thenation | In Steve Bannon’s now-famous call to Robert Kuttner of The American Prospect
the day before he was fired, Bannon described the white supremacists
who had marched in Charlottesville as “losers” and “a collection of
clowns.” Of course, those are the same sorts of people Bannon mobilized
to vote for Trump, the most loyal part of his base. I asked Joshua Green
about that—he wrote the definitive book on Bannon, Devil’s Bargain. We spoke the evening before Bannon was fired as chief strategist at the Trump White House.
“He said similar things to me,” Green said; “he called them ‘freaks’
and ‘goofballs.’” Bannon, he said, “views these kinds of alt-right
Internet trolls as useful idiots whom he can manipulate to do his
bidding. He sees them as a small but powerful and energetic cohort that
will help him tear down the Republican political establishment and open
up room for Donald Trump. He sees them also as a group of people who
won’t hesitate to attack the mainstream media, which is another
obsession of Steve Bannon’s.”
The big questions about Bannon, of course, are how Trump views him, and
how he views Trump. Green emphasized that Trump’s biggest problem with
Bannon always was the way Bannon got credit for Trump’s victory. For a
long time, he said, Trump has been “furious at the idea put forward in
the press, and frankly that’s also the thesis of my book—the idea
that…without Bannon’s guidance, Trump probably wouldn’t be president.”
Green pointed to a Saturday Night Live sketch that “portrayed
Bannon as the real president, making Donald Trump sit at the little
boy’s desk—Trump hates that sort of thing.”
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