CT Blue

I keep a sort of journal, usually only a few paragraphs a day. No Thoreau or Pepys am I, but during the Trump years I usually put in something about whatever idiotic thing the stable genius did on that particular day. The journal is on my Ipad, and it has an “On This Day” feature that makes it easy to look at entries from the same date on previous years. I read them to my wife most nights, so we can relive our boring lives, but I skip the parts about the genius. That is, i don’t read them to her, but I do look at them myself. It never ceases to amaze me how much of his bizarre behavior has been assigned to the memory hole. Again, if Joe Biden did any of this stuff we’d never hear the end of it.

In any case, it occurred to me that I might, every once in a while, resurrect some of this stuff. This is from January 3, 2018, and it is illustrative of something that continues to happen in the MAGA world. It is the case that no matter how much Trump abuses his acolytes, they are always willing to come back for more. In this case, we’re talking about Steve Bannon. Michael Wolff had just published a book about the Trump White House and Bannon was quoted, and he didn’t have a lot of nice things to say about the Trump campaign:

He is particularly scathing about a June 2016 meeting involving Trump’s son Donald Jr, son-in-law Jared Kushner, then campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower in New York. A trusted intermediary had promised documents that would “incriminate” rival Hillary Clinton but instead of alerting the FBI to a potential assault on American democracy by a foreign power, Trump Jr replied in an email: “I love it.”

The meeting was revealed by the New York Times in July last year, prompting Trump Jr to say no consequential material was produced. Soon after, Wolff writes, Bannon remarked mockingly: “The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor – with no lawyers. They didn’t have any lawyers.

“Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately.”

So Bannon basically accused the Trump campaign of treason. I’m not arguing with him, but it didn’t go over well with the genius, who released the following statement:

”Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind. Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating seventeen candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican party.

”Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn’t as easy as I make it look. Steve had very little to do with our historic victory, which was delivered by the forgotten men and women of this country. Yet Steve had everything to do with the loss of a Senate seat in Alabama held for more than thirty years by Republicans. Steve doesn’t represent my base — he’s only in it for himself.

”Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was. It is the only thing he does well. Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped write phony books.

Pretty harsh language from both sides, not something most people on either side of the equation would be likely to forget, but my guess is that they both have. In MAGA land, one says what suits ones mood or interest at the time one says it, and then one proceeds to forget it if it suits ones interest. Just ask Mike Pence, who has totally forgotten that it was fine with Trump if Mike Pence was killed by the mob he sicced on the Capitol. And it’s true, as well, that Bannon had cause to get back to kissing Trump’s ass, inasmuch as he needed a pardon after he was indicted for defrauding Trump’s MAGA followers by claiming to use their money to build a wall.

Yet more proof that there simply is no fixed reality for Trump specifically and Republicans generally. They will assert anything that suits their purpose in any given moment, and assert the contrary the very next moment of that serves their purpose. Just ask Joe Rogan.