By Mike Huckabee
Trump strategist Steve Bannon has stepped down, and there’s a media frenzy over it the likes of which hasn’t been seen since Pope Benedict XVI stepped down. But then, there’s a media frenzy over everything related to Trump, whether it’s what he said or didn’t say or shouldn’t have said or should’ve said but didn’t say fast enough. Not since the GOP debates where there were 17 candidates have there been so many people on CNN at once who all thought they should be President.
Bannon has been slammed by the media since day one for allegedly pushing for Trump to appeal to white supremacists. If true, that would be scurrilous and cause for his dismissal. Problem is, the anti-Trump left has so overplayed the “everyone I disagree with is Hitler” card that the public has grown weary and skeptical of the charge. Trump’s opposition is now so strident and deranged that according to them, thinking that mobs shouldn’t tear down and spit on Confederate monuments means you want to bring back slavery. You think I’m overstating the derangement? Someone in New Orleans vandalized a statue of Joan of Arc by spray-painting “Take it down” on it. You’d think they’d give her at least a few feminist points for being the first female Confederate general: “Joan of Arkansas.”
So as to whether Bannon really harbors the ugly racist feelings he’s accused of or has been slandered for political purposes is currently a hot debate. What’s not debatable is that for all the current media foaming over the so-called “rise” of the white supremacist alt-right, as Rush Lmbaugh pointed out, there aren’t enough of those idiots to elect a dog catcher, much less a President, and Trump didn’t win by appealing to racism. He won by promising to champion millions of middle class and blue collar workers who were being ignored, insulted, abused, looked down on, put out of work and taxed and regulated to death by arrogant DC, media and Wall Street elites.
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Bannon’s exit is being celebrated by the left as a big win: they finally got his head by rekindling the Civil War. In fact, he handed in his resignation on August 7, and the current media frenzy actually caused his departure to be postponed. Oops! Either way, the root cause of his exit can more likely be found in the interview he gave to the Weekly Standard in which he said this:
“The Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over...We still have a huge movement, and we will make something of this Trump presidency. But that presidency is over. It’ll be something else. And there’ll be all kinds of fights, and there’ll be good days and bad days, but that presidency is over.”
He went on to add that most Republicans in Washington have no interest in real reform; they made a half-hearted stab at repealing Obamacare, won’t support infrastructure rebuilding and will come up with a standard Republican tax plan. He’s probably not wrong about most of that, and notice that he never brought up race once, even though the media would have you think that’s the only bar of Lifebuoy in his soapbox.
But it’s easy to imagine that the underlying whiff of arrogance – that “with my departure, everything Trump claimed to champion will wither and die” – had to seriously rankle this POTUS. The standard template for the media is to paint every Republican President as an incompetent doofus whose strings are pulled by some evil puppet master (think Bush and Dick Cheney or Ronald and Nancy Reagan). The fact is, advisers and strategists come and go; some have a big influence and some only think they do, but they don’t run the show. Trump couldn’t have given riveting hour-long speeches to stadium crowds off the top of his head if he were a ventriloquist’s dummy. It must’ve been annoying to him to hear the media try the standard line on him, but intolerable for his own staffer seemingly to endorse it. Trump even hinted at that when he called Bannon a “good man,” not a racist, but pointed out that he won the primaries without Bannon’s involvement.
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It is infuriating to see the entrenched DC elites of both parties working so hard to stage their silent coup, block what the people voted for, and protect their overstuffed bipartisan trough. But maybe with Bannon back in the media, where he can be unconstrained in promoting his issues through Breitbart and fighting back against attacks, Trump can refocus his staff on people who know how to get things done in DC. Winning a political campaign and running a government are two very different tasks. Sometimes, it takes someone like Revolutionary War hero Francis Marion (“The Swamp Fox”) who knows how to dodge the alligators and get things done.
Meantime, if Trump really wants to make the media self-implode, might I suggest that he replace Bannon with two of his most famous, eloquent and no-nonsense supporters: Diamond and Silk.
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