Steve Bannon pleads guilty to one count of first degree scheme to defraud in New York in plea deal to avoid trial and jail

Trump pardoned Bannon on the federal charges literally at the 11th hour in January 2021, but not Bannon's partners, who all went to the big house. 

New York State went after Bannon separately.

Former Trump aide Steve Bannon pleads guilty in New York ‘build the wall’ case

 

... Bannon and three other men were accused of pocketing donations, while the group managed to build a paltry three miles of fencing along the southern border. ...

 

Toddler billionaire throws tantrum, strips critics of paltry incomes earned on X in bid to shrink platform to his size

 

Elon Musk Defends Stripping Critics of Monetization Amid Free Speech U-Turn

Musk continued to receive even more backlash after he doubled down on his stance, endorsing a post which suggested Americans were too “retarded” to be hired for skilled positions and warning his critics in an expletive-laden rant.

 

Beltway Republican David Winston for Roll Call wants 2016 to have been about the economy when it was about illegal immigration

 

This slight-of-hand reasoning is how Trump got co-opted by the GOP in 2017 in the first place, and it's how they're going to co-opt him again should he win. Beltway Republicans love, love, love immigration, so the top issue cannot, must not, be that.

 In 2016, the economy was the top issue, just as today . . ..

Here.

Trump's controversial 2015-2016 message was immigration, immigration, immigration for 14 straight months, until Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway got a hold of him in August 2016.

Trump barely won.

Trump's unfavorables were indeed high, but not because Hillary drove them there as Winston says. People forget that Trump did that all by himself. He ended up underperforming John McCain 2008 in 12 states and DC.

Trump was an insurgent candidate who exploited division within the GOP to capture the nomination. The 2016 primary popular vote for Cruz, Rubio, and Kasich exceeded Trump's 13.3 million.

That division has subsided, but it has never gone away, and Winston is one of the other side's smooth operators who still want to change the subject to anything else but the issue staring everyone in the face, from working class Americans now competing with 8 million new illegals for wages to upper class suburban denizens of Massachusetts being told to cope with hordes of new students in public schools they never designed to accommodate this flood.

That's the issue confronting voters, not Trump's Kangaroo Kourt Konviction, about which David wrings his hands.

If there's any vengeance in American politics about which we should be upset in 2024, Joe Biden's open southern border is surely it.

Peter Navarro chose allegiance to the separate and equal power of the Executive, of which he was a part and which the Legislative transgressed in a political witchhunt

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department wants former Trump White House adviser Peter Navarro to spend six months behind bars after being convicted of criminal contempt of Congress for ignoring a subpoena. ...

“The Defendant chose allegiance to former President Donald Trump over the rule of law,” prosecutors wrote in Thursday’s sentencing memo.

 More.

Egads, the new Human Events has chosen the wrong side (the side of the Redcoats, not of colonial Bostonians)

Reagan’s Favorite Rag Gets a Trump-era Makeover:

A block away from the former Capitol Hill headquarters of Breitbart News — known in Washington as the “Breitbart embassy” — sits a second-floor apartment its occupant calls “the Consulate.”

Here, surrounded by memorabilia of the British empire, two right-wing entrepreneurs — a protege of Steve Bannon’s and a social media activist — are rebooting a dilapidated conservative publication from around a dining room table. ...

[T]he duo are positioning it as an alternative to what they derisively call “Conservative Inc.” ...

Human Events aims up-market and has been imbued with Kassam’s vaguely royalist sense of Anglo-American identity. ...

The ‘Consulate’ also features a map showing the British empire at its largest extent and a red hat that says “Make America Great Britain Again.”

Over the dining room table where the duo works looms a framed print of the Boston Massacre, prominently featuring the shooting of Crispus Attucks, considered the first black man to die in the American Revolution. But Kassam has not stuck it there as a celebration of American liberty. Instead, he said, he forces his American dinner guests to sit facing the print to shame them with the memory of the massacre, which he blames on the mobbish antics of colonial Bostonians, while praising the discipline of the Red Coats who fired upon them. ...

[T]his pronounced Anglophilia was not a feature of the original Human Events . . ..

For a second there I thought Steve Bannon was aging badly and had lost a lot of weight

Robert Redford

Steve Bannon

The Rush Limbaugh lie of the day: "Drain the swamp" is why Trump was sent to Washington

"Drain the swamp" was a late development in the campaign, courtesy of the libertarian Steve Bannon and former Cruz campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, also a libertarian. Arguably if Trump had dropped that rhetoric and pretended to make nice with the Establishment after he'd won we'd see far more of the things Trump ran on accomplished by now than we do.

Trump distinguished himself from every other candidate in the primaries by making the border with Mexico the central issue from the time he walked down that elevator until mid-August 2016, which, when solved, would help to solve many other problems, like drugs, disease, and crime. After Bannon and Conway came on board replacing Manafort, however, that message began to be played down, to the point that Trump's campaign nearly cratered in the Arizona town hall in late August with Sean Hannity when Trump wavered badly on the issue, polling the crowd for its opinion. That was not the same man we had been seeing for an entire year.

Rush Limbaugh is also a libertarian, and characteristically doesn't give a damn about the border. He never has. He just licked his finger and checked the wind in his support of border security under Trump. But illegal immigration was never on Rush's radar, just as it wasn't on Ted Cruz' either. Rush was for that dual citizen, remember?

Here is Rush today, still trying to co-opt the Trump base:

That’s why at every Trump rally, what is the No. 1 sign they see, outside of Make America Great? What’s the number one sign you see at a Trump rally, Mr. Snerdley? (interruption) Nope. “Drain the swamp.” “Drain the swamp” is the No. 1. “Build the wall,” No. 2. (“Lock her up” is really a chant.) But “drain the swamp” is why Trump was sent there, and declassifying these documents would be a giant step for mankind in draining the swamp. 

Wikipedia gets some things right:

In the final month of his campaign, Donald Trump used the phrase "drain the swamp" in his rallies, pledging his supporters to "make our government honest once again." Trump said he originally "hated" the phrase, but when people reacted positively to it, he began "saying it like I meant it".

The Christopher Wylie story is fascinating but isn't really bombshell news: Ted Cruz used the same firm Wylie worked for

We reported on the story about Cruz from WaPo here already in December 2015.

The really hysterically funny thing about it all, once again, is how Facebook and its millions of idiot users are the real chumps. 

From the story here:

. . . Wylie offers a unique, worm’s-eye view of the events of 2016. Of how Facebook was hijacked, repurposed to become a theatre of war: how it became a launchpad for what seems to be an extraordinary attack on the US’s democratic process.

Wylie oversaw what may have been the first critical breach. Aged 24, while studying for a PhD in fashion trend forecasting, he came up with a plan to harvest the Facebook profiles of millions of people in the US, and to use their private and personal information to create sophisticated psychological and political profiles. And then target them with political ads designed to work on their particular psychological makeup.

“We ‘broke’ Facebook,” he says.

And he did it on behalf of his new boss, Steve Bannon.

“Is it fair to say you ‘hacked’ Facebook?” I ask him one night.

He hesitates. “I’ll point out that I assumed it was entirely legal and above board.”

The new McLaughlin Group episode one: Tom Rogan has really porked out since McLaughlin's death

Better watch it buddy or you'll look like Jack Germond before you know it.

You can watch episode one in its entirety, here.

Rogan did a passable job, but appeared nervous and distracted. He'll need to focus and be himself if he wants to moderate the debate to be at all entertaining.

Evan McMullin was a real dud, mixing populism and white nationalism together in his incoherent analysis. Memo to McMullin: Steve Bannon is incoherent, don't imitate him. Pat Buchanan tried to set him straight, but as usual the young don't listen to the old.

The other two old warhorses, Eleanor and Clarence, looked like they were just happy to be there to go through the motions.

then

now

Jack Germond

Snapshot of Trump job approval up to the exit of Steve Bannon

Bannon and Conway took over the campaign management just one year ago, and now Bannon is out as chief strategist. Trump is up +1 in the approval average since Charlottesville on the 12th. We'll see what happens now.

Steve Bannon poses as our new Albert Jay Nock, says Trump's third goal is the deconstruction of the administrative state

Good stuff, except the real enemy is the income tax. Leave the income tax in place and a new behemoth administrative state is just another administration away.

Here.

Peter Brimelow: Donald Trump and Steve Bannon are not alt-right people

Quoted here in The New York Times in an article which calls to mind, as usual, nothing so much as a bucket full of eels:

“Trump and Steve Bannon are not alt-right people,” Mr. Brimelow said, adding that they had opportunistically seized on two issues that the alt-right cares most about — stopping immigration and fighting political correctness — and used them to mobilize white voters. 

To The Times racism defines not just the alt-right but conservatism generally, such as believing in Obama's foreign provenance and therefore his illegitimacy to be president, or thinking Black Lives Matter is itself a racist movement, or advocating something more than birth within our borders is necessary to be a citizen, none of which could possibly be legitimate topics of debate because The Times believes they are settled matters and any other view means one must be a racist.

To question what is settled is unacceptable to The Times, and that is best dealt with by slathering on the racism charge.

Never argue the substance.

A sayings snack from Stephen Bannon that makes sense

“We think of ourselves as virulently anti-establishment, particularly ‘anti-’ the permanent political class. We say Paul Ryan was grown in a petri dish at the Heritage Foundation."

Donald Trump cucked himself and his followers a week ago on deportation: Today he'll try to uncuck himself

Video here on FOX, where Trump actually polls the audience and comes down on the side of legalization of otherwise law-abiding illegal aliens because people everywhere supposedly keep telling him that's what they want, not what he originally stood for in the debates.

What were the primary debates about then, how brown you like your marshmallows?

Trump cucked himself because a week prior to these remarks he caved to open borders libertarians Rebekah Mercer, Stephen Bannon and Kellyanne Conway. That's all there is to it. 

Legalizing 11 million or whatever the number is law-breakers yet again will only encourage more law-breaking, undermining whatever else a president Trump might be able to pass to stem the tide of illegal immigration. As Donald Trump might say, Not good!

Trump is compromising long before he has to, which tells you that as president he will roll over on lots of other promises also and get very little of what he has claimed he wants.

Pragmatism in the face of vice is no virtue. 

One day after Rebekah Mercer, Stephen Bannon and Kellyanne Conway took over the campaign, Trump started apologizing

They took over August 17th.

Here was Trump, August 18th:

“Sometimes, in the heat of the debate and speaking on a multitude of issues, you don’t choose the right words or you say the wrong thing. I have done that, and I regret it, particularly where it may have caused personal pain. Too much is at stake for us to be consumed with these issues." 

Not exactly the Trump of July 2015:


Moderator Frank Luntz asked Trump whether he has ever asked God for forgiveness for his actions. "I am not sure I have. I just go on and try to do a better job from there. I don't think so," he said. "I think if I do something wrong, I think, I just try and make it right. I don't bring God into that picture. I don't."

Hard libertarian billionaire daughter Rebekah Mercer is behind Trump's shift to Bannon and Conway, away from deportation

The price of consensus for Mercer's "help" in retrospect was obviously that Trump soften his deportation stance. Bloomberg's story here in June completely misses the signficance of the Mercers' libertarianism.

The Hill had the story already on August 17, here, the day Trump shook up his campaign by hiring Stephen Bannon as CEO and Kellyanne Conway as campaign manager, detailing Mercer's links to Stanford, the Heritage Foundation, BREITBART, the Ted Cruz campaign and libertarian think tank CATO:

“The Mercers basically own this campaign,” said a source who has worked with Rebekah Mercer in her political activities. “They have installed their people. ... And now they’ve got their data firm in there.” ... Little has been written about the Mercers because they avoid the public spotlight, but conservative sources who know the family, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described them as “kind, civic-minded people and consensus-builders.” ... But that source, who has worked with Mercer in some of her other political ventures, said it was a surprise to some people that the Mercers had swung so forcefully behind Trump, given her ideological bent. “She identifies as a libertarian. At least she always did,” the source said, adding that Mercer was a big supporter of libertarian think tanks like the Goldwater Institute and Cato. “With Bekah you always had to prove your libertarian racing stripes,” the source added. “This seems really strange.”

Trump campaign CEO Stephen Bannon also needs to go out the door with Conway by his side

They never should have been hired in the first place . . . they're in for 8 days and Trump self-destructs over deportation. Bannon is as much at fault as Conway.