Day 350: Bannon: Trump Jr. is a Traitor; Everyone in WH: Trump is Incompetent

Yesterday, excerpts from Michael Wolff’s new, explosive book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House were made public.

The portion that is getting the most attention is a section of quotes from former top aide Steve Bannon.

The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor — with no lawyers. They didn’t have any lawyers,” Bannon continued, according to the Guardian. “Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad s***, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately.”

Bannon also reportedly told Wolff: “They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV.”

Unsurprisingly, this has caused the entire right-wing to flip-flop on their opinions of Bannon, including Donald Trump.

Then:

Now:

While Wolff has an iffy reputation regarding reporting, Trump’s own response to the Bannon quotes shows that the White House believes them. Bannon’s silence is also quite telling.

On top of the salacious Bannon excerpt, the book also shows a common thread among everyone interviewed and observed: no one close to Trump thinks he has the mental capacity or temperament for the job.

As Wolff wrote regarding his year writing the book:

One of these frequent callers was Rupert Murdoch, who before the election had only ever expressed contempt for Trump. Now Murdoch constantly sought him out, but to his own colleagues, friends and family, continued to derisively ridicule Trump: “What a fucking moron,” said Murdoch after one call.

It became almost a kind of competition to demystify Trump. For Rex Tillerson, he was a moron. For Gary Cohn, he was dumb as shit. For H.R. McMaster, he was a hopeless idiot. For Steve Bannon, he had lost his mind.

Donald Trump’s small staff of factotums, advisors and family began, on Jan. 20, 2017, an experience that none of them, by any right or logic, thought they would — or, in many cases, should — have, being part of a Trump presidency. Hoping for the best, with their personal futures as well as the country’s future depending on it, my indelible impression of talking to them and observing them through much of the first year of his presidency, is that they all — 100 percent — came to believe he was incapable of functioning in his job.

One doesn’t need full access to the White House to be able to tell most of these things.

350 days in, 1112 to go

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