The West Wing Democrats reportedly do not want President Donald Trump reading articles from Breitbart News, according to various reports this week on new chief of staff John Kelly’s efforts to control the White House’s paper flow.
Axios national politics reporter Jonathan Swan suggested in an appearance on MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports this week that West Wing Democrats and globalists, whose allies have never been able to handle Breitbart News’ relentless “40 minutes of hell” of pressure for causes important to working-class Americans of all backgrounds, were frustrated that Trump was reading articles from Breitbart News. A New York Times cover story acknowledged that there is “no real precursor for Breitbart” of an outlet that has so quickly emerged to “dominate the political conversation in a pivotal election” like Breitbart News did during the 2016 election cycle.
Swan said the Oval Office before Kelly’s arrival was like “Grand Central Station,” with “people coming in and out” and slipping Trump news stories from “sources like Breitbart” that would harm their enemies. He noted that if someone wanted to get Trump “angry or kill an appointment,” they would just “surreptitiously put the paper across his desk.”
“It was truly amazing,” he said.
Roger Stone, who was no fan of Steve Bannon’s at the end, told BuzzFeed that “news summaries have been sanitized” under Kelly, which means no more conservative outlets like Breitbart.
Kelly’s new rule has apparently “been a source of reassurance” to establishment Republicans, according to Politico, which first reported that Kelly’s new system “is designed to ensure that the president won’t see any external policy documents, internal policy memos, agency reports and even news articles that haven’t been vetted.”
Kelly’s globalist deputy, Kristjen Nielson, “is also expected to assume an integral role” in the process, according to the report. Breitbart News pointed out that Nielson, “like nearly everyone else in Trump’s West Wing, does not understand Trump’s voters or his movement” and may think Trump’s campaign promises are “crazy” like many of the West Wing Democrats and globalists apparently do.
Trump reportedly greatly benefited by reading Breitbart News to understand the pulse of working-class voters from across the political spectrum on key issues like immigration and trade. That enabled him to ultimately run circles around his primary challengers, whose advisers have always been unfamiliar with what concerns working-class voters. But, in Chris Matthews’ words, it appears that Kelly now wants to lock Trump in a cage to prevent him from understanding the issues important to his historic “movement.” The West Wing Democrats apparently want Trump to cater to the 3.8%, which consists mainly of elites whose approval and affirmation they seek above all else.
As Joshua Green pointed out in his book Devil’s Bargain and Breitbart News highlighted, “an analysis of ‘Trump’s campaign tweets showed that Breitbart was far and away his primary source of news'”:
Years before Trump took on all of the same forces that tried to ram through the Gang of Eight’s amnesty legislation, Trump, according to Green, “was reading Breitbart articles flagged by Bannon and then printed out on paper (Trump’s preferred medium for reading) and delivered to him in manila folders by his staff.”
Green notes that “by the time Trump entered the presidential race in June 2015,” Breitbart News’ reporting on illegal immigration’s impact on American workers, corporations gaming the guest-worker visa system to displace American workers with foreigners who are not more qualified, the existential threat of radical Islam, and the “excesses of political correctness” had done “much to shape Trump’s populist inclinations and inform his political vocabulary.” Green writes that the site’s “unapologetic and take-no-prisoners style of reporting” appealed to Trump.