Trump's Afghanistan speech.

Chasing a break in the clouds to get a look at the 85% solar eclipse.

It was overcast here today in Madison, so we jumped in the car and headed for the blue:



About 40 minutes north we pulled over where if all else failed we still had a great look at the prairie:



We got a nice crisp view of the eclipse using the glasses I'd picked up at Walmart. I shared my glasses with Meade and with a nice couple from Mineral Point who happened to drive up. After the peak of the eclipse, we drove a short distance to Palfrey's Glen, where the eclipse affected the dappling light:



And we hiked all the way to the waterfall, where a big patch of light gave an excellent view of the last part of the eclipse:



On the way back home, we took the Merrimac Ferry across Lake Wisconsin:

Did you break all the rules and look at the sun? Trump did!

Pics, at CNN, of the Prez squinting at the famous disc of fire.

"Even talking about this… Men get so mad when they hear women talk about them this way. They get so defensive."

I watched that video a few days ago, and it's haunting me. Something about the demeanor of the 2 women — Amanda Marcotte and Fiona Helmsley — is just so weirdly enervated as they bemoan the deplorable energy ("fragility") of men.

More transcript here, at Salon:

I think the single greatest threat, and I’ll say to humanity, at the moment is male fragility, and men just not being able to process their feelings of insecurity, their feelings of anger....

What they were chanting in Charlottesville: ‘You will not replace us.’ Who is trying? Who is trying to replace you?...

I think it’s just the way that society raises them. Women are raised to have some concern about the way that they look, and they’re encouraged to be more sensitive. A lot of men aren’t....

So they're taking the nurture side of the old nature-or-nurture argument. And they're happier with women because they've been nurtured to care about how they look? Shouldn't a feminist oppose the nurturing of women to care about how they look and whether they're "more sensitive"? That sounds as though low-level vanity is meritorious.

And oddly enough those Charlottesville Alt-Right guys were concerned about how they look. There's this (in Vice):

... Andrew Anglin, who runs the popular hate site the Daily Stormer, published a truly astounding blog post... that explains how the movement he helped build should market itself [at the Charlottesville rally]....

"It may be a trend, but I can’t be the only person to find the term ‘cougar’ repulsive."

"It’s predatory, naff, insulting to the woman and the man. And ‘toyboy’ isn’t exactly complimentary to anyone, either. (A boy to be toyed with? No, thanks.) Instead, I’m going to campaign for older women who are dating younger men to henceforth be called WHIPs – Women who are Hot, Intelligent and in their Prime. And the men shall be called really bloody lucky."

From "Now I'm in my 50s, young men want to date me: Welcome to the world of WHIPS" (in The Telegraph).

Nuclear enthusiasm posters from North Korea.

More at "With Color and Fury, Anti-American Posters Appear in North Korea" (NYT).

“What is typical in these posters is the image of an undaunted, fierce North Korea that is not fazed by the moves by the United States or the United Nations,” Koen de Ceuster, an expert on North Korea at Leiden University in the Netherlands, told Reuters.

“It reinforces the images of the strides North Korea made in missile capability,” he said, “and how North Korea is undaunted by any challenges to its sovereignty.”

"This is the second time in the past two months where a US guided-missile destroyer has been involved in a collision in the region."

"In June, the USS Fitzgerald collided with a Philippine container ship off the coast of Japan. Seven navy sailors were killed, and two senior officers and the senior enlisted sailor on the Fitzgerald were removed after the incident."

And, in the past 24 hours, "Five US Navy sailors are injured and another 10 missing after guided-missile destroyer USS John S McCain collided with an oil tanker early on Monday morning (Aug 21) off the coast of Singapore."

How are accidents like this possible? 

IN THE COMMENTS: MayBee said:

I'm worried someone is messing with our navigation systems.

etbass said:

Starting to look like the US Navy is pretty vulnerable to fairly primitive battle tactics that have been around a couple millennia.

Which seems more likely to you:

An ancient battle tactic is being used against us.

Someone is hacking our sophisticated technology.

No one is doing anything to us. These are just accidents.

 

pollcode.com free polls

ALSO IN THE COMMENTS: FleetUSA said:

I served in the Navy and spent many hours doing underway deck watches as an officer. I would like to know exactly what the deck watches were doing during the 30 minutes prior to the collisions. Were the watchers distracted? Internet surfing? Chatting up enlisted sea(wo)men?

Published comments after the first one gave us no information other than the heroics after the collision.

Much as we should feel concern for the personnel who are injured, missing, or killed, we should resist being manipulated by demands to pay attention only to that and not to the serious questions about why this has happened twice now.

"But seeing this film was really awe-inspiring, in that you are rarely in the presence of the perfect object."

"This movie is so drastically wrong, its pathos and its comedy are so wildly misplaced, that you could not, in your fantasy of what it might be like, improve on what it really is."

Said Harry Shearer, one of the few people who have actually seen the long-suppressed "The Day the Clown Cried." The movie, directed by Jerry Lewis, starred Jerry Lewis as a comedian who made fun of Hitler and got arrested and forced to entertain children in a Nazi death camp.

Lewis biographer Shawn Levy probably sums it up for many of us when he says the interest in Clown is the “the inconceivable oddness of it. Jerry Lewis is still such a strange and singular bird that I think the very concept is intriguing. And the people who’ve seen the film and spoken about it – Harry Shearer, say – are so vivid in their description that they’ve made it a holy grail. Plus, the fascination with grindhouse, Ed Wood, and movies so bad they’re good (a dubious category) virtually insures there’s a cult for something like this.”

Here's Jerry Lewis saying it will never be seen because it's bad and he's embarrassed by it and he's grateful he had the power to suppress it.



But he didn't destroy it, and in fact he donated it, along with other films, to the Smithsonian, and the instructions are simply that it not be shown until at least 2025. And Lewis once said:

“After I’m gone, who knows what’s going to happen? The only thing that I do feel, that I always get a giggle out of, some smart, young guy is going to come up with an idea, and he’s going to run the fucking thing. I would love that. Because he’s going to see a hell of a movie!”

He's gone now, so maybe we will see it. I've expressed my opinion before (in 2013):

Even if it was in the end, a terrible idea — but wasn't it basically the idea in "Life Is Beautiful"? — can't we see it now, with the understanding that it was a mistake and extract the good and learn from the lesson about what badness is?

It ended with a notoriously cringe-inducing scene of cavorting clown Lewis leading the laughing kids into the gas chamber. Overcome by the grief of what he is being forced to do, he chooses to stay in the gas chamber with them as they are killed.

Let us see it. Of all the Nazi-related things to be ashamed of... maybe this excessive shame about bad art is shameful. Or is it the other way around... and more bad art should be destroyed before anyone can see it?

The sun rises again, not knowing or caring...

... about the United States, where millions are motoring to position themselves in a shadow the moon will cast — for a couple minutes — on a place called the United States.



That's a photograph I took just now from our backyard in Madison, Wisconsin. The sky was very orange at that moment, but the orange has dissipated in the couple minutes it's taken me to get the picture up here.

Yes, we will not be among the millions in the moon shadow. It's not that we didn't plan. We were onto the eclipse very early and had hotel reservations in Boise, Idaho, which looks like just about the best place to be. But we canceled. It was one of the many things we could have done, but clouds got in the way.

ADDED: I seriously considered hopping in the car and barreling down to Nebraska — not worrying about hotels, just sleeping in the car when necessary. But here's the morning weather report for Nebraska:

The morning showers and thunderstorms could leave some significant cloud cover over parts of the region through Monday afternoon, leading to potentially difficult eclipse viewing in some locations, the National Weather Service office in Valley said. However, a few breaks in the clouds cannot be ruled out. In southeast Nebraska, there is a good chance of high-level clouds, but they may be thin and broken with peeks at the sky possible. Looks at the sky may be more possible closer to the Interstate 80 corridor and north, the weather service said.

That's where I'd be, on I-80. But what's I-80 going to be like today — especially if people start chasing the breaks in the clouds? I'm picturing people pulling over everywhere on I-80 and then just even stopping right in the lanes and the whole thing becoming an insane parking lot. Then everyone runs out of gas, including the gas stations, and we have to wait until the federal government saves us.

At CNN, it says:

"This will be like Woodstock 200 times over -- but across the whole country," said Alex Young, solar scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

I missed the real Woodstock too. I had a ride and all, but I couldn't afford the $17 ticket and how was I to know people would just tear down the fences and get in free? And yet my friend who would have driven me there came home and told me that with all the rain and mud it was impossible to enjoy "unless you were part pig."

The great Jerry Lewis has died!

NYT obit.

A mercurial personality who could flip from naked neediness to towering rage, Mr. Lewis seemed to contain multitudes, and he explored all of them. His ultimate object of contemplation was his own contradictory self, and he turned his obsession with fragmentation, discontinuity and the limits of language into a spectacle that enchanted children, disturbed adults and fascinated postmodernist critics.

ADDED: I like this 1995 interview (with Charles Grodin, whose show I, unlike most people, loved):



And here's the car chase scene from "The Disorderly Orderly," which I saw when I was 13:



That scene revealed a whole new dimension of hilarity to me. I'd had no idea how funny something could be — just waves and waves of funnier and funnier. With possibly one exception, it's the most I ever laughed at a movie.

AND: Here's the Marc Maron interview with Jerry Lewis.

At the Questionable Artwork Café...

... you are invited, once again, to examine the political significance and possible offensiveness of a painting. This time there's no hiding the name of the painter. Even if I smudged out the signature, I think you'd know it's Norman Rockwell. I'll add that it's from 1926 and titled "Love Song." The rest is up to you. I especially encourage you to discover the 5 things that are egregiously wrong with this picture.

And it's a café post, so that means that you can talk about any subject and that I remind you that if you want to encourage my scurrilous scribblings here, you can shop through The Althouse Amazon Portal or make a direct contribution using the PayPal buttons in the sidebar. The advantage of using the Amazon Portal is that you can buy things you want to buy anyway and send a contribution to me without paying anything more. The advantage of using the PayPal button is you're not burdened by pesky packages arriving by truck and you'll have a space where you can write a note that I'll get by email. For example, recently somebody gave me $100 and said: "I am particularly grateful for your recent focus on the media."

"When you put a hat and sunglasses on it, it kind of takes the raunchiness out of it."

"I want to raise the bar for dick pics. If you’re going to send one, at least make me laugh. Put some effort into it."

[Soraya] Doolbaz says her husband is very supportive of the idea and dick pics in general, noting that they dated long-distance for a while. Before that, she says she received enough dick pics to give her plenty of inspiration for the project: “Oh my God, when I was single, I would get a ton of them,” she says. “And my friends would get them too and we would show them to each other.”

That's from a Village Voice piece published in 2015. I found that as a result of searches inspired by discussion in the comments to yesterday's "Questionable Artwork Café," where I'd invited people to impose political analysis on a Thomas Hart Benton painting of a farm scene. Participating in the comments myself, I said:

Huge vagina symbol in foreground.

Empowering for women or insulting?

Horse is big phallic symbol, but far from adequate to that huge vagina. Also the harnessing of the horse is emphasized. Is that empowering for women?

And after I got a little pushback for seeing a vagina symbol, I added:

Freud thought a hat was a vagina symbol.

And then the fanciful notion:

That suggests that when a man is having sex with a woman, he's wearing her.

Not wearing her out. Wearing her like she's a very elaborate hat.

Robt C brought up one of my all-time favorite books:

If what Althouse says about sex and hats is true, it give a whole new meaning to Oliver Sacks' book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

I said:

Suddenly, everything makes sense!

The man wasn't wrong at all. He was right and everyone else was wrong. And that's the way of the world, if we could only see things from a different point.

As Bob Dylan sang: "We always did feel the same/We just saw it from a different point of view."

Meanwhile, CWJ had said, "Well there are pussy hats after all." But those are hats for your head. To get the humor — and it's my favorite form of humor — you have to picture the ridiculous big-and-small foolery. The penis is wearing that hat. I figured somebody had already made a project out of putting little hats on penises, and I was right. The big-and-small element or humor is not present in the art project shown at The Village Voice. Soraya Doolbaz — great name! — makes penis-sized clothing, including hats, and dresses real penises up for posing in photographs. In the woman-as-hat notion that amused me, the "head" for the hat is much smaller than the head in a normal hat, but the hat is much larger than the normal hat, so you've got a very radical disproportion.

As I said in a post back in 2009, I have long been aware I am usually amused by humor about the size of things:

We were talking about the expression "postage stamp lawn," that is, a very small lawn, perhaps the size of an area rug. But what if there really were a postage stamp the size of an area rug? That would be a huge postage stamp. Ha ha. Imagine the size of the envelope you'd put it on. Okay. That to me is hilarious, and it reminded me of the joke I found so funny — decades ago — that I laughed so hard the teller of the joke got mad at me for laughing so much. I was cutting the joker's hair — I used to think I could do haircuts and acted upon that belief — and I noticed a bright red dot on the top of his head — the size of a pimple, but not a pimple — and not something he'd ever have noticed. I said, "What's this red dot on top of your head?" He said, "That's my Santa Claus hat!"

I have ever since regarded that as the funniest spontaneous remark I've ever heard, and maybe that will give you some insight into how I feel about the woman-as-hat notion that amused me so much yesterday. Or maybe you have the same taste in big-and-small jokes and you're laughing too. Click the "big and small" tag for more insight into Althouse's big-and-small fetish. In any case, I hope you like the photographs of Soraya Doolbaz.

And apologies to all of you who are thinking I waited nearly 4 hours for the 3d post of the day and this — this!! — is what I get? This post, half written, spurred a real-world conversation that took up nearly the entire interval. So that makes me think if you'll find plenty to say in the comments.

NYT headline offers Trump a measure of praise.

"Protesters Flood Streets, and Trump Offers a Measure of Praise."

Here's the part of the article about Trump:

President Trump, who has faced unyielding — and bipartisan — criticism after saying that there was “blame on both sides” in Charlottesville, tweeted Saturday that he wanted “to applaud the many protestors in Boston who are speaking out against bigotry and hate. Our country will soon come together as one!”

He also wrote: “Our great country has been divided for decades. Sometimes you need protest in order to heal, & we will heal, & be stronger than ever before!”

It was an abrupt shift in tone. The president posted earlier Saturday that it appeared there were “many anti-police agitators in Boston.”

Nothing in the Times about Trump's need to delete and retweet after misspelling "heal" as "heel," a topic of mirth in the lesser New York paper, The Daily News, where the headline is "Trump roasted over pair of tweets saying country must ‘heel.'"

That's not just a nonsense misspelling like covfefe. "Heel" has meaning, as a tweeter named @dexter_doggie barked: “Donald Trump intends to bring you to heel."

"Every time I do your show, it's almost like I'm on a black station... There's a certain clairvoyance that black folks born with."

"We don't have as much as we used to, but that's always been there. And so, they can listen to you and know ain't no tricking going on, ain't no nothing. They don't even have to question. Very seldom you hear a black person talking about conspiracy theory. The conspiracy theory is The New York Times and The Washington Post and NBC and CBS. And just thank God that all these radio stations like yours...."



That's just the first thing I ran into as I looked for old video of Dick Gregory — old in the sense of not things put together on the occasion of his death. That's Dick Gregory talking to Alex Jones.

Here's the obituary in the conspiracy theory New York Times:

Dick Gregory, the pioneering black satirist who transformed cool humor into a barbed force for civil rights in the 1960s, then veered from his craft for a life devoted to protest and fasting in the name of assorted social causes, health regimens and conspiracy theories, died Saturday in Washington. He was 84....

In 1962, Mr. Gregory joined a demonstration for black voting rights in Mississippi. That was a beginning. He threw himself into social activism body and soul, viewing it as a higher calling.

Arrests came by the dozens. In a Birmingham, Ala., jail in 1963, he wrote, he endured “the first really good beating I ever had in my life.”

He added: “It was just body pain, though. The Negro has a callus growing on his soul, and it’s getting harder and harder to hurt him there.”...

There seemed few causes he would not embrace. He took to fasting for weeks on end, his once-robust body shrinking at times to 95 pounds. Across the decades he went on dozens of hunger strikes, over issues including the Vietnam War, the failed Equal Rights Amendment, police brutality, South African apartheid, nuclear power, prison reform, drug abuse and American Indian rights.

And he reveled in conspiracy theories, elaborating on them in language that could be enigmatic and circuitous. Hidden hands, Mr. Gregory insisted, were behind everything from a crack cocaine epidemic to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001; from the murders of President John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lennon to the plane crash that killed John F. Kennedy Jr. Whom to blame? “Whoever the people are who control the system,” he told The Washington Post in 2000.

Correction appended: "An earlier version of this article misstated the year of the Sept. 11 attacks. They were in 2001, not 2011." Of all the dates to botch.

Playing the wrong song.

On December 16, 1977, Elvis Costello was on "Saturday Night Live, and he was supposed to play "Less Than Zero." He gets started, then starts waving his hands and saying "Stop! Stop!"...



and "I'm sorry, ladies and gentlemen, there's no reason to do this song here" — it was about some British political situation — and switches to "Radio Radio."

Later, Costello said he got his inspiration from Jimi Hendrix, who was on Lulu's BBC TV show back in January 1969 and supposed to play "Hey Joe." Hendrix starts the song, then stops and says: "We'd like to stop playing this rubbish and dedicate a song to the Cream regardless of what kind of group they might be. I'd like to dedicate this to Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, and Jack Bruce." Cream had broken up a couple months before.

Jimi then switches to "Sunshine of Your Love" and goes on and on until "We're being pulled off the air":

At the Questionable Artwork Café...

... you can write about anything — this is a café post — but I am inviting you to consider whether this painting is deplorable.(Double click the image to enlarge and see details much more clearly.)

Does it deserve a place of honor or is this something that good citizens should pressure the museum to store in its basement along with other disreputable junk from America's shameful past?

And if these proddings amuse you, encourage me by using The Althouse Amazon Portal.

ADDED: Here's the wall card for that painting (at the Indianapolis Museum of Art):

Not very informative — politically — is it? Why did Thomas Hart Benton lead "Regionalists" and why did these people "favor images of America, especially the rural Midwest"? It's 1942. It's WWII. It's the year FDR relocated Japanese Americans to internment camps. Why so hot to show us the America of the rural Midwest where farmers still plow with a horse? Isn't this the kind of image Hitler would have enjoyed? Hitler too objected to the abstract art of the Modernists. He himself painted rural scenes. For example:

And yet, what a difference between Hitler's rural scene and Benton's. Benton had everything rolling and flowing, pulsating with life. Hitler doesn't even have a person or an animal, and there's no activity in his inanimate things. Hitler's painting looks like a snapshot of a real place — a boring place not even worth photographing. Benton's painting refers to reality, but everything is transformed. He takes the most humble subject and pumps it up into the mythic, heroic, and phantasmagoric.

But who knows? Maybe that's what Hitler meant to do too, and he was too crappy a painter to achieve the intended effect. And more importantly, similarity/difference to Hitler is not a good enough political test, especially for art.

"By identifying sexual desire as a universal drive with endlessly idiosyncratic objects determined by individual experiences and memories..."

"... Freud, more than anyone, not only made it possible to see female desire as a force no less powerful or valid than male desire; he made all the variants of sexual proclivity dance along a shared erotic continuum. In doing so, Freud articulated basic conceptual premises that reduced the sway of experts who attributed diverse sexual urges to hereditary degeneration or criminal pathology. His work has allowed many people to feel less isolated and freakish in their deepest cravings and fears...."

From a NYT book review of "FREUD/The Making of an Illusion." The book is by Frederick Crews, who is extremely hostile to Freud. The review is by George Prochnik, who sees value in Freud, despite all of the bad science and self-deception belabored by Crews.

Crews has been debunking Freud’s scientific pretensions for decades now; and it seems fair to ask what keeps driving him back to stab the corpse again. 

The Oedipus complex?

Now that we’ve effectively expelled Freud from the therapeutic clinic, have we become less neurotic? With that baneful “illusion” gone, and with all our psychopharmaceuticals and empirically grounded cognitive therapy techniques firmly in place, can we assert that we’ve advanced toward some more rational state of mental health than that enjoyed by our forebears in the heyday of analysis? Indeed, with a commander in chief who often seems to act entirely out of the depths of a dark unconscious, we might all do better to read more, not less, of Freud.

Ooh! Trump keeps popping up everywhere. It's like sex in Freud. It/he is everywhere. I'm going to read Freud just because I'd like some reading material where I know Trump won't show up.

Just kidding. What I really mean is that there's some reason we seem to need a big, dominating, larger-that-life male figure to loom over us and mess with our mind.

Prochnik says Trump seems to act entirely out of the depths of a dark unconscious, but maybe the feelings we project onto Trump are arising entirely out of the depths of our dark unconscious.

"Do not waste your time photographing it."

From "Five Things You Must Not Do During Totality At The Solar Eclipse."

But let me offer something for your things-to-do list: If you must take photographs, take photographs of things other than the eclipse. Maybe something about the landscape in the dark or with an approaching moon shadow. And if you're stuck surrounded by people during the eclipse, maybe get something interesting about how human beings behave, such as stupidly wasting their time trying to get their own amateur photograph of the thing that pros will be photographing to death. I'll bet lots of people will try for the selfie "Me With the Total Eclipse of the Sun." Pictures of them posing for themselves with the eclipse framed in the background might be amusing.

Who would spray paint "Tear It Down" on a statue of Joan of Arc in New Orleans?

I'm reading this story at PJ Media  — which misquotes the graffiti in the headline and makes it sound as though the graffiti was on the statue when it's actually on the base. So let's switch to The Times-Picayune (which is linked at PJ Media):

The phrase "Tear it Down" was hastily sprayed in black paint across the base of the golden Joan of Arc statue on Decatur Street in the French Quarter sometime earlier this week. It has since been removed, with only the vaguest traces of the paint remaining.

The "Tear it Down" tag would seem to relate to the debate surrounding the city's ongoing removal of four Confederate monuments. But the statue of Joan of Arc, a 15th-century military leader, martyr and Catholic saint, hasn't been mentioned in the controversy to this point.

Now, wait a minute! This article is from last May, and the PJ Media article went up yesterday and doesn't mention that the defacing of the Joan of Arc monument predated the current uproar over the removal of Civil War monuments. But there was a "Take Em Down NOLA" movement at the time that — as the Times-Picayune tells us — aimed at the local Confederate monuments (and this group denies targeting the Joan).

Anyway, who would spray paint "Tear It Down" on a Joan of Arc monument? Do you leap to assume that some idiot believes that Joan of Arc has to do with the Confederacy? Maybe that's how you have fun. At PJ Media, the author (Tom Knighton) does not assume it was ignorance about Joan of Arc. At the end of his piece he says:

It's also possible that this was the result of someone being intentionally ridiculous. After all, while removing statues of Confederate leaders is the big thing, there are also movements to remove a Thomas Jefferson monument from outside of Columbia University and a Teddy Roosevelt from outside of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. So maybe someone is just trolling these lunatics.

Yes, that theory fits the facts better than the theory that some idiot thought it was a pro-Confederacy statue.

But it could also be anti-Catholic. Speaking of ignorance of American history, it's ignorant not to know that the KKK and other nationalists have been virulently anti-Catholic. Here's a Wikipedia article, "Anti-Catholicism in the United States."

Here's some KKK artwork from 1925:

You see the tear-it-down enthusiasm.

There are people who would want to take down a statue of a Catholic saint. Quite aside from the KKK, what about people who want the strict separation of religion and government? Why is there a religious monument in the public square?

If "the Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over" — as Bannon says — then who is this Trump-minus-Bannon we've got now?

The quote comes from The Weekly Standard:

“The Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over,” Bannon said.... “We still have a huge movement, and we will make something of this Trump presidency. But that presidency is over. It’ll be something else. And there’ll be all kinds of fights, and there’ll be good days and bad days, but that presidency is over.”

The "we" in Bannon's quote is a subset of the people who voted for Trump. Clearly, Trump won the Electoral College, which is our system. He won the game according to our rules, but his opponent got more votes and something like 40% of the eligible voters abstained for one reason or another. But even if you look only at the — what is it? — 26% of the people who voted for Trump, only some unknown fraction of that were people who fit Bannon's "we," people who want whatever Trump-minus-Bannon is not.

Among the senior advisers competing with Bannon in trying to shape Trump’s agenda, and his tone, were the president’s daughter, Ivanka, and son-in-law, Jared. Bannon pointedly voiced criticism of those in the president’s sphere whom he considered to be globalists, or liberals (or both), and the president himself plainly bristled over the early attention that Bannon got from the press (including a Time magazine cover, which is said to have particularly irked Trump).

Yes, some of the people who voted for Trump want something more moderate, something represented by Jared and Ivanka, the Trump who said things like:

“Ask yourself who is really the friend of women and the L.G.B.T. community, Donald Trump with actions or Hillary Clinton with her words? I will tell you who the better friend is, and someday I believe that will be proven out, big-league.”

The big league is a strange place. You never know what you're getting when you vote for a President. Some people who voted for Trump were saying he didn't really mean those harsher things he said. Voters hear what they want to hear or hear and hope for the best or just loathe both candidates and join the 40% who abstained or pick somebody because they're more afraid the other person. I was in that last category, and while I have never revealed which of the 2 candidates I voted for in spite of disliking both of them — I voted for the one I disliked more! — there's no way I'm in Bannon's "we."

Bannon deserves to feel great pride that he got Trump over the line. He's entitled to think of himself as the without-which-nothing of Trump's presidency. But the intensely excited subset of Trump supporters don't deserve to get everything they want. Trump is the President of all of us, even those who didn't vote or who are not eligible to vote or who voted for Hillary Clinton or Gary Johnson or Jill Stein. The people outside of Bannon's "we" are the vast majority of Americans and include millions of people who voted for Trump and would like to vote for him again in 2020.

“Now, it’s gonna be Trump,” Bannon said. “The path forward on things like economic nationalism and immigration, and his ability to kind of move freely . . . I just think his ability to get anything done—particularly the bigger things, like the wall, the bigger, broader things that we fought for, it’s just gonna be that much harder."...

“I think they’re going to try to moderate him,” he says. “I think he’ll sign a clean debt ceiling, I think you’ll see all this stuff. His natural tendency—and I think you saw it this week on Charlottesville—his actual default position is the position of his base, the position that got him elected. I think you’re going to see a lot of constraints on that. I think it’ll be much more conventional.”

But the vast majority of Americans — 80? 90? 95%? — want something more conventional! Convention is tradition. Trump said "Make America Great Again," invoking the past, tradition, and there is a longing for stability and recognizable values and principles and inclusiveness.

“I feel jacked up,” he says. “Now I’m free. I’ve got my hands back on my weapons. Someone said, ‘it’s Bannon the Barbarian.’ I am definitely going to crush the opposition. There’s no doubt. I built a f***ing machine at Breitbart. And now I’m about to go back, knowing what I know, and we’re about to rev that machine up. And rev it up we will do.”

Great! Get out there where you belong. Speaking freely, speaking directly to us, out there where we can see you and where you don't have your hands on political power.