Yes, Steve Bannon Should Terrify You - Frank Bruni
Remember all the talk, before Steve Bannon was expectorated from the Trump administration, that hed be a worse menace on the outside than on the inside? Turns out it was true.
He popped up last week in a picture as unsettling as any image from Puerto Rico, North Korea or Las Vegas. It showed the potbellied Pygmalion beside a new protégé, Michael Grimm, who is hoping to reclaim, from a fellow Republican, the congressional seat that he had to vacate a few years back when he was convicted of felony tax fraud and sent off to the clink. Bannon apparently wants to help.
Why? Excellent question. Grimms botched effort to enrich himself by hiding $1 million of his restaurant-business earnings doesnt exactly scream populism. He has as much to do with draining the swamp as Cheetos do with nutrition.
But hes loud, obnoxious and a thorn in the side of the Republican establishment, and those are the real criteria to be a minion in Bannons motley brigade. That picture of the two of them in Bannons Washington townhouse the Breitbart Embassy, its called was a declaration of Bannons real intent, which is to inflict as much pain and ugliness on the G.O.P. as he can. Hes not an ideologue. Hes an arsonist. And he doesnt care who or what is reduced to ashes.
What made Bannon so damned angry? Ive scoured the long profiles of him and devoured Devils Bargain, a biography of sorts by Joshua Green. I know about his fathers stock-market losses and his own estrangement from dewier and more smoothly conformist classmates at Harvards business school. Still I feel theres something were missing, a sequence of belittlements beyond our view.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/07/opinion/sunday/steve-bannon-agenda.html