Welcome to what I hope will become a daily feature. This carnival we call the Trump Presidency is like an out of control merry-go-round, shit being thrown off in every direction at 100 mph. By the time the 6:00 news rolls around, you’ve completely forgotten the “breaking news” of 8:39 am. And it seems that every story is incrementally worse than the one that preceded it.
But in this whirlwind of nonstop dysfunction, it’s easy to forget that this has been going on pretty much nonstop for two years now. So I thought it would be both entertaining, as well as informative, to take a step back every day to see what was happening a year ago, and two years ago on the same day in the history of Trump. Entertaining because we can look back in hindsight at what piddly event we were sure was going to be the asteroid that would smash into planet Trump, obliterating it from the political heavens once and for all. And informative, because we can be reminded of “major” scandals and events of days past, and look at them through the prism of events and information from today, to guage their importance, and possible outcome. So, here we go.
August 18th, 2016
This one couldn’t have worked out more appropriately if I had planned it that way. Last night, Ari Melber spent an hour interviewing former Trump campaign Chairman Steve Bannon. But two years ago today, the political world was agog at the replacement of the newly departed Paul Manafort as Trump’s campaign manager by KellyAnne Conway as the new campaign manager, and none other than Steve Bannon as the new “campaign CEO.” bannon was already a known far right political figure from his time running the official site of the then blooming alt-right, Breitbart, but the media gleefully traced his history, including his rather rocky previous attempt at stardom as a Hollywood producer, and reports that he had abused an ex wife.
At the time, CBS News ran an opinion piece by John Dickerson titled; “Trump campaign shake-up looks like chaos to worried GOP,” but Dickerson had no way of knowing that the Steve Bannon paint mixer would continue to shake things up for the next two years.
August 18th, 2017
Yes folks, we have a Steve Bannon twofer! On August 18th, 2017 the New York Times front page article announced that after a turbulent year as first the Trump campaign CEO, and then an equally rocky tenure as Trump’s Chief Strategist in the White Hose, Bannon had semi buttoned up his three shirts, mussed up his hair one last time, and slunk out of a side door of the west wing with a cardboard box in his hands. Bannon’s show, “The Political Apprentice” had been cancelled. The Times noted that while conservatives grumped that Bannon’s departure might signal a shift by Trump to the left to try to quell growing criticism of Bannon’s outsized influence on his policies, the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange erupted into cheers when news of Bannon’s departure flashed across the screen. It seems the perfect dichotomy to describe Bannon’s effect on the country.
But on the other hand, Glorious Bleater himself proved once and for all that you really can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Following a terrorist truck attack in Barcelona, Trump once again trotted out the stale, universally debunked story of General Black Jack Pershing using bullets dipped in pigs blood to execute Muslim extremists, educating the world once again on how “real men” deal with terrorists.
And, riding high on the rush he got from causing havoc in American racial tensions by his ignorant equivocation that there “were fine people on both sides” in the Charlottesville riots, Trump weighed in on the news of a group of protesters pulling a confederate statue off of it’s pedestal by taking to Twitter to proclaim;
Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments.
I can’t imagine a more perfect example of “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” One year later, Steve Bannon is still ginning up Trump’s racist base, and scarifying the rest of the country, and His Lowness continues to find ways to glorify jackbooted thugs, and guys running around with pillowcases over their heads, doing his own best to keep the base juiced. What a way to run a railroad.
