The Washington Post reports: When Stephen K. Bannon reported for work Wednesday, he did not act like a man who had just been publicly humiliated by his boss.
The White House chief strategist cycled in and out of the Oval Office for meetings with President Trump and took a seat in the front row of the East Room for the afternoon visit of NATO’s secretary general, flanked by some of the very advisers with whom he has been feuding.
But for Bannon, the day’s routine obscured the reality that he is a marked man — diminished by weeks of battles with the bloc of centrists led by Trump’s daughter and son-in-law and cut down by the president himself, who belittled Bannon in an interview with the New York Post.
The president’s comments were described by White House officials as a dressing-down and warning shot, though one Bannon friend, reflecting on them Wednesday, likened Bannon to a terminally ill family member who had been moved into hospice care. [Continue reading…]
Ah, the hard work of normalization! Now that Bannon is being publicly humiliated by The Boss, like every other associate and rival has been and will be, we are expected to believe that ‘centrists’ are back in power. Said centrists being the closest of family members, whose political beliefs & inclinations are all but unknown, but who reside inside a personalized sphere of safety around our neo-Nero. For the moment.
Most striking, I think, is the way that Bannon portraiture has changed. Out come the excellent Canon and Nikon telephoto lenses, now focused to a T, so you can see every blotch and burst capillary in his ruined visage, every greasy strand of hair in his thick do, now printed in lurid reddish-bluish tones. One is reminded of Old Testament passages on the diseases of livestock. A moment of national catharsis, after which we will all feel better.