It should be clear by now that the only real political talent possessed by Steve Bannon is his ability to take the usual political norms, shred them into slivers, and throw the whole mess up in front of an electric fan. He did that by helping elect the current president*, who has that same talent by the bucketful. He did that by promoting the Gadsden Mall Creeper in Alabama right up until the night before Roy Moore got pounded by Doug Jones, who was sworn in on Wednesday as the Democratic junior senator from Alabama. And now, according to a new book by Michael Wolff, Bannon apparently has decided that it’s time to bring the temple down on his own head, just for laughs. From The Guardian:

The meeting was revealed by the New York Times in July last year, prompting Trump Jr to say no consequential material was produced. Soon after, Wolff writes, Bannon remarked mockingly: “The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor – with no lawyers. They didn’t have any lawyers. “Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately.” Bannon went on, Wolff writes, to say that if any such meeting had to take place, it should have been set up “in a Holiday Inn in Manchester, New Hampshire, with your lawyers who meet with these people”. Any information, he said, could then be “dump[ed] … down to Breitbart or something like that, or maybe some other more legitimate publication”. Bannon added: “You never see it, you never know it, because you don’t need to … But that’s the brain trust that they had.”

It has been clear for a while that the Trump spalpeens, and Jared Kushner, the golden-child spalpeen-in-law, had no use for Bannon and that they probably are more than partly responsible for shoving the master strategist off the Truman Balcony. Bannon also apparently was quite plain about the peril presented by Robert Mueller to the president* as well.

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Bannon has criticised Trump’s decision to fire Comey. In Wolff’s book, obtained by the Guardian ahead of publication from a bookseller in New England, he suggests White House hopes for a quick end to the Mueller investigation are gravely misplaced. “You realise where this is going,” he is quoted as saying. “This is all about money laundering. Mueller chose [senior prosecutor Andrew] Weissmann first and he is a money-laundering guy. Their path to fucking Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr and Jared Kushner … It’s as plain as a hair on your face.” Last month it was reported that federal prosecutors had subpoenaed records from Deutsche Bank, the German financial institution that has lent hundreds of millions of dollars to the Kushner property empire. Bannon continues: “It goes through Deutsche Bank and all the Kushner shit. The Kushner shit is greasy. They’re going to go right through that. They’re going to roll those two guys up and say play me or trade me.”

(Speaking of Jared, he brought the whole stupid sampler tray out the other day while talking about his bungled attempts at foreign policy. From Politico:

“He told me, ‘I’m a businessman, and I don’t care about the past. Old allies can be enemies, or enemies can be friends,’ so the past doesn’t count,” one official told the magazine. “I was taken aback. It was frightening.”

Yeah, he’s such a businessman that he’s stuck with one of the biggest white elephants in the history of Manhattan real-estate. I’d certainly hand him the keys to NATO.)

The problem Bannon’s newfound candor presents to this White House is a simple one. He’s smarter than most of them are, including the president*. He is better at burning things down than they are because he does very little of it by accident. His talent for destruction is more finely honed and he is a man of no political conscience whatsoever, and now he has very little to lose. He also is someone who prospered in both high finance and in Hollywood, two places where having the essential humanity of a wolverine is a positive advantage.

The Trumps et. al., including the president*, were raised in an atmosphere in which nobody was around to tell them that they couldn’t do X, or that they shouldn’t do Y. This left them unprepared for someone like Bannon who, for all his faults, truly and deeply appears not to give a green shit about anything or anybody. And now, alas for the administration, the piper has shown up at the door, demanding payment.

Scorning apparent White House insouciance, Bannon reaches for a hurricane metaphor: “They’re sitting on a beach trying to stop a Category Five.”

He also has a gift for metaphor. Here, from New York, is the entire excerpt. Read in awe and wonder.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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