No, he didn’t make the call to motivate his sacking, although it may have been intended as justification for his move. He was already planning his exit when he gave that interview, and it was probably voluntarily and cooperatively planned with Trump.
Anything involving internal West Wing manoeuvres is hard to read. But as a best guess:
Moving his desk from the West Wing back to Brietbart HQ doesn’t actually cost him any power. His job was senior advisor; he can still advise.
Bannon is Trump’s Goebbels. Brietbart was always his main power base and weapon. Moving back to direct control doesn’t hurt him.
Bannon’s exit substantially dissipates the heat Trump has been taking over Charlottesville. It shouldn’t, but it will.
The interview set Bannon up as the hero of the true believers in the Trump base. This positions him well to campaign against the “disloyal” elements remaining in the GOP.
The events preceding this were the removal of the primary RNC-GOP operatives in the West Wing (Spicer, Priebus) and the ramping up of both local and Russian sourced online attacks on one of the last old-school RNC representatives in the administration: McMaster.
There are two significant threats to Trump: the people and the RNC.
Increasingly overt fascist violence keeps the people cowed, so long as you don’t ramp it up so fast as to shock them into a unified response. Charlottesville and Korea upped the heat, Bannon lowered it with his interview and exit. Repeat the cycle, cranking the frog a little hotter each time.
The purge of the GOP is on. They’ve almost cleared the West Wing of RNC partisans, and they’re gearing up to revise the legislature in the primaries. If they manage that, all threat of impeachment or indictment is gone. Bannon is now well positioned to aid in this task.
He isn’t actually badmouthing Trump. He’s saying that Trump is surrounded by disloyal traitors, and the base needs to act to ensure they return to purity.
What lot of people fail to understand is that the white house was always “overstaffed” in a sense. We, including the media, got used to it. Call and they answer. Attend media events, get access. Set up an interview, get it. It doesn’t necessarily have to run that way from a technical standpoint. An administration like this one could simply have fewer people, to accomplish fewer things and solve a couple problems simultaneously.
Fewer staff means fewer leak opps, and the unintended leaks that do occur can be blamed on fewer individuals. Less work, lower profile.
Queries from media, the public, other government depts, just go unanswered. Until such time as the admin decides it is time to address it.
Probably other stuff, too. Not that I think any of it is good. It’s not. It explains why so little has been done. The chaos still finds them, no matter how streamlined they think they are. If there were a bigger team, with strongly positive intra-team dynamics, then I’m pretty sure stuff like repealing Obamacare would have happened: more people talking it up. But they chose this route, so let them rot.
And to my original point about going underground is that we are seeing the development of a shadow government, which you can see signs of by the apparent lack of an official capacity. That’s the sad, scary part of all this. We are being played bigly and don’t even realize it.
From Breitbart he has a line to Trump that can’t be blocked or filtered by “globalist” staff. In fact, with the resources of Cambridge Analytica, they could probably pick out browsing by Trump’s phone and give him a custom version of the site.
Maybe 2003, my boss (owner of the ISP I worked at) had us do exactly this to his buddy who was the CEO of a company whose website we hosted. Showed a custom version of their homepage hosting the Paris Hilton video. Good stuff.
There’s a Breirbart app, so if Trump uses that, then Bannon/Mercer control the vertical and have the President’s dog whistle. They don’t need a special version of the app, they just have to know that it’s him and change the feed.
Hmm. Since Trump’s attention span is limited, drop all the gaming stories for their gamergate readers. Kill any adverts. Re-prioritize the rest: Character assassinations and anything else they want him to read go to the top. Giving him custom versions of stories could be done, but carefully. (Oh, and definitely track what he reads.)
With Cambridge Analytica to do the crunching, they could probably try to profile all their readers. During campaigns, they could prioritize local election stories to their alt-right base.
