Here's Robert Kutner's actual article about Steve Bannon's phone call.
White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, seen walking into the Rose Garden
in June, gave an interview with the liberal magazine The American Prospect,
discussing trade and administration infighting. (photo: Chip
Somodevilla/Getty)
Steve Bannon Goes Full Mooch in Bizarre, Unplanned Interview
By Robert Kuttner, The American Prospect
17 August 17
Trump's embattled strategist phones me, unbidden, to opine on China, Korea,
and his enemies in the administration.
You might think from recent press accounts that Steve Bannon is on the ropes
and therefore behaving prudently. In the aftermath of events in
Charlottesville, he is widely blamed for his boss's continuing indulgence of
white supremacists. Allies of National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster hold
Bannon responsible for a campaign by Breitbart News, which Bannon once led,
to vilify the security chief. Trump's defense of Bannon, at his Tuesday
press conference, was tepid.
But Bannon was in high spirits when he phoned me Tuesday afternoon to
discuss the politics of taking a harder line with China, and minced no words
describing his efforts to neutralize his rivals at the Departments of
Defense, State, and Treasury. "They're wetting themselves," he said,
proceeding to detail how he would oust some of his opponents at State and
Defense.
Needless to say, I was a little stunned to get an email from Bannon's
assistant midday Tuesday, just as all hell was breaking loose once again
about Charlottesville, saying that Bannon wished to meet with me. I'd just
published a column on how China was profiting from the U.S.-North Korea
nuclear brinkmanship, and it included some choice words about Bannon's boss.
"In Kim, Trump has met his match," I wrote. "The risk of two arrogant fools
blundering into a nuclear exchange is more serious than at any time since
October 1962." Maybe Bannon wanted to scream at me?
I told the assistant that I was on vacation, but I would be happy to speak
by phone. Bannon promptly called.
Far from dressing me down for comparing Trump to Kim, he began, "It's a
great honor to finally track you down. I've followed your writing for years
and I think you and I are in the same boat when it comes to China. You
absolutely nailed it."
"We're at economic war with China," he added. "It's in all their literature.
They're not shy about saying what they're doing. One of us is going to be a
hegemon in 25 or 30 years and it's gonna be them if we go down this path. On
Korea, they're just tapping us along. It's just a sideshow."
Bannon said he might consider a deal in which China got North Korea to
freeze its nuclear buildup with verifiable inspections and the United States
removed its troops from the peninsula, but such a deal seemed remote. Given
that China is not likely to do much more on North Korea, and that the logic
of mutually assured destruction was its own source of restraint, Bannon saw
no reason not to proceed with tough trade sanctions against China.
Contrary to Trump's threat of fire and fury, Bannon said: "There's no
military solution [to North Korea's nuclear threats], forget it. Until
somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that ten million
people in Seoul don't die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons,
I don't know what you're talking about, there's no military solution here,
they got us." Bannon went on to describe his battle inside the
administration to take a harder line on China trade, and not to fall into a
trap of wishful thinking in which complaints against China's trade practices
now had to take a backseat to the hope that China, as honest broker, would
help restrain Kim.
"To me," Bannon said, "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, of hitting an inflection point
from which we'll never be able to recover."
Bannon's plan of attack includes: a complaint under Section 301 of the 1974
Trade Act against Chinese coercion of technology transfers from American
corporations doing business there, and follow-up complaints against steel
and aluminum 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."
But what about his internal adversaries, at the departments of State and
Defense, who think the United States can enlist Beijing's aid on the North
Korean standoff, and at Treasury and the National Economic Council who don't
want to mess with the trading system?
"Oh, they're wetting themselves," he said, explaining that the Section 301
complaint, which was put on hold when the war of threats with North Korea
broke out, was shelved only temporarily, and will be revived in three weeks.
As for other cabinet departments, Bannon has big plans to marginalize their
influence.
"I'm changing out people at East Asian Defense; I'm getting hawks in. I'm
getting Susan Thornton [acting head of East Asian and Pacific Affairs] out
at State."
But can Bannon really win that fight internally?
"That's a fight I fight every day here," he said. "We're still fighting.
There's Treasury and [National Economic Council chair] Gary Cohn and Goldman
Sachs lobbying."
"We gotta do this. The president's default position is to do it, but the
apparatus is going crazy. Don't get me wrong. It's like, every day."
Bannon explained that his strategy is to battle the trade doves inside the
administration while building an outside coalition of trade hawks that
includes left as well as right. Hence the phone call to me.
There are a couple of things that are startling about this premise. First,
to the extent that most of the opponents of Bannon's China trade strategy
are other Trump administration officials, it's not clear how reaching out to
the left helps him. If anything, it gives his adversaries ammunition to
characterize Bannon as unreliable or disloyal.
More puzzling is the fact that Bannon would phone a writer and editor of a
progressive publication (the cover lines on whose first two issues after
Trump's election were "Resisting Trump" and "Containing Trump") and assume
that a possible convergence of views on China trade might somehow paper over
the political and moral chasm on white nationalism.
The question of whether the phone call was on or off the record never came
up. This is also puzzling, since Steve Bannon is not exactly Bambi when it
comes to dealing with the press. He's probably the most media-savvy person
in America.
I asked Bannon about the connection between his program of economic
nationalism and the ugly white nationalism epitomized by the racist violence
in Charlottesville and Trump's reluctance to condemn it. Bannon, after all,
was the architect of the strategy of using Breitbart to heat up white
nationalism and then rely on the radical right as Trump's base.
He dismissed the far right as irrelevant and sidestepped his own role in
cultivating it: "Ethno-nationalism-it's losers. It's a fringe element. I
think the media plays it up too much, and we gotta help crush it, you know,
uh, help crush it more."
"These guys are a collection of clowns," he added.
From his lips to Trump's ear.
"The Democrats," he said, "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."
I had never before spoken with Bannon. I came away from the conversation
with a sense both of his savvy and his recklessness. The waters around him
are rising, but he is going about his business of infighting, and attempting
to cultivate improbable outside allies, to promote his China strategy. His
enemies will do what they do.
Either the reports of the threats to Bannon's job are grossly exaggerated
and leaked by his rivals, or he has decided not to change his routine and to
go down fighting. Given Trump's impulsivity, neither Bannon nor Trump really
has any idea from day to day whether Bannon is staying or going. He has
survived earlier threats. So what the hell, damn the torpedoes.
The conversation ended with Bannon inviting me to the White House after
Labor Day to continue the discussion of China and trade. We'll see if he's
still there.
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