Posts Tagged ‘ Steve Bannon ’

Omit “semi”

May 29th, 2019 11:07 am | By

To the surprise of no one, Steve Bannon says Trump is a crook. You don’t say.

The former White House adviser Steve Bannon has described the Trump Organization as a criminal entity and predicted that investigations into the president’s finances will lead to his political downfall, when he is revealed to be “not the billionaire he said he was, just another scumbag”.

Well the two are not mutually exclusive. He would still be a scumbag even if he were a billionaire.

The startling remarks are contained in Siege: Trump Under Fire, the author Michael Wolff’s forthcoming account of the second year of the Trump administration. The book, published on 4 June, is a sequel to Fire and Fury: Trump

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Executive privilege starts at birth

Feb 15th, 2018 12:38 pm | By

Meanwhile in areas a little bit away from gunshots, Steve Bannon is trying to convince the House Intelligence committee that “executive privilege” extends retroactively, as if Trump were surrounded by a penumbra of executivityhood for months or years or even decades before he actually took office, and thus that anyone he plotted with at any point within that penumbra had a privilege of not saying anything to pesky House committees no matter how hard they asked.

House Republican leaders are weighing “further steps” to force former top White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon to answer investigators’ questions in their probe of Russian meddling in the 2016 election — including potentially declaring him in contempt of Congress — after a Thursday

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No wait, he’s quit

Aug 18th, 2017 10:24 am | By

According to ABC News.

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 Aug. 14, exactly one year after he joined the Trump campaign.

“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 Sanders said in a statement to ABC News.

The alt-right invasion will begin at midnight.… Read the rest

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Bannon will go…one of these days, maybe

Aug 18th, 2017 10:19 am | By

The Times reports that Trump has decided to “remove” Bannon…but also that it may take him some time. (Should we start a pool on whether he can get Bannon out before he himself is “removed”?)

President Trump has told senior aides that he has decided to remove Stephen K. Bannon, the embattled White House chief strategist who helped Mr. Trump win the 2016 election, according to two administration officials briefed on the discussion.

The president and senior White House officials were debating when and how to dismiss Mr. Bannon. The two administration officials cautioned that Mr. Trump is known to be averse to confrontation within his inner circle, and could decide to keep on Mr. Bannon for some time.

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Children of the Sun

Mar 2nd, 2017 11:02 am | By

What’s on Bannon’s bookshelf? What’s on his list of top most inspiring and influential reads? One item is a clerico-fascist named Julius Evola, whom he name-checked in a speech at a Vatican conference in 2014.

“The fact that Bannon even knows Evola is significant,” said Mark Sedgwick, a leading scholar of Traditionalists at Aarhus University in Denmark.

Evola, who died in 1974, wrote on everything from Eastern religions to the metaphysics of sex to alchemy. But he is best known as a leading proponent of Traditionalism, a worldview popular in far-right and alternative religious circles that believes progress and equality are poisonous illusions.

Stagnation and hierarchy are so much better – provided you have the good fortune to be … Read the rest

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Bannon wanted it this way

Jan 31st, 2017 12:42 pm | By

Dan Drezner raises the question: was The Ban incompetence or malevolence?

He starts with saying it was Bannon’s baby, which seems to be generally accepted. Next, The Ban is a disaster. Then he points out that Bannon is definitely not stupid. Agreed…so I wonder what it can be like for him having to baby and cajole the amazingly stupid Trump.

So why did not-stupid Bannon perpetrate a disaster?

The most plausible story to assume in this instance is incompetence. Ordinarily, when the federal government does something stupid, it’s best to assume incompetence rather than malevolence. This is Bannon’s first week in a White House job and, like most other really smart people who lack high-level government experience, there will

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Off to a great start

Nov 15th, 2016 3:03 pm | By

Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown gently suggests that hiring a hate-everybody troll for a top policy job in the White House might be seen as unfriendly to non-troll Americans.

Ohio U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D.) today urged President-elect Donald Trump to reverse his appointment of Steve Bannon, executive chairman of Breitbart News, as chief White House strategist and senior counsel because of his association with the Alt-right.

“We cannot bring the country together by inviting into the White House the same bigotry and hate speech that divided us on the campaign trail,” Mr. Brown said in a statement released today.

“This is not about a difference in policy or politics — Steve Bannon has promoted anti-Semitic, racist, misogynistic and dangerous views

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Guest post: Critics see

Nov 15th, 2016 2:32 pm | By

Guest post by G Felis.

New York Times headline: “Critics See Stephen Bannon, Trump’s Pick for Strategist, as Voice of Racism”

Oh FFS! Steve Bannon’s history of waving the banner of both implicit and explicit racism is not a judgment call or matter of perspective. That’s like saying “Critics See Animal in this Picture as Duck-like.” If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and calls for the separation of the races like a duck and publishes racist rhetoric like a duck, it’s a racist duck.

(The duck pictured is just a metaphor, of course. I apologize for any implication that the duck in this picture is racist. He isn’t a racist, he just thinks ducks … Read the rest

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