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Donald Trump's immigration woes raise new questions about Stephen Bannon's role

Paul McGeough
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In a Silicon Valley pile-on, about 100 tech firms have joined the legal stoush over Donald Trump's migration crackdown, as new questions are raised about whether the President even bothers to read his controversial executive orders before signing them.

In a seemingly well-sourced, inside account of the first days of the Trump presidency, The New York Times reports: "[Chief strategist Stephen] Bannon remains the president's dominant adviser, despite Mr Trump's anger that he was not fully briefed on details of the executive order he signed, giving [Bannon] a seat on the National Security Council, a greater source of frustration to the president than the fallout from the travel ban."

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Who is Steve Bannon?

From Breitbart to the White House, the man once called America's "most dangerous political operative" has risen in rank to become one of Donald Trump's most trusted advisers.

Which is to say that Trump is spewing about his two most controversial orders – that line about "not [being] fully briefed" is code for the President not having read an order that stunned the national security establishment. We have read enough now to know that Trump was infuriated by the secretive drafting and chaotic roll-out of the travel ban, another order that stunned the national security establishment.

So who's in charge? If Bannon writes the orders and Trump signs without reading, is Bannon the second most powerful person in the world, as described on the cover of Time last week or, as George W. Bush was wont to say, did the magazine "misunderestimate" Bannon's power in a chaotic and still under-staffed White House?

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And is it too early to ask if Bannon has surpassed previous GOP White House powerbrokers in terms of their control of the levers of power – think of the roles of Karl Rove and Dick Cheney in the second Bush administration?

But first, have a think about that NSC appointment – damned cheeky of Bannon to sneak himself into a permanent appointment on the country's highest security council if the boss didn't bless the move. And if Trump wasn't aware that Bannon was joining the NSC, it's reasonable to ask if he appreciated that the defence and intelligence representation on the NSC was being downgraded by the same order?

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And apart from being a war history nut and a former US Navy man, what was the real reason for Bannon so desperately wanting an NSC berth?

It was doubly dammed cheeky of Bannon to pull a stunt like that in the week that he achieved two great media moments – the first was landing on the cover of Time; and the second was a Saturday Night Live skit, in which he was depicted as the Grim Reaper standing over Trump's shoulder as he seemingly directed events in the Oval Office.

Remember that Trump did his classic blah-blah-blah to a meeting of CIA staff on the day after his inauguration about how many times he had been on the cover of Time – and here was Bannon usurping a piece of media real estate that Trump thinks he owns.

But if a more secure president was worried about an upstart staffer, he might have a quiet word with him, put him back in his box without making a fuss.

But Trump being Trump, the President revealed his anxiety to the world, tweeting awkwardly, if not incoherently, at 4.07am on Monday: "I call my own shots, largely based on an accumulation of data, and everyone knows it. Some FAKE NEWS media, in order to marginalize, lies!"

And a few hours later – at 8.32am – he was stabbing at his mobile phone again: "The failing @nytimes writes total fiction concerning me. They have gotten it wrong for two years, and now are making up stories: sources!"

Serial leaks and backgrounders reveal Bannon's fingerprints on every critical move by Trump – his "carnage in America" inaugural address; the crackdown on migrants and refugees entering the US, as a gesture to Trump's hardcore followers and, perhaps, Bannon's alt-right associates; and, of course, his own appointment to the NSC.

Picking up on the sense of an email to The Washington Post, in which Bannon claimed to be the midwife to the "birth of a new political order," Time declares: "Bannon is the one who keeps the doctrine pure, the true believer, who is in it not for money or position, but to change history."

But there's more to Bannon – the world view that he'll take to meetings of the NSC is that the US and the "Judeo-Christian West" are in a war against an expansionist Islamic ideology – which, he says, they will lose because they don't understand what they are up against; that all differences with Russia should be overlooked, to allow a joint effort in this battle; and that Muslims simply should not be allowed into the US – which is to say that for Bannon, the current Trump order on refugees and migrants from seven majority-Muslim countries is merely a halfway house.

He has been heard to like himself to Vladimir Lenin, claiming that he's just as eager as the Russian revolutionary to "bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today's Establishment."

In a celebrated interview with the Hollywood Reporter in the days after Trump's stunning election win, Bannon broke with the customary it's-all-about-the-boss spiel in cheerfully drawing a parallel between himself and Dick Cheney and some other unsavory notables – "Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That's power," he said. "It only helps us when they get it wrong. When they're blind to who we are and what we're doing."

Going further, Bannon found his own image in Henry VIII's 16th century England. Lighting on the man credited with splitting the Church of England from the Catholic Church, an earth-shattering achievement, he told the Hollywood Reporter: "I am Thomas Cromwell in the court of the Tudors."

The Time profile of Bannon contains this revealing passage: "'Where Bannon is really having his instinct is on the policy front,' says a Trump partisan.

"Which policies? 'All of them. He's Trump's facilitator.' In a Trump White House, this adviser says, you can only get – and keep – as much power as the President wants you to have. But Trump and Bannon 'sat down before the election and made a list of things they wanted to do in office right away,' says this adviser. Trump is the one deciding which items to tick off. 'Bannon's just smart enough to give him the list.'"

In his encounter with the Hollywood Reporter, Bannon embraced the description of himself as a nationalist – but baulked at "white nationalist," before racing ahead to talk as though he was the new president – for decades to come.

"I'm not a white nationalist, I'm a nationalist. I'm an economic nationalist," he insisted.

"The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia.

"The issue now is about Americans looking to not get f---ed over. If we deliver we'll get 60 per cent of the white vote, and 40 per cent of the black and Hispanic vote and we'll govern for 50 years.

"That's what the Democrats missed, they were talking to these people with companies with a $US9 billion market cap employing nine people. It's not reality. They lost sight of what the world is about."

Foreseeing an American populism that would be "greater than the Reagan revolution – conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement," he declared:

"We're going to build an entirely new political movement … It's everything related to jobs. The conservatives are going to go crazy. I'm the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. With negative interest rates throughout the world, it's the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Ship yards, iron works, get them all jacked up. We're just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks."

The jobs and infrastructure plan might have been a more uplifting opening act for the Trump presidency, instead of kicking at migrants and refugees.

But how would Rove or Cheney have handled this transition?

Obviously at this early stage, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to take Bannon apart – but there are reports of head shaking in GOP circles; and a number of senior congressional Republicans have spoken out on the botched roll-out of the migration crackdown.

It's an easy shot for Democrats to charge that Bannon is Cheney or Rove incarnate – "Karl Rove on steroids," as described by House minority leader Nancy Pelosi's spokesman Drew Hammill in the weekend.

Assessing the political advantage for the Democrats, Politico concludes: "Democrats see an opportunity to turn Bannon into a figure whose mere presence rallies the Democratic base, as Rove did when he was dubbed 'Bush's brain'."

But a thoughtful piece on the progressive website ThinkProgress, argues that the comparison doesn't work, because the Trump-Bannon machine doesn't have the disciplines that Bush-Rove-Cheney had, to create a false, but believable alternate political universe – which was "a willingness to tell many little lies that were internally consistent, mutually reinforcing, and at least superficially plausible, as they added up to one big lie".

Ned Resnikoff, a senior editor at ThinkProgress, argues that despite not being true, the Bush administration's Iraq narrative was compelling – "Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, Al Qaeda was in cahoots with virtually all of America's enemies, and the United States was a messianic crusader that would eventually spread capitalist liberal democracy to every corner of the world".

In conceding the "clear internal logic" of the fantasy world constructed by Bush and Rove, Resnikoff writes: "Whereas President Bush offered America the illusion of morality clarity, President-elect Trump offers an ever-shifting phantasmagoria of sense impressions and unreliable information, barely held together by a fog of anxiety and bewilderment … something more like an endless bad dream – think Kafka more than Lord of the Rings."

There is some support for Resnikoff's argument in opinion polls – Americans bought the Bush-Rove fantasy, to the extent that as many as 93 per cent of them believed it on the eve of the US-led invasion in 2003, according to Gallup; but a poll for CNN in the weekend, found that 53 per cent of Americans did not approve of Trump closing the door to migrants and refugees from the seven countries.

And on cue, in another unhinged performance on Monday, Trump again proved Resnikoff's point that Team Trump is not capable of fabricating the "believable" lie.

Speaking to the military brass at Central Command in Florida, Trump departed from his prepared text to make this startling claim: The media are intentionally covering up reports of terrorist attacks.

"You've seen what happened in Paris, and Nice. All over Europe, it's happening," he ad-libbed. "It's gotten to a point where it's not even being reported. And in many cases the very, very dishonest press doesn't want to report it. They have their reasons, and you understand that."

Bannon has had a rough start, but maybe he'll find his feet. Or perhaps Trump will find them for him – and cut them.

And to some observers, as a political novice, his weakness is his strength – having spent his career chopping the establishment of both parties off at the knees, he has no political safety net.

"If he hit a bump, there is no personal support mechanism to sustain bad times," Tom Rath, a Republican strategist in New Hampshire, told Politico. "But perhaps he has a pretty good hold in the only personal relationship he needs. He has a constituency of one."

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