At war in the West Wing: the battle for Trump’s ear

Is Steve Bannon “toast”? It’s certainly not looking good for the White House chief strategist, said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. Until quite recently, the controversial “economic nationalist” – as he likes to style himself – was seen as Donald Trump’s most influential aide (some even dubbed him the “shadow president”). But he now seems to be on the losing side of a vicious bout of West Wing infighting with the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, along with Kushner’s two key allies: his wife (and Trump’s daughter) Ivanka Trump, and the increasingly influential economics adviser, former Goldman Sachs president Gary Cohn. Not only has Bannon been obliged to stand down from the National Security Council, he has also suffered a verbal demotion. In two separate interviews last week, Donald Trump – insisting he was his own strategist – spoke belittlingly of Bannon, describing him as “a guy who works for me”. And in private, the president has reportedly complained that Bannon is “not a team player”.

This factional battle has been “thrilling to watch”, said Jim Newell on Slate. Kushner’s allies have accused Bannon of being a divisive, ineffective blowhard. Bannon’s allies, in turn, have accused them of being closet liberals (their mocking nickname for Cohn is apparently “Globalist Gary”). “I see some bad press in [Jared’s] future,” muttered one of them darkly the other day. All fun knockabout stuff, but it doesn’t really mean much. For, as we all know, the “only adviser that will ever truly have Trump’s ear is the host of whatever cable news show he happens to be watching”. On the contrary, said David A. Graham in The Atlantic, Trump’s erratic decision-making means the stakes in these palace intrigues are that much higher. The president has a widely noted tendency to adopt the position “of the last person with whom he spoke on a given issue” – so whether that person is Bannon or, say, Cohn, they can have a crucial impact on policy. It already has done, said Philip Rucker in The Washington Post. Trump’s intervention in Syria, and his recent more emollient approach to China, betray the influence of his more moderate advisers. What really did for Bannon wasn’t so much his ideology as his failure to achieve results. It was he who pushed the botched ban on Middle Eastern immigrants that came so dramatically unstuck in the courts, and it was he who failed spectacularly to bully hard-line Republicans into passing Trump’s healthcare bill. That made him a “marked man” in the White House.

I’m no fan of Bannon, said Rich Lowry on Politico. But he does at least have “a considered world view and helps anchor Trump somewhere in the populist-conservative policy continuum”. If his influence disappears, everything – from Trump’s stances on immigration and climate change to abortion – could be “up for grabs”. We’d end up with an administration in the mould of Ivanka, Kushner and Cohn, whose political instincts aren’t just those of Democrats but of “ladies-who-lunch Democrats who have marinated for decades in the financial and social elite of Manhattan”. Cohn, especially, “would have been the totem of everything Trump was running against in 2016, when he made Goldman Sachs into a kind of swear word”. Cohn is as “toxic” as Bannon, agreed David Dayen in The Nation. He’s “the guy who ran Goldman’s mortgage department, turning it into an enormous trading operation that fuelled the housing bubble”; the guy who “exported deceptive finance schemes to Greece”. Do we want him running the show? Whatever happens, Trump would be foolish to fire Bannon, said Rick Wilson on The Daily Beast. The alt-right fringe that helped elect Trump is growing suspicious that he’s turning into a conventional Republican. If a vengeful Bannon rejoins the populist, internet-driven movement that he helped start, Trump “should prepare for war”.