Trump Booted Steve Bannon From A Top Gig & They’re Pretending It’s All Fine

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Published

April 5, 2017

Steve Bannon, the slowly expanding sack of rotting potatoes that somehow came to control Breitbart News and then Trump‘s White House, has been removed from his controversial position on the president’s National Security Council. The White House is already trying to spin it as a completely normal change that no one should really think about very much.

Rewind for a moment. Bannon’s appointment to the National Security Council was always a little bit cooked. Though he was the President’s top advisor – and considered the mastermind behind Trump’s more nationalist, anti-globalisation policies – most were a little uneasy with him being on the NSC. It’s a statutory body which advises the president on intelligence, military, and counterterrorism matters, and it’s usually populated with military top brass.

So the addition of Bannon, whose only qualification in this regard is a stint in the navy forty years ago and who looks like a corpse someone dredged up from the bottom of a river, invited some scratching of heads.

The reasoning given for Bannon’s departure from the council by the White House is perhaps a bit weird. This is from Bloomberg:

A White House official said that Bannon was placed on the committee in part to monitor Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and never attended a meeting. He’s no longer needed with McMaster in charge of the council, the official said.

Michael Flynn stepped down from his job as national security adviser after it came to light that he had lied about the level of contact he’d had with Russian embassy figures before the election. This government stance is backed up by Washington Post reporter Robert Costa‘s takes on Twitter:

Bannon hasn’t been taking part in NSC meetings. Saw his role early on as keeping an eye on Flynn, making sure Obama-era NSC was reshaped…

— Robert Costa (@costareports) April 5, 2017

Bannon was there to “de-operationalize” the NSC, one official said, and he feels that job has been accomplished…

— Robert Costa (@costareports) April 5, 2017

Of course, there’s no explanation as to what ‘de-operationalising’ the NSC actually means, what steps he had taken to achieve this demonstrably made-up task, and how he achieved this despite the fact he did not attend a single meeting.

But wait! Despite all this mumbo jumbo about de-operationalising, Fox News had another scoop which sounds way more in line with how Trump approaches matters of government:

The other, other shoe drops.
@johnrobertsFox: “The president wasn’t particularly happy at the way Bannon had been grabbing the limelight…” pic.twitter.com/P3PIXNwL0n

— Tom Namako (@TomNamako) April 5, 2017

Trump wasn’t happy about Bannon getting all the attention, Fox alleges. That sounds more in line with the inclinations of the very optics-obsessed commander-in-chief.

Well, for whatever reason it went down, Bannon is no longer officially on the National Security Advisor. He’s still Trump’s chief strategist, though. And – I stress this – he still looks like an alcoholic sea captain who has been stranded on an Arctic ice floe for three weeks. That to me is most important.

Source: Boston Globe.

Photo: Getty Images.

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Donald Trump, President, Steve Bannon

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