Posted on 08/16/2017 2:39:11 PM PDT by be-baw
On Tuesday night, while Gary Cohn was fuming about President Trump's latest comments, Steve Bannon was excitedly telling friends and associates that the "globalists" were in mass freakout mode.
Today, Bannon reveled in the disbanding of the president's business council, seeing this as yet more evidence that the Trump administration is at odds with the "Davos crowd," as Bannon often calls these corporate elites, in a voice dripping with contempt.
Bannon saw Trump's now-infamous Tuesday afternoon press conference not as the lowest point in his presidency, but as a "defining moment," where Trump decided to fully abandon the "globalists" and side with "his people." Per a source with knowledge: "Steve was proud of how [Trump] stood up to the braying mob of reporters" in the Tuesday press conference. This account of Bannon's thinking has come from conversations with his friends and associates who've been in touch with him since the racist carnage in Charlottesville.
Bannon has not meaningfully advised the president about his response to Charlottesville. He's still on the outs with Trump, who has been calling him a leaker for weeks, though the president described Bannon as a good person on Tuesday.
They spoke by phone on Saturday, Sunday and Monday, according to a source with knowledge of the calls, but the response to Charlottesville has been all Trump, and Trump at his purest.
On the phone to Bannon, Trump asked his chief strategist "where does it end?" according to a source with knowledge of their conversations. Trump wasn't referring to the white supremacists, but to the counter-protesters whom the president believes are on a slippery slope towards "changing history" by tearing down monuments of Confederate heroes and potentially, he has said, the Founding Fathers like George Washington, who owned slaves.
Bannon, who is in New York today, has a view of Trump's Charlottesville response that horrifies many of his West Wing colleagues:
Unlike some of Trump's other top aides — who have varied on a spectrum between frustration and disgust since the president's Charlottesville remarks — Bannon has unapologetically supported Trump's instinct to apportion blame to "both sides."
Sources who've spoken with Bannon since Charlottesville say he views this moment as analogous to the campaign moment when Hillary Clinton condemned half of Trump's supporters to a "basket of deplorables." Bannon believes that if Trump condemned all the people who protested the pulling down of the Robert E. Lee statue then he'd fall into a trap set by leftists, the establishments of both parties, and the mainstream media. (Some of Bannon's colleagues say this is an absurd argument. They point out it was a crowd of white supremacists holding tiki torches and chanting racist slogans, and that this is no time for the president to be searching for the "fine people" in the group. They say Trump should be condemning the tiki torch crowd unequivocally and leaving the debate over statues and free speech to another, less racially-heated, day.)
Bottom line: Both Trump and Bannon are of one mind, and, within the White House at least, theirs is a minority view. They saw the backlash to Charlottesville as an example of political correctness run amok and instinctively searched for "their" people in that group of protesters. Bannon has told associates that Trump, on Tuesday afternoon, took it to the next level for the country by asking where does it end? He especially loved Trump's line: "I wonder, is it George Washington next week?
Bannon needs to stay right where he is for now.
L
I am with Trump and Bannon. Glad the globalist left. At least the President tried.
Pres Trump hit a grand slam last night.
“Bannon needs to stay right where he is for now.”
I agree. Most people know exactly what President Trump said and what he meant.
“Steve was proud of how [Trump] stood up to the braying mob of reporters”
So was I - Trump was right
Bannon is a globalist socialist. Where does he think his trillion dollar budget comes from?
Didn’t Trump just slam Bannon?
Yeah, because axios.com and Jonathan Swan just "know" things. I might think they have ESP, except that they're so often dead wrong about what they think they know.
Same here. This is like the campaign when the left and Rinos thought they had Trump over a barrel. They were wrong and Trump only became stronger. He’s fighting the good fight here, taking on the PC hordes. His fight is ours and he’s charging in the lead, taking all he bullets, but he keeps going. God bless him. He’s this Country’s last, best hope.
The establishment and msm are all freaking out for one big reason. What Trump did and said on Tuesday was powerful. The truth is the enemy of the globalist cause.
Bannon is one of us, a closet Freeper.
‘This account of Bannon’s thinking has come from conversations with his friends and associates’
They got the phraseology wrong. It’s supposed to be, ‘According to people familiar with Bannon’s thinking.’
Somewhere in the article it said Trump accused Bannon of being a leaker. Had not heard that. What did the President slam him for?
The left is outraged that people protesting the
destruction of their history would carry Tiki torches
while they carry candles....and Molotov cocktails.
Breitbart went after Cohn hard today.
This is turning into a fight between Cohn and Bannon, which is interesting on ethnic grounds to say the least.
I like Bannon because he’s hated by all the right people.
L
Trillion dollar budget? We already spent $4 trillion a year!
I have never been more proud of any president in my life time as I was of Trump yesterday. Match Trump’s response to dozens of idiotic responses that 0bama had over the years. 0bama even invited Black Lies Matter to the White House, and Al Sharpton on numerous occasions, inciters of riots and murders.
I was proud of our American President too.
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