Among the vignettes in Jeremy Peters' new book Insurgency is a story about Steve Bannon's revelation that former President Donald Trump didn't actually want to be president.
According to Bannon, it was COVID and George Floyd that convinced him Trump only really wanted the Oval Office when it was fun. Up until 2020, Trump was able to largely let the country run on auto-pilot. Racking up deaths was depressing.
"But Trump’s inattentiveness to the pandemic alarmed Bannon. And his response to George Floyd’s death had him increasingly convinced that Trump had lost his mind," Peters wrote. "He complained to colleagues that Trump didn’t seem interested in his job."
"Being president and doing the job of president are two different things,” Bannon claimed. “He doesn’t want to do the job of president of the United States.”
There was no way that Trump was going to rise to acclaim as Lincoln or Roosevelt did.
"Instead, Bannon said, Trump would end up going down in history as one of the two or three worst presidents ever: 'It’ll be James Buchanan, Donald Trump, and Millard Fillmore.'
Having run Trump’s successful underdog bid four years earlier during its final weeks, Bannon was openly critical of how the new team was running the reelection campaign. 'Trump did not win in 2016. That’s the one thing they never embraced and understood. Hillary Clinton lost. Trump did not win,' he said."
He was annoyed with top Trump aides showing the president fake poll numbers just to make him happy.
"It’s like showing Hitler fake armor divisions when the Reichstag is burning down," Bannon scoffed. And he was correct, that's exactly what they were doing. All of the post-mortem books about Trump's final year convey that the staff was so desperate to get the president to stop falling into a fit of rage.
"They’d tell him he was improving in the Reno media market and with seniors in Phoenix," Peters reported. One aide, “They’d tell him he’s up seventeen points with left-handed redheads in Pennsylvania.”
So, when it became clear that he'd lost, it's no surprise that he didn't believe it. Why would if he spent the past six months being told they were winning?
When it came to the president's advisers, Bannon didn't think much of them either.
“Corey’s the guy who wears the hats and buys the books,” he said of Trump’s first campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski. he was like a cult follower.
Roger Stone, Bannon called “a f*cking flake.”
And none of the men were beneficial to what Trump needed
to win, Bannon thought.
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