With Bannon gone, it’s civil war, by Michael Davis.
At its most coherent, Trumpism has always been a heretical offshoot of Bannonism: the same populist-nationalist spirit without its conservative, Christian foundation.
So there’s really no other way to say it: objectively speaking, with the departure of Bannon, there is no point of continuity between Candidate Trump and President Trump. They’re two completely different people who happen to share the same Twitter handle. …
The West Wing … is now controlled by New York liberals: Ivanka, Jared Kushner, Dina Powell, and Gary Cohn. …
There’s been a slow leak of prominent defectors from the beginning of this presidency, none of which attended major firings. Most prominent were Ann Coulter, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Paul Joseph Watson: three of the President’s most ardent media boosters, who ‘got off the Trump Train’ after his attacks on Syria. …
If I were a White House counsellor, I wouldn’t worry about Trump’s re-election prospects… at least not for that reason. What he loses in Bannonites, he makes up for in prodigal establishmentarians. But as a voter and a journalist, I do wonder about the future of the nationalist movement. …
What happens after Trump? As we said, the actual Trumpist machine is now either ‘establishment’ or out-and-out liberal. Whoever he appoints as his successor, it probably won’t be someone his base would accept on their political vision.
Which means we should expect Trump to give rise to a new political dynasty, much like the Clintons: ideologically tepid but efficient technocrats. Trumpism, like Clintonism, will be defined less by its ideology than its managerial competence …
So, what happens if he appoints (say) Ivanka: someone the Trumpist base has never really liked and certainly never trusted? What happens when the head of the Trump machine is someone to whom the base has absolutely no affection or loyalty – someone that won’t get a free pass for deviating from the nationalist program, the way Trump himself has?
The movement’s best chance for survival is that Bannon turns his guns on the New York faction and forces a purge, reinstalling allies of the Old Guard (Bannon, Priebus and co) Otherwise, if the Trump Administration concludes with such a deep and pronounced ideological divide, there will be civil war – almost certainly one brutal enough to destroy both the Trumpists and the Bannonites.
