We are watching Negotiation 101. Trump is the professor showing how to do it.
The auctioneer holds up an item he knows will eventually sell for $20. He says: "Let's start the bidding on this lovely item. Who will bid $500? Let's start at $500! No? Who will grab this bargain at only $300?"
Donald Trump has started the negotiations over how he will staff his administration.
It is probably true that Trump would like to have Steve Bannon close at hand for advice. There are a dozen ways he could get this, either with an official role or an informal one. The informal roles would allow Bannon to make tons of money in the private sphere back at Breitbart or in some consultancy. The formal roles put him in an office in the White House. Either would work for Trump and Bannon. Trump named Bannon a "Chief Strategist" to be paired with Chief of Staff Reince Priebus. Trump says he wants him right at his side in the West Wing.
Trump knows full well that Bannon is a big controversial choice. (If he didn't know it then Bannon told him.) Trump did it anyway. On purpose. It is a red herring, a cape in front of the bull, a diversion. It is a negotiation.
By naming Bannon Chief Strategist Trump has just re-set the standards of normal and acceptable. Trump was the auctioneer who started the bidding at a ridiculous price.
The news is full of stories about all the unacceptable things published under Bannon's supervision. Bannon says, sure, his websites attract white supremacists and homophobes. Bannon says that the women who oppose Michelle Bachman and Sarah Palin are "just a bunch of dykes that came from the Seven Sisters schools." Bannon calls the Occupy Wall Street people "dirty and greasy", and says that Paul Ryan was grown in a petrie dish at the Heritage Foundation, and says that conservatives should "bitch-slap the Republican Party."
Democrats have risen to the bait. Steve Bannon is too much. Steve Bannon goes to far. Fire Steve Bannon. Steve Bannon. Steve Bannon.
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| Democratic Senators Rise Up in Opposition |
My Senators Wyden and Merkley have each emailed their lists. Sign the petition! Send money!
Wyden: "It's outrageous the first announcement from the Trump administration is to announce the chief strategist will be a man who not only tolerated hate in every form, but actively courted it and fomented it. I'n the son of German-Jewish immigrants. My family fled Nazi Germany. . . ."
Merkley: "Sign the Petition: Call on Donald Trump to rescind the appointment of Steve Bannon, repudiate his horrific, racist, sexist bigoted views, and call for an end to violence, hate speech, and intimidation."
Democrats took the bait. Trump just moved the goalpost on them. Bannon is the new standard for "too far." Trump just showed them how he negotiates. The worse Bannon is, the more horrific, racist, sexist, and bigoted he is, the more normalized are the rest of Trump's potential appointments. Trump has just made John Bolton, Newt Gingrich, and Rudy Giuliani look acceptable in comparison.
By any standards of a Republican administration Bolton, Gingrich, and Giuliani would be uncharted waters of extreme and controversial choices for public office. They have been aggressive political provocateurs on the leading edge of partisan anger and aggressive policy advocacy. Trump has just made them normal and mainstream.
This early in the term Trump will no doubt prevail in keeping Bannon on as "Chief Strategist" if he and Bannon want him to continue in this role. It is too early for Trump to appear to be bending or compromising. He won the electoral vote. He gets to pick his team. Steve Bannon has just cleared the way for Trump to nominate as extreme a cabinet as he wants.
3 comments:
“The Building of a Popular Bi-Partisan President Begins”
As the UpClose post yesterday explained, the Steve Bannon controversy is classic media manipulation by the President-Elect, laying the ground work for normalizing his coming nominations and Congressional agenda. This post-Bannon period has already begun. Today’s New York Times headline is “Senate Democrats’ Surprising Strategy: Trying to Align With Trump”, NY Times (Nov 16, 2016, http://nyti.ms/2f0Q3hn). The article states: “On infrastructure spending, child tax credits, paid maternity leave and dismantling trade agreements, Democrats are looking for ways they can work with Mr. Trump and force Republican leaders to choose between their new president and their small-government, free-market principles.” The article says NY Senator Chuck Schumer will lead Democrats out of the desert.
While this may be “surprising” for the Times, anyone who didn’t live in an anti-Trump media bubble would easily have seen this coming. All of the following is excerpted from the Two Left Eyes podcast on November 6, 2016:
We’re headed to an era of a popular President with bipartisan appeal in the electorate, like Ronald Reagan was, especially in his first term. It’s usually ideology that divides us, but Trump is non-ideological like most of the country left and right. True, Americans get angry and combative over certain things like economic malaise, tax increases, cuts to entitlements like Social Security. But regular people don’t protest tax cuts, everybody likes entitlements, and we’re all used to our great national credit card—the deficit—to pay for everything from wars to bailouts. There’s actually very little people won’t like with Trump on these bread and butter issues.
Trump's infrastructure projects, his love of bricks and mortar, they’ll be popular. Even New Yorkers and Hollywood will love him if he renovates La Guardia and LAX. He has no economic or ideological interest in war. If the left was right about one big thing regarding Trump, its that he's a wall building isolationist. Trump and Sanders exposed Americans for the popular isolationists that we are.
From the election, we learned that “globalism” is a bad word, its politically toxic and its now solidly linked to the political toxicity of open borders, exactly as it was with the Brexit vote in UK voters rejecting EU globalism and open borders. It’s not just the Trans Pacific Partnership under Trump that is dead, its NAFTA as well without major and symbolic modifications. We likely won’t see either party in the future doing anything other than telling voters they are against any global trade agreements that are perceived—rightly or wrongly-- as costing industrial job loss in the rust belt and mid-west. And we learned that our body politic is far less ideological and far more populist that we had known. Most of our history for the past 100 years has been electing ideological Republicans or ideological Democrats. Bush and the neo-conservatives on the right, Obama and neo-liberals on the left. Trump is literally an ideological agnostic, he doesn’t care about social or political ideology. Americans now want populism, and they want non-ideological progressivism
Bottom line, there is a strong chance that Trump is going to be a very popular president for everyone other than 2/3rds of Hispanics, 100% of our 3 million Muslims, the left establishment, and die-hard nerd Democrats like us. It’d be foolish to underestimate Donald Trump yet again. We should have learned that lesson after he won the primary when everyone said he couldn’t, and won the general election we were told that was inconceivable at 10 to 1 odds. Never, ever underestimate the Donald’s drive and effectiveness in winning, or his need to be loved as part of that.
I have had similar thoughts about Bannon. He is a monster but is drawing all the fire, when every other appointment suggested is horrid also. And with Schumer vowing to cooperate to get infrastructure improvements, it feels rather like "but Hitler got the trains to run on time." Not to mention that Trump's lifelong corruption shouts "don't let this man hand out the candy."
I'd be constitutionally and philosophically inclined to support Trump's pullback from America's long economic imperialism, but I don't know how you do that when others have already blown the Middle East structure to smithereens.
Interesting--and important?--that non-ideological populism appears the decisive factor this year rather than religious or Tea-party conservatism. Is this a seismic shift?
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