*Just this morning, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin apparently said he thought a weak dollar was a good idea. The dollar is falling.
*The 2008 financial crisis was a turning point in his political life, he says. His working-class father had retired after 50 years at the phone company. “The market is crashing and Jim Cramer came on TV and said if you need cash in the next 10 years blow out your stocks. My dad called me up and said I just sold all my AT&T. He just gave it away. By the next spring I was radicalized.” Bannon saw the financial crisis as the most dramatic illustration of a problem at the core of American life: the betrayal of society by the elites. It’s not the elites whose children die in the pointless wars they start. It’s not the elites who lose their jobs when U.S. companies move their plants overseas. And it’s not the elites who suffered the consequences of the financial crisis. “This thing didn’t just come all of a sudden,” he says, referring to the crisis. “How did it happen? Who is responsible? We still don’t know the answer to that question.”
*Bannon thinks the U.S. is in decline and the people perched on top don’t particularly care. “The elites of both parties are comfortable with America being in decline,” he says. “They manage on the way down, and they make even more wealth.” He sees his job as finding ways to organize the masses against the elites. Trump was never an end in himself but the means to it — and Bannon clearly finds some of what Trump has done since taking office, like the tax cuts, as, at best, beside the point
*Bannon has a favorite line: If I had to choose who will run the country, 100 Goldman Sachs partners or the first 100 people who walk into a Trump rally, I’d choose the people at the Trump rally.
*Steve Bannon reminded me of someone, but it’s not until I’m back in my hotel room that I realize who. He was a character from “The Big Short.” He saw the world differently from virtually everyone in his profession, and it led a lot of people to think that he was insane. But he was right and they were wrong, and the rest of the world has yet to come to terms with why.
*Anger and fear is what gets people to the polls.
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Walter Schaub- Former Ethics Officer
*The ethics office had only two sources of power. One was the Senate’s refusal to hold hearings for nominees before the office had signed off on them. The second was the vigilance of the White House counsel, always on alert for anything that might tarnish the president. These sources of power are matters of custom, not law. There is no law saying the Senate needs to wait for the office to vet candidates. And there is no law saying the White House counsel needs to care about corruption. He just always has — until now. McGahn struck Shaub as both uninterested in ethics, and ignorant. “My mind was blown by how little he knew about the process,” Shaub says. “I’ve never met an attorney less equipped for the job he was about to undertake. How could he know as little as he knew and be taking this on?”
*Trump soon answered that question. He himself didn’t care. He wasn’t going to divest himself of his businesses, but instead mix his new political life into his old business life. (No conflict, no interest!) That, thought Shaub, set the tone for his entire administration. “We were expecting a tidal wave of financial disclosure reports, and they were not coming,” Shaub says. Only the Senate’s last-minute insistence on maintaining a role for the ethics office stopped it from becoming entirely powerless. But Shaub soon found himself in this bizarre situation where Trump would announce that “the Ethics Committee” was holding up his nominations. “He used Anthony Scaramucci as an example,” Shaub says. “And we’d never even heard of Scaramucci. I never saw a Scaramucci report or a Scaramucci anything.”
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*It’s funny how close Bannon came to Trump, without actually feeling close to him. He never called him anything other than “Mr. Trump.” He saw other people near him make the mistake of pretending to know our president. Trump didn’t enjoy familiarity. He preferred that people see him from a distance.
*Bannon’s movement is about fetishizing U.S. citizenship. “It’s not ethno-nationalism. It’s just nationalism,” he says. “We’ve got to make citizenship as powerful as it was in the Roman Republic.” He thinks that people who voted for Trump are at this moment asking a pair of related questions: “Where the fuck’s my wall? And where’s Mexico’s check?” Now, incredibly, there appears to be the possibility that Trump will offer a path to citizenship for people his supporters have been trained to think of not as Dreamers but as criminals. Bannon doesn’t think that Trump, in the end, will do this. But he’s not sure. “The whole thing is whether path to citizenship is in there,” he says, of the State of the Union speech.
*He notes Trump’s blue tie — and that Trump puts a lot of his decision-making energy into the smallest details of his appearance.
*Words are now coming out of Trump’s mouth but Bannon seems to be only half listening. He’s got a pair of phones out and is scrolling through the speech, the text of which someone has just sent him. As he reads his face flushes. “They have path to citizenship in here,” he says, matter-of- factly. “It’s terrible. It’s a betrayal.”
*Bannon seems to view the Democrats less as the opposition party than figures of fun. “The Democrats don’t matter,” he had said to me over our lunch. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
*The night’s not all bad, from Bannon’s point of view. The moment he seems to most enjoy is a line Trump delivers, after he’s told the story of a 12-year-old boy who tended the graves of fallen troops. The boy, Trump says, “reminds us why we salute our flag, why we put our hands on our hearts for the Pledge of Allegiance, and why we proudly stand for the national anthem.”
“Boom!” Bannon explodes, and pumps his fist. When Trump shortly follows this with a plug for “beautiful, clean coal” (ad-libbing, with typical weirdness, the “beautiful”), Bannon says “I love it,” and starts to laugh. “He’s trolling! He’s trolling from the podium.” By now Trump is simply ignoring the side of the room on which the Democrats sit in silence and delivering the speech only to the Republicans. To “Liddle Bob Corker” and “Lyin’ Ted Cruz” and “Lightweight choker Marco Rubio” and “Jeff Flake(y)” and “Truly weird Senator Rand Paul” and “Publicity seeking Lindsey Graham” and all the rest of the Republicans he’s insulted on Twitter, yet who stand and cheer for him. “He can’t look down and tweet,” Bannon says and laughs.
*What Bannon thinks, I’m guessing, is that Trump does not understand how he got elected. He doesn’t understand the power of the anger he’s tapped, almost by accident. And he likely never will. There’s a throwaway line in Michael Wolff’s book: Trump never learned how to read a corporate balance sheet. His approach to his own ignorance is not to correct it but to compensate for it.
*Bannon’s gift was to realize that he could simply ignore Trump’s weaknesses and play to his strengths, and a lot of people, distracted by the strengths, would never see the weaknesses. Hang a giant American flag in the atrium of American political life, and people cease to notice the art hanging from the ceiling.
*Eventually, Bannon walks me out into the street. It’s dark and quiet, but for the sirens. “It’s ridiculous. It’s like a country under siege,” he says. “It’s over-the-top.” The dome of the Capitol rises like a reminder of something over the Supreme Court. Bannon points to a battery of police officers standing around a metal barrier they’ve erected in the street. “You know what that is?” he says. “It’s a blast shield.” The houses inside the blast shield, he notes with real wonder, are now more valuable than the ones on the outside. And he’s on the inside.
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 