Caution, swamp draining in progress.

Posted by Pointman on October 13, 2017 · 34 Comments 

It’s a self-evident truism that every large organisation requires some sort of overall leadership. The usual form is one head, perhaps only titular or perhaps almost omnipotent, surrounded by people upon whom that person has devolved some of his power so that they can assume responsibility for a designated area that requires management. To a varying extent, they also act as advisers to the boss when policy decisions must be made.

That common arrangement of a leader surrounded by trusted confidants goes by a lot of names such as the board, senior management or as it’s known in politics, the cabinet. Whatever name it goes by, the unspoken rule is they discuss policy decisions in private, and irrespective of how divisively the final decision has been reached, it is always presented to the outside world with a united front. The unspoken rule is a faction who didn’t get their way still have to support the decision in public. This rule is commonly referred to as cabinet collective responsibility and in one form or another exists at the top of every western democracy.

While a president or Prime Minister, being the person elected by the people to implement his election pledges, ultimately decides policy, he still has to accommodate the various factions of his party by allowing their leading figures some role in the inner cabinet. Where the system breaks down is when the losing faction in a cabinet decides to actively sabotage the implementation of policies they don’t agree with using various covert means such as negative briefing outside the cabinet or using procedural mechanisms to stymie the legislation’s progress through the legislature.

This is what’s been happening in the Trump administration for the last year.

The rebel faction in the cabinet, who’re representative of the old Republican way of doing business, regard Trump and the populist mandate he’s trying to implement as a transient thing which they can stifle as a prelude to getting rid of him and returning the Washington swamp to business as usual. The leaders of this faction are the Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and to a lesser extent Speaker of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan, who can barely conceal their distaste of the leader and administration they’re supposed to be serving.

Given the Republican majority in both houses of congress, the failure to do things like repeal Obamacare or implement tax reforms can only be laid squarely at the door of Republican congressmen rather than a Democrat party that is still in total disarray after losing last year’s election. Increasingly, the people who voted for Trump and his agenda have become aware of the problem and regard such underhand legislative sabotage as a betrayal by some politicians they elected. Not surprisingly, they’ve become angry and frustrated by it.

Trump, because of the unspoken rule of cabinet policy presentation, cannot just simply attack them publicly or fire them for their disloyalty or outright duplicity, and he must also bear in mind they still have a power base within the Republican party. The obvious way forward for Trump is to eliminate their power base as a prelude to firing them, and this is exactly what he’s doing with the upcoming congressional primaries. All the foot soldier congressmen supporting those who’re hindering Trump’s policy roll out will either come to heel and abandon their tacit support for the swamp, or run the risk of having to fight a congressional primary against a candidate supported by the Trump faction.

Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka were powerful inner cabinet members who were definitely in the Trump faction and like Trump and for the same cabinet reason, couldn’t publicly go after the GOP swamp faction. They both resigned rather unexpectedly and this was an event widely celebrated by the swampers and fake news industry alike as signifying that the reforming edge was being taken off the Trump agenda and he was knuckling under to the establishment way of doing things.

I think the reverse is actually true. It’s yet another example of people chronically underestimating Trump and the deviousness of his long-term thinking behind that seemingly simplistic and blunt façade.

Being outside the cabinet, the unspoken rule no longer applied, so Bannon’s attack on the Republican old guard commenced almost immediately. Within days of him quitting, Bannon resumed control of Breitbart news whose editorial slant immediately opened fire on the administration’s enemies within. He moved it straight onto a war footing against the anti-Trump Republicans.

Despite the liberal’s hatred of Breitbart and the establishment Republican’s grudging acceptance of it as some grubby sort of useful but necessary evil, the fact remains that it’s a very influential news source amongst Trump’s grass-roots supporters, since almost all the rest of the media are almost pathologically anti-Trump, never mind being knee-jerk critics of any conservative initiative.

More importantly, Bannon has rapidly put together a loose organisation of some extremely rich former donors to the Republican party who’re thoroughly frustrated with nearly a year’s length of a majority Republican congress that has achieved very few of the great things that were widely expected of it. They’re closing their wallets to what they perceive as the do-nothing element of the Republican establishment but opening them up to Bannon, who’s going to run populist primary candidates against anti-Trump congressmen in 2018 and 2020.

This strategy is already bearing results with the defeat of the establishment backed candidate Luther Strange by the populist Roy Moore in the Alabama Republican primary recently. That can only be called a writing on the wall event for the Republican swampers and is widely considered to be the reason for several sitting Republican congressmen like Bob Corker deciding not to contest their seats in the upcoming primaries.

Against a still powerful Steve Bannon’s political ferocity, the influence of the Breitbart news machine bearing down on them, the withholding of the usual donors’ funds and at the same time up against Bannon’s extremely well-funded organisation backing populist candidates, they don’t stand a chance and they’re politic enough to know that when holding a bad hand of cards like that, all you can do is fold it and walk away from the table.

Despite the momentary blip of him backing the loser Strange, the whole situation is working out very well for Trump. Apparently being persuaded by the swamper establishment to endorse the wrong candidate and therefore embarrass their president, has much reduced their influence in the inner cabinet. It’s yet another complex political situation which just happens to shake out in such a way as to confound Trump’s enemies and almost amazingly couldn’t have worked out any better if it had been planned that way.

And that’s because it was planned exactly that way.

Despite fake news reports to the contrary, Bannon has been very careful not to make any attacks on Trump and has already firmly established the narrative that he’s defending the agenda Trump was elected on from the machinations of a fundamentally disloyal GOP. To borrow a phrase from Lincoln who when asked why he’d invited a bitter enemy of his to join the cabinet replied, “I want him inside the tent pissing out, rather than outside pissing in”. In my opinion, Trump has deliberately positioned Bannon outside the tent to do some very selective inward pissing.

Bannon is now Trump’s deniable attack bulldog operating outside the cabinet and its restrictions, who over the next year will desolate the Republican anti-Trump faction from its congressional roots right up to its leading figures like McConnell and thereby not only break the legislative log jam and its supporters in the Republican party, but also clear the way for some big wins by the Trump faction in next year’s mid terms.

©Pointman

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Filed under Article · Tagged with Bannon, mid-terms, Steve Bannon