In yesterday’s Politico, Michael Crowley wrote that the primary West Wing beneficiaries of Donald Trump’s second visit to Europe are Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, who form the nationalist, chauvinistic wing of TrumpNation, as opposed to the globalist wing, led by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and (maybe) son-in-law Jared Kushner.
Trump’s Warsaw speech was clearly designed to appeal to his ever-shrinking base in the US.
In Warsaw, before going to Angela Merkel’s G-20 meeting in Hamburg, Trump gave a bleak speech praising Poland’s right-wing government’s defense of “civilization” from European Union bureaucrats and from unpleasant visitors such as refugees.
When he met with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin in Hamburg, Trump went through the motions of complaining to the former KGB officer about what all the US intelligence agencies have verified as true (but which Trump still refuses to acknowledge), namely, that Putin personally ordered the Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
And in today’s Politico, Cory Bennett noted that cyber policy specialists predict that any “deal” for cyber cooperation between the US and Russia, with which Putin has evidently hoodwinked Trump, would likely fail, based on past experience.
It seems that Bannon and Miller aren’t going anywhere, although associate solitary reporter Johanna Jones was hoping to pick up some gossip to the effect that either one or both of them might be sent to Foggy Bottom’s State Department in janitorial capacities.