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This afternoon Attorney General Jeff Sessions gave a speech down at the USA-Mexico border at Nogales, Arizona with an amazingly stark line which mixed right wing apocalyptic snuff flicks and the kind of talk you hear from Steve Bannon and top aide Stephen Miller.
Here’s one key passage from the speech as prepared for delivery …
The premise of most liberal internationalist interventionism is not just preserving norms about human rights and preventing mass killing but the belief that totalizing violence is inherently unstable and spreads. This was the idea in the Balkans in the 1990s. By and large, the Clinton administration’s efforts, long delayed, often incomplete, largely vindicated this idea. The Balkans are no paradise but there are no mass killings there today. And there’s a slow progress of integration into European norms and the European state system.
Over the weekend, I wrote this piece on the bizarre, surreal, totally Trumpian situation in which Steve Bannon, ersatz “nationalist”, part-time anti-unrooted (((cosmopolitan globalist elite)))) and all around Trump ideologue had managed to somehow summon up a situation out of his and his followers deepest fever dreams: he’s on the verge of getting pushed out of the White House by the President’s Jewish legacy real estate tycoon son-in-law, a couple of Jewish bankers from Goldman Sachs and … well, that’s really enough right there, isn’t it?
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Glenn Thrush of The New York Times has a very interesting article out on Paul Manafort. It contains no one blockbuster piece of information. In fact, it is oddly understated, leaving it to the reader to draw what I think is a fairly straightforward conclusion. The article is based on access Thrush received to a series of emails and memos Manafort prepared for Trump (Glenn, WTF? Please publish the actual memos and emails.)
The upshot is that Manafort aggressively courted Trump for the job, sold himself creatively and – key for Trump, one imagines – offered to work for free.
According to the AP, President Trump is ditching his tax plan and starting the search for a tax plan he can pass.
Here’s notable news this morning. K.T. McFarland, a key Flynn holdover at the NSC and a comically unqualified Fox News National Security ‘analyst’, has been fired as the number two person at the National Security Council. This is more house-cleaning by National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster. (Initials and Irish surnames? No, no idea. Maybe there’s a Times trend piece.)
Mike Allen likely has as good a sources as anyone for the White House Game of Thrones story. He says this morning that Priebus will now be allowed to stay. He is “‘with the program’ of a more inclusive style, and will stay.”
It is worth noting here that Priebus was a job-seeker convert to Bannonism in the first place. Now he’ll unconvert to keep his job. Bannon too might get to stay. But only at a steep price. As Allen puts it, “Either Steve becomes a team player and gets along with people, or he’ll be gone.” To render this in the alt-Trump creole, Bannon can stay if he agrees to go cuck.
All signs suggest we’re now in the “President Trump has full confidence in Michael Flynn” phase of Steve Bannon’s tenure in the Trump White House. I don’t know whether this is some moron genius dialectic on Bannon’s part or just Karma. But can we miss that the man who gave coherence and verve to Trump’s campaign against the ‘globalists’ and unrooted cosmopolitan elites is about to be booted by the President’s Jewish tycoon son-in-law and a group of bankers (yes, Jewish bankers) from Goldman Sachs? These are I confess uncomfortable observations, but consider this …