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[Joe]

The usually private Steve Bannon seems emboldened and chatty the last few days.

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Axios | What Steve Bannon thinks about Charlottesville

On Tuesday night Steve Bannon was excitedly telling friends and associates that the "globalists" were in mass freakout mode.

This account of Bannon's thinking has come from conversations with his friends and associates who've been in touch with him since the racist carnage in Charlottesville.

Bannon has not meaningfully advised the president about his response to Charlottesville. He's still on the outs with Trump though the president described Bannon as a good person on Tuesday.

• Bannon reveled in the disbanding of the president's business council, seeing this as yet more evidence that the Trump administration is at odds with the "Davos crowd," as Bannon often calls these corporate elites.
• Bannon saw Trump's now-infamous Tuesday afternoon press conference not as the lowest point in his presidency, but as a "defining moment," where Trump decided to fully abandon the "globalists" and side with "his people."
• Per a source with knowledge: "Steve was proud of how [Trump] stood up to the braying mob of reporters" in the Tuesday press conference.
• They spoke by phone on Saturday, Sunday and Monday, according to a source with knowledge of the calls, but the response to Charlottesville has been all Trump, and Trump at his purest.
• On the phone to Bannon, Trump asked his chief strategist "where does it end?" according to a source with knowledge of their conversations.
• Trump wasn't referring to the white supremacists, but to the counter-protesters whom the president believes are on a slippery slope towards "changing history" by tearing down monuments of Confederate heroes and potentially, he has said, the Founding Fathers like George Washington, who owned slaves.

Bannon, who is in New York today, has a view of Trump's Charlottesville response that horrifies many of his West Wing colleagues:

• Unlike some of Trump's other top aides — who have varied on a spectrum between frustration and disgust since the president's Charlottesville remarks — Bannon has unapologetically supported Trump's instinct to apportion blame to "both sides."
• Sources who've spoken with Bannon since Charlottesville say he views this moment as analogous to the campaign moment when Hillary Clinton condemned half of Trump's supporters to a "basket of deplorables."
• Bannon believes that if Trump condemned all the people who protested the pulling down of the Robert E. Lee statue then he'd fall into a trap set by leftists, the establishments of both parties, and the mainstream media. (Some of Bannon's colleagues say this is an absurd argument. They point out it was a crowd of white supremacists holding tiki torches and chanting racist slogans, and that this is no time for the president to be searching for the "fine people" in the group. They say Trump should be condemning the tiki torch crowd unequivocally and leaving the debate over statues and free speech to another, less racially-heated, day.)

American Prospect | Steve Bannon, Unrepentant

Trump's embattled strategist phones me, unbidden, to opine on China, Korea, and his enemies in the administration.

The question of whether the phone call was on or off the record never came up.

minced no words describing his efforts to neutralize his rivals at the Departments of Defense, State, and Treasury. ”They're wetting themselves," he said, proceeding to detail how he would oust some of his opponents at State and Defense.

”We're at economic war with China," he added. ”It's in all their literature. They're not shy about saying what they're doing. One of us is going to be a hegemon in 25 or 30 years and it's gonna be them if we go down this path. On Korea, they're just tapping us along. It's just a sideshow."

Contrary to Trump's threat of fire and fury, Bannon said: ”There's no military solution [to North Korea's nuclear threats], forget it. Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that ten million people in Seoul don't die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don't know what you're talking about, there's no military solution here, they got us." Bannon went on to describe his battle inside the administration to take a harder line on China trade

”To me," Bannon said, ”the economic war with China is everything. And we have to be maniacally focused on that. If we continue to lose it, we're five years away, I think, ten years at the most, of hitting an inflection point from which we'll never be able to recover."

Bannon's plan of attack includes: a complaint under Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act against Chinese coercion of technology transfers from American corporations doing business there, and follow-up complaints against steel and aluminum dumping. ”We're going to run the tables on these guys. We've come to the conclusion that they're in an economic war and they're crushing us."

”I'm changing out people at East Asian Defense; I'm getting hawks in. I'm getting Susan Thornton [acting head of East Asian and Pacific Affairs] out at State."

But can Bannon really win that fight internally?

”That's a fight I fight every day here," he said. ”We're still fighting. There's Treasury and [National Economic Council chair] Gary Cohn and Goldman Sachs lobbying."

”We gotta do this. The president's default position is to do it, but the apparatus is going crazy. Don't get me wrong. It's like, every day."

Bannon explained that his strategy is to battle the trade doves inside the administration while building an outside coalition of trade hawks that includes left as well as right. Hence the phone call to me.

I asked Bannon about the connection between his program of economic nationalism and the ugly white nationalism epitomized by the racist violence in Charlottesville and Trump's reluctance to condemn it. Bannon, after all, was the architect of the strategy of using Breitbart to heat up white nationalism and then rely on the radical right as Trump's base.

He dismissed the far right as irrelevant and sidestepped his own role in cultivating it: ”Ethno-nationalism—it's losers. It's a fringe element. I think the media plays it up too much, and we gotta help crush it, you know, uh, help crush it more."

”These guys are a collection of clowns," he added.

”The Democrats," he said, ”the longer they talk about identity politics, I got 'em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats."

I had never before spoken with Bannon. I came away from the conversation with a sense both of his savvy and his recklessness.

Either the reports of the threats to Bannon's job are grossly exaggerated and leaked by his rivals, or he has decided not to change his routine and to go down fighting.

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I want to add here that right-wing extremism isn't irrelevant, it's actually responsible for 74% of domestic terrorism (3x more than Muslim extremism)
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/21/opinion/finsbury-park-terrorist-attack-far-right.html?_r=0

http://www.gao.gov/assets/690/683984.pdf

https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/MurderAndExtremismInUS2016.pdf

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Also:

 

[Blablurn]

That trade war with China could get really ugly.

 

[BlackGhost]

Bannon saw Trump's now-infamous Tuesday afternoon press conference not as the lowest point in his presidency, but as a "defining moment," where Trump decided to fully abandon the "globalists" and side with "his people."

Oh wow....

 

[Dead Prince]

welp. time for bannon to get fired. see you guys on Fired Friday.

 

[lastplayed]

Sorry Bannon, but the globe will move on without America. We're fine.

 

[BronsonLee]

That's funny, because the only notable thing I've seen Bannon do since Trump became President is get scared when brown people wanted to talk to him

 

[traveler]

There's already a thread for this, although I do think your title and OP is a bit more comprehensive. Could the mods please move the posts here over there and swap the titles?