Well before the National Day of Patriotic Devotion, on which the 45th president’s inauguration was cheered by a crowd of dozens of admirers, it had become clear that despite his mortifying inventory of moral, ethical, and verbal deficiencies, Donald Trump was only the second-worst thing about the Trump administration.
Steve Bannon is the latest and most alarming exponent of a long political tradition: advisers who not so secretly do all the thinking for lightweight Republican presidents. Ronald Reagan had the trifecta of James Baker, Edwin Meese, and Michael Deaver under the stage direction of the first lady (and, apparently, her astrologer). W. had Karl Rove and Dick Cheney.
Trump has Bannon. And so do we. And it’s a major problem for the whole world on a scale we’ve never seen before. While his predecessors were also skillful manipulators who loved power, they weren’t hardcore ideologues who definitely believe in biblical prophecy, have intense affinities for Sun Tzu and Julius Evola, and explicitly yearn for an apocalyptic holy war with Islam they say has already begun.
