ever since his firing, Bannon has been taking shots at the president. Vanity Fair reports him saying that Trump has only a 30% chance of completing his term, whether because he will be impeached or the cabinet will invoke the 25th Amendment on the grounds of mental incapacity. Bannon said of Trump, “He’s like an 11-year-old child.”
But this is nothing compared to what Bannon is quoted as saying in Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. Unaccountably, Wolff was given unprecedented access to the Oval Office. New York Magazine, which has published an excerpt from the book, puts it this way:
Wolff, who chronicles the administration from Election Day to this past October, conducted conversations and interviews over a period of 18 months with the president, most members of his senior staff, and many people to whom they in turn spoke. Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, Wolff says, he was able to take up “something like a semi-permanent seat on a couch in the West Wing” — an idea encouraged by the president himself.
The book, to be released on January 9, records the chaos, infighting, and incompetence of those first months, depicting staff-members only interested in their own clout and a president who has no clue what he is doing.
But Bannon was especially damaging, not only in his blow-by-blow account of his feud with the president’s daughter and son-in-law, but by weighing in on the campaign’s connection to the Russians, which has become a criminal investigation.
The UK newspaper The Guardian, which had access to an advance copy of Wolff’s book, reports Bannon calling Donald Trump, Jr.’s meeting with a Russian representative “treasonous.” He also said, “The chance that Don Jr. did not walk these jumos up to his father’s office on the twenty-sixth floor is zero.”
One thing I don’t understand is why, given journalists’ hostility to Trump and Bannon and everything they stand for, they are so eager to talk with journalists and are so unguarded when they do!
It will certainly help the president to be distanced from Bannon. And yet this book can only hurt Trump’s presidency, coming as it does not from his enemies but from his own people who have betrayed him.
UPDATE: Read this account from Michael Wolff, the author of the book, to give you a taste of the revelations that are coming.
UPDATE: President Trump’s attorney has sent a “cease and desist” order to the publishers of The Fire and the Fury, threatening legal action if the book is released as planned, next Tuesday. He also sent a cease and desist order to Bannon, saying that he had violated non-disclosure agreements.
UPDATE: Now the publisher, responding to the furor, has moved up the release date of the book to today.
Photo of Steve Bannon by Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America (Steve Bannon) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
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