Steve Bannon is so very screwed
If you’re Steve Bannon, you were fearing two things with equal trepidation a week ago. The first was irrelevance; since his ouster from Donald Trump’s White House, he’s become more of a non-factor by the day. The second was incarceration; the Trump-Russia scandal is reaching the point where it may end up taking everyone down who came anywhere near it. Now, a week later, things have gone about as poorly as they could possibly go for Bannon on both fronts.
First came the assertion from the fiancee of Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos that Steve Bannon knew what Papadopoulos was plotting with the Russian government. If true, that would incriminate Bannon in the Russia scandal. MSNBC intel analyst Malcolm Nance went so far as to predict that Bannon will end up in prison if he doesn’t find a way to cooperate with Special Counsel Robert Mueller. That in turn led to questions about why Mueller hasn’t yet interviewed Bannon, and a reminder that Mueller only tends to interview the people he doesn’t plan to arrest. Then things got worse for Bannon.
Steve Bannon somehow got hired by SiriusXM radio, leading to widespread backlash and boycotts, putting Bannon at risk of immediately losing that job. So what did he do? He held a rally for Republican Senate candidate and accused child molester Roy Moore in Alabama. Bannon used that rally to insult Alabama, to attack Ivanka Trump, and to predict that Donald Trump is about to get ousted from office by his own Republican Party. Then the next day Moore lost in humiliating fashion, prompting Bannon’s name to begin trending on Twitter.
There is no faster way for a conservative political pundit to become irrelevant than to sloppily endorse a Republican candidate in a deeply red state who then goes on to lose to a Democrat. At this point things are going so badly for Steve Bannon that his only silver lining is this: if he does lose the SiriusXM gig as expected, well, he wasn’t going to be able to do his show from prison anyway.
