"Dionne and Ponnuru on Bannon's White House exit, Trump's Charlottesville isolation" PBS NewsHour 8/18/2017
Excerpt
SUMMARY: Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. and Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review, join Hari Sreenivasan to discuss the week's news; including Stephen Bannon getting pushed out of the White House, how criticism over his response to Charlottesville has affected the Trump presidency and, what national turmoil over racism means for party politics.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): And now to the analysis of Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne — he's also co-author of the upcoming book “One Nation After Trump” — and “National Review” senior editor Ramesh Ponnuru.
Mark Shields and David Brooks are away.
Let's start with the big news first, your reactions to the ouster of Steve Bannon.
RAMESH PONNURU, National Review: Well, it's been rumored to be happening for several weeks now. And I think this is just another example of the volatility and turnover in this administration, much of it based on petty jealousy and resentment of people who are getting, in President Trump's view, too much press.
HARI SREENIVASAN: E.J.?
E.J. DIONNE, The Washington Post: I think that's all true.
I also think it's the case a lot of this talk about Trump as populist was always phony, that Bannon was the one guy in there who on economic issues represented the kind of populism. And his being pushed out, I think means that the Trump administration becomes much more of a kind of corporate Republican place.
He was also obviously radioactive on racial questions because of the alt-right's — Breitbart's history of kind of ethno-nationalism. And so I think the two forces came together to force him out of there.
HARI SREENIVASAN: Does this change anything at the White House? We have already had reports tonight that he's headed back to Breitbart, that there could be a way where he ends up forcing more change in the White House from the outside than the inside.
RAMESH PONNURU: One of the interesting things, although E.J. was talking about this corporate Republican Party, you see the corporate side of this White House, it doesn't have much institutional Republican presence.
Of course, Trump is a fairly recent Republican himself. Reince Priebus, the Chief of Staff, former Chief of Staff, who had been chairman of the RNC, was pushed out.
And one of the really interesting things here is that how many New York Democrats are now influential in this administration. Where it goes from now, it all depends on Trump, all of this. You know, we all obsess in Washington too much about the personnel. He's the person who sets the tone. He's the person who sets the policies.
E.J. DIONNE: Ramesh has just come up with a brilliant Republican strategy. Blame the Democrats for Donald Trump.
(LAUGHTER)
E.J. DIONNE: I think that you will see some change, but not a lot of change.
If you really want to change the Trump administration, you have to change the guy at the top. And that's not happening anytime soon. But, again, where I do think where you will see some movement is on this economic side, where I suspect, for example, this is a victory for China, because Trump was — I mean, Bannon was the hawk on China trade.
And as he said in that interview with Bob Kuttner — and, by the way, a Trump Administration official will never again give an interview to a liberal columnist — is that he was fighting Gary Cohn, the chief economic adviser, great victory for him — he was fighting the Treasury Department.
And so I think that's an area where you will see change. And I think, by the way, it's obviously a victory for John Kelly, who wanted to impose order, and Bannon was clearly a threat to order in the White House.
