THE BANNON FACTOR

I was recently going over notes from a ghostwriting project that I worked at for nearly a decade. I was chief researcher and editor and thus responsible for formulating a lot of the political ideas that the client prompted me to consider in his writing. I was struck by how on point we had been as far back as 2013-2014 regarding the wave of authoritarian thought that was taking shape all over the West, but nowhere as much as in the United States, where a man who had never been taken seriously before, an almost ridiculous jet set playboy with a lousy comb-over and a series of insane business projects, many of which were crashing failures became suddenly relevant. He was a guy who was taken in the best of cases as a joke and in the worst as a swindler whom former partners sought to avoid in the future. But suddenly, he was becoming, against all odds, the face of the American ultra-right and, incredibly, a serious contender for US president.

What’s stunning to me now—although I called it on a hunch back then—isn’t so much the nefarious influence that this man, Donald Trump, has had on the entire spectrum of American politics in the last seven or so years. It was easy enough to see that coming if he managed to gain access to the White House. What was chilling, in retrospect, was just how influential his former chief adviser, Steve Bannon, had been in ushering Trump from the play-by-ear politics of his early campaign for the presidency into a truly pernicious political philosophy similar to the classic ideologies of some of the most prominent dictators in history. I couldn’t help thinking that, without Bannon—and to a somewhat lesser extent, Stephen Miller—while Trump surely would have been a capricious, directionless, reactionary and recalcitrant executive, as he always had been in his role as CEO of the Trump Organization where his main “product” was the Trump Brand, he probably wouldn’t have been nearly as focused as he has been on destroying the US representative democratic system as we, born right after World War II, had known it up to the present. He would, I reasoned, simply have bumbled through a four-year term like a bull in a china shop, alienating everyone, probably even including his own base and the GOP, with his aimless brand of populism and duplicity until he was voted out of office and faded from the scene.

But Bannon, a well-studied ideologue with a warrior mentality at the service of anti-establishment chaos, got Trump’s ear early on and convinced him that he was the man called by destiny to burn it all down. It was no coincidence that I referred back then to Bannon as “the American Rasputin”, because he was no less nefariously influential on Trump than Grigori Rasputin had been on Czar Nicholas of Russia. This was obvious from the outset, when what had passed for “policy” in the Trump campaign and early presidency, and that had all of the orientation of a weathervane in a hurricane, suddenly became laser focused on issues that were sure to appeal to the most extreme elements of the Republican far right. And, indeed, even beyond the traditional far right to other political currents too extreme to be embraced even under “the big tent” of Republicanism.

The arrival of Bannon and his “war room” in the West Wing of the White House was, then, clear as day, in its extremist influence that had Trump at war with the world, but a political war imbued with almost military strategy, designed to isolate enemies, incorporate erstwhile rivals where convenient, and destroy those who refused to climb on board. This was all pure Bannon, not because Trump wasn’t interested in conquering absolute power, but because he’d had no idea how to go about it in American politics until Bannon provided him with the tools.

Out of those project notes of mine, the information that jumped out at me regarded Steve Bannon’s stated philosophy in the years prior to the Trump era when the alt-right strategist was still searching for a protégé—courting potential candidates like Jeb Bush, Rick Santorum and Ted Cruz unsuccessfully before finding a perfect fit in Trump, someone aggressive yet malleable because he had never had a salient intellectual notion of his own. Trump’s brain was, Bannon reasoned, fertile soil for his revolutionary politics, a blank slate on which he could write his manifesto.

The notes in question had to do with an article that writer Ronald Radosh had researched for The Daily Beast in 2013. It was that year when he was invited to a book-signing event and cocktail that Bannon, then CEO of the Breitbart far-right ideological site, was holding at his posh digs in Washington DC. Radosh struck up a conversation with Bannon about a picture in which his daughter, Maureen, a West Point-graduate Army officer, was sitting in Saddam Hussein’s former throne with an assault rifle across her lap. Bannon, the doting father, couldn’t contain his pride for her.

One thing led to another and the chat became an interview. In the course of it, Bannon suddenly said, apropos of nothing, “I’m a Leninist.”

Radosh wasn’t sure he’d heard Bannon right. He knew the political strategist to be a far-right-wing, Christian white supremacist, “populist” and “nationalist”. Or at least, that was the pitch that he was currently hawking.

So Radosh said something like, “A Leninist?” And when Bannon confirmed it, he asked him to explain what he meant by the term. “Lenin wanted to destroy the state,” Radosh quoted Bannon as saying. “And that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.” Asked to expand on that thought Bannon, according to Radosh, told the writer that he was applying Lenin’s strategy to Tea Party populist goals. Radosh said that Bannon wasn’t shy about telling him that the institutions that he was focusing on were the Republican and Democratic Parties and the traditional conservative press.

Several years later, when Bannon was picked to be Trump’s chief strategist, Radosh contacted him again and told him that he planned to reused parts of that 2013 interview in a new profile he was creating for The Daily Beast and asked if the strategist would like to add anything new. Bannon, knowing that those comments weren’t going to fly in Republican far-right circles, claimed he didn’t recall that conversation and said if Radosh used it, he would deny it ever took place.

In the wake of the Trump era, in which the GOP has been usurped by the extreme right, and its moderates as well as true conservatives have been marginalized, in which the two main parties are faced off in a war in which Congress is shackled and stalled in a climate of non-negotiation, and in which the unthinkable happened for the first time in history when the extreme right tried to overthrow the established order and install an autocratic regime after losing an election, and indeed in a current climate in which an enormous cross-section of American politics no longer believes in the integrity of the democratic election process, it’s not hard to see that Bannon’s nihilist goals found an able enforcer in Donald Trump.

While it may seem positive for democracy that, in this week’s general election process, observers have pointed to Trump and his camp as the big losers in the race, Trump still has a large and fanatical following. And the fact that big-money campaign donors are reportedly ready to write Trump off, fades in importance in view of the fact that he is still capable, among his most loyal supporters, of raising millions of campaign dollars through donations of five to twenty dollars each. It is worthwhile recalling that neither Trump nor his most implacable base—often evangelicals who view him as a messiah sent by God—are simply not bound by long-standing American ideals and traditions. And it is also important to remember that if there is one thing we’ve learned about Donald Trump, it is that he often resurges even when the most sacred of pundits pronounce him finished.

Anyone who has ever had an ounce of true patriotism, anyone who cares at all about the future of American representative democracy, should be bearing that in mind for 2024, when the presidential election process is once again center stage.   

SUBPOENA? DON’T MAKE ME LAUGH!

 

One of the many rules of civilized government for which the former Trump administration has demonstrated authoritarian disdain is the power of Congress to subpoena both material evidence and witness testimony pertaining to the investigations of its committees and subcommittees. A hallmark of the Trump regime’s former and continuing authoritarianism has been its utter disdain for the three-branch system of checks and balances to guarantee the integrity of representative democracy.

And nowhere has that disdain been more derisive than in the refusal of Trump administration officials and former Trump aides to comply with congressional subpoenas. Indeed, Trump’s attorney general (clearly Trump’s, not the nation’s) William Barr scoffed at threats by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to cite Trump officials including himself for contempt of Congress, actually daring her to go ahead. It was a “make my day moment” for a Justice Department placed by its chief at the service of one man rather than that of the nation.

The fact is that, up to the time of this new era of anti-democratic decay, mutual compliance among the three branches of government has been largely based on common respect and on everyone’s being on the same page when it came to the importance of maintaining the sanctity of the democratic process. And the forty-four men who preceded Trump in office, though some more compliant than others, understood that, in the end, the main duty of their administrations was to protect and serve the democratic institutions on which the United States was founded. In short, to hold sacred the provisions of the US Constitution. Not even Richard Nixon was willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater and resigned rather than face impeachment.

But the Trump era has been, and continues to be—since one would have to be an eternal optimist, or would have to live in a fantasy world even more clueless than that of “the base” itself, to think that the Trump era is over—the greatest test since the Civil War of American democracy’s resilience in the face of internal threats to its integrity. Trump and his political cohorts have shown utter disregard and disrespect for the Constitution and for the time-honored traditions of American democratic and patriotic zeal, even to the extent of flouting the most basic tradition of all: the peaceful transition of power and acceptance of the outcome of free and fair elections. They have gone beyond anything Americans could ever have imagined in their worst nightmares by actually seeking to incite and then seeking to excuse an insurrection aimed at toppling the established order. 

Anyone who is still asking if “we might be in danger of a constitutional crisis” isn’t paying attention. We are in the midst of one. We have been ever since the former president refused to concede his loss of the 2020 election and made the seditious decision to incite his followers to go to Congress and remind the vice president, in his role as president of the Senate, where his loyalties should lie—clearly not with the United States, but with Trump World.

The idea of any of the anti-democratic actors in Congress and in the Executive Branch who were behind the January Sixth Insurrection (which is how, if historians are honest, it should be remembered in the history of the United States) not just being cited for, but being convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to obey a congressional subpoena seems naïve to say the least. Even prior to the Trump regime, compliance with congressional subpoenas was pretty much based on the honors system. And in Washington, the threat of someone’s being charged with contempt has been, over the last several decades, barely more of a deterrent to non-compliance than a parking ticket.

Congress in theory has the faculty to impose fines and jail-time for contempt. But the sergeant at arms no longer has a calaboose in the Capitol, and Congress hasn’t done so against a government official since the 1920s and 1930s, when those who were cited basically got a slap on the wrist. “Civilians” are another issue altogether. Congress famously jailed and fined members of the Hollywood acting, producing, directing and writing communities during the McCarthy communist witch-hunt in the mid-1900s, whenever those called to testify refused to go before Congress or refused to rat on their colleagues.

The sentencing of the Hollywood Ten to a year
in prison rocked Hollywood for years to come.

The most iconic case of that dark era in American politics was that of the so-called Hollywood Ten. In that case, the House voted 346 to 17 to cite ten Hollywood writers, directors, and producers for contempt. These ten men, including Albert Maltz, Dalton Trumbo, John Howard Lawson, Samuel Ornitz, Ring Lardner, Jr., Lester Cole, Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Edward Dmytryk, and Robert Adrian Scott, refused to cooperate at McCarthy’s anti-communist hearings, when the House Un-American Activities Committee was probing communist influence in the film industry.

Although the ten said in their defense that they were only defending their First Amendment right to free expression by refusing to answer inappropriate questioning about their political affiliations, the Supreme Court upheld the congressional contempt conviction and they were sentenced to a year in prison. This was clearly an abuse of congressional powers and a legal travesty that led to an unprecedented level of self-censorship in the motion picture industry and to the black-listing of anyone with even vaguely left-wing views. That climate of suspicion and terror lasted in Hollywood from the late 1940s until the 1960s, during which time dozens of lives and careers in the film industry were ruined.

But no such stricture has been in evidence within politicians’ own community for a very long time. This has probably been the case because issues among them are less about the law and legal procedures and more about not doing something to members of another party that they will be able to do back to you when their party is in charge. The great difference is, however, that while the so-called Red threat to American democracy was, by and large, manufactured in the fevered minds of far-right zealots, the threat to democracy that the country is facing today is quite real. It is, indeed, a clear and present danger to constitutional democracy.

Bannon

Getting down to brass tacks, this is what’s happening: The House Select Committee investigating the January Sixth Insurrection has sought to issue subpoenas to former Trump officials including former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Defense Department official Kash Patel, one-time White House adviser (and Trump Rasputin) Steve Bannon, and former Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications Dan Scavino, calling on them to testify regarding the events of January 6^th of this year. Trump has sent a letter to all of these men calling on them to simply ignore the subpoenas.

So far, none of them has complied with the subpoenas to hand over related documentation and they have now been scheduled to testify before the committee next week, after missing a documentation compliance deadline set for last Thursday. Scavino has, in fact, taken his former boss’s non-compliance order so seriously that he has been living like a fugitive, holing-up at an unknown location so that he can’t be served the subpoena.

Nor does Bannon’s claim of “executive privilege” hold water, because he had long since left the Trump administration by the time of the events of January 6, 2021, but was nevertheless alleged to have been in contact with the former president, encouraging him to push the storming of the Capitol.  

The watch word here, in general, is “privilege”, executive privilege to be precise, which Trump claims to still command and which he is invoking as the reason for urging his former aides not to comply with the probe. But does executive privilege apply in Trump’s case, or in the case of any former president?

While Trump sycophants are seeking to make a case for it, constitutional law experts apparently agree that Trump has no executive privilege. Privilege, in fact, doesn’t really belong to the president—any president—but is a faculty of the United States of America, which, as such, is only exercised by the current president. A former president may offer an opinion to the incumbent executive regarding questions of privilege during his former administration, but he has no power whatsoever to compel the current president to conserve that privilege, period. And even less so if that privilege is being used to cover up potentially criminal activities.

But here’s the rub. In modern times—or at least since the McCarthy era—Congress has all but relinquished its power to invoke its faculty for punishing “inherent contempt” directly, even though, under federal law, it can fine offenders up to a hundred thousand dollars and/or send them to prison for a year, instead referring any and all citations of criminal or civil contempt of Congress to the courts. The problem with that is that the legal procedures involved are notoriously slow.

McGahn - "Crazy shit"

For instance, when former Trump White House Attorney Don McGahn was subpoenaed to testify before Congress after it was revealed that he had told other Trump aides that he was refusing to do all of “the crazy shit” Trump was ordering him to do—including an attempt to sack special investigator Robert Mueller—Trump immediately invoked “executive privilege” and blocked the attorney from testifying in Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 elections. The House sued to get McGahn to testify, but the ensuing legal battle bounced around in the courts for a total of 25 months before, finally, in June of this year, the attorney testified behind closed doors, far too late, obviously, to do any good in stopping Trump from doing even more “crazy shit”, as witnessed by the events of January 6^th.

This doesn’t bode well for getting former Trump aides to testify in the current probe, since the House is playing “beat the clock” with mid-term elections to take place in November of next year. Why? Because if the GOP manages to take over the House, which well they could, the January 6^th investigation will be dead in the water.

There are those, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who want to bring back undiluted “inherent contempt” action in Congress. And constitutional experts indicate that the only thing keeping that from happening is majority will.

Constitutional law expert Kia Rahnama has written: “…(T)here is clear legal precedent that all but endorses such power. The Supreme Court has consistently analogized between the congressional contempt power and the judiciary’s contempt power. For example, in McGrain v Daugherty (1927) the (Supreme) Court was asked to review whether an unsworn committee report could form the basis for a warrant issued by a Senate investigation subcommittee; the Court agreed that Congress had that power because the courts of law followed the same practice. In Juney v McCracken (1935), the Supreme Court clearly stated that the power of Congress to punish for contempt is ‘governed by the same principles as the power of the judiciary to punish for contempt.’ Similarly, in Kilbourn v Thompson (1880)—concerning Congress’s impeachment powers, which follow the same quasi-judicial procedures as contempt proceedings—the Supreme Court stated that Congress should be able to conduct investigations ‘in the same manner and by the use of the same means that courts of justice can in like cases.’ The Court then, in dicta, stated that this would logically give Congress the power to punish by ‘fine or imprisonment,’ the same options being available to courts.”

The only question, then, appears to be, will Democrats in general and the Biden administration and attorney general’s office in particular, make the hard decisions necessary to get democracy back on track, and quite possibly save the United States from authoritarianism, at the possible expense of their political careers? Or will they dissemble, as they have to date, in the face of Donald Trump’s assault on democracy and of the authoritarian designs at work in the GOP?