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There was a thrill to reading Bannon’s attack on Trump. But I had to remind myself that he is a bad guy tooIf the enemy of your enemy is your friend, watching the spectacle of Donald Trump and Steve Bannon trying to dismantle each other this week was a joyful but complicated experience. As details from Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff’s book, poured out, hearing Bannon describe Trump’s son as “treasonous” and daughter Ivanka as “dumb as a brick” was deeply satisfying. But it also triggered an uncomfortable response: some small surge of identification with the man. A ping of gratitude that took a second to squash, once I remembered who it was who was speaking.Bannon’s power is still real. He may have been fired from the White House and fallen foul of some of Trump’s supporters (Don Jr’s tweet on Wednesday drew attention to that barometer of national opinion, the comments section on Breitbart, with the observation, “When Bannon has lost Breitbart, he’s left with … umm, nothing”), but the nationalist project he spearheaded has hardly gone away, and what pleasure there might have been in watching him turn on his former master was undercut by a sense of the threat Bannon continues to pose. Continue reading…

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/04/steve-bannon-trump-bad-guy