MSNBC’s Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough and co-host Mika Brzezinski are set to wed. But Scarborough seems unable to shake thoughts — or are they fantasies? — about White House senior adviser Steve Bannon.
On Friday morning, Scarborough fumed at President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accords by blaming Bannon:
He has gone in. Donald Trump doesn’t know anything about policy. Donald Trump doesn’t know anything about politics. Donald Trump doesn’t know anything about anything. He can get up and give a good speech. You listen to him talk about any topic and he wanders from sentence to sentence to sentence. So Steve Bannon is now the President of the United States. And that was more clear yesterday than ever before.
Scarborough kept returning to the “President Bannon” theme. Mediate’s Jon Levine kept count: Scarborough said the words “President Bannon” seven times in one minute:
President Bannon is on the wrong side of the majority. President Bannon may be right when President Bannon is looking at President Bannon’s primary base, but when President Bannon is looking at the overall scope of American voters … President Bannon’s not even reading the polls right for today. … Again, a small subset of the population that President Bannon’s obsessed with.
The “President Bannon” meme is one that gained traction on the left, several weeks ago, in what seemed to be a deliberate effort to tweak President Trump, and provoke him to sideline Bannon. The media congratulated themselves when they thought they had achieved just that, and looked forward to Bannon’s supposedly imminent departure from the administration.
Along the way, some of them began to believe their own malicious propaganda.
Now that they have failed, and that Bannon continues to play a critical role, Scarborough is returning to the same theme, apparently hoping that repeating the phrase “President Bannon!” like a kind of magic incanation will cause him to disappear.
Alternatively, Scarborough’s behavior is involuntary, the sign of far deeper emotional attachment.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named one of the “most influential” people in news media in 2016. He is the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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