There has been some talk that former President Donald Trump will be arrested today. If he is, talk of Guo Wengui's arrest will fade into the background. Before it does, though: The Trumper fire who was our last President was quite sparing about which of his grifter buddies he pardoned. If, God forbid, he ever gets another crack at it he will presumably extend pardons far and wide but, last time around, he kept the circle narrow, perhaps to generate incentives for all the grifters in the galaxy o work hard to see that there would be a next time. Against that background, federal prosecutors in New York recently arrested exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui. On the Trump scorecard, he is a friend-of-a-friend. Steve Bannon, on the other hand, is a friend. Full stop. Trump, you may remember, signed Bannon's pardon, freeing him from responsibility for the We-Fatten-the-Wall-it-oddly-looks-like-Bannon's-wallet scam: he signed this document in his final hours in office...
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It came out, and made its splash, months ago now, but I'm just getting around to reading FIRE AND FURY, a take on the early months of the Trump presidency written largely from the point of view of Steve Bannon. "It's worse than you can imagine. An idiot surrounded by clowns. Trump won't read anything -- not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers, nothing. He gets up half-way through meetings with world leaders because he is bored. And his staff is no better. Kushner is an entitled baby who knows nothing. Bannon is an arrogant prick who thinks he's smarter than he is. Trump is less a person than collection of terrible traits. No one will survive the first year but his family. I hate the work, but feel I need to stay because I'm the only person there with a clue what he's doing. The reason so few jobs have been filled is that they only accept people who pass ridiculous purity tests, even for midlevel policy-making jobs where the people will never ...
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...