Laura Ingraham’s Twitter feed is full of ‘WTF Trump?!’ tweets, as is Ann Coulter’s. Nigel Farage tweets:
Military intervention has opened the door to ISIS across the Middle East. Many Trump supporters will be worried by talk of regime change.
At The National Interest, Daniel McCarthy (editor at large of The American Conservative) writes of “Donald Trump’s Biggest Problem”:
Before he gets more deeply involved in Syria’s civil war, Donald Trump will have to win one at home. The Republican Party was already divided after failing to repeal Obamacare. Now the conflict has spread to the White House, where Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner are at daggers drawn. Even Trump’s most loyal grassroots and media supporters are in an uproar over the president’s evolving foreign policy, which has taken a turn toward the establishment as his domestic agenda sinks into the swamp he promised to drain.
How much damage has the Syrian attack done to Trump? He’s lost Ann Coulter, who took to Twitter to vent her outrage and retweet lesser-known supporters who felt equally betrayed. He’s lost Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com and the sizable blocs of Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan activists who had flocked to Trump’s “America First” banner. He’s even lost InfoWars, whose readers are overwhelmingly against the attacks, to judge from the site’s self-polling and user comments. Commenters at Breitbart.com are not less outraged over Trump’s move.
The president has lost his base, or is in grave danger of doing so. But he has also picked up new support: from John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Bill Kristol, all of whom praised the airstrike on Syria. Neoconservatism is suddenly back in fashion at the White House, or so it seems.
Trump’s supporters had been growing restive over a litany of setbacks and reversals even before this. The president’s executive order to restrict immigration from countries with active Islamist revolutionaries has bogged down in the courts. Obamacare repeal turned into a fiasco, with the White House getting behind an unpopular plan that neither conservatives nor right-wing populists could get behind. Bannon, the tribune of the right-wing populists, appears to be losing ground by the day in the White House’s internal battles. Word that Reince Priebus may soon be replaced as chief of staff by a more moderate Washington insider led Laura Ingraham to quip on Twitter, “Trump is going into the Swamp he promised to drain for his new Chief-of-Staff.” (A former chief of staff to Sen. Arlen Specter is among those being considered)
It’s Bannon whose dismissal would be a real call to arms for the right, however. Only anonymous sources have been willing to speak to the press about Bannon’s reputed power struggle with Trump’s son in law, Jared Kushner. But outside the White House, establishment Republicans have started to go on the record calling for Bannon’s removal. Politico notes that Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen has told a Miami radio station that Bannon’s downfall “would be welcome news for the nation.” She predicts “his days are numbered in that administration. And I think profound changes will be coming.”
This is the springtime of Republicans’ discontent. The failure of Trump’s opening gambits in his first 100 days in office has created an opening for the establishment he vanquished during last year’s election to come to his rescue now: at least, that’s how they would tell it.
The Neocons are, in fact, ecstatic. Bill Kristol is doing a Twitter Victory Dance, while over at Slate, Michelle Goldberg (ahem) has a piece titled “The “Globalist Cucks” Are Winning”, the byline of which reads: “Jared Kushner might save us after all.”
Millenarian racist Steve Bannon, Trump’s erstwhile Svengali, has been kicked off the National Security Council, and Politico reports that he was so upset about his diminished status that Rebekah Mercer, his far-right billionaire patron, had to convince him not to quit the administration. According to CNN, Kellyanne Conway, another Mercer ally, “has largely been sidelined.” Elsewhere, Politico tells us that there’s an escalating “civil war” between Trump loyalists and establishment Republicans throughout the federal government, “and increasingly the president’s allies are losing.” At this point in the administration, one former campaign aide is quoted saying, “it is very obvious that no one cares what happens to the people who worked for the campaign or who have loyalty to the president.”…
Perhaps we’re moving from the President Bannon phase of the Trump nightmare into a President Jared Kushner period. Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, is now apparently in charge of Middle East peace, fighting opioid addiction, criminal justice reform, China diplomacy, and innovation… With Jared, Ivanka, and former Goldman Sachs executives Dina Powell and Gary Cohn forming a socially moderate but powerful faction inside the White House, it must sting for Bannon to realize that after all he did to elect Trump, the globalist cucks are suddenly ascendant.
Under any other circumstances, it would not be a source of relief to have Kushner—a callow would-be media mogul with no government experience—shaping presidential policy. Better him, however, than Bannon, a fascist would-be media mogul with no government experience. If nothing else, maybe some fraction of Trump voters will be disillusioned when they realize they voted for America First nativism and got a government of nepotistic dilettantes and Manhattan bankers instead
Meanwhile, McCain and Lindsey ‘Delta Queen’ Graham, the goyim cuck-hawks, are themselves salivating at the prospects of 7,000+ troops in Syria (for starters.)
Tucker Carlson debated the latter on his show recently:
