How honey badger Bannon ate Donald Trump for lunch
What is a Steve Bannon? And if so, why? I have never seen a spiky American political operative reduce so many commentators to making lists. Normally opinionators pick an angle and stick to it, but during the Bannon years, they floundered in a sea of possibilities.
Bannon birthed U.S. President Donald Trump and worked as his White House chief strategist. He was fired on Friday. Here’s the upsetting part: in many ways, Bannon was the more sensible of the two.
Joshua Green’s new book, Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump and the Storming of the Presidency, makes a good effort at tracking Bannon before and during the election. Trump was an empty vessel. Bannon gave him a world view, plus “an infrastructure of conservative organizations” that worked “sometimes in tandem with mainstream media” to destroy Hillary Clinton.
Bannon was a kingmaker. He provided Green with acres of interviewing time and the book is very much Bannon’s version of things.
But up against a publishing deadline, Green ended the book on June 5 with an afterword, a list of dire reasons for the presidency falling apart as soon as it began. 1. Trump thought being president was about asserting personal dominance, rather than working with people and groups, including Congress.
2. He ran against the Republican Party, Wall Street and Paul Ryan, and then reverted to their agenda.
3. He doesn’t have a political philosophy, being nothing more than a creature of his ego.
This makes sense. But then came that interview Bannon gave to a left-wing outlet on Wednesday, saying white supremacists were clowns, a nuclear war with North Korea was beyond the pale, and that what he really wanted was economic war with China.
Why would Bannon have done this? Margaret Hartmann of New York Magazine made a list: 1. He made a mistake. 2. Or he leaked on purpose, trying to damage a rival for Trump’s ear, or to assert his dominance over Trump, or to distract from Trump’s disastrous reaction to Charlottesville.
3. Or he just didn’t care if he was fired, which he was.
I could write essays on my own response: 1. No, he didn’t. 2. Yes, partly right. He may have already been fired. 3. Yes. But opinionating adds to the chaos, and chaos is what Bannon loves. He’s a hypercompetitive, hyperaggressive “political grifter” whose life in the Navy, Wall Street, Hollywood finance, gaming, and Breitbart News turned him into a malevolent man who wants to blow up his own country.
He was born blue-collar and never fit into Republican country club culture. Shrugging off the status anxiety that afflicts Americans, unshaven and dressed in borderline rags, he made it obvious that he didn’t want to belong. Green calls him “a human hand grenade,” and that was what Trump liked about him, initially.
“Honey badger don’t give a shit” was Bannon’s catchphrase, honey badgers being big furry weasels in Africa and Southeast Asia who attack and eat pretty much anything. The honey badger meme is vile; so are its fans on the extreme right.
But the Republican Party has been driving into animality for a long time, arguably since Pat Buchanan’s “culture wars” speech rolling out their loathing of the modern world at the Republican convention in 1992.
I see the hatred Buchanan expressed as the human embodiment of the underground fires that forever burn beneath abandoned American coal mining towns. Centralia has been smoking in Pennsylvania for 55 years. It looks peaceful enough. You can be asphyxiated or swallowed by gassy sinkholes.
It’s not a bad metaphor for the Republican Party right now.
I was startled by the absurd Canadian reaction to the New Yorker’s casual mention of a “friendship” between the honey badger and Trudeau Principal Secretary Gerald Butts. “They talk regularly.”
Well, of course they do. Bannon was a get. Bannon wants to chat about his pet economic wars; Butts wants to save Canada from economic destruction at the hands of an unhinged president. Butts was doing his job.
For interim NDP leader Thomas Mulcair to demand Ottawa talk only to the nice Americans proves that Mulcair has a student council view of international governance. Bring us a bright, capable NDP leader, please.
Negotiating with Trump’s people is like feeding animals. You have interests in common. You wish to sustain the animal; honey badger wants its meat. I’m glad we have Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland. Who else could manage it? hmallick@thestar.ca