Demotion of Bannon
brings White House crisis into the open
By Patrick Martin
7 April 2017
7 April 2017
President Donald Trump removed his chief
political adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, from the “principals committee” of the
National Security Council, the top foreign policy decision-making body within
the White House. The action was not formally announced, but made public through
a presidential memorandum made available to news organizations late Wednesday.
The memorandum restructures the principals
committee, which brings together key White House and cabinet officials either
to make decisions or recommend options to the president. Besides removing
Bannon, it restores several top military-intelligence officials who had been
removed only two months ago, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA director.
The demotion of Bannon, the most openly
fascistic of Trump’s inner circle, brings into the open a ferocious conflict
within the new right-wing administration, involving both foreign and domestic
policy.
In national security affairs, Bannon has been
displaced by National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster, an active duty Army
lieutenant-general named by Trump in February to replace retired General
Michael Flynn. Top military officers control all the top national security
positions in the Trump administration: McMaster at NSC, retired Marine General
James (“Mad Dog”) Mattis at the Pentagon and another retired Marine general,
John F. Kelly, at the Department of Homeland Security.
McMaster has gradually consolidated control over
the National Security Council, removing many Flynn appointees. Prior to the
ouster of Bannon, deputy national security adviser K. T. McFarland, a former
Fox News personality and Republican candidate for US Senate, was offered the
post of ambassador to Singapore, or some other State Department post of her
choosing, to allow McMaster to advance his own deputy, former Bush
administration official and Goldman Sachs banker Dina Powell. The memorandum
signed Wednesday by Trump places Powell on the principals committee as
McMaster’s alternate.
In domestic policy, Bannon, Trump chief adviser
on policy Stephen Miller and director of the National Trade Council Peter
Navarro are identified with a policy of extreme economic nationalism and
right-wing populism. They have conflicted with Wall Street veterans, including
Gary Cohn, former president of Goldman Sachs, who heads the National Economic
Council, as well as Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, himself the scion of a
billion-dollar New York real estate fortune.
On Thursday, the US media was filled with sensationalized
accounts of “civil war” in the White House between the Wall Street “globalists”
headed by Cohn and Kushner (each possessed of a fortune of more than half a
billion dollars), and the “nationalists” headed by Bannon.
There were reports of “face-to-face” clashes
between Kushner and Bannon, “nonstop” fighting amid vitriolic diatribes by
Bannon in particular. There is no disguising the anti-Semitic subtext of much
of the conflict, since Cohn and Kushner are both Jewish. Bannon is well known
for his religious bigotry, which he thinly disguises as opposition to what he
has called the “New York” faction of Trump’s inner circle.
The bulk of the corporate media sides with
Kushner and Cohn—both longtime donors to the Democratic Party, like Trump
himself, until the 2016 election campaign—and against Bannon. But both sides in
this factional struggle are reactionary defenders of big business and American
imperialism, whatever their personal and tactical differences.
Cohn and Kushner were said to be opposed to a
full-court-press approach to the repeal of Obamacare. This reflects the
widespread support in the corporate elite for Obama’s efforts to reduce the
cost of health care to both government and business. Obamacare placed more of
the burden on individual working people, moving towards an openly two-tier
medical system, with cut-rate care for working people, while the wealthy have
the best care money can buy.
Cohn and Kushner favored focusing instead on
cutting taxes for the wealthy and big business, and slashing spending on
entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare. They have opposed even
token, demagogic efforts to appeal to working people, as with proposals for
increased spending on infrastructure.
The New York
Times suggested that Bannon was on his way out entirely, reporting
Wednesday that he had threatened to resign from the White House rather than
accept his demotion on foreign policy, a claim that Bannon stridently denied.
Such reports have sparked a flood of complacent and celebratory comments from
pro-Democratic Party media pundits.
Typical of these was Michelle Goldberg on Slate,
who detected “a tiny crack of light in the black cloud hanging over Washington,
D.C. We might be seeing the berserk horror of Trumpism giving way to the slightly
lesser horror of normal conservatism… Perhaps we’re moving from the President
Bannon phase of the Trump nightmare into a President Jared Kushner period.”
Ultra-right media outlets have taken up a
campaign in defense of Bannon, warning Trump against siding with the
“Democratic” faction in his own White House. Former Trump adviser Roger Stone
claimed that Kushner was directly inspiring anti-Bannon stories in the media.
Right-wing talk radio host Mark Levin took to Twitter Wednesday night to
denounce “Jared Kushner, Gary Cohn, Dina Powell: the three big-government
liberals tightening their hold on the White House.”
The conflicts over foreign policy continue to
drive the congressional investigation into alleged Russian interference in the
2016 US elections. Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee,
stepped aside from the committee’s probe Thursday, less than 24 hours after the
demotion of Bannon, an action that seems to represent a congressional parallel
to the White House shake-up.
Nunes was seen as the most determined defender
of the president within the committee, going so far as to engage in a clumsy
effort to vindicate Trump’s claim that Barack Obama had ordered the wiretapping
of Trump Tower during the election campaign.
Nearly all Democrats and many Republicans had
criticized Nunes’s conduct, but he flatly rejected calls to step down from the
inquiry until formal charges were filed with the House Ethics Committee, based
on the claim that in his public statements about intelligence agencies
intercepting the communications of Trump transition aides he had revealed
classified information.
Nunes met Wednesday night with House Speaker
Paul Ryan and apparently got his marching orders, announcing the next morning
that he would remain as chairman of the committee, but turn over the
investigation into Russian hacking—as well as Trump’s unsupported claims of
Obama-ordered wiretapping—to a trio of Republican representatives, Mike Conaway
of Texas, Trey Gowdy of South Carolina and Tom Rooney of Pennsylvania.
THE
SWAMP DWELLERS:
GLOBAL
LOOTING of the POOR
TRUMP
and FAMILY, BILL, HILLARY &
CHELSEA CLINTON, MICHELLE AND “HOPE
&
CHANGE” PSYCHOPATH MUSLIM
BARACK OBAMA!
Will
they finish off America as they serve
themselves and the super rich???
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