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Steve Bannon

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 Slate recently featured a fine brief take-down of Steve Bannon's reputation as a policy intellectual, written by Jamelle Bouie.

Of course, Bannon no longer darkens the doors of the White House. He is back at Breitbart, but he has made it clear he isn't going away.

And coverage of him by press organs he does not control does often have a certain grudging-respect quality. Sort of like what Newt Gingrich got in the 1990s, back when he was relevant and not yet a caricature of himself.

Here's a link to the Bouie piece:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/09/steve_bannon_s_reputation_as_an_intellectual_and_strategic_genius_is_unearned.html

Early on, Bouie provides a couple of fine examples of this grudging-respect tone, one from Glenn Thrush of The New York Times. Bannon, Thrush says, "is a deep if narrow reader who is trying to create an ideological/intellectual foundation for Trumpism."

The following has little to do with Bouie's argument, but is what the Thrush quote brings to my mind.

1) Either Trump is acting on a real and coherent set of premises, or he is not.
2) The Thrush quote makes it seem as if the work of creating an "foundation for Trumpism" is an ongoing present-text project.
3) That suggests there was no such foundation as of, say, November 2016 or before,
4) Which in turn suggests the proper response to premise (1) above us, "he is not."
5) And if he is NOT, then present moment rationalizations won't change that.


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