Just over one hundred years ago, on December 30, 1916, Grigori Rasputin was assassinated in St. Petersburg, courtesy of incompetent monarchists. A few months later, the Bolshevik Revolution occurred; we know the rest of the story.
A century later, Stephen Bannon does not have the ear of the president. He is, effectively, the president.
Bannon is not merely a senior counselor or chief strategist as his formal or informal titles imply. Rather, he is Trump's mind and minder. Jared Kushner listens a la a confidant to his father-in-law and is thus close - but by no means a rival to Bannon. Priebus and Conway are window dressing to parade before cameras, by comparison. Vice President Pence is straight-laced and dutiful. The Cabinet is still largely unformed, uninformed, or antithetical to the posts to which they are appointed; the executive branch is on unguided autopilot. And, despite their experience and majorities, Congressional Republican leaders have been flummoxed by a flurry of presidential executive orders.
That Trump first anointed Bannon as a senior counselor first among equals in the inner circle of the presidency is now followed by a coup of the unelected. Confirmation of the coup came in several forms.
The mouthing of Bannon's words regarding the press (as the "opposition party") by Trump and Bannon's warning via the New York Times that the media should shut up evoked the NSC changes that were promulgated over last weekend. Placing Bannon among NSC "Principals" and demoting the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Director of National Intelligence was not just unprecedented or as Susan Rice opined "stone cold crazy". Instead, this action was carefully crafted by the beneficiary, and embodies Bannon's Rasputinesque role vis-à-vis the presidency.
Bannon's lock on executive power is due to his control of Trump's thoughts. Unlike the mad monk in the early twentieth century, Bannon captured the presidency not through mysticism or the women around, groped or hired by Trump; instead the "senior counselor" manufactures information and massages a very insecure ego that requires repeated reassurance and frequent enlargement.
As this presidency commences, its violent and abrupt movements seem to please those who care not for Constitutional norms and hope to disrupt federal government. In one of his rare non-profanity laced quotes that does not attack women, Jews, Muslims, blacks, the LGBTQ community, or gun control advocates, Bannon said to the Daily Beast, "I'm a Leninist ... Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that's my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today's establishment."
What further ought one to expect in Bannon's presidency?
We can anticipate many more Breitbart-like early AM tweets from the White House, Spicer "briefings" and Priebus-Conway appearances that spew out falsehoods to feign and deceive. We can gird ourselves for lurching executive orders and presidential memoranda that avoid Congressional retort and soon will be immune from Supreme Court rebuke. Such orders and memoranda will endeavor to destroy "the establishment" that Bannon so despises - rule of law, an accepting and tolerant society, and an international law and alliances that have for decades been a bulwark against global disorder he wishes to impose.
Purges, pogroms, and disinformation. All are omens of internecine chaos that Bannon seeks to engender.
Rasputin is smiling.
Daniel Nelson is an international consultant in Virginia.