Donald Trump’s spiteful suicide move with Steve Bannon

| 10:39 pm EDT August 18, 2017
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This spring, Donald Trump felt so much antipathy toward FBI Director James Comey that he fired him out of pure spite, even with the knowledge that doing so would probably come back to bite him. Sure enough it directly resulted in the appointment of a Special Counsel who is now investigating Trump’s lifetime of financial crimes. We learned back then that Trump is willing to severely injure himself just to scratch an itch. And today he did it again, in likely much more self-harming fashion.

Make no mistake: Donald Trump didn’t fire Steve Bannon because Charlottesville happened and the public demanded that the racist Bannon be ousted. Trump began plotting Bannon’s demise more than three weeks ago when he signed off on the firing of every one of Bannon’s allies on the National Security Council, even as he leaked to the media that he suspected Bannon was a leaker. This is how Trump gets rid of people. He screws with them, he exhausts them, he weakens their resolve, and by the time he has the conversation with them about their exit, they’re ready to be done with the whole thing. So let’s look at why Trump really got rid of Bannon.

We saw early on that the media, ranging from Time Magazine to Saturday Night Live, wanted to portray Steve Bannon as a puppet master putting Donald Trump’s strings. How true was it? We’ll never know for sure. But we do know that it bothered Trump, a lot. Even as Bannon faded from the public spotlight amid an endless series of other Trump controversies and crises, that resentment seemed to stay with Trump. We saw it as recently as this week, when Trump insisted that “Mr. Bannon” had only joined the campaign late in the game. Trump was just that bothered that someone else was getting credit for his win.

So when Trump fired Bannon today, it wasn’t because he thought it was a good move that would help turn his dysfunctional White House around, or help with how the public views things. Trump fired Bannon because he was annoyed by him. And now Bannon goes from being an annoyance inside the White House, to being a chaotic troublemaker on the outside. Moreover, Bannon’s exit will serve to erode Trump’s support among his own base. This will accomplish what six months of nonstop inept, corrupt, and evil behavior couldn’t. Trump committed political suicide today, just to scratch an itch.