![\"Bannon](\"https:\/\/essays.rsree.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/Cartoon-BannonTrump.jpg\")
<\/p>\nHaving already demonstrated on countless occasions his inability to put two sentences together coherently (unless, perhaps, in praise of his own grandeur, e.g. “I am very intelligent …” etc.) I assume we shouldn’t be all that surprised to learn that US President Trump\u2019s inauguration speech* was written by two of the president\u2019s closest aides, chief strategist Steve Bannon and senior advisor Stephen Miller, and not by Trump himself – as he had claimed earlier – as reported by the Wall Street Journal on January 21st.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, I wonder if Americans have figured out yet that, while Trump is now in the\u00a0 US President’s seat doing his thing,\u00a0 this might not be\u00a0 quite his own thing as there is a puppet master in the White House, pulling the strings he needs to\u00a0pull to have Donald do his bidding for him and his paranoid anti-Islam ideology.<\/p>\n
I’m referring of course to alt-right-wing\u00a0 and rabid-Islamophobe Stephen K. Bannon who in 2015 was described by a Bloomberg Newsweek article about him, “The Most Dangerous Political Operative in America”, and more recently referred to by the Guardian as “The man who once imagined a \u2018global war\u2019 between \u2018the Judeo-Christian west\u2019 and \u2018jihadist Islamic fascism\u2019. This man is now Trump\u2019s top adviser.<\/p>\n
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And so I’m wondering what if Trump might not be quite his own man because it’s not the Russians that have the goods on dear Donald, but Steve Bannon does, having dug up some highly compromising information on Dear Donald through his Breitbart<\/em> News<\/em> dirt-mining research team known as the Government Accountability Institute<\/em>, or\u00a0 GAI.<\/p>\n Earlier, Bannon, in his capacity as executive chair of Breitbart News LLC, had hired discredited author Peter Schweizer, the president of\u00a0 GAI,\u00a0 after being very much impressed by his best-selling publication of Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich<\/em>.<\/p>\n Schweizer, who began his career as a researcher at the conservative Hoover Institution, digging through Soviet archives, led the conservative GAI group that is said to have close ties to the Mercer family – called in 2015 by the Washington Post<\/em> one of the ten most influential billionaires in politics – as well receiving substantial support from other right-wing sources such as\u00a0 Charles and David Koch.\u00a0 In conducting its “fact-based” research the GAI team\u00a0 has access to resources that include an “after-hours” deal to use European internet infrastructure equipment worth 1.3 billion to comb the internet including the secretive Deep Web for information (read “dirt”). And if it is true that Bannon through the GAI has found some real dirt on Trump,\u00a0 it would not be inconceivable that he and his alt-right cronies are able to put this to some good use by advancing their own ideological ends.<\/p>\n I’m not sure how else to explain the fact that there is a NON-ELECTED individual talking into the ear of the president all day, as well as why Trump is allowing Bannon as a regular attendee to the National Security Council \u2032s Principals Committee<\/em>, a Cabinet-level senior inter-agency forum for considering national security issues. This move has been \u00a0severely criticized by several members of previous administrations and was called \u201cstone cold crazy<\/em>\u201d by Susan E. Rice, Barack Obama\u2019s last national security adviser.<\/p>\n But regardless of what Bannon and the GAI may or may not have on Trump, it remains to be seen how the latter – as a person with NPD** – is able to tolerate the presence of Bannon without being able to control him, especially now, when more and more attention appears to be focused on Bannon’s role in running the country. Having to share the limelight with another human being is not something Trump is capable of, so stand back and wait for this situation to come to a head.<\/p>\n (*) Described at the time by George Bush as “some weird shit …”<\/p>\n (**) Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is a form of pathological narcissism, first diagnosed by the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut, in 1968. A rigid pattern of behaviour that drives a lifelong quest for self-gratification, NPD is characterized by a grandiose sense of self-importance, an insatiable need for attention and a chronic lack of empathy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Having already demonstrated on countless occasions his inability to put two sentences together coherently (unless, perhaps, in praise of his own grandeur, e.g. “I am very intelligent …” etc.) I assume we shouldn’t be all that surprised to learn that … Continue reading