Katie McHugh thinks so, and has some interesting insights into Bannon’s character when she’s not talking about herself:
Will Bannon recover from this nuclear strike? Probably, but the radiation will hang around for a long time. What if Breitbart decides to drop its mask of acting like Trump and the MAGA movement’s conscience and decides to begin trashing Trump? It won’t end well for them: The Left will use them as a weapon against Trump and the base will thrash them before they stop reading them.
As for the White House Leaks — why do people talk to the media at all? Because every human being has an innate need to confess. That’s why people leak to the press and why they talk to the Opposition Media. Bannon is a Catholic, but has he heard of a priest?
Bannon is a warrior and a brilliant man; White House work was not for him. He wanted out. Sigmund Freud talks about “the death drive” and that may have been an unconscious cog turning in Steve’s mind as he spoke to the media….
Bannon has an excess of Logos and Pathos, but little Ethos. He rarely helps people whom he used as an energy source. More importantly, because he shoots from the hip, he doesn’t have a good sense of Kairos, which means striking at the opportune moment, while the iron is hot. When all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail, and Steve struck without discrimination and with wild abandon, cold or hot irons. Sometimes he hit the mark. Other times — no.
Bannon runs on a frantic energy that propels him forward. During my first phone conversation with him when I was interviewing with Breitbart, he kept asking me what I thought of this and that, and kept getting more and more amped up as I reeled off my thoughts. “What do you think of immigration?” he asked. “I think it affects everything,” I said offhand as I wandered around the art section of a Barnes and Noble. “Yeah!!!!” he yelled back. Whoa, I thought as I pulled the phone away from my ringing eardrums. This job is going to be awesome. Later, I thought, did I make a mistake by not majoring in studio art and going into journalism? Maybe these people should have left well enough alone and let me draw and paint all day instead of letting the velociraptor out of the pen. “That one: When she looks at you, you can see she’s working things out.” And at eight months, Bannon’s Valkyries are what is called “lethal”… When you’re blessed with the gift of aggression and you’re permitted to use it, establishments will fall before your eyes. With one jawbone, you can dispatch an entire army.
That same energy that drives Bannon and drives me also drives many talented and intelligent people who never learned to harness their energy like the bucking bronco it is. It brings people in and then it repulses them, because every action has an equal and opposite reaction. You must learn to tame it and reign it in, so it’s yours and it doesn’t run you. Fall asleep in the lap of your vices and you’ll wake up in the hands of your enemies.
This is why I always thought it was mildly amusing when people talked about Bannon as if he was some sort of master strategist, the Bill Belichick of politics. The truth is that Bannon is a superb tactician and he isn’t a strategist at all. It was always Trump who was the strategist; what confuses people is that Trump is a better strategist than tactician even though he verbally shoots from the hip as if there is no tomorrow.
Bannon made several several mistakes – what part of DON’T TALK TO THE MEDIA is hard for the Right to understand? – but the worst one was that he judged Trump by his own standards, thinking his achievements justified a modest amount of disloyalty. But Trump always, always, always places loyalty first and foremost. That’s why he often puts more responsibility in the hands that are less than competent than one might like to see. Fortunately, what keeps this from being a fatal flaw is that he is also a strong enough executive to not hesitate to remove that responsibility once he sees they cannot handle it to his liking.
Bannon will recover because, being a tactician, he has cornerback memory. Tacticians tend to bounce back quickly, as if nothing ever happened. Once he recovers his energy, no doubt he’ll be causing serious heartburn for the mandarins of some industry, somewhere. But it could be anything; it won’t necessarily have anything to do with U.S. politics.
That being said, it’s unfortunate to see that even at the very top levels, the Right remains almost totally incapable of working productively together or looking out for each other’s interests. There are a few, a very few, who play well with others, Mike Cernovich and Stefan Molyneux being the foremost examples, but for the most part, if you’re on the Right, you’re either wholly-owned by an interest group or you’re on your own.
