'"It's a Cromwell moment! Bannon is quoted as nearly shouting, referring to the 17th century political leader often characterized as a fanatical dictator. 'It's even more powerful than populism. It's deeper. It's primal. It's elemental. The long black dresses and all that -- this is the Puritans! It's anti-patriarchy,"' declaims Steve Bannon in an updated paperback edition of "Devil's Bargain" set to be released Tuesday. Author Josh Green watched the Golden Globes Awards with Bannon last month. CNN Money:
But Bannon went further than that, declaring, "The anti-patriarchy movement is going to undo ten thousand years of recorded history."
Bannon, Green wrote, watched Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as he was watching Oprah Winfrey on stage delivering a politically-charged speech.
"He's ruined his career," Bannon said, according to Green. "If you rolled out a guillotine, they'd chop off every set of balls in the room."
"You watch. The time has come. Women are gonna take charge of society," Bannon said, according to Green. "And they couldn't juxtapose a better villain than Trump. He is the patriarch. This" -- the Golden Globe Awards -- "is a definitional moment in the culture. It'll never be the same going forward."
Maybe Bannon is right. It's for certain that Trump's comments on Rob Porter echoed his sentiments on Roger Ailes and Bill O'Reilly. He sympathized with the male aggressor and never with the female victim; unless the subject was Al Franken or John Conyers, that was different. The New Yorker:
Kellyanne Conway, whose defenses of Trump's most preposterous statements are sometimes so tortured that they become the stuff of late-night satire, could not bear to back the President on this one. She told CNN that she saw "no reason not to believe" Porter's former spouses. "In this case, you have contemporaneous police reports, you have women speaking to the FBI under threat of perjury," Conway said. "You have photographs, and when you look at all of that pulled together, Rob Porter did the right thing by resigning." This was hardly a condemnation, but, in the context of this White House and these times, she showed, if fleetingly, common sense.
Trump's cruel and clueless remarks are of a piece with the tactics he has used to tamp down all his other scandals, miscues, and embarrassments. Just as he tries to divert attention from his, and his circle's, errors and wrongdoing in the Russia scandal by shouting "fake news," by casting blame on the F.B.I. and the Justice Department, and by deploying a congressional lackey like Devin Nunes, he diverts attention from his own encyclopedic record of miserable behavior toward women by casting doubt on the accusers. This is a neat trick, yet hardly original. It has come to the point when even Trump's closest aides know that a reckoning is coming. It's not going to be O.K.
Reprinted from www.dailykos.com
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