Mr. Toad’s wild ride crashes and burns
It shouldn’t have lasted this long, nor did he likely ever expect it to. Steve Bannon took over Donald Trump’s dying campaign fairly late in the game, with the seeming intent of simply using the losing effort to promote his own white supremacist site Breitbart. But after Russia and the FBI stunningly put Trump over the top, he and Bannon each found themselves stuck working in a White House they loathe. And now Mr. Toad’s wild ride is coming to an end.
It’s telling that Donald Trump and Steve Bannon are both such grotesque creatures that either of them could safely be referred to as “Mr. Toad” in a manner which would only serve to insult toads. But while Trump’s premature exit from the White House is now inevitable eventually, Bannon’s exit is imminent. For reasons known only to him, Trump has spent the past few weeks weakening Bannon by firing all of his loyalists and leaking trash talk about him to the media. This is how Trump erodes his own top people in the hope they’ll quit so he doesn’t have to fire them. But a development that neither of them saw coming, the Charlottesville white supremacist terror attack has complicated Bannon’s exit while also cementing it.
Even if you’ve never heard Steve Bannon speak, and in that case lucky you, the white supremacist garbage routinely cranked out by his site Breitbart is enough to prove that Bannon is either profoundly racist or cravenly willing to cash in by strategically promoting racism. For that reason, as the public eats Trump alive this week for his de facto racist response to Charlottesville, the focus has been largely placed on forcing Bannon out the door.
And so while Trump will now instinctively change his mind and want to hang onto Bannon just to spite the mainstream public, he’ll eventually give in and do what he was already planning to do before Charlottesville happened. Steve Bannon, who has spent his life as a sewer rat of Wall Street, a sewer rat of Hollywood, and now a sewer rat of politics, will invariably find a way to go succeed in being horrible at something else in life. But Mr. Toad’s wild ride in the White House is done. The only question is when the toad’s boss will find himself out on the street as well. Regular readers, feel free to support Palmer Report
