Steve Bannon

Bannon Was Registered To Vote In Two States

... New York until Wednesday, when he was removed from voter rolls in Sarasota County, Fla. The move came after a notification from the New York City Board of Elections, an official with the Sarasota County Supervisor of Elections told NBC News. Bannon, who served as the CEO of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, lists a rented apartment in Manhattan as his New York address,  The Guardian  reported Wednesday. He registered to vote in New York before last year’s presidential election, despite having already been registered in Florida. Bannon cast his ballot for Trump in New York, a source familiar with the arrangements told the paper. The Washington Post said Wednesday that Bannon sent a letter to the Florida elections officials on Nov. 7, one day before Election Day, asking that he be removed from the rolls because he had moved to New York. But when contacted by the Post Wednesday, Elections Supervisor Ron Turner said “none of us ...

The Chaos Presidency, Brought To You By Steven Bannon

... pushing back against the obvious truth of President Trump’s relatively small inauguration crowds was disturbing enough to the president’s own inner circle for them to leak to any reporter who would listen about their concerns over the president’s apparent obsession over how much size matters. The signing of the order on the wall scotched a planned visit from Mexican President Nieto, and resulted in a hastily arranged phone call and joint statements from both governments that were actually not the same statement. For sure, stepping into the presidency would be difficult and disorienting for anyone, a difficulty magnified for someone who has never worked in government. Conservative and former Reagan speechwriter John Podhoretz presumed something similar when he saw the administration’s statement on the occasion of Holocaust Remembrance Day didn’t make ...

White House Strategist Steve Bannon Sets Up Fight With News Media

... tough questions and potential investigations. FOLKENFLIK: The White House will deal with it, Bardella says, by dismissing the media. BARDELLA: They're laying the groundwork so that when those questions come or those reports come or those facts come, that they can say, of course they're writing that; they're the opposition. Of course they're writing that; they're fake news. They're laying the groundwork to try to discredit any type of negative press that could be damaging to the administration in the future. FOLKENFLIK: The White House's routine denunciation of the media, Bardella says - a marriage of conviction and convenience. David Folkenflik, NPR News. (SOUNDBITE OF THE BLOW SONG, "TRUE AFFECTION"). Copyright © 2017 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at __link__ for further information. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb 8 tm, Inc. , an NPR contractor, and ...

Stephen Bannon’s Quiet Power Grab

... a high-profile national security role. By Win Mc Namee/Getty. Amid the chaos that unfolded at airports throughout the United States and abroad in the 24 hours after Donald Trump signed an executive order barring the entry of non-U. S. residents from seven majority-Muslim countries and suspending the entry of refugees, the president quietly issued three more executive orders—one of which reshuffled the National Security Council and granted controversial White House strategist Stephen Bannon a regular seat in security meetings at the highest levels of government. In yet another flurry of executive orders issued on Saturday, Trump ordered the Pentagon to present a 30-day plan to defeat the Islamic State, issued a five-year ban on domestic lobbying and a lifetime ban on international lobbying for administration officials, and signed a ...

Trump's Immigration Fiasco Might Be More Premeditated Than We Think

... 2017. In cases like this, the smart money is usually on incompetence, not malice. But this looks more like deliberate malice to me. Bannon wanted turmoil and condemnation. He wanted this executive order to get as much publicity as possible. He wanted the ACLU involved. He thinks this will be a PR win. Liberals think the same thing. All the protests, the court judgments, the press coverage: this is something that will make middle America understand just what Trump is really all about. And once they figure it out, they'll turn on him. In other words, both sides think that maximum exposure is good for them. Liberals think middle America will be appalled at Trump's callousness. Bannon thinks middle America will be appalled that lefties and the elite media are taking the side of terrorists. After a week of ...

With National Security Council Shakeup, Steve Bannon Gets A Seat At The Table

... and process were not governed by whatever formal instruction issued by their respective presidents. Political staffers from the White House have attended meetings in the past. The committees invite who they think they need to invite given the topics under discussion – something that will likely continue under [National Security Advisor Michael] Flynn.". Attorney John Bellinger, who served on the National Security Council during the George W. Bush administration, told NPR's Weekend All Things Considered on Sunday that presidents structure the National Security Council in the ways they think work best for them. "There's no law against the president taking advice from anyone he wants," Bellinger said. He also said the headlines about the "demotion" of the Joint Chiefs chairman and the director of national intelligence were overblown. Bellinger said time would tell how the council practically operates under Trump and Flynn, but that some of its dealings legitimately might not need to involve those leaders – when leaders meet to plot their strategy for ...

Virginia Tech Community Letter To Disavow The Appointment Of Steve Bannon

... so unique is its carefully nurtured environment of community. Though not perfect, this inclusive community is the bedrock upon which everything we remember so fondly stands. Though he is an alumnus of Virginia Tech, Stephen Bannon sticks out as an aberration. He does not represent our values — he stands in opposition to them. We denounce him, and his appointment as Chief Strategist in the Trump Administration. As a land grant university, Virginia Tech’s purpose is to serve the public. The history of Virginia Tech is not free from discrimination or hardship, and there is still progress to be made. However, we continually strive to live up to our aspirational motto: Ut Prosim, "That I May Serve.". Ut Prosim is our motto. It applies to all Hokies. Virginia Tech has not always been on the forefront of progress, but we now recognize the values that have always been inherent in our motto. Virginia Tech exemplified this in 1953, when it became the first public university in ...

On Facts, Steve Bannon And Trump War On Journalism

... debate. The obvious one has been exposed with Conway’s memorable coinage, “alternative facts.” No, facts are facts are facts. Alternative facts are lies, untruths or distortions. When confronted with untruths, journalists have one and only one choice: to call them what they are. They cannot, without misleading the public, pretend that there are two sides to a purely factual question. Partisans might well emphasize some facts over others. But facts themselves aren’t partisan. This, in turn, means that reporters may indeed seem “oppositional” when they confront an administration that, day after day, shows so little regard for fact or truth. But this is not the media’s problem. It’s Trump’s. Even trickier is the bizarre way the administration has been doing business. Because Trump repeated to ABC News’ David Muir on Wednesday his claim that he’d find a way for Mexico to pay for his border wall, the administration scrambled to back him up. Spicer told ...

Steve Bannon’s War On The Press

... 2013, he described himself as “Leninist” to the writer and historian Ronald Radosh. In a piece at the Daily Beast , Radosh recalled that Bannon had said to him, “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal, too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.” (Bannon subsequently told Radosh that he didn’t recall the conversation.). To a good Leninist, the very notion of an objective press is a liberal piety. Media outlets like the Times and the Washington Post are merely the ideological arm of highly educated urban cosmopolitans, liberals, and financiers—the “donor class,” Bannon calls them—who have benefitted from globalization and large-scale immigration. “I’m not a white nationalist,” Bannon told the Hollywood Reporter’s Michael Wolff shortly after the election. “I’m a nationalist. I’m an economic nationalist. The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia.”. The first part of this statement was dubious. Regardless of Bannon’s personal views, about which there is some dispute, he undoubtedly provided a ...

No, Steve Bannon, The Media Won’t Keep Its Mouth Shut

... campaign" may have been Hillary Clinton's; namely the notion that hers was a "policy-driven campaign." It just wasn't true, he said, recalling his utter frustration in procuring any meaningful details about her alleged $250 billion infrastructure plan. It was a meaty hour — nobody's keeping their "mouth shut," as Bannon "demanded" — with a variety of inside-journalism topics broached. Those included the need to be judicious in over-covering pedestrian White House briefings (a point made by Rhodes); the positive side of Trump-inspired heightened ratings and newspaper readership (Zucker); the perils of now feverishly "doubling down" on White House coverage at the expense of many other important matters (Lipinski); and the potential limits of fact-checking's influence (Bai and Rhodes). For sure, Bannon's red-meat target audience would have been unmoved by these declarations of good intentions by representatives of the evil mainstream media. But it remained ...