The president’s decision to expand US military intervention condemns Afghanistan to escalating conflict, and its people to further misery and death
Illustration by Nicola Jennings
Tuesday 22 August 2017 15.28 EDT
In a major speech on Monday night at Fort Myer, in Virginia, Donald Trumpperformed a U-turn on his electoral promise to pull troops out of Afghanistan and cut military spending in what has become the US’s longest war.
Given Trump’s 2013 tweets about getting out of Afghanistan and cutting wasteful military spending there, his decision now to raise troop levels (without specifying by how much – there are currently 8,500 US service members in the region) indicates a neutering of his presidency. This was hinted at last week by Steve Bannon, who abruptly departed his job as White House chief strategist just days before the speech and who – like Trump during his campaign – had long advocated a non-interventionist approach. Bannon said, rather ominously, that the presidency, as voted for by the majority of Americans, was now “over”.
The speech, which marked the end of a month-long review “of all strategic options in Afghanistan and south Asia” by General James Mattis and the national security team, was a clear victory for the military-industrial complex and the generals. The script could have been written by the generals themselves, and heralds a period of escalation and never-ending war (there will no longer be emphasis on meeting temporal objectives, but instead on vague “conditions” being fulfilled). In particular, “Mad Dog” Mattis, infamous for laying waste to Falluja in 2004 (complete with the use of banned weapons and depleted uranium, which still causes birth defects to children born there) has now been told that “the gloves are off” in the Afghan war.
For as well as raising troop levels Trump’s speech clarified that he has now given his generals the green light to conduct operations in any way they see fit, without “micromanagement from Washington”. This approach is ominous for the Afghan people, and will inevitably lead to further increases in civilian casualties. According to a report by the UN assistance mission in Afghanistan, deaths of Afghan women and children in the conflict reached a new high for the first six months of 2017.
Other remarks made by Trump revealed contradictions between US policy in Afghanistan and what is happening on the ground. This included inconsistency over Saudi Arabia, a key sponsor of jihadist terror groups, which Trump called a “partner”, and Pakistan, which Trump demonised for acting as a “safe haven” for US-designated terror organisations. Today, Islamic State in Afghanistan drive around in Japanese jeeps apparently the same as those issued to the Taliban by the Saudis prior to 11 September 2001, when I was based in Kandahar, working for the UN.
In comments likely to infuriate Afghans, Trump also talked of the need for them to “take ownership” of the future direction of their country (for anyone who has seen the vast military apparatus, watchtowers and “green zone” of occupied Kabul, these comments are blatantly absurd). He added disingenuously that “we will no longer use American military might to construct democracies in faraway lands or try to rebuild other countries in our own image. Those days are now over.” Given what unfolded in Afghanistan from the days immediately after the 11 September 2001 attacks onwards, in my view these comments are a complete mischaracterisation of what the US went into the country, using the pretext of the attacks, to do.
He also talked of the need for the US to tackle criminality and corruption in Afghanistan despite the fact that from the outset the US allied itself with unindicted warlords who have since presided over the growth of the opium trade (now affecting US citizens to an unprecedented degree), and the trafficking of women, children and artefacts. They also created illegal armed groups that roam the countryside, contributing to the security problem. When Trump said that the US was not interested in nation-building, but solely in “killing terrorists”, he sounded as Manichaean as George Bush. I wonder if this script will pass muster with the American people – because Afghans are long since jaded by it.
Interestingly, Trump failed to mention the increasingly significant Silk Road project, which is championed by China and other Central Asian countries as a motor for economic development. The project would bring a vast peace dividend to the region. If he really wants peace in Afghanistan, Trump and the other Nato countries he is pressuring to put more into vast military budgets to fight endless expensive and tragic wars would do well to follow China’s lead.
When I was in Kabul in 2013 as a political adviser to the EU ambassador, an Afghan commander I knew from Wardak province, a veteran of the war against the USSR, told me that the Americans were transporting “terrorists” to his region from Pakistan. Clearly, Afghans believe that the Americans have long been backing both sides in this, the US’s longest war. Trump’s speech, which invoked children, the September 11 attacks and terror in Europe as justification for a continued war in Afghanistan, will do little to change their minds.
•Lucy Morgan Edwards is author of The Afghan Solution: The inside story of Abdul Haq, the CIA and how western hubris lost Afghanistan
Let us finally rip off the veneer that Trump’s affinity for white supremacy is distinct from the Republican agenda. It isn’t
‘If Republican lawmakers want to distinguish themselves from Trump’s comments, they need to do more than type out 144 characters on their phone.’ Photograph: Andrew Harnik/AP
It takes approximately 30 seconds to send a tweet. A half hour to draft and release a statement. And the shelf life of both is only marginally longer. We should not commend Republican party elected officials who claim outrage on social media at Trump’s remarks, often without daring to mention his name. The phony claimed outrage becomes dangerous if it convinces anyone that there is a distinction between Trump’s abhorrent comments and the Republican Party agenda.
The lesson from Charlottesville is not how dangerous the neo-Nazis are. It is the unmasking of the Republican party leadership. In the wake of last weekend’s horror and tragedy, let us finally, finally rip off the veneer that Trump’s affinity for white supremacy is distinct from the Republican agenda of voter suppression, renewed mass incarceration and the expulsion of immigrants.
There is a direct link between Trump’s comments this week and those policies, so where is the outrage about the latter? Where are the Republican leaders denouncing voter suppression as racist, un-American and dangerous? Where are the Republican leaders who are willing to call out the wink (and the direct endorsement) from President Trump to the white supremacists and acknowledge their own party’s record and stance on issues important to people of color as the real problem for our country?
Words mean nothing if the Republican agenda doesn’t change. Governors and state legislatures were so quick to embrace people of color in order to avoid the impression, they too share Trump’s supreme affinity for the white race. But if they don’t stand up for them they are not indirectly, but directly enabling the agenda of those same racists that Republican members were so quick to condemn via Twitter.
Gerrymandering, strict voter ID laws, felon disenfranchisement are all aimed at one outcome: a voting class that is predominantly white, and in turn majority Republican.
The white supremacist chant of, “you will not replace us,” could easily and accurately be the slogan for these Republican politicians. Their policies will achieve the same racial outcome as Jim Crow – the disenfranchisement and marginalization of people of color.
It is a sad day when more CEOs take action by leaving and shutting down Trump’s Strategy and Policy Forum, and Manufacturing Council, than elected officials take action leaving Trump’s “election integrity” commission.
Businessman are acting more responsive to their customers than politicians are to their voters. At the end of the day, which presidential council is more dangerous? Which most embodies the exact ideology that Trump spewed on Monday? A group of businessmen coming together to talk jobs or a group of elected officials coming together to disenfranchise voters of color?
Anyone still sitting on the voter suppression commission is enabling Trump’s agenda and that of the white Nazi militia that stormed Charlottesville to celebrate a time when the law enforced white supremacy.
If Republican lawmakers want to distinguish themselves from Trump’s comments, they need to do more than type out 144 characters on their phone. They need to take a hard look at their party’s agenda.
A good start would be with voting rights. Let’s see lawmakers like John Kasich in Ohio immediately stop the state’s intended purging of voting records. Let’s see Wisconsin lawmakers throw out their gerrymandered district map and form a non-partisan redistricting commission.
Let’s see strict voter ID laws criticized with the same vitriol that Republicans used in responding to the events in Charlottesville. Let’s see Republicans call out their own agenda, and openly recognize the connection between the agenda of the racist alt-right and that of the Republican party.
Anything short of radical change to the Republican party’s war on voters of color is merely feigned outrage. Even if the white supremacists are condemned, even if the entire Republican party rises up in self-professed outrage at white supremacists, if voter suppression and other such racist policies survive, the white supremacists are winning. And America is losing.
'The civil war lies on us like a sleeping dragon': America's deadly divide - and why it has returned
The years leading up to 1861 saw polarised politics, paranoia and conspiracy theories. Sound familiar? One of the US’s foremost historians reflects on America’s Disunion - then and now
General Kearney’s gallant charge at the Battle of Chantilly, painted by Augustus Tholey. Kearny mistakenly rode into the Confederate lines and was killed. Photograph: UniversalImagesGroup/Getty Images
“Itremble for my country when I reflect that God is just,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1781. The American revolution still raged, many of his own slaves had escaped, his beloved Virginia teetered on social and political chaos. Jefferson, who had crafted the Declaration of Independence for this fledgling nation at war with the world’s strongest empire, felt deeply worried about whether his new country could survive with slavery, much less the war against Britain. Slavery was a system, said Jefferson, “daily exercised in tyranny,” with slaveholders practicing “unremitting despotism,” and the slaves a “degrading submission.”
The founder was hopeless and hopeful. He admitted that slaveholding rendered his own class depraved “despots,” and destroyed the “amor patriae” of their bondsmen. But his fear was universal. “Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God?” This advocate of the natural rights tradition, and confounding contradictory genius, ended his rumination with the vague entreaty that his countrymen “be contented to hope” that a “mollifying” of the conditions of slaves and a new “spirit” from the revolution would in the “order of events” save his country.
For that republic to survive it took far more than hope and a faith in progress. Indeed, it did not survive; in roughly four score years it tore itself asunder over the issue of racial slavery, as well as over fateful contradictions in its constitution. The American disunion of 1861-65, the emancipation of 4 million slaves, and the reimagining of the second republic that resulted form the pivot of American history. The civil war sits like the giant sleeping dragon of American history ever ready to rise up when we do not expect it and strike us with unbearable fire. It has happened here – existential civil war, fought with unspeakable death and suffering for fundamentally different visions of the future.
Republics are ever unsteady and at risk, as our first and second founders well understood. Americans love to believe their history is blessed and exceptional, the story of a people with creeds born of the Enlightenment that will govern the worst of human nature and inspire our “better angels” to hold us together. Sometimes they do. But this most diverse nation in the world is still an experiment, and we are once again in a political condition that has made us ask if we are on the verge of some kind of new civil conflict.
In one of his earliest speeches, the Young Men’s Lyceum address, in 1838, Abraham Lincoln worried about politicians’ unbridled ambition, about mob violence, and about the “perpetuation of our political institutions”. The abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy had just been murdered by a mob the previous year in Illinois. Lincoln saw an “ill omen” across the land due to the slavery question. He felt a deep sense of responsibility inherited from the “fathers” of the revolution. How to preserve and renew “the edifice of liberty and equal rights,” he declared, provided the challenge of his generation. “At what point shall we expect the approach of danger?” Lincoln asked. “By what means shall we fortify against it?” His worries made him turn inward. “Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined … could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.” Lincoln did not fear foreign enemies. If “danger” would “ever reach us,” he said, “it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
Those words were prescient in Lincoln’s own century. But they have a frightful clarity even today. Where are we now? Are Americans on the verge of some kind of social disintegration, political breakup, or collective nervous breakdown, as the writer Paul Starobin has recently asked? Starobin has written a new book, Madness Rules the Hour: Charleston, 1860, and the Mania for War, in which he revisits the old thesis that the secession moment represented a “crisis of fear” that led tragically to disunion and war. Psychologically and verbally, in the comment sections on the internet, and in talkshow television, we are a society, as Starobin shows, already engaged in a war of words. And it has been thus for a long time. Americans are expressing their hatreds, their deepest prejudices, and their fierce ideologies. It remains to be seen whether we have a deep enough well of tolerance and faith in free speech to endure this “catharsis” we seem to seek.
Far-right protesters clash with anti-fascist demonstrators in Charlottesville. Photograph: Michael N/Pacific/BarcroftImages
Psychological explanations, however, do not fully explain America’s current political condition. We are in conflict about real and divergent ideas. Are we engaged, half-wittingly, in a slow suicide as a democracy? Are we engaged in a “cold civil war” as one writer has suggested? Or does it feel like 1859, as another expert wondered, with so much rhetorical and real violence in the air? The election, and performance in office of Donald Trump, have many serious people using words like “unprecedented,” or phrases like “where in time are we,” or “we haven’t been here before.” Commentators and ordinary citizens have been asking how or where in the past we can find parallels for our current condition.
For historians, Trump has been the gift that keeps on giving. His ignorance of American history, his flaunting of political and constitutional traditions, his embrace of racist ideas and groups, his egregious uses of fear, his own party’s moral bankruptcy in its inability to confront him, have forced the media to endlessly ask historians for help. That moral cowardice by Republicans shows some glimmers of hope; Mitt Romney has just called out President Trump, accusing him of “unraveling … our national fabric” by his coziness with white supremacists, and Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee charged Trump with putting the nation “in great peril” by his incompetence and racism.
Sixteen years ago, in the book, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, I made a simple claim: “As long as America has a politics of race, it will have a politics of civil war memory.” Unfortunately, despite many more fine books, as well as conferences and courses taught on the same subject, that prescription seems truer now than ever. The line from the killings of Travon Martin and Michael Brown, through a myriad of other police shootings, and then especially from the mass murder of nine African Americans in Charleston in June, 2015, to the recent white supremacist demonstration and violence in Charlottesville mark a dizzying, crooked, but clear historical process. America is in the midst of yet another of its racial reckonings which always confront us with a shock of events we are, pitifully, never collectively prepared for. Just now we are engaged in a frenzied wave of Confederate monument removals; it is a manifestation of how well-meaning Americans can demonstrate their anti-racism and full of admirable impulses. But this too in all likelihood will not itself prepare us for the next shock of events nor our next reckoning. Hence, we so achingly need to know more history.
All parallels are unsteady or untrustworthy. But the present is always embedded in the past. The 1850s, the fateful decade that led to the civil war, has many instructive lessons for us. Definitions of American nationalism, of just who was a true American, were in constant debate. After the Great Hunger in Ireland the United States experienced an unprecedented immigration wave between 1845 and the mid-1850s, prompting a rapid and powerful rise of nativism. Irish and German Catholics were unwelcome and worse. The Mexican-American war of 1846-48, the nation’s first expansionist foreign conflict, stimulated an explosive political struggle over the expansion of slavery. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 caused a wave of “refugee” former slaves escaping the northern states into Canada, as well as a widespread crisis over violent rescues of fugitive slaves. Indeed, the constant flight of slaves from the South to free states was, in effect, America’s first great refugee crisis. The abolition movement, the country’s prototypical reform crusade, became increasingly politicized as it became more radical, extra-legal, and violent.
At every turn in that decade, Americans had to ask whether their institutions would last. The two major political parties, the Whigs and Democrats, either disintegrated or broke into sectional parts, north and south, over slavery. Third parties suddenly emerged with success like no other time in our history. First the Know-Nothings, or American party, whose xenophobia and anti-Catholicism got them elected in droves in New England in the early 1850s. And the most successful third party in our history, the Republicans, were born in direct resistance to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, championed by Democrats, and which opened up the western territories to the perpetual expansion of slavery. A succession of weak and pro-slavery presidents from 1844 through 1860 either tarnished the institution of the presidency or deepened the sectional and partisan divide.
In 1857, the supreme court weighed in by declaring in Dred Scott v Sandford that blacks were not and could never be citizens of the United States. They had, wrote chief justice Roger B Taney, “for more than a century been regarded as beings of an inferior order … so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” This most notorious court decision legally opened up all of the west, and for that matter, all of the north to the presence of slavery. So discredited was the supreme court among many northerners in the wake of the decision that the Republicans made resistance to the judiciary a rallying cry of their political insurgency. That impulse led to the election of Lincoln in 1860, interpreted by most southern slaveholders, who firmly controlled that region’s politics, as the primary impulse to secede from the union. They believed they could not co-exist in a nation now led by a political organization devoted to their destruction.
By the time of the sectionalized and polarized election of 1860, conducted in a climate of violence and danger caused by John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859, north and south had developed broad-based mutual conspiracy theories of each other. They did so through a thriving and highly partisan press, in both daily and weekly newspapers. Both sides tended to have their own sets of facts and their own conceptions of both history and the constitution.
White southerners feared and loathed abolitionists, and now they faced anti-slavery politicians who could truly affect power and legislation if elected. By the 1860 election, pro-slavery interests had developed a widespread theory about a “black Republican” conspiracy in the north, determined on taking hold of all reins of government to put slavery, as Lincoln in 1858 had actually said, on a “course of ultimate extinction.” In the secession crisis, one southern leader after another pronounced against what they perceived as an abolitionist conspiracy against their livelihoods and their lives. William Harris, the secession commissioner for Mississippi, claimed in December, 1860 that Republicans “now demand equality between the white and negro races, under our constitution; equality in representation, equality in the right of suffrage … equality in the social circle, equality in the rights of matrimony.” He concluded therefore, the deep south faced a stark choice: “Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish, the part of Mississippi is chosen, she will never submit to the principles and policy of this black Republican administration.”
That Republican party, along with radical abolitionists, advanced an equally potent idea of a “slave power” conspiracy that had grown into a staple of antislavery politics. The slave power, argued northerners, consisted of the southern slaveholding political class; they were obsessively bent on control of every level of government and every institution – presidency, courts, and Congress. The slave power especially demanded control over future expansion of the United States in order for its system to survive. The theory made greater sense with time to many people, since they could see that the slave south, though wealthy, was increasingly a minority interest in the federal government.
No one made this case about the slave power better than the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass. In May, 1853 Douglass gave the slave power clear definition. It was “a purely slavery party” in national affairs and its branches reached “far and wide in church and state.” The conspiracy’s “cardinal objects” were suppression of abolitionist speech, removal of free blacks from the United States, guarantees for slavery in the west, the “nationalization” of slavery in every state of the union, and the expansion of slavery to Mexico and South America.
By 1855, as the Kansas crisis deepened, Douglass saw the slave power as an all-encompassing national plague with “instinctive rapacity,” with a “natural craving after human flesh and blood.” It was a “murderous onslaught” upon the rights of all Americans to sustain the claims of a few. Seeking consensus with the slave power, Douglass maintained, would be “thawing a deadly viper instead of killing it.” He had faith in the “monster’s” inherent tendency to over-reach and destroy itself. “While crushing its millions,” he said, “it is also crushing itself.” It had “made such a frightful noise” with the “Fugitive Slave Act… the Nebraska bill, the recent marauding movements of the oligarchy in Kansas,” that it now performed as the abolitionists’ “most potent ally.” Douglass detected a great change in northern public opinion. Instead of regarding the abolitionists as mere fanatics “crying wolf,” the masses now perceived the evil in their midst and themselves cried “kill the wolf.”
Thus we might see one of the strongest parallels of all between the road to disunion and our current predicament. The rhetoric about the slave power and about black Republicans has a familiar ring today. Millions of Americans on the right who garner their information from selective websites, radio shows and Fox News possess all sorts conspiratorial conceptions of liberals and the alleged radical views of professors on university campuses. Many on the left also know precious little about people in rural and suburban America who voted for Trump; coastal elites do sometimes hold contemptuous views bordering on the conspiratorial about the people they “fly over.” Americans are more than politically polarized; we are bitterly divided about our expanding diversity, about the proper function of government, about the right to vote and how to protect it, over women’s reproductive rights, about climate science, over whether we even believe in a social contract between citizens and the polity. In other words, like the 1850s, we are divided over conflicting visions of our future. Let us hope that we find ways to fight out our current conflicts within politics and not between each other in our over-armed society. From my perspective, we can hope that like the slave power, the white supremacist far right will become its own worst enemy, and after all its frightful noise, kill itself.
As Americans consider the survival of their own amor patriae we might reflect on just how old our story is. We love stories of exile and return, destruction and redemption. When Moses sent the Israelites across the Jordan, he instructed them to put up memory stones to mark their journey and their story. Americans have put up more than their share of memory stones, and are just now living through a profound process of deciding which ones will remain. But as we look deeply into just what our own amor patriae means, and whether it can hold together, we might think hard about what inscriptions we want written on the memory stones of our own times. We might draw one from Douglass in 1867: “We ought to have our government so shaped that even when in the hands of a bad man we shall be safe.”
The author is Professor of American history at Yale University and author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, and the forthcoming, in 2018, Frederick Douglass: American Prophet
What follows is the article that likely pushed Steve Bannon, President Trump’s chief strategist and architect of his white nationalist messaging, out the White House door. Robert Kuttner, the co-founder and co-editor of this magazine, never expected a phone call from Bannon; the Prospect, after all, is a proudly liberal and defiantly anti-Trump journal. Nonetheless, Bannon called him on Tuesday afternoon, and on Wednesday, we posted Kuttner’s piece—a careful report of what Bannon said and an insightful analysis of why he said it. You can read it below.
You might think from recent press accounts that Steve Bannon is on the ropes and therefore behaving prudently. In the aftermath of events in Charlottesville, he is widely blamed for his boss’s continuing indulgence of white supremacists. Allies of National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster hold Bannon responsible for a campaign by Breitbart News, which Bannon once led, to vilify the security chief. Trump’s defense of Bannon, at his Tuesday press conference, was tepid.
But Bannon was in high spirits when he phoned me Tuesday afternoon to discuss the politics of taking a harder line with China, and minced no words describing his efforts to neutralize his rivals at the Departments of Defense, State, and Treasury. “They’re wetting themselves,” he said, proceeding to detail how he would oust some of his opponents at State and Defense.
Needless to say, I was a little stunned to get an email from Bannon’s assistant midday Tuesday, just as all hell was breaking loose once again about Charlottesville, saying that Bannon wished to meet with me.
Needless to say, I was a little stunned to get an email from Bannon’s assistant midday Tuesday, just as all hell was breaking loose once again about Charlottesville, saying that Bannon wished to meet with me. I’d just published a column on how China was profiting from the U.S.-North Korea nuclear brinkmanship, and it included some choice words about Bannon’s boss.
“In Kim, Trump has met his match,” I wrote. “The risk of two arrogant fools blundering into a nuclear exchange is more serious than at any time since October 1962.” Maybe Bannon wanted to scream at me?
I told the assistant that I was on vacation, but I would be happy to speak by phone. Bannon promptly called.
Far from dressing me down for comparing Trump to Kim, he began, “It’s a great honor to finally track you down. I’ve followed your writing for years and I think you and I are in the same boat when it comes to China. You absolutely nailed it.”
“We’re at economic war with China,” he added. “It’s in all their literature. They’re not shy about saying what they’re doing. One of us is going to be a hegemon in 25 or 30 years and it’s gonna be them if we go down this path. On Korea, they’re just tapping us along. It’s just a sideshow.”
Bannon said he might consider a deal in which China got North Korea to freeze its nuclear buildup with verifiable inspections and the United States removed its troops from the peninsula, but such a deal seemed remote. Given that China is not likely to do much more on North Korea, and that the logic of mutually assured destruction was its own source of restraint, Bannon saw no reason not to proceed with tough trade sanctions against China.
Contrary to Trump’s threat of fire and fury, Bannon said: “There’s no military solution [to North Korea’s nuclear threats], forget it. Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that ten million people in Seoul 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, they got us.” Bannon went on to describe his battle inside the administration to take a harder line on China trade, and not to fall into a trap of wishful thinking in which complaints against China’s trade practices now had to take a backseat to the hope that China, as honest broker, would help restrain Kim.
“To me,” Bannon said, “the economic war with China is everything. And we have to be maniacally focused on that. If we continue to lose it, we're five years away, I think, ten years at the most, of hitting an inflection point from which we'll never be able to recover.”
Bannon’s plan of attack includes: a complaint under Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act against Chinese coercion of technology transfers from American corporations doing business there, and follow-up complaints against steel and aluminum dumping. “We’re going to run the tables on these guys. We’ve come to the conclusion that they’re in an economic war and they’re crushing us.”
But what about his internal adversaries, at the departments of State and Defense, who think the United States can enlist Beijing’s aid on the North Korean standoff, and at Treasury and the National Economic Council who don’t want to mess with the trading system?
“Oh, they’re wetting themselves,” he said, explaining that the Section 301 complaint, which was put on hold when the war of threats with North Korea broke out, was shelved only temporarily, and will be revived in three weeks. As for other cabinet departments, Bannon has big plans to marginalize their influence.
“I’m changing out people at East Asian Defense; I’m getting hawks in. I’m getting Susan Thornton [acting head of East Asian and Pacific Affairs] out at State.”
But can Bannon really win that fight internally?
“That’s a fight I fight every day here,” he said. “We’re still fighting. There’s Treasury and [National Economic Council chair] Gary Cohn and Goldman Sachs lobbying.”
“We gotta do this. The president’s default position is to do it, but the apparatus is going crazy. Don’t get me wrong. It’s like, every day.”
Bannon explained that his strategy is to battle the trade doves inside the administration while building an outside coalition of trade hawks that includes left as well as right. Hence the phone call to me.
There are a couple of things that are startling about this premise. First, to the extent that most of the opponents of Bannon’s China trade strategy are other Trump administration officials, it’s not clear how reaching out to the left helps him. If anything, it gives his adversaries ammunition to characterize Bannon as unreliable or disloyal.
More puzzling is the fact that Bannon would phone a writer and editor of a progressive publication (the cover lines on whose first two issues after Trump’s election were “Resisting Trump” and “Containing Trump”) and assume that a possible convergence of views on China trade might somehow paper over the political and moral chasm on white nationalism.
The question of whether the phone call was on or off the record never came up. This is also puzzling, since Steve Bannon is not exactly Bambi when it comes to dealing with the press. He’s probably the most media-savvy person in America.
I asked Bannon about the connection between his program of economic nationalism and the ugly white nationalism epitomized by the racist violence in Charlottesville and Trump’s reluctance to condemn it. Bannon, after all, was the architect of the strategy of using Breitbart to heat up white nationalism and then rely on the radical right as Trump’s base.
He dismissed the far right as irrelevant and sidestepped his own role in cultivating it: “Ethno-nationalism—it's losers. It's a fringe element. I think the media plays it up too much, and we gotta help crush it, you know, uh, help crush it more.”
“These guys are a collection of clowns,” he added.
From his lips to Trump’s ear.
“The Democrats,” he said, “the longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”
I had never before spoken with Bannon. I came away from the conversation with a sense both of his savvy and his recklessness. The waters around him are rising, but he is going about his business of infighting, and attempting to cultivate improbable outside allies, to promote his China strategy. His enemies will do what they do.
Either the reports of the threats to Bannon’s job are grossly exaggerated and leaked by his rivals, or he has decided not to change his routine and to go down fighting. Given Trump’s impulsivity, neither Bannon nor Trump really has any idea from day to day whether Bannon is staying or going. He has survived earlier threats. So what the hell, damn the torpedoes.
The conversation ended with Bannon inviting me to the White House after Labor Day to continue the discussion of China and trade. We’ll see if he’s still there.
Illustration by Nicola Jennings
