Steve Bannon just lost big time
Steve Bannon, who’s currently out on bail while awaiting a New York criminal trial that will send him to prison for several years, is still trying to make himself relevant. His latest antics involved trying to get Jim Jordan elected Speaker. Bannon wasn’t the only one in on this plot; everyone from Donald Trump to Sean Hannity also tried to whip votes on Jordan’s behalf.
Yet Jim Jordan lost. In fact he lost badly. The harder people like Bannon worked to try to pressure House Republicans into voting for Jordan, the bigger the margin Jordan kept losing by.
While this process was going on, we saw a ton of headlines and tweets lamenting how awful it was that the likes of Bannon, Trump, and Hannity were getting the next Speaker of the House elected. But in the media’s rush to declare defeat at the hands of Bannon so they could lament over it, they missed the fact that Bannon’s tactics didn’t work.
For that matter, Bannon’s antics never seem to work. Each time he announces some new candidate he’s backing, that candidacy fails. Then Bannon announces he’s amassing a huge private army, but it doesn’t exist. Sooner or later you figure out that the likes of Steve Bannon are just making things up as they go, and they have no real influence over how things play out. If Bannon had any influence, Jim Jordan would be Speaker right now.
