President Trump embraced analysis of the 2020 Democratic field from former strategist Stephen Bannon, whom he previously derided as “sloppy” and a leaker, The Hill reports.
Said Trump: “Nice to see that one of my best pupils is still a giant Trump fan. Steve joined me after I won the primaries, but I loved working with him!”
Trump shared a clip from Bannon on CNBC in which he dismissed the chances of the current field of Democrats against Trump in 2020.
“Steve Bannon’s training academy for nationalists is set to lose its spiritual home,” Politico reports.
“Italy’s Culture Ministry announced it will revoke the lease on a state-owned monastery given to Dignitatis Humanae Institute, a right-wing Roman Catholic institute affiliated with Bannon, the former Breitbart executive and ex-chief strategist to Donald Trump.”
“After Steve Bannon left the White House in 2017, he tried to turn his bombastic nationalism into a global movement and let a progressive documentarian follow him for more than a year — Arizona to Italy, Texas to France. The result is The Brink, a fly-on-the-wall, cinéma vérité film coming to theaters March 29, and being screened in D.C. on Tuesday,” Axios reports.
Despite Bannon’s extensive cooperation, the Washington Post says the film is ultimately a damaging portrait: “A number of moments seem to make the argument that Bannon’s populism is a pose.”
“Donald Trump will be in your personal life 30 years from now, whether you like it or not.”
— Stephen Bannon, quoted by USA Today.
“There’s no glamour to the job. I hated every second I was there. The West Wing has bad karma to it. They say, ‘Because you were doing bad stuff!’ But I was doing the Lord’s work.”
— Stephen Bannon, quoted by USA Today, on working in the Trump White House.
“Steve Bannon found himself back in the hot seat last month as the former White House adviser answered questions from Senate intelligence committee investigators behind closed doors,” the Daily Beast reports.
“The sources said investigators asked about Cambridge Analytica, the controversial and now defunct data firm he co-founded.”
“Steve Bannon will no longer be speaking at a UM, the latest and third event to be canceled following the announcement he would be a keynote speaker at a joint conference on sex robots this month,” the Montana Kaiman reports.
Steve Bannon “is teaming up with one of the Chinese government’s fiercest critics on a $100 million effort to investigate what they view as abuses of power by President Xi Jinping and the Communist Party,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Exiled Chinese businessman Guo Wengui … said he would provide the funding for the so-called ‘Rule of Law Fund’ to investigate deaths and disappearances of Chinese executives, politicians and other public figures. Mr. Bannon said he would volunteer to serve as the fund’s chairman and oversee its operations, which he said would include hiring a professional staff.”
Jane Mayer: “For two years, observers have speculated that the June, 2016, Brexit campaign in the U.K. served as a petri dish for Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign in the United States. Now there is new evidence that it did.”
“Newly surfaced e-mails show that the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, and Cambridge Analytica, the Big Data company that he worked for at the time, were simultaneously incubating both nationalist political movements in 2015.”
Playbook: “Can anyone point us to any money that Steve Bannon spent on this election? He told various new outlets that he was going to spend many millions of dollars on digital ads supporting House Republicans. We cannot find evidence he spent one dollar.”
The New York Times has an email exchange between Stephen Bannon and Roger Stone: “The email exchange, not previously reported, underscores how Mr. Stone presented himself to Trump campaign officials: as a conduit of inside information from WikiLeaks, Russia’s chosen repository for documents hacked from Democratic computers.”
“Mr. Bannon and two other former senior campaign officials have detailed to prosecutors for the special counsel, Robert Mueller, how Mr. Stone created that impression… One of them told investigators that Mr. Stone not only seemed to predict WikiLeaks’s actions, but that he also took credit afterward for the timing of its disclosures that damaged Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.”
“The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee is pursuing a wide-ranging investigation into former White House adviser Steve Bannon’s activities during the 2016 presidential campaign,” Reuters reports.
“The committee is looking into what Bannon might know about any contacts during the campaign between Moscow and two advisers to the campaign, George Papadopoulos and Carter Page.”
“As Donald Trump held midterm rallies this week in front of thousands, his one-time chief strategist Steve Bannon made his own, rather more low-key return to the campaign trail,” the Guardian reports.
“Bannon appeared in front of 200 people at a firehouse outside Buffalo, New York, ostensibly to campaign for Republicans based in the area. But in a visceral demonstration of just how far Bannon’s stock has fallen since leaving the White House 14 months ago, none of those Republicans running for office turned up.”
Steve Bannon told Bloomberg that next month’s congressional elections will be a referendum on the president and that Republicans can still hang on to a slender House majority with the GOP base energized by the bitter confirmation fight over Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Said Bannon: “I’ve called this now for many months to be his first re-elect. There’s a very narrow gate you have to go through but it’s doable. The Kavanaugh hearings gave us traction for the first time to try to, against all odds just like in ’16, to try to close strong and try to save it by a seat or two.”
Steve Bannon texts Jonathan Swan: “The fight for Judge Kavanaugh became a proxy fight for Trump’s presidency. Senator McConnell showed real leadership and the rest of the Senators real spine. This should stand as a lesson for the future — when Republican band together, stand up for the grassroots and take the fight to the Democrats and the opposition party media, America wins.”
Adds Swan: “You know something rare has happened in the Republican Party when Steve Bannon is gushing over Mitch McConnell — the man he spent months trying to destroy.”
Pointing to an anonymous column in the New York Times detailing resistance within the Trump administration, Steve Bannon said that President Trump is facing a “coup”, Reuters reports.
Said Bannon: “What you saw the other day was as serious as it can get. This is a direct attack on the institutions. This is a coup, okay.”
Steve Brannon “is forming a group to try to sell voters on a midterm message that they should support Republicans to defend the Trump agenda and save the president from impeachment,” the New York Times reports.
“The group, Citizens of the American Republic, is Mr. Bannon’s new vehicle after he was pushed out of the White House last summer and then parted ways with the conservative website Breitbart.”
“Mr. Bannon declined to describe his donors or how much money the group has raised. One person close to the group said that Rebekah Mercer, the hedge fund billionaire who supported Mr. Bannon’s previous political efforts but broke ties with him months ago, has no role.”
Stephen Bannon is ratcheting up his war on the Koch network, accusing the billionaire brothers of running “a conscious scam” and a “con job,” The Hill reports.
“He also has a warning for Republican candidates in November’s midterm elections who might be thinking of distancing themselves from President Trump: Don’t do it.”
Said Bannon: “You’re not going to be able to hide Trump. The opposition is going to force this anyway…You have to go all-in. If you try to go in half-baked, it’s not going to work.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
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