Steve Bannons first major play is shaping up as a full-blown fiasco

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Steve Bannon got his Time magazine cover Thursday, and the accompanying piece offers an account of his astonishingly rapid consolidation of power inside the Trump White House. As the article details, Bannon’s fingerprints are all over Trump’s new immigration ban, making this a test case of sorts as to what the disruptions that Bannon and President Trump promised will produce in the real world.

Bannon, Time reports, continues to relish the massive blowback unleashed by Trump’s executive order — which bans refugees and migrants from seven Muslim-majority countries — as proof that he is doing something right. He’s shaking the elites to their core (he didn’t even attend the exclusive Alfalfa Club dinner!!!), which, he crows, heralds the birth of a “new political order.” But, for all of Bannon’s bravado, the better interpretation of what’s going on is that Bannon’s first major effort to translate Trumpism into policy reality is a full-blown disaster:

1) A federal judge in California has just issued a sweeping ruling that puts a stay on key aspects of Trump’s executive order: His ruling holds that the government must now let into the country people with valid visas who are coming from the seven targeted countries and are looking to live here permanently.

2) The underlying legality of the executive order is now in serious doubt. As the judge’s ruling notes, this stay was issued because the underlying legal challenge to it is “likely to succeed on the merits.” Similarly, another federal judge who blocked the removal of detainees at an airport did so out of the belief that those detained and others like them have a “strong likelihood of success” in showing that their constitutional rights had been violated. As one ACLU lawyer put it: “Every court that has ruled on this has seen it as unconstitutional, so that is a strong sign that this is blatantly illegal.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2017/02/02/steve-bannons-first-major-play-is-shaping-up-as-a-full-blown-fiasco/?tid=pm_pop_b&utm_term=.b4da94e48a1d

[NightWatcher]

1. Governmenting ain't easy. It takes pros

[Lindsay]

2. He's not looking to govern.

He's looking to destroy, which is apparently a whole lot easier.

[cynatnite]

3. Bannon is a Leninist...

He wants to centralize power in the executive branch. He doesn't care about the damage he leaves in his wake.

[Orsino]

4. I think he never planned to be here.

I think all his hyperbole about wanting to tear down all existing institutions was just red meat for the prepper fans that supported him, and that he expected by now to be at home with a suitcase full of Trump campaign cash.

He may be the Trumpista with the closest to a functional work ethic, though, and with the job thrust upon him by an uninterested president he is coping as best he can in a position for which he was utterly unprepared. Fascism for these guys is the easy way out, the form of government that lets them sit on their asses and tell people what to do.

That's the only notion that has me thinking we'll eventually be able to vote them out of power. They don't really want to destroy the world, I think, but they will as they flail about and just try to get paid.