steve bannon is going to be gone from the white house. the president was able to rally a lot of people to his side, get a lot of energy from the bannon wing of the republican party. i don t think bannon is necessarily their leaders, but he is somebody looked at as having their interests at heart. so he may or may not stay in the white house. my guess is that the president would want him not to be outside the tent throwing rocks in, so whatever the situation, however it resolves, it would be bad for president trump to be a split with a guy who has done a pretty good job of taking a wrecking ball to institutions in the establishment. pima, i want to get to one or two domestic things. clearly what happened on united airlines and others, certainly other issues bother me, but china, i must ask about this before we come domestic. the fact that the head of china had his mar-a-lago meetings, how they are playing, and how
we ve been hearing about a possible shake up since the oath was taken and president trump took office. factions and shake ups and infighting are really common in presidential administrations. we can talk about any president going back decades. there is always infighting. look atment lincoln with his team of rivals, everybody at each other s throats. i think in this instance, you see a dividing line in the white house between kushner and ivanka trump on one side, and bannon on the other trying to push the trump populist agenda that got him elected. but you ve got kushner on the other side trying to go more mainstream agenda and taking action in syria and other parts of the agenda that i don t think bannon goes along with. so, i think there is a power struggle and at this point it seems like bannon is losing. david, i read one report that said that steve bannon criticized kushner, the son-in-law, jared kushner, and said, you re a democrat, which is about as nuclear as you can get, i
important role, which, as you mentioned, is usually reserved for military and other high brass. so i think that, you know, it would be overplaying this to say that it s a shake-up. i think it s more of a course correction. bannon has a huge portfolio. he s a very trusted adviser of president trump. he s done a lot of focus on domestic issues, particularly health care, in the last couple of weeks. clearly this is a sign of the influence of the generals like mcmaster rising on trump. and with mcmaster now being given the reins to put his own people in. there is a course correction. there s a possibility of reading too much into it. i don t think bannon is going anywhere any time soon. right. but a very interesting decision by trump and one that tells us that some of these new
couple of different levels. and that they re just now figuring out the staffing issues. but this is a white house also, more than any white house, where rules and titles are absolutely interchangeable and in many cases meaningless, you see secretary of state secretary of state as secretary of state and but jared kushner is essentially secretary of state. i don t think bannon has walk-privileges where he friend can call the president late night at and influence policy and means he won t be involved in decisions he wants to be involved in. look, my colleague this morning, a lot of the implications are still being borne out. but steve bannon retains the clearances and steve bannon reserves the ability to sit down in a national security meeting anytime he wants to. but if you have a storied military career and you want to set the policy, a couple of
that s why you are here. you get ten years for that. josh, we heard fairly reliable that white house staff, trump s campaign staff have attempted to speak to donald trump as the candidate or as the president through the media and they go on shows and tweets and they do different things. bannon has the closest next to media at breitbart where he s empowered to give him a call, you know what, it will be great if you guys would really kill ryan or kill a healthcare bill. i am not sure that i don t think bannon is controlling breitbart anymore. it is tenuous now. my own sense based on some knowledge is i don t think bannon really does not care about this healthcare bill. now, he may cares about it.