Steve Bannon and Donald Trump. (photo: Getty)
Steve Bannon Splits From Trump: Hilarity Ensues
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
22 September 17
The Alabama Senate race may become a proxy for a nationwide fracturing of
the Republican Party
As delicious as it was to watch the mainstream Republican Party crushed
under the weight of its own internal contradictions during the 2016 campaign
season, a new horror show could be even better. In a special Alabama Senate
race going on now, we can watch Donald Trump chewed to bits by his own base.
The CliffsNotes version of this story:
1) Trump botches the Charlottesville mess, says there are "very fine people"
among neo-Nazi marchers.
2) World freaks out. Backstabbers in the White House try to save themselves
by leaking to the press that the problem is chief strategist Steve Bannon, a
white supremacist cancer on an otherwise redeemable presidency.
3) Bannon is pushed out, and immediately gives an interview to The Weekly
Standard in which he declares the Trump presidency "over" and promises to
use Breitbart to hog-butcher his enemies back in Washington. "I built a
f***ing machine at Breitbart. And now," he says, "we're about to rev that
machine up. And rev it up we will do."
4) Bannon backs former judge Roy Moore in a runoff race for the Senate seat
vacated by Justice Department chief and oft-whipped Trump toady Jeff
Sessions. Moore is a Christian identitarian throw-the-bums-out lunatic who
normally would be close to a perfect fit for Trump's alleged
"drain-the-swamp" movement.
5) But Trump backs another guy, a 6-foot-9 Republican Party hack-lifer named
Luther Strange.
6) Hilarity ensues.
If you can stand it, check out Breitbart this week. Bannon has reportedly
decreed that it's all hands on deck, and the only story that matters is the
Moore-Strange Senate race. Bannon and the alt-right are all-in for Judge Roy
Moore.
"Luther Strange Ducks DACA Amnesty Questions," blares a top-line story. "Roy
Moore Statewide Appeal an Edge," announces another.
Breitbart is hammering Trump's candidate Strange on a number of fronts,
including his involvement in a bent shopping mall development deal involving
Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker and his investment in a company that doles out
visas under the controversial EB-5 program.
More than anything else, though, Breitbart is ripping Strange for being a
tool of the Republican establishment. According to various reports, the
Senate Leadership Fund, Mitch McConnell's Super PAC, has poured as much as
$9 million into the Strange campaign.
All of this is happening in advance of a visit to Alabama by Trump to
support Strange this Friday night. The prez threw a half-hearted tweet in
Strange's direction in advance of the visit:
Looking forward to Friday night in the Great State of Alabama. I am
supporting "Big" Luther Strange because he was so loyal & helpful to me!
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 20, 2017
Bannon's "thermonuclear" revenge play threatens to throw the Republican
Party into a chaos from which it may not recover. The schadenfreude factor
is off the charts. Take just one hilarious angle to this thing, the
embarrassingly shameless effort by the McConnell PAC to cling to the hated
Trump like a barnacle as it pushes to keep Moore out of office.
This is the text of a TV ad for Luther Strange funded by the Senate
Leadership Committee:
"Which Alabama conservative was endorsed by the NRA and National Right to
Life Committee? Big Luther Strange," the ad asks. "Who's fighting with
President Trump to build the wall? Big Luther Strange, again. And, who did
President Trump give his complete and total endorsement to? That's right:
Big Luther Strange."
What could be funnier than the mainstream Republican Party - and Mitch
McConnell in particular - begging the citizens of Alabama to believe they
love The Wall more than Breitbart does?
Two years ago, when Trump was just an irritating subplot in the Beltway
Republicans' half-assed plan to re-take the White House, Mitch McConnell
wouldn't have touched the Wall idea with a set of surgical forceps. Now,
McConnell has no choice but to wrap his arms all the way around Trump and
everything he stands for. The party has no natural constituency otherwise.
Without the constituencies of at least one of Trump or Bannon, the
McConnells of the world would be completely irrelevant in places like
Alabama.
Meanwhile, in an exactly opposite ironic stroke, the Bannon-backed
candidate, Moore, is blasting Luther Strange as a representative of the
"Washington Swamp."
This means that Trump, who stormed into the White House riding a "drain the
swamp" platform, has essentially become the swamp in the eyes of Breitbart,
at least for the time being.
So McConnell has sold out to Trump, and Trump has sold out to McConnell, and
it's Steve Bannon, who just weeks ago was kicked out of the White House, who
is now playing the role of kingmaker in the Republican Party.
The spectacle will achieve peak gruesomeness Thursday evening, when Sarah
Palin and the also recently ousted Dr. Sebastian Gorka will campaign for
Moore in Alabama. The event is sponsored by something called the MAGA
Coalition, a new group not officially connected to Trump. (Charles Manson
and the ghost of Heinrich Himmler were not available.)
Having these two freak shows back-to-back - Palin-Gorka Thursday,
Trump-Strange Friday - will offer the national media and the Republican
electorate a reality-show-style standoff, cartoonizing the new divisions
within the party.
God knows why Trump is backing Luther Strange. My personal theory is that
it's because Luther is tall - Trump has a thing about short people. Whatever
the reason, politically it has the potential to be a massive error.
The one piece of leverage Trump held over the Republicans in the House and
Senate was his ability to blow the disobedient among them out of office with
more despicably nativist primary challengers. He was doing this to Jeff
Flake in Arizona and seemed poised to do it to Corker in Tennessee.
By backing Strange, however, Trump opens the door to allow Bannon to show
everyone that Trump owes more to Breitbart than Breitbart owes to him. If
Moore wins, all of Washington will know that Bannon really controls the
crucial lunatic plurality of the party, not Trump.
Trump may be dumb enough to think that he can elevate "big" Luther Strange
to office through the sheer force of his cult of anti-personality. It's a
close call, but he's probably wrong. The polls suggest Moore is a strong
favorite to win, despite both Trump's endorsement and McConnell's money.
This is a monstrous comeuppance for Trump. He gate-crashed the Oval Office
by stirring up race-hatred and anti-immigrant sentiment and promising to lay
waste to the perfumed boyars in the Republican political establishment.
Now that he's in Washington and potentially dependent upon those same
Republicans to survive his term - he could need the McConnells and Ryans of
the world to weather an impeachment effort, for instance - he seems tempted
to throw in with those same hacks to save his skin.
What a glorious disaster this is, all the way around. McConnell and company
disgrace themselves totally by clinging to Trump's ankles. Trump betrays his
own constituents and may soon represent the same "swamp" he campaigned
against. If the world is just, they will roast together for all eternity in
the same boiling hell-cauldron.
Of course, the price of this chaotic spectacle is high. Roy Moore is an
awful human being, and it will be a bummer to see him decorating a Senate
office with a stone relief of the Ten Commandments. Moreover, the likely
endgame here is Trump running back into Bannon's arms behind the scenes,
resulting in even worse White House behavior.
But for the moment, Trump, McConnell and the rest of that party deserves to
circle the drain together, and to claim collective ownership of a
near-impossible achievement: in control of both houses and the White House,
the Republicans have somehow managed to make themselves completely incapable
of exercising power, thanks to these devastating internal divisions.
They may not stay divided forever. But for the sane among us - who haven't
had much fun watching politics in the last few years - this fracturing for a
while at least should be a comedy worth following.
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