WHO WAS THIS STEVE BANNON?

By Robert P. Bomboy

Way back in March 2017, when it was still cold and Donald Trump had been in the White House less than two months, I wrote a column titled, WHO IS THIS STEVE BANNON?

           

As Trump's campaign C.E.O., Bannon was on the top step after Trump won the election and began picking his henchmen. That's how Bannon got the White House job of "chief strategist."

Everyone could see him coming. I even joked back then that, with Steve Bannon around, it might be worthwhile to bring the House Un-American Activities Committee back from the dead - though I shuddered to so much as joke about it.

            The House Un-American Activities Committee was infamous for hauling people out of their beds and asking them, point blank, "Are you a Communist sympathizer?”

            If they had asked Steve Bannon, I'm sure he would have said, "You Bet!"

He’s an admirer of Friedrich Engels, who wrote the Communist Manifesto with Karl Marx. He says openly that he’s a “Leninist.” Lenin was the alias for the Russian revolutionary who created the Communist Party and, with his fellow Communists, began the Bolshevik Revolution that gave birth to the Soviet Union. “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too,” Bannon has said. “I want to bring everything crashing down. It only helps us when . . . . they’re blind to who we are and what we’re doing.”

            Bannon had his hand on the controls from Trump's first day in office, writing a lot of his boss's horrid, cruel inauguration speech. In the first 10 days after Trump's inauguration, Bannon engineered executive orders halting America's refugee program and barring U.S. entry to anyone from seven Middle Eastern and African countries - even permanent, legal U.S. residents; brazenly doubling down on Trump's intent to build a wall at the border with Mexico; revoking dozens of federal regulations that protected the health and safety of American citizens; immediately weakening Obamacare; and withdrawing from an important international trade agreement.

            For eight months he was a revolutionary in the White House, with unprecedented power and an "enemies board" on the wall of his West Wing office. Then he overstepped, crossed media mogul Rupert Murdoch, the founder and C.E.O. of Fox News, who wanted him gone, and heard Donald Trump - in his best voice from The Apprentice - holler, "You're fired!" Although he had engaged in all kinds of internal rivalries and fights since January, he left his office with most of the projects on his "to do" list left undone.

Ironically, the thing that finally got Bannon fired was the one thing he did get right. He said: “Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that 10 million people in Seoul [Korea] 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.”

After the President's bullying - declaring "North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire, fury, and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before" - that was the one thing in TrumpWorld that the boss didn't want to hear.

Bannon couldn't pull his hand out of the fire; he enjoyed the pain so much.