Welcome to the commentary magazine podcast.

I am John Pudhoritz, the editor of commentary today is Monday, August 21st, 2017, the day of the Bic at Clips.

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With me as always, a green walled our senior editor, Hi Abe.

Hi John.

And Noah Rothman, our associate editor, Hi Noah.

Hi John.

So let's see, we have the three Bs, right?

We got Bannon, we got Barcelona, and we got Boston, as we decided.

So Steve Bannon, out as chief strategist of the White House, horrific terrorist attack in Barcelona, followed up by a second terrorist attack in a beach resort about 60 miles away.

And of course in Boston there was another alt-right Nazi rally that was basically overrun and swamped by protesters numbering about 20,000 times the number of the actual rallyers, and some antifa, violent left-wingers throwing bottles of urine at cops and 27 arrests of sane.

None of these is connected except for the general atmosphere of planetary instability that they can note that will be followed in a couple of hours from when I'm talking by the sun blotting out the moon blotting out the sun, which I assume will have no larger consequences, but it does seem to be a metaphor for the time that we're living through.

So why don't we start with Bannon since he's been a lingering preoccupation of everybody on the planet for seven and a half months, but I think it's increasingly coming to the point where people are acknowledging and realizing that his departure is probably essentially meaningless.

So where do you come out on the, in terms of policy, in terms of the good working order of the Trump White House, that the fish rods from the head, and that if there's a working order problem at the White House, it's not Bannon, it's Trump.

I suppose I have a brief monologue on me on this one. The Bannon wing of the party is largely to blame for quite a bit of early Trump presidency's stumbles.

We had just about every initiative that was embarrassing for the Trump administration emerged from this populist nationalist wing of the party, the many of which were stopped in the courts.

And I cite specifically the attempt at a travel ban that cited individuals who had visas to enter the United States, stopped in the courts, the effort to target sanctuary cities, kind of a broad Republican position that was consensus Republican position that was implemented

sloppily and also stopped in the courts temporarily at the very least, but nevertheless something humiliating the effort to use American steel to build a Keystone pipeline, which was always going to be a fantasy because there's nowhere near enough American made steel to do such a project, but it sounded really good in the executive order.

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