People have been underestimating these asshats since 2015 and look what happened. I’m not making an argument that they are indeed brilliant, but they absolutely understand the game.
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Meh, if Trump gets impeached, what’s the backup plan? Oh yeah, President Pence. If they impeach at just the right time, maybe the Repubs will retain their majorities and then we’ll see what theocracy looks like.
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I don’t think they understand any game. Most political strategists are one-trick ponies.
A few elections ago the Conservative Party of Canada won control of the federal government. The Liberal Party picked a new leader.
The Conservatives made fun of him as being clueless. They won the next election and people said, “Negative ads work.” He left and the Liberals picked a new leader.
The conservatives attacked him as being not really Canadian because he’d spent most of his career as a US academic. They won the next election and people said, “Negative ads work.” The liberals picked another new leader.
The conservatives attacked him as being too young and substanceless, “not ready” for the job. The liberals largely ran on what was described as “sunny ways”. The liberals came up from third and won a strong victory.
None of the people who said, “Negative ads work” have any explanation for this. No pundits came forward to say, “Well, I said negative ads work, but I guess it’s really complicated and different things work at different times and it’s hard to predict which way the public will go.”
Sometimes if you hit on 18 the top card will be a 3. That doesn’t make you good at blackjack.
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Not exactly. Bannon was ejected from the Trump administration after he was fingered as the one who came up with the “many sides” rhetoric after a bunch of actual Nazis got together to do and say actual Nazi things in order to “unite” the right, then flipped out like pathetic children when confronted with the reality that not very many people like Nazis, ultimately resulting in one of them murdering some people with his car.
As to whether Bannon came up with that or not is probably going to be a mystery forever, though. It’s certainly the kind of dog-whistle race baiting that he’s known for, but there were a lot of things coming out about Bannon, and his presence was not generally well tolerated by other people in the administration, as well as the vast majority of the American public. He was polling very negatively even among self-identified conservatives well before he was ousted, so it’s entirely possible that they were just looking for a reason to fire him that didn’t openly admit that the administration was caving to “leftist pressure” (even though people far from the left weren’t happy about him either) or in any way admitting fault.
That’s Trump’s M.O. anyway. He is, probably literally, physically incapable of accepting fault for anything so when people call out his mistakes he finds creative ways of framing himself as not technically wrong/at fault. I think Bannon held on longer than expected partly because I’m fairly certain that he has dirt on Trump (that fits his M.O.) but I also think that Trump may have been holding onto him as a high-value sacrifice. He knew Bannon was widely disliked/distrusted and there were pretty good reasons why he should have never been in the White House in the first place, but Trump waited until he (being Trump) said some shit so stupid that for weeks afterwords something like 75% of the US population was “seriously concerned” about a civil war to fire him. Maybe he wrote it, or maybe Trump keeps controversial figures in his employ so that he can use them as a sort of ablative PR armor. Fortunately for the world, it seems like the number of people willing to take the job as “Donald Trump’s PR meat shield” is getting pretty small pretty fast.
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is fake news, comrade bannon wear two shirt
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I’m going with the theory this is Bannon trying to re-establish his relevance by being “right” about something (anything) after he got his ass handed to him in Alabama.
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ugh, he’s totally going to run in 2020, isn’t he?
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So… why are we just now hearing about this?
Presumably because this Wolff guy sat on it for six months while he finished his book. Which I understand on one level–the market for ripped-from-the-headlines hardcover political porn is pretty brutal–but COME ON, DUDE. There was a public interest here!
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2 billion were spent by Clinton and Trump, and the financial repurcussions of the outcome could make that look like pocket change. I dont believe the whole thing came down to a lucky draw, there is too much at stake.
The bigger problem is that underestimating team trump at this point in time is not a helpful strategy. These are sociopathic gangsters with a deep understanding of the world they live in, and we need to treat them as such.
Maaybe the anti trump crowd is exaggerating his idiocy to make themselves feel better about the situation??
Just my gut feeling. No longer can I underestimate the racist assholes, or the people that exploit them for power.
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This depend on how many he chased by
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What is “useless idiot,” Alex?
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But it’s kind of impossible to believe it didn’t come down to the luck of the draw. Trump somehow won the election while losing by 3M votes. He didn’t win those rustbelt states convincingly, he won by less than a quarter of a percent.
Trump’s margin of victory was so razor thin that if anything had gone wrong for him he probably would have lost. If the access hollywood tape came out a few weeks closer to the election, if there weren’t quite as many fake news posts on facebook, if Comey hadn’t interfered on Trump’s behalf at the last minute (or even if he had done so but a week sooner) Trump probably would have lost. And the fact that the Clinton campaign neglected those states wasn’t Bannon’s doing; Bannon’s only chance to win was that their opponent’s screwed up big.
That’s just the big stuff. When it’s a quarter percent it’s possible Clinton would have been president had there been a big rain storm over certain counties.
I never underestimated their chances of winning. Like I said, stupid people win elections all the time.
I think we need to understand that the world we live in is one in which idiotic socipathic gangsters can take over. People don’t rise to the top because of their intelligence or their understanding. Bannon and Trump got where they are because because of bigotry, not because of merit.
Thinking that Bannon is stupid doesn’t make me feel better about the situation. I just don’t think the problem we are facing is that evil geniuses are capable of great evil. I think the problem is that our culture rewards the worst kind of behaviour.
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Largely because what Bannon thinks shouldn’t be carrying much weight. We already know about the meeting.
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If Bannon knew all of this all along, why didn’t he call the FBI? Or did her? Dun, dun, dun!
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he, He, HE!!!
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Yes! This! I can’t fathom how anyone would see a shred of intelligence, strategy or insight from anyone even remotely attached to 1600 Penn right now. They are all clearly stumbling their way through things that they have no conception of while also doing an incredibly poor job making it seem otherwise. The emperor has no clothes (nor does his vizier, his hot princess, his blustery enforcers or any other damn one of them).
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Perhaps because his pathology is boundless.
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I like this, and I’m going to quote you. It’s even better than my favorite, “Winning the lottery doesn’t mean you’re a financial genius”.
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