National Security Council

Hillary Clinton would have Handled the Coronavirus Differently

Imagine an alternate reality where there was no Electoral College and Hillary Clinton won the Presidential Election in 2016. Fast forward to 2020 and the first stirrings of a new virus in China are making their way to the Pandemic Team on Clinton’s National Security Council. What would a Hillary Clinton Presidency have done? Probably … Read more

Trump’s ‘House of Cards’: Stephen Bannon removed from principals committee of NSC (but can still attend meetings)

It looks as if we have a House of Cards power struggle going on inside Trumpland, despite denials.

The New York Times reports, Trump Removes Stephen Bannon From National Security Council Post:

For the first 10 weeks of President Trump’s administration, no adviser loomed larger in the public imagination than Stephen K. Bannon, the raw and rumpled former chairman of Breitbart News who considers himself a “virulently anti-establishment” revolutionary out to destroy the “administrative state.”

But behind the scenes, White House officials said, the ideologist who enjoyed the president’s confidence became increasingly embattled as other advisers, including Mr. Trump’s daughter [Ivanka] and son-in-law [Jared Kushner], complained about setbacks on health care and immigration. Lately, Mr. Bannon has been conspicuously absent from some meetings. And now he has lost his seat at the national security table.

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‘Trump’s brain’, Stephen K. Bannon, elevated to National Security Council

Informed readers will recall that Karl Rove aka “turdblossom” was known as Bush’s Brain. Rove is credited with making “W” president. He has also been credited as the unidentified White House aide in Ron Suskind’s report in The New York Times Magazine, “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” quoted as saying:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Screen Shot 2017-01-30 at 7.57.21 AMNow we have Stephen K. Bannon, a white nationalist racist who ran the alt-right web site Breitbart and the Trump campaign, who is now Trump’s chief political strategist in the White House. It is fair to characterize Bannon as “Trump’s Brain.”

Bannon is no doubt the original source for Trump’s “alternative facts,” something his web site has specializes in for years. This past week Bannon attempted to silence the critical media with a threat that the Media Should ‘Keep Its Mouth Shut’:

Chief White House strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, ratcheted up the attacks, arguing that news organizations had been “humiliated” by the election outcome and repeatedly describing the media as “the opposition party” of the current administration.

“The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while,” Mr. Bannon said in an interview on Wednesday.

“I want you to quote this,” Mr. Bannon added. “The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.”

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