First Trump said: “A few days ago I called the fake news the enemy of the people. And they are. They are the enemy of the people.”

He continued in a barely coherent diatribe of sentence fragments, incongruous ideas and broken logic. But if you listened closely, you could hear echoes of Bannon. At one point, Trump said: “We have to fight it, folks, we have to fight it. They’re very smart, they’re very cunning and they’re very dishonest.” At another he said of the media: “Many of these groups are part of the large media corporations that have their own agenda and it’s not your agenda and it’s not the country’s agenda, it’s their own agenda.”

Trump is Bannon’s puppet, whose one sustaining parlor trick is to deliver incoherence with confidence. Strangely enough, people find comfort in this kind of imperfect parlance.

Maundering is the rhetoric of the middlebrow.

Demagogic language is reductionist language. It draws its power from its lack of proximity to soaring oratory. It can be quaint and even clumsy, all of which can give idiocy, incomprehensibility and untruth a false air of authenticity.

So Trump and Bannon spin their folksy tale of media corruption to give Trump a needed enemy in his perpetual campaign and a needed diversion from the enormity of his disasters. This fits Trump perfectly because not only does he have a gnawing insecurity, he also views the confrontational nature of news as maleficently targeted.

Trump doesn’t seem to register that lying — all the time! — is not allowed. He doesn’t seem to understand that news, by its very nature, is the publishing of that which those in power would prefer to conceal. He doesn’t seem to realize that fawning promotion of politicians’ positions is not the exercise of journalism but the promotion of propaganda. Or maybe he does and is enraged at the absence of propaganda.