It’s Anthony Scaramucci all over again. Last week White House Chief of Staff (now former Chief of Staff) Steve Bannon called up liberal news rag American Prospect out of the blue to talk to a reporter he had never met before to discuss something the reporter had written in the days prior.
Some of the things Bannon said caught instant fire, while others angered his compatriots at the White House. And now Bannon is gone.
Sound familiar? It should. It’s the exact same White House exit that befell Anthony Scaramucci earlier this month. After New Yorker reporter Ryan Lizza received a profanity laced phone call from Scaramucci over a piece Lizza had written in the days prior, Scaramucci was shown the door after only 10 days at his position in the White House.
Both Scaramucci and Bannon claimed they didn’t know their words were on the record and both came out after their resulting phone interviews were published with a shocked and apologetic tone (albeit too late).
While its conceivable that Scaramucci didn’t know what he was doing when he called up Lizza to talk, that notion is harder to believe about veteran media executive Bannon. But instead of speculating why Bannon gave such a revealing interview, its more important to focus on what Bannon said during it. Because in truth, the man is probably right.
Bannon — to the likely shock and horror of progressive Democrats — repeatedly denounced the racists in Charlottesville who committed some of the violence there. Bannon straight up called them “a collection of clowns” and “losers.” This is important for two reasons. First, it destroys the Left’s narrative that Bannon is a hardcore racist himself, and it goes farther than President Trump’s initial blaming of “both sides” for foul play in the conflict.
“Ethno-nationalism — it’s losers. It’s a fringe element,” said Bannon. “I think the media plays it up too much, and we gotta help crush it… These guys are a collection of clowns.” And he’s right. The fact of the matter is that the members of real hate groups in this country make up less than one percent of one percent of the population, but the mainstream media splashes these people’s images all over the news as if their views are the norm, or at least in some parts of the country. The truth is that these people existed long before Trump came to power (for several years, one-time Democratic Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd was one of them), and certainly, they will continue to remain long after Trump is gone.
Furthermore, Bannon was quick to realize that allowing the Democrats and the media to play up the race card works to the Republicans’ advantage. “The Democrats — the longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the Left is focused on race and identity and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.” Again, this is sound thinking which won Trump the White House in 2016 while Hillary Clinton was left to twist in the wind despite her ludicrous efforts to recruit African-Americans to her campaign — from adding slang expressions to impromptu comments in a New York radio interview to appearing onstage alongside Jay-Z and Beyonce at a campaign rally in Cleveland. At the end of the day, it’s great to say you’re fighting racism, but racism (or even the lack thereof) doesn’t put a paycheck in an unemployed person’s pockets.
In The American Prospect interview, Bannon also weighed in on his running battles with holdovers from the Obama administration in the Treasury, Defense and State Departments. “They’re wetting themselves,” confided Bannon, regarding his plans to oust some of these staffers. “We’re still fighting,” said Bannon, also referring to elements of globalist sympathy in these departments. “There’s Treasury and [National Economic Council Chairman] Gary Cohn lobbying.” But specifically, Bannon referred to the overwhelming threat facing the U.S. in terms of China, which had been facing trade sanctions from the United States prior to the crisis in North Korea.
The fact of the matter is that to a large degree, the North Korean crisis is being nudged along by the Chinese — despite the country’s public support for UN sanctions against the rogue regime of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. It’s in China’s interest to have a client or buffer state along its borders acting as the crazy nuclear-armed “bad cop” while China acts as the “good cop” in confronting the U.S. regionally and in the South China Sea. The more members of the global “nuclear club” there are that are adversaries of the U.S., the stronger China’s position grows on the world stage.
While Chinese statements denounce the “recklessness” of Kim Jong Un, reports continue to appear in the media that North Korea is simply dodging UN trade sanctions by sewing “Made in China” labels into the clothing its slave-driven factories turn out. China’s promises to crack down on companies doing business with North Korea are worthless, and the world can expect that luxury goods — at least to the degree that China can supply them — will continue to flow to the Hermit Kingdom.
Chinese state press has said that if the U.S. preemptively attacks North Korea that China would come to its aid, and so, it should now be clear that despite the recent “blinking” of North Korea on its threats to fire missiles toward Guam, that the crisis of North Korean ICBMs reaching a mature development stage in the near future will be much harder to defuse than previously thought. It should now be clear — even more so than previously — that the path to North Korean disarmament (or at least a nuclear “freeze” and/or inspections) goes through China, rather than North Korea.
“To me, the economic war with China is everything. And we have to be maniacally focused on that. If we continue to lose it, we’re five years away — I think, ten years at the most — from hitting an inflection point from which we’ll never be able to recover,” stated Bannon. Bannon wants to use Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 against the Chinese coercion of transfers of technology from American companies doing business on its soil. He then wants to follow up with official complaints against Chinese aluminum and steel dumping. “We’re going to run the tables on these guys. We’ve come to the conclusion that they’re in an economic war, and they’re crushing us.” As President Trump reiterated many times on the campaign trail, the U.S.’s most threatening adversary from an economic standpoint is “China, China, China.”
President Trump had wanted to execute trade action against China over intellectual property issues prior to the North Korean crisis, but he held off in order to get Chinese support for the UN sanctions (which he’s likely aware aren’t worth much). Now that these are in effect, it’s time to get tough on China. Given China’s support for North Korea in the ongoing nuclear standoff, it would appear that the U.S.’s only leverage over the People’s Republic is economic. After all, America is China’s largest trading partner by far, and sanctions, tariffs or simply cutbacks on the quantities of goods America purchases from the Middle Kingdom may be the only way to force China to force its “bad cop” buddy to disarm or at least freeze its weapons program.
China is on record as saying it desires a nuclear-free Korean peninsula. The only question now is — does it mean what it says?
