Despite the rocky start and the fact that he’s not an O.G. Trump loyalist, Sean Spicer’s position as White House press secretary seems secure. How do we know this? Because the guy pulling the strings—that’s right, Steve Bannon himself—is making a big point of supporting him.
Mr. Bannon, the former chairman of Breitbart News, rarely speaks to reporters on the record. But he reached out to a reporter unprompted to praise Mr. Spicer after learning of this profile, a sign of the Trump White House’s support for Mr. Spicer after a tumultuous first week. [...]
“He’s a fighter,” Mr. Bannon said in a telephone interview, during which he also urged the news media to “keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while.”
“Sean Spicer is much too polite to the media,” Mr. Bannon added. “I’m the guy who wanted them out of the building.” (He was referring to a proposal, scrapped for now, to move the White House briefing room from its current West Wing home.)
It was awfully nice of Acting President Bannon to take time out of his busy schedule of overruling the Department of Homeland Security in the matter of detaining and deporting green card holders and replacing the director of national intelligence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the National Security Council to call a reporter and praise Sean Spicer in a vaguely threatening terms, wasn’t it? Message received: Sean Spicer is the velvet glove over the iron fist of Bannon, so be nice to him, media, or here’s what’s coming next.
Wouldn’t it have been nice if voters knew that by voting for Donald Trump, they were putting Bannon in charge?