Ben Schreckinger: “I asked friends and foes alike to imagine how, should Bannon get the boot, the pugnacious populist might exact his revenge.”

“Taken together, their suggestions amount to an epic, Kill Bill-style revenge saga that starts with Bannon leaking personal dirt on his enemies to the tabloids, using the megaphone of Breitbart News to exacerbate divisions inside the administration, and siccing an army of internet trolls on his adversaries to harass and defame them. It ends with Bannon using Cambridge Analytica data to identify and primary their vulnerable allies in Congress, then releasing a ‘Where Trump Went Wrong’ documentary on the eve of the November midterms and finally—in this revenge fantasy’s epic climax—running against Trump himself in 2020.”

New York Times: “Mr. Bannon’s allies have already begun discussing a post-White House future for him. On Friday, his main political patron, Rebekah Mercer, the daughter of Robert Mercer, a major Trump donor, holed up in her office at Cambridge Analytica in New York, discussing possibilities for Mr. Bannon should he leave… Mr. Bannon served on the data-mining firm’s board until last summer.”

“Steve Deace, a conservative commentator from Iowa who has always been skeptical about Mr. Trump’s conservative core, said that cutting Mr. Bannon loose would send the wrong signal to conservatives — and could be dangerous given the delight Mr. Bannon takes in disruption.”

Said Deace: “I think firing Bannon would be a huge mistake for Trump. Hell hath no fury like a Bannon scorned.”

Michael Goodwin: “Washington’s rumor mill is working overtime on the fate of aide Steve Bannon, who is said to be at the center of the rampant White House in-fighting. When I asked the President Tuesday afternoon if he still has confidence in Bannon, who took over the campaign in mid-August, I did not get a definitive yes.”

Said Trump: “I like Steve, but you have to remember he was not involved in my campaign until very late. I had already beaten all the senators and all the governors, and I didn’t know Steve. I’m my own strategist and it wasn’t like I was going to change strategies because I was facing crooked Hillary.”

He added: “Steve is a good guy, but I told them to straighten it out or I will.”

Rick Wilson: “If Bannon is cut loose, the old Washington adage of ‘better to have your enemy inside the tent pissing out’ will come into play. The coverage of Trump in the Bannon/Mercer echo chamber will go from ‘gushing hagiography’ to ‘more in sorrow than in anger’ to ‘Trump is now a globalist cuck shill for the ZOG’ faster than Andrew Breitbart can rotate in his grave.”

“Another reason firing Bannon is fraught with risk: Bannon is running the Russia pushback operation from inside the White House. He’s up to his ample ass in the Nunes shenanigan with NSC staffer Ezra Cohen-Watnik and White House Counsel’s Office staffer Mike Ellis. Bannon doesn’t just want to protect Trump over the Russia allegations; he wants to protect Russia, a nation he sees as an essential ally in his new alliance of white Christian nations against the Muslim horde. Does Trump really want Bannon, angry and in the wind, declaring his own jihad?”

A Washington Post examination “found that Bannon was able to produce more than a dozen conservative documentaries over the past decade by drawing on a network of two-dozen nonprofit organizations and private companies. Bannon helped arrange donations from wealthy Republicans to the nonprofits that paid him for films and other work, documents show. At the same time, Bannon and his firms took in at least $2 million from the nonprofits and an additional $5 million from the private companies, records show.”

“Bannon, who had already made millions on Wall Street, often was paid in multiple ways for each project — a common practice in Hollywood, where he had worked as an entertainment financier. Because he was paid through the nonprofit and private companies, which have limited obligations to disclose details about their activities, the total pay to Bannon remains unknown.”

Axios: “Steve Bannon’s allies both inside and outside the White House are worried Trump is going to fire him. They’re scrambling this afternoon to figure out a way to persuade the president he’d be making a grave mistake. They argue that getting rid of Bannon will cost Trump among his “America First” constituency, and gain nothing among Democrats or the press.”

“They say Trump’s key to victory is to keep his base motivated. And that means keeping Bannon.”

Mike Allen reports Bannon “is increasingly isolated and will be forced out unless he can adopt a more cooperative approach, a top source told me.”

After a series of high-level White House leaks portraying Steve Bannon as fed up with his job and ready to quit, Axios reports that Trump’s chief strategist has told associates the stories are “100 percent nonsense” and he’s playing for keeps.

Said Bannon: “I love a gunfight.”

“Even for this leaky, rivalrous White House, the Bannon broadside was brutal. Numerous officials torched the senior adviser in media stories, did nothing to soften the Bannon-loses-power narrative and watched gleefully as Drudge and others trumpeted his fall. Truth is, the hatred between the two wings is intense and irreconcilable.”

New York Times: “Mr. Bannon resisted the move, even threatening at one point to quit if it went forward, according to a White House official who, like others, insisted on anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Mr. Bannon’s camp denied that he had threatened to resign and spent the day spreading the word that the shift was a natural evolution, not a signal of any diminution of his outsize influence.”

“His allies said privately that Mr. Bannon had been put on the principals committee to keep an eye on Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, a retired three-star general who lasted just 24 days before being forced out for misleading Vice President Mike Pence and other White House officials about what he had discussed with Russia’s ambassador. With Mr. Flynn gone, these allies said, there was no need for Mr. Bannon to remain, but they noted that he had kept his security clearance.”

Politico: Mega-donor Rebekah Mercer urged Bannon not to quit.

Washington Post: “Years before Bannon became the architect of an anti-globalist revolution — working as chief strategist under President Trump to weaken free-trade deals, restrict immigration from a number of majority-Muslim nations and slam corporations that move jobs overseas — he made his fortune as the quintessential global capitalist.”

“An examination of Bannon’s career as an investment banker found that the Bannon of the 1980s and 1990s lived what looks like an alternate reality from the fiery populist of today who recently declared that ‘globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia.'”

Politico: Bannon made more than half a million dollars last year from entities tied to big GOP donors.

The Wall Street Journal has a must-read profile of White House adviser Stephen Bannon:

There were many factors that turned Steve Bannon into a divisive political firebrand. But his decision to embrace “economic nationalism” and vehemently oppose the forces and institutions of globalization, he says, stems from his upbringing, his relationship with his father and the meaning those AT&T shares held for the family.

“Everything since then has come from there,” he says. “All of it.”