If an aide to Donald Trump phones a journalist, the chances are that the conversation is going to be out of the ordinary. This was certainly true when Anthony Scaramucci phoned Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker and it was true again Tuesday when Steve Bannon phoned Robert Kuttner of The American Prospect when Trump was melting down in his tower.
I was a little stunned to get an email from Bannon’s assistant...saying that Bannon wanted 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.
Kuttner is quite funny recounting his being stunned to receive Bannon’s call, being as how he’s the writer and editor of a progressive publication to begin with, then surprised when Bannon vowed his personal admiration for Kuttner’s writing and views, then finally intrigued when Bannon, in a call that he never even specified was on or off the record, sought on a day when the political and moral chasm on white nationalism was yawning open especially wide, completely ignored the topic, and instead sought to converge his views on China trade with that of Kuttner’s liberal publication.
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.
“We’re at economic war with China,” [Bannon announced.] 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.
The last time that Bannon happily opened up in an exclusive interview was in the celebration period of immediate post election, when Bannon spoke with The Hollywood Reporter. This is definitely an unexpected thing. Kuttner said that, ”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.” Bannon eagerly shared his views on Korea and 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.”
Then Bannon, in vintage pugilistic style and using all his war metaphors, told Kuttner how he was going to prevail in all his personal battles with none other than the Departments of Defense and State:
“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.”
“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...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.
So there you have it, Bannon’s current plan to reshape the world, if only he can get the people in the same room with him, let alone the same administration, to go along with his wishes. Last but definitely not least, Kuttner got Bannon to share a few words on white nationalism, a topic he had adroitly side stepped at the beginning of the conversation:
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.
“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.”
“Crush the Democrats,” sounds a lot like “burn the boats,” which was Bannon’s edict to Trump and Congress the Friday in March that the ACA repeal pyrotechnically crashed and burned, even as Paul Ryan declaimed on, “The nightmare that is ObamaCare,” and Bannon burned the midnight oil in his War Room with the Freedom Caucus’ Mark Meadows, scratching away with colored markers on his oversized white board, figuring out how he was going to beat the odds despite all appearances to the contrary.
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.
I’m not going to go so far as to say that Bannon is displaying grace under pressure, but he is street smart enough to keep promulgating his own agenda while standing on the quicksand that is daily life in the West Wing, with none other than the First Daughter and her husband, whom he calls “Jarvanka” steadily working on Trump’s frayed nerves in an effort to get Trump to fire Bannon, or so sources say. Neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post are willing to call this shot, and they were not at all so reluctant with Spicer or Priebus; indeed they were most prescient. Unless Bannon pulls a Scaramucci, this is one for the tea leaves or the crystal ball.