Tag Archives: Fire and Fury

Fire and Fury of Steve Bannon and Hope Hicks and the Trumps ……….

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just finished reading the book Fire and Fury, about the dysfunction, internal squabbles, and mutual backstabbings of the first year of the Trump White House. The author is not exactly a Theodore White, but then these are not Teddy White days, and the book’s focus was on the post-election rather than the campaign.

It took me a few days because I usually read several books at the same time, a habit from undergraduate university days. Here is my brief take, succinctly put: 

Beyond all the headlines and the cacophony which focused on Donald Trump and his inadequacies and consequent insecurities. The picture drawn in the book, at least the picture I saw, was one of a bunch of  self-serving extremely disloyal players. Everyone of the White House staff seems to be in the game for themselves, everyone focuses on their own role and its continuation.

Nobody gave priority to “serving” Trump and what is good for his tenure. That includes his own immediate family who took offices in the West Wing. That includes his New York in-laws. Everyone seems to have forgotten political convictions and principles and what Trump promised the voters. One young lady who apparently had some ‘boy trouble’, Hope Hicks, was/is probably loyal to the Trumps.

But there was one more other significant exception: one person who did not seem, from the author’s depiction, to be looking after personal gain and the one who did not play the sycophant. Perhaps the most ideological, most zealous person among them all.

Oddly that is the one person whom much of the media focused on and incessantly reviled during his brief tenure in the West Wing: Steve Bannon.

(P.S.: funniest thing in the book? Was the part about NSC candidate General H R McMaster showing up in a large suit and Trump thinking he looked like a ‘beer salesman‘)

Cheers

M H Ghuloum

The Fast and Furious Iterations of Steve Bannon…..

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“Steve Bannon is stepping down as executive chairman of Breitbart News. NYT’s Jeremy Peters reports his exit was forced by financial patron Rebekah Mercer amid the backlash from President Trump following Bannon’s comments in Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury…….”

A new iteration for Steve Bannon:
Out of the White House…
Back to Breitbart….
Out of Breitbart….
A new iteration coming soon, no doubt. I wouldn’t be (too) surprised if Mr. Bannon lengthens his beard, flies into Istanbul, hires a car and heads for the Syrian border……
Or, he can join the other side by flying into Damascus or Beirut…..
How about Iran? I doubt that he would enjoy the (not very) Islamic ambience of Tehran…

It is tempting to say: “Steve, we hardly knew ye“, but I suspect you’re not fading away yet…..

Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

A Dichotomy of Protests: Streets of Iran, NFL Fields……..

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A Dichotomy of Protests:
Kaepernick, Kaepernick, Kaepernick……
NFL, NFL, NFL…..
Iran, Iran, Iran…….
Fire and Fury, Fire and Fury, Fire and Fury…..
Right of Protest and Freedom of Expression…..

(FYI: this political outrage in Washington, it is all about regional rivalry, stupid)

Cheers
M Haider Ghuloum