Bannon in Washington: A Report on the Incompetence of EvilBy Quinta Jurecic Tuesday, February 14, 2017, 10:32 AM
https://www.lawfareblog.com/bannon-washington-report-incompetence-evil...
Over the first few weeks of the Trump administration, Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon has worked hard to establish himself as the would-be Grand Vizier of the White House. Bannon, the former executive chair of the winkingly
white nationalist website Breitbart, was the driving force behind the executive order banning entry into the United States of immigrants and refugees from seven majority-Muslim countries and now sits on the Principals Committee of the National Security Council.
And if he had his way, the rest of this piece would be about how frightening he is.
Being scary is Bannon’s schtick;
he publicly compares himself not only to Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s newly popular fixer, but also to Darth Vader and Satan, declaring, “Darkness is good … that’s power.” In 2013,
he told a reporter that he identified as a Leninist: “I want to bring everything crashing down and destroy all of today’s establishment.”...
I’m going to call nonsense on this whole meme. In fact, I’d like to take a moment to thank Bannon for tempering my
libertarian panic about the fate of democracy in America.
...
Bannon isn’t an arch-villain. And he’s not the guy who’s going to destroy American democracy. Instead, as I’ll explain, he’s just an internet troll.
Bannon’s ineptitude has become clear in the context of his role at the center of the refugee order’s botched writing and rollout—strangely, the same context out of which emerged the portrait of him as the sinister, all-knowing eminence grise. To paraphrase Benjamin Wittes, the executive order was both deeply malevolent and profoundly incompetent. The question is whether the chaos that attended the order’s rollout, in which legal permanent residents of the United States were denied entry into the country and travelers were stranded in airports as federal officials frantically tried to figure out the legal scope of the ban, should be understood as a component of the order’s malevolence or of its incompetence.
In other words, did chaos blow the plan or was chaos part of the plan?
Only a few months ago, the notion of an executive order intentionally botched in order to engineer chaos would have been difficult to propose with a straight face, but such are the times we live in that this is precisely what people are proposing, and with very straight faces. . . .
...
I want to suggest an alternative way of viewing Bannon’s recent behavior: It is best understood, particularly given the symbiotic relationship between online culture and Bannon’s and
Breitbart’s particular brand of reactionary politics, as government by internet trolling.
Trolling, in its purest form, is the act of deliberately behaving in an upsetting or offensive way in order to provoke an angry response. . . .
...
Excerpt. Read more at
https://www.lawfareblog.com/bannon-washington-report-incompetence-evil
