Let’s suppose, for a minute, that the Trump transition has some organising principle beyond the chaotic. What do the first two appointments of president-elect Trump, as well as the first week of his transition to power, tell us about his forthcoming reign? At first blush, Trump seems to have squared two competing desires. With Reince Priebus as his chief-of-staff, Trump is placating and controlling his own party, now ruling both sides of Capitol Hill. The Republican National Committee chairman is perfectly plugged into the messy politics of the Republican leadership.
With Steve Bannon as his chief strategist, Trump is placating the pitchfork mob that helped sweep him to power. Bannon’s role inside any organisation is traditionally the keeper of the ideological flame. In case anyone was still confused about Trump’s ideology, Bannon is chairman of Breitbart, a news and commentary website in the United States with a racist and sexist slant. But nothing in Trumpistan is that neat. In the brief time that Trump has presided over the semi-public enterprise of his presidential campaign, we know he has a track record of tolerating the kind of internal rivalry that ends up in ritual slaughter.
His first campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, warred openly with his second campaign manager Paul Manafort. And the same goes for the third and fourth people to fill those roles (no matter their official titles): Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon himself. Chaos is Trump’s coin of the realm. The only complex situation he seems to manage with some consistency are his tax-avoidance schemes. The Bannon-Priebus announcement was carefully constructed with Bannon’s appointment ahead of Priebus. Such formalities do not go unnoticed in the corridors of power of America’s capital, where the pecking order is the only game in town.
Of the two, Bannon is by far the superior operator, having turned Breitbart from a cult into a powerhouse of white nationalism. Needless to say, this is not a positive development for an immensely diverse nation with a long history of racial violence. Priebus, for his part, has shown his House of Cards talent by staging the coup that ousted his former boss, Michael Steele. Priebus seized the job of RNC chair just after Steele’s RNC swept the board in the 2010 mid-term elections.
But with no experience in the executive or legislative branches of government, Priebus is hopelessly out of his depth. At best, he’s a party hack who will follow the orders of his friends on Capitol Hill. At worst, he’ll drown as he attempts to manage the West Wing, the federal bureaucracy, national security crises, Washington politics, the venal media, and a president who has returned to Twitter.
All of which makes him easy pickings for Bannon, who is offensive in every sense of the word. According to sworn testimony by his ex-wife, Bannon is so virulently antisemitic that he insisted “he didn’t want [his] girls going to school with Jews” (Bannon denies he ever said it).
Not for nothing as the Anti-Defamation League gone public with its opposition to his appointment. The coming Bannon-Priebus cage-fight is only one side of the struggle for power inside the administration. For the real influence lies in the hands of Trump’s children and son-in-law. Already Jared Kushner, husband to Ivanka, has reportedly ousted the head of the transition, the hapless and gormless New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. Ostensibly Christie’s downfall was because he was embroiled in the scandal known as Bridgegate. But the proceedings about the closure of the George Washington Bridge have been rumbling for three years.
A more likely scenario is that Christie could not be trusted with such a powerful transition job because he presided, as US Attorney in New Jersey, over the prosecution of Kushner’s father. Can these people successfully navigate their way out of a paper bag, never mind the confirmation process that could doom their own administration?
In case people have forgotten, with full control of Congress and at the height of his popularity, the newly-elected President Barack Obama in 2008 stumbled repeatedly with nominees whose tax returns were questionable and who seemed too cozy with corporate power.
Perhaps president Trump can help his nominees dodge their tax questions by ordering the Internal Revenue Service to audit them all as quickly as possible. As for his desire to drain the swamp of corporate influence, those promises are now being managed by a small army of lobbyists who control his transition. How clueless is Team Trump? According to the Wall Street Journal, they had no idea the entire West Wing would evacuate on inauguration day next year: That they would have to appoint every single member of staff, except for the permanent help tending to the building and grounds. As a result, President Obama intends to spend more time helping his successor understand the enormity of what he’s about to take on. The first black president is going to help train the 44th white president whose campaign was built on questioning his own citizenship.
Obama started his presidency winning the Nobel Peace Prize, but he ends it deserving some kind of sainthood. Like all good Shakespearean tragedies, the Trump presidency is presaging its own collapse at the height of its glory. The Priebus-Bannon-family disputes will corrode the West Wing from within. They are the manifestation of a leader who projects certainty but cannot decide if he wants to repeal all of Obamacare or keep parts of it; if he wants to bring the country together or end the wave of racist intimidation that is being spray-painted across America’s schools and churches.
The Republican establishment may think they can manage Trump through Priebus. But they are about to discover that this campaign just turned into a brushfire of a transition.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Richard Wolffe is chief digital and marketing officer at Global Citizen, a non-profit organisation dedicated to ending extreme poverty. He is the author of Renegade: The Making of a President, Revival: The Struggle for Survival Inside the Obama White House and The Message: The Re-Selling of President Obama.
