Spanish
life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
-
Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain.
Life
in Spain:-
- Here's more on the macro/micro divide in Spain that I bang on about.
- I regularly receive short promotional videos from Tur Galicia, highlighting the delights of our lovely region. But, as they're all in Galician/Gallego, I can't help wondering who the target audience is. It surely can't be the folk who already live here and might able to understand the soundtrack. Here's the latest one anyway. Given what you're about to read, it's rather appropriate.
- One night last week here in Pontevedra, we had a Blues concert starting at 10.30, a large temporary fairground and fireworks at midnight. So, a busy night. And obviously the perfect time to close the city's largest free carpark adjacent to the fairground for re-tarmacing. If I were a cynic, I'd say this must have been beneficial for the owners of our underground carparks. Oh, I think that's the same people - the local council - who ordered the re-tarmacing . . .
My two Dutch guests and I travelled north yesterday, for one of Galicia's numerous summer gastronomic fiestas. This one, in Cerceda, offered spit-roasted suckling pig. Cochinillo in Spanish and Cochiño in Galician. Not something I associate with this region, as it happens. More so with Castilla y León.
Anyway, having eventually found the Parque Aquatico where it was being held, we established where to buy the tickets for 3 portions and then joined the shorter of the 2 queues near the serving counter. And then unjoined it, after I'd discovered it was for octopus.
After 20 minutes or so we reached the counter, to be told we'd been queuing for ribs and should have been in a 3rd queue.
I say 'queue' but, in fact, we were directed to an empty table near the spits:-
There I was given a large dish of roasted piglet:-
Finding seats and a table at the bar - after being ejected from the fully booked marquee - we then discovered that, among the pieces of meat, there was . . . .
An ear:-
A snout:-
And a tail plus accompanying arse:-
So, either all of these are considered delicacies by the locals, or the guy dishing it all out saw this guiri coming. Given that absolutely none of said locals was queuing for the roast piglet, I suspect it was the latter.
Either way, we declined to consume any of the above and gave most of them to the dog we'd brought with. So, at least one of us was happy. But it was something of a waste of €30 for the 3 humans among us.
I've been warned more than once over the years never to go to a fiesta gastronomica for the local speciality, as this would alway be of lower quality but higher price than at any other time of the year. Pity I was never told: But, if there any any available, always go for the delicious ribs.
Which reminds me . . . The worst aspect of all was that the portions of ribs and sausages which all the locals were buying looked stupendous.
Happily, though, we could see the funny side of things and chalked it up to life's experiences.
Moving on to a wider perspective . . .
Trump: How on earth to understand what's going on in Washington? Here's a couple of apposite comments:-
- A friend said to me today that in a rational world, Scaramucci would have been fired for that interview. But in a rational world, Scaramucci would never have been hired. And in a rational world, Donald Trump would not be the president of the United States. We’re well past the rational world.
- If all this really were the plot of a television show, critics would say it was unfeasible. Perhaps only Shakespeare could have described Washington over the past week. “Hell is empty,” he wrote in The Tempest. “And all the devils are here.”
Finally . . . In the normal Spanish disjointed way - you can displease all the people all the time - a couple of gardeners have been laying turf in my neighbour's garden during the last 2 weeks or so. The grass looks very good. I'll have to check but I'm sure it isn't the bloody gramón that I moaned about recently. The horrible stuff that's taken over my lawns that was much lauded by my other neighbour, Ester, and her visiting plumber.
 |
"Well, so much for Plan A" |
THE ARTICLE
Inside Trump's White
House Part I: Your guide to the feuding factions behind the
President
Donald Trump came to
power promising to shake up Washington and so revolutionise
America. So far his biggest impact has been on something very
different – the way the White House operates.
He has brought his
distinctive management style, developed at the Trump Organisation, to
the West Wing, where competing factions battle each other for
influence and the chance to shape policy.
The result is a complex
web of alliances and enmities, where key players build their own
internal organisations, complete with chiefs of staff and spokesmen,
all arranged in five factions:
- An inner circle of family members and former Trump Organisation staffers
- Anti-establishment radicals
- Establishment figures from the traditional Republican Party core
- The "Generals"
- Wall Street
Best known among the
groups, largely because of the way their animosity has spilled into
the press, are the competing anti-establishment and Trump family
wings of the White House.
Steve Bannon, the
former head of Breitbart News, arrived late in Mr Trump’s campaign
but his brash brand of economic nationalism had long informed the
candidate’s populist worldview.
“Lenin wanted to
destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring
everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s
establishment,” he once told a Daily
Beast reporter(in a conversation he claims he does not recall).
Although he once worked
for Goldman Sachs, he was never going to see eye-to-eye with the
bankers and billionaires that fill other key posts in the White
House.
Take Jared
Kushner, a politically moderate multimillionaire who inherited
his family’s business and has donated to the Democrats in the past.
His internationalist outlook could not be more different from Mr
Bannon’s, but having married Ivanka, his position as Mr
Trump’s son-in-law makes him untouchable and puts him at the centre
of a close-knit inner circle, alongside loyal retainers carried over
from the Trump Organisation.
To supporters, the
result is the sort of creative, chaotic tension that has been the
hallmark of Mr Trump’s businesses. To detractors, the chaos is
hampering Mr Trump’s ability to get things done. The first weeks of
this administration were dominated by damaging reports of bitter
infighting as the two big players butted heads over strategies for
replacing Obamacare, intervening in the Syrian war and efforts to
tackle immigration.
There are moderating
influences among the alpha males that the president admires so much.
The grown-ups include his generals – Jim Mattis at the Pentagon
and HR McMaster, his National Security Adviser – and the
pragmatists among the bankers brought in from Wall Street (or Goldman
Sachs to be more precise). Anthony Scaramucci, brought in to
replace Sean Spicer as Communications Director, is the latest Goldman
graduate to join the Trump White House.
And there are the
political insiders from the Republican establishment perhaps best
represented by Reince Priebus, White House chief of staff. Their job
is to liaise with the Party leadership in Congress, translating the
president’s agenda into legislation.
Those competing power
centres make this White House unlike any other in history. Although
clashes over policy inside an administration are nothing new, such
deep divides over tone, direction and philosophy are unprecedented so
early in a presidency. The fortunes of the factions will dictate the
direction of the Trump presidency.
But will Trump allow
just one group to dominate the others? Or is his plan to
maintain competing, creative tensions, while taking obvious
delight in his status as the ultimate disruptor.
Over the next
five daily instalments, I will introduce the factions, their
ideologies and temperaments, their backgrounds and politics, and
explain how this very unconventional presidency makes a topsy turvy
sort of sense.
Inside Trump's White
House Part II: The untouchable inner circle of Donald's family and
entourage
When Donald Trump fired
James Comey, the director of the FBI, he knew it needed a trusted
hand.
So he turned to Keith
Schiller, his director of Oval Office operations, to deliver the
manila envelope to FBI headquarters in New York.
At six foot four with a
buzzcut, he still looks like the transport cop who used to travel
back and forth everyday on the number three subway line from Harlem
to deepest Brooklyn, shuttling between what were then two of New
York’s toughest neighbourhoods. He joined the Trump Organisation in
2004 as bodyguard, before expanding his role to be Mr Trump’s body
man and sounding board.
Today that gives him a
powerful position at the heart of the White House – an unofficial
gatekeeper known as a trusted confidant and something of a Trump
whisperer. Win him over, say insiders, and you have the ear of the
President.
His rise is emblematic
of the way Mr Trump has organised his White House. Among the
competing factions, the biggest, most powerful bloc is made up of
friends, family and employees from the Trump Organisation. People he
knows and trusts.
Their value lies in
their history. They fought alongside Mr Trump through his turbulent
business life, the legal challenges and bankruptcies, the marriages
and divorces, then the primaries and the polls that wrote off his
presidential run.
So when Donald Trump
launched his campaign to become president two years ago with his
promise to build a wall on the border with Mexico, the core of his
White House team was already in place watching from positions stage
right in the atrium of Trump Tower.
His daughter Ivanka
stood out among the sober business suits in a striking ivory dress.
Beside her, fiddling with his tie, was her multimillionaire husband
Jared Kushner.
And among the crowd of
journalists and professional cheerers (hired at $50 a pop) stood
assorted loyal retainers from the Trump Organisation, who had
descended from its headquarters on the floors above to support their
boss in what many must have thought would be nothing more than
another brief vanity project.
Instead many of the
family and Trump employees have followed their patriarch and employer
to the White House where they have formed the most powerful faction
in his administration.
Mr Kushner has perhaps
the most consequential post as an unpaid senior adviser. His
portfolio is extraordinarily broad. He shuttles back and forth to the
Middle East trying to broker peace between Israel and Palestine. He
also heads Mr Trump’s delivery unit, the White House Office of
American Innovation, as well as co-ordinating with visiting heads of
state.
His wife is one of the
highest ranking women in the White House, and has an almost unlimited
portfolio, from women’s rights to business and foreign policy.
Although first daughter is not an official title, she has recruited a
chief of staff adding to a sense that she is building her own power
centre.
It is difficult to know
how effective either can be. Both were associated with Democratic
politics in New York, making them political outsiders in this
administration. And while both have recruited staffs around
themselves, they don’t head the sort of agencies that might easily
serve up policy wins.
However, their status
as daughter and son-in-law give them softer, hidden influence across
almost all the President’s thinking.
Ivanka has let it be
known that she sees herself as a moderating influence on a president
elected on a nativist, nationalist vote. Officials have let it
be known she has taken to reviewing draft executive orders, for
example, in order to avoid the furore over initial attempts to ban
travellers from certain Muslim countries.
And she is thought to
be one of the few people who can deliver bad news or criticism to a
famously thin-skinned president.
In addition, Mr
Kushner’s support was thought to be crucial in persuading Mr Trump
to launch punitive missile strikes on Syria after its use of
chemical weapons at a time when Steve Bannon, the other major power
centre, was arguing such a move would not advance the America First
agenda.
That axis has provided
most of the clashes inside the White House so far. Mr Bannon and his
allies have referred dismissively to a “New York”
internationalist and liberal tendency.
At one stage things
got so bad – with Mr Bannon calling his rival a “cuck” (a
favoured alt-Right term of abuse) and a “globalist” behind his
back – that the President had to intervene and demand a truce.
That leaves a festering
struggle at the heart of the White House between two sets of
outsiders who would never have been appointed by any other
administration.
Mr Bannon’s
friendship with Mr Trump goes back further than the campaign. But he
cannot compete with blood relatives or Trump Organisation stalwarts.
Take Dan Scavino, who
runs White House social media, but got his start caddying as a
teenager for Mr Trump and became one of his golf club managers. Or
Jason Greenblatt who works as Middle East envoy despite his main
qualification being that as company attorney his office was two doors
away from Mr Trump’s (and one of those doors was a supply
cupboard).
The one thing to
understand about this White House is that Mr Trump’s family and
company loyalists hold the advantage in an administration run by a
thin-skinned president whose lack of political experience means he is
reliant on personal allegiance alone to get things done.
As one insider put it
to me: “Analysts keep talking about clashes between conservatives
and liberals, or putting people on a nationalist-internationalist
divide, moderates and revolutionaries and that sort of thing.
“That’s all wrong.
“The only thing that
matters – the only thing – is how long have these people been
part of the team?”
Inside Trump's White
House Part III: The Republicans struggling for influence and the
party line
Sean Spicer’s wild
ride through the first six months of this White House tells you all
you need to know about the place of the Republican establishment in
this administration. From day one as press secretary he found himself
cast as kicking dog for both president and press, forced to
defend indefensible claims about the inauguration crowd size.
He became both a TV
show punchline – lampooned by a merciless Melissa McCarthy on
Saturday Night Live – and a Washington celebrity, sought out by
tourists for selfies. The journalists who had once hung out with him
when he was a useful source of gossipy titbits in previous Republican
posts on Capitol Hill came to pity him, wondering how many times he
could get up after being put down.
The final straw came on
Friday. When Mr Trump appointed a New York financier with no
communications experience as communications director Mr Spicer
finally said enough was enough and quit.
The appointment of
Anthony Scaramucci, a long-time Democratic donor, demonstrated Mr
Trump’s attitude to the wing of his staff with a traditional
Republican background: It is utterly dispensable.
Mr Spicer, who had
served as spokesman for the US trade representative under George W
Bush, was one of them. Another is Reince Priebus, who was chairman of
the Republican National Committee before becoming White House chief
of staff. Few other party figures made the jump. There was too much
mutual suspicion to overcome.
Mr Priebus’s
calculation was different He feared the party would take the blame if
Mr Trump lost heavily in the election and threw his weight behind the
brash New Yorker once he had clinched the party nomination with 14.5
million primary votes, more than any previous nominee.
After the election, his
reward was a plum job at the heart of the White House (bringing with
him Mr Spicer, his strategist) and his role has largely been to act
as conduit to Republican leaders in Congress, the men and women who
must try to deliver the President’s legislative agenda.
The still leaves the
party apparatchiks with a problem inside the White House: they are
outsiders to the small crew which launched Donald Trump’s campaign.
That, according to one
veteran Republican operative, is the best way to understand the under
currents of this White House: Not by considering conservatives and
moderates, or establishment versus anti-establishment but by
measuring time served.
It’s the Band of
Brothers syndrome. Observers compare the late arrivals with the
new faces arriving to serve in 101st Airborne's Easy Company, well
after it had forged a camaraderie through training for and then
fighting in months of warfare. The replacements were never going to
fit in easily.
“It’s great that
you are with us now but you didn’t fight your way off the Normandy
beaches,” is how he put it.
The result is that Mr
Priebus has taken more than his fair share of blame for White House
blunders. The president reportedly took to asking Oval Office
visitors for their opinion on his chief of staff’s performance as
the Republican healthcare bill struggled to make it through the House
of Representatives.
It is a case of last
in, first out – as Mr Spicer has discovered.
To survive this far
they have had to build alliances with Steve Bannon’s
anti-establishment faction to fend off the rising influence of Jared
Kushner and the family wing. But that’s a micro thing, backing each
other on a case by case basis, rather than a macro move, according to
an administration source.
That offers a survival
strategy inside the White House. But outside they are still viewed
with hostility by Mr Trump’s hard core who are intent on draining
the swamp.
The Republican
stalwarts are blamed for diverting Mr Trump from his populist agenda
and replacing it with a conventionally conservative plan, cutting
taxes for the rich and focussing too much time and attention on
Obamacare.
In particular they
reserve maximum ire for another of the Republican apparatchiks –
John DeStefano, who serves as director of presidential personnel.
His position gives him
extraordinary power across the administration, identifying picks for
senior positions that need Senate confirmation as well as the more
than 3,000 lower level posts that don’t.
His background, in
traditional party politics before becoming political director for
former House speaker John Boehner (an establishment figure ultimately
toppled by the forces that gave rise to Donald Trump), means he is
suspected of using the recruiting office to stymie their hopes for
upending federal government.
The economic
nationalists see every vacancy – of which there are still thousands
– or incumbent left in place as a victory for inertia and an
entrenched elite.
Government on
autopilot, is the frequent cry from American Firsters who want their
revolution now.
That leaves Mr Priebus
and what is left of his Republican cadre in a precarious position.
Their motives are scrutinised and their loyalty questioned.
And so long as Mr
Trump’s strategy is to rile up his narrow base against a “fake
news” media and biased establishment, the party apparatchiks inside
his administration will find themselves in the firing line.
Inside Trump's White
House Part IV: The Wall Street millionaires fighting the globalist
corner
There aren’t many
people in this White House who would have served under any other
president. Misfits, outsiders and political neophytes make up the
bulk of appointments.
One of the outstanding
exceptions is Gary Cohn. His 25 years at Goldman Sachs, history of
political donations, and personal connections mark him as a typical
appointee. But in this topsy turvy administration, those three
qualities also count as handicaps.
Those donations were to
Democrats, those connections were to liberal causes (his wife served
on the board of Planned Parenthood) and his career has been spent at
the bank depicted as the centre of a global political conspiracy by
his new boss.
Throughout the
campaign, Donald Trump echoed the imagery of a Rolling Stone writer
who once described Goldman Sachs as a “vampire squid”. The
candidate’s populist rhetoric blamed bankers in general for the
great recession and that one bank in particular for its hold on
American politicians, such as Ted Cruz and his Democratic opponent.
“I know the guys at
Goldman Sachs. They have total, total control over [Cruz]," he
said. "Just like they have total control over Hillary Clinton."
Things became so bad
that the bank banned its employees from making donations to the
campaign.
So it was something of
a surprise to see the bank’s chief operating officer arriving at
Trump Tower in November – scheduled between boxer Floyd Mayweather
and rapper Kanye West – and heading up the golden elevator to a
meeting with Mr Trump.
After an hour
explaining such basics as why a strong dollar was not necessarily
good for the American economy, he was offered a job as director of
the National Economics Council, the central White House policy forum.
As such, he has been at
the heart of almost every big political decision.
For now, the Wall
Streeters are on the rise
During the run-up to
the G20 his was the loudest voice arguing against the protectionist
populists who wanted tariffs on steel imports of as much as 25 per
cent. The consequences, he warned, would be a trade war with China.
He was opposed to
withdrawal from the Paris accords, disputing publicly Mr Trump’s
claim that it would help keep the US coal industry alive.
And he was among the
group of internationalist and pragmatic figures who successfully
urged the president to renegotiate the North American Free Trade
Agreement rather than torpedo it (with an executive order
drafted by Steve Bannon and his economic nationalist allies).
As such, Mr Cohn and a
handful of others carry the hopes of optimists who still believe Mr
Trump might be nudged to more centrist positions.
They are the grown-ups,
the people who know how the world works and have the expertise to
resist the isolationists in the White House.
Among them are Steve
Mnuchin, another Goldman Sachs alumnus who founded several hedge
funds before being appointed Treasury Secretary. At $300 million, he
has the sort of eye-catching wealth that impresses Mr Trump. Anthony
Scaramucci, a luxuriantly coiffed Democratic donor and financier,
arrived on Friday as the new director of communications. And there is
Dina Powell, one of the most senior women in the White House. She
headed Goldman Sachs’ charitable foundation before being approached
by Ivanka Trump to become an adviser to the president on
entrepreneurship and women’s empowerment.
Since then she has been
profiled repeatedly as a rising star, promoted quickly to become
Deputy National Security Adviser and was the only woman present with
Mr Trump and his core team at Mar-a-Lago on the night he launched
missile strikes on Syria.
Her Republican bona
fides – she served in George W Bush’s White House – and
friendship with Ivanka, mean she bridges some of the divides within
the White House, insulating her from the barbs of the Bannonites who
see the New York contingent as Democrats, globalists and late
arrivals to the Trump project.
Even so, they could yet
prove crucial to Mr Trump’s success. In particular this is the wing
most anxious to press ahead with tax reform and deliver a much needed
legislative win.
They have numbers on
their side. Mr Cohn’s NEC has about 30 staff, giving it the sort of
weight other factions lack. And there is the New York alliance with
the Kushners to fall back on.
Mr Cohn himself is
spoken of as a possible future chief of staff, should the president
finally decide to put Reince Priebus out of his misery.
For now, the Wall
Streeters are on the rise. The recent arrival of The Mooch – as Mr
Scaramucci is known – suggests that when Mr Trump is in trouble he
returns to his roots, bringing in talent from New York City whatever
their past political leanings might be.
Inside Trump's White
House Part V: The retired generals holding the isolationists at bay –
for now
Moments after being
sworn in as America’s 26th defence secretary, Jim Mattis stood
behind the president’s left shoulder, his face fixed so as to
betray no emotion. Donald Trump sat before a giant mock-up of the
Medal of Honour in the Pentagon’s Hall of Heroes signing an
executive order banning the arrival of travellers from seven mostly
Muslim nations.
As a retired
Marine general, Mr Mattis knew the costs. He had fought in Iraq
alongside local troops and translators who would no longer be
allowed into the country they had served.
It was day one in the
job, but the bargain he had just made with the Trump administration
was clear.
So when the Pentagon
issued a statement later in the day it made no mention of the ban.
The pen used to sign
the ban was given to Mike Pence, the vice president, who had nodded
along enthusiastically to Mr Trump’s sales pitch. Poker-faced Mr
Mattis accepted a second pen used to sign a second executive order
committing the government to building up military forces.
The episode illustrates
two aspects of this administration: Mr Trump’s enthusiastic embrace
of the military, its alpha males and its symbolism; and their
reluctance to endorse the president’s more extreme pronouncements.
The generals (former
and current) in this administration – including HR McMaster,
National Security Adviser, and John Kelly, another retired
Marine general who runs the Department of Homeland Security
– bring prestige, credibility and know-how. They provide ballast to
a White House filled with officials whose main qualification is
friendship or kinship with Mr Trump.
But, like the Wall
Street faction in this White House, their can-do success story is
accompanied by lessons learned the hard way, making them a check on
the president’s wilder impulses.
So although introducing
his defence secretary by the nickname of “Mad Dog” may give Mr
Trump a TV thrill, it misses the fact that few of Mr Mattis’s
friends use it.They know him as a sober scholar-soldier, whose world
view is shaped by three wars and the lives lost in them.
He made that clear in
his confirmation hearings, laying down a clear red line in his
relationship with the commander in chief.
“History is clear,”
he told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “Nations with strong
allies thrive, and those without them wither.”
That sets
the generals at odds with the isolationist,
anti-interventionist America First sentiments of Steve Bannon, which
did so much to propel Mr Trump’s election. – despite what Mr
Trump may have said about Nato, for example.Instead the generals find
themselves working to reassure allies that America is not trying to
break down the post-war international order
They are harder on
Russia, softer on China and more inclined to commit American troops
around the world than their boss. In short, their outlook brings a
more conventional foreign policy than might have otherwise been
expected.
And they have already
scored wins. Mr Trump has denounced Russia’s support of Syria and
reaffirmed America’s commitment to Nato, last month confirming his
backing for the alliance’s mutual defence pact (despite the
opposition of the Bannonites).
The generals’
role in national security and foreign policy have had conflicting
impacts on another senior figure. Their portfolios overlap with that
of Rex Tillerson, the Secretary of State who finds himself in danger
of becoming the forgotten man in this administration.
At times he has worked
with Mr Mattis on trying to heal divisions in the Middle East,
reining in Mr Trump’s angry rhetoric on Qatar (blamed by the
president for supporting terrorists) in an effort to end the
Saudi-Emirati blockade of Doha.
The generals, it seems,
can get away with diverging from their president, protected by the
epaulettes that Mr Trump finds so appealing. When Mr Tillerson, on
the other hand, has tried to row back the more extreme White House
positions he has been contradicted in public for his trouble.
Already there talk of a
Rexit, with growing whispers in Washington that a disgruntled
secretary of state could jump before he face further humiliation.
Exactly how the foreign
policy dynamic plays out will become clearer this summer, as the
White House finalises its Afghanistan strategy.
Gen McMaster is pushing
for a mini-surge of several thousand troops with a long-term
commitment to increase pressure to force the Taliban to negotiate –
a sort of status quo plus. Mr Mattis and Mr Tillerson have quietly
cautioned against the plan, telling their colleague that the proposal
won’t fly with a president who wants a more outside-the-box
solution. To Mr Bannon's American Firsters sending more soldiers
sounds like a step down the slippery slope to nation building, the
trap that ensnared previous presidents.
The outcome, when it
finally arrives, will provide a Litmus test of whether
the generals have been able to keep the isolationists at
bay. Fail and they will be compared with Colin Powell, a respected
and popular general who as George W Bush’s secretary of
state was ultimately squeezed out of the big policy decisions.
Inside Trump's White
House Part VI: The watch-it-all-burn, America First Bannonites
Steve Bannon has been
many things: an officer in the US Navy, investment banker, director
of the research project Biosphere 2, Hollywood mogul, media executive
and part of a company mining and selling virtual gold in online
games.
His peripatetic career,
jumping from one fad to the next, made him easy to dismiss as he
circulated through the world of Republican politics. A “political
grifter seeking to profit from the latest trend,” was how the
journalist Joshua Green saw him in 2011, dismissing him as just
another chancer looking for an empty set of coattails.
Six years later he is
chief strategist to the president of the US, and very possibly the
second most important person in the White House.
Mr Green’s new
book, Devil’s Bargain, details how Mr Bannon found in Donald Trump
the perfect vehicle for his synthesis of blue-collar values,
apocalyptic philosophy and sweeping historical analysis. His genius
was to harness the candidate’s anger and name recognition in
pursuit of a populist programme of economic nationalism.
With it, he brought an
understanding of the electorate and the modern political landscape,
informed as much by that odd venture into online gaming (“These
guys, these rootless white males, had monster power,” he later said
about an underground economy that was getting 1.5 billion page views
a month) as much as his time as head of Breitbart News.
So when the Trump
campaign was accused of running a TV ad riddled with anti-Semitic
triggers – complete with nods to a global financial
conspiracy and namechecks for Jewish money men and women such as
George Soros – it was Mr Bannon who whispered in his
boss’s ear to double down. “Darkness is good,” he told his
candidate. “Don’t let up.”
His reward in power was
to be appointed chief strategist, keeper of the populist flame
inside the White House. Around him he has allies who are wedded to
his belief that protectionism, restrictive immigration policies and
non-interventionism represent the future of the Republican Party.
He has long been close
to Jeff Sessions, going back to the years when the Senator from
Alabama was kept at arms length by much of the Republican Party for
his outlying views on immigration and history of racist comments. At
one time he was the figure Mr Bannon wanted to run for president: He
would not have won but he would have reset the debate on immigration
that seemed to be tilting towards a liberal win.
Instead, as Mr Green’s
new account describes, he persuaded Mr Sessions to endorse Mr Trump’s
run, ensuring that immigration rose to the top of his candidate’s
agenda.
And it brought Stephen
Miller, who worked for the senator, into the team.
While Mr Sessions is
now attorney general, busily toughening controls on illegal
immigrants, Stephen Miller is Mr Trump’s senior policy adviser and
author of some of his most notable speeches.
Bannonite blood course
through this administration.
Sebastian Gorka, for
example, joined the campaign team as a national security expert with
an understanding of radical Islamist terrorism. His clash of
civilisations analysis chimed with Mr Bannon’s worldview and he
worked for a time as an editor at Breitbart News.
But in power, he has
been kept away from national security by the generals who dominate
the portfolio and are intent on pursuing a more conventional policy.
Instead, his throaty British accent is a fixture on cable news
networks where he has frequently been Mr Trump’s go-to defender
when times are tough.
In May, speculation
swirled that he was on his way out, dogged by allegations that he was
a member of a far-Right order in his father’s native Hungary. That
he survived was in part down to the patronage of Mr Bannon plus the
golden rule of this White House: It does not matter whom you anger –
the media, the opposition, the Republican hierarchy – just so long
as you display sufficient loyalty to the President himself.
Mr Bannon too has
learned how to ride the ups and downs. At one time his celebrity
threatened to overtake that of his boss (remember that Time magazine
cover headlined “The Great Manipulator") and rumours of
his impending downfall swirled.
But by last month, he
was back taking a prominent position in the White House rose
garden soiree, where a jazz band played as Mr Trump announced he was
pulling the US out of the Paris climate agreements – a big win for
the Bannonites.
So although his clashes
with Jared Kushner and the family wing overshadowed the early weeks
of the presidency, he has since managed to find common cause with the
fragile Republican establishment faction to consolidate his position.
With a shake-up of the
administration expected over the summer, he has learned the great
lesson of political gurus and practitioners of the dark arts. The
best place to be is not in the headlines, but operating quietly in
the shadows, managing and manipulating rival factions.
“I am Thomas Cromwell
in the court of the Tudors,” is how he put it in an interview last
year.
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