Abcarian: Steve Bannon discovers the hard way that defying Congress is no joke
‘I’m not the president. The president is not the law. The law is not me. The president is not above the law,’ Steve Bannon said.
In his new book, Steve Bannon, the former chief strategist to President Donald Trump, says the president “has been trying to make himself king for years” and that Trump’s “ideological absolutism is rooted in an inflated belief in his own ability.”
Bannon takes aim at Washington’s political class, suggesting it is out of touch with ordinary Americans, but he defends his boss with his typical bluntness.
The former White House chief strategist accuses them of “straying away from being the nation’s voice.”
“The presidency is the central organizing principle of American politics,” Bannon writes. “It is where power is concentrated. It is where the executive branch and Congress clash and work together to advance the policies of the legislative branch, or the legislative branch to advance the presidency. It is where partisan divisions and ideological differences become paramount, and where political agendas clash with the needs and desires of the American people.”
Bannon adds, “It’s where we’ve left people who have been in Congress for decades, or decades who have never held public office before. It’s where we’ve left the people who don’t have jobs, or have had their jobs taken away from them. It’s where we’ve left people who are on their way to being retired, who have worked for decades but who don’t have pensions. It’s where we’ve left people who are in a state of debt, who don’t have money. It’s where we’ve left the people who are in the middle class, who don’t own homes but want to live in them, and don’t have access to a nice car.”
Bannon writes that he joined the right-wing news organization Breitbart News because he hoped it would be “the last bastion of what had been America’s free speech tradition. It was the last bastion of what had been the rule of law.” He wanted to push back against what he