"There is an easy familiarity between the two men that allows Bannon to call Epstein a 'schmuck' and 'criminal' and even ask if he is 'the devil' fallen from paradise."

"At one point, Bannon comments: 'There’s something deeply fucked up with you.' The interview also becomes an exercise in intellectual peacocking as they invoke Socrates, Isaac Newton and quantum physics but pay little attention to Epstein’s crimes. Epstein reveals himself to be a living museum of racial prejudice...."

From "'Do you think you’re the devil himself?': highlights from the bizarre, newly released Bannon-Epstein interview/The interview,⁠ revealed in the latest tranche of Epstein files, was reportedly intended for a sympathetic documentary" (The Guardian).

Sample clip, with Epstein posing as thoughtful on the topic of gender difference:

Transcript:

Science doesn't describe romance. I don't know why I'm attracted to somebody. I don't know. People are attracted to each other, and everyone has felt the same thing at some point. They've seen someone walk into a room and thought, "Oh, that person gives me a creepy feeling."

He knows, I infer, that the females he is finding attractive are experiencing him as creepy.

"Muzzle velocity, in its literal sense, describes the ferocious speed of a bullet at the moment it exits the front end of a gun."

"The term came from an interview that Steve Bannon, President Trump’s former chief strategist, gave in 2019. 'All we have to do is flood the zone,' Bannon said. 'Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity.'"

Writes Ezra Klein, in "Trump Has Overwhelmed Himself" (NYT).

But has Trump "overwhelmed himself"? Listen to last night's press gaggle — all the topics he crunched through in 15 minutes. Iran. Venezuela. Cuba. China and India. Crime in Minneapolis and Chicago. ICE protests. The 250-foot arch and the ballroom, the Epstein files, suing Michael Wolff, suing the FBI. Greenland. And that "sleazebag" Don Lemon. 

He didn't seem overwhelmed at all, and that was at night, on a gruelingly noisy plane, grilled by reporters after an evening event where, as WaPo puts it, "Trump tries humor, gets some silence, at black-tie dinner with 'people I hate.'"

He seemed to be up for all of it.

"WTF is going on here with Michael Wolff giving PR strategy to Jeffrey Epstein?"

Said the podcaster Brian Reed, quoted by The Guardian in "Blurred lines: how Michael Wolff aspired to be part of elite circles he wrote about/The writer who features prominently in newly released Jeffrey Epstein emails has achieved extraordinary access but faced questions about his journalistic ethics."

Wolff's attempt at an explanation: "I was engaged then in an in-depth conversation with Epstein about his relationship with Trump and this seems to be part of that conversation."

The Guardian also quotes what NYT reporter Maggie Haberman said about Wolff back in 2018 (when his Trump-bashing book "Fire and Fury" came out: "He believes in larger truths and narratives.... So he creates a narrative that is notionally true, that’s conceptually true; the details are often wrong."

Reminds me of the old Ratherism "fake but accurate."

Back to The Guardian:

"A Bannon-Vance primary would trigger an explosive civil war within Trump's populist movement, pitting its original architect against its institutional inheritor."

Intones The Daily Mail, in "Steve Bannon is secretly plotting a sensational run for president in 2028 ... and he's already knifing his likely rival: 'I created him.'"

The Wall Street Journal's aggressive effort to get Trump with the Big Bawdy Birthday Letter backfired, according to the NYT.

I'm reading "How Trump Deflected MAGA’s Wrath Over Epstein, at Least for Now/By tapping into other grievances, President Trump managed to turn one of the most fractious moments for his base into a unifying one."

That's an amazingly pro-Trump headline for the NYT. Let's read:

Mr. Trump turned one of the most fractious moments for his base into one of the most unifying by tapping into other MAGA grievances: the deep mistrust of mainstream media, the disdain for Rupert Murdoch and the belief that the president had been unfairly persecuted by his political foes.... 

Stephen K. Bannon, a former White House adviser to Mr. Trump and influential leader of the MAGA base, said that the dynamics were shifting in part because the reporting in the story seemed “phony,” and because the paper decided not to show Mr. Trump a copy of the letter.

“The Murdochs’ bizarre assault on the president galvanized his base because of both content and process,” Mr. Bannon said. “Now we are united as Trump goes on offense — against the Murdochs, the courts and the deep state.”...

It seems less a matter of Trump managing to turn things around as the press behaving badly and suffering the predictable consequence.  

"I don't give a shit whether the upper middle class and Beverly Hills in Bel Air have got to pay actual American citizens to do their lawn or, you know, clean their gutters."

"And people say, oh, we'll never get American citizens to do it. Well, hey, if you have to pay a decent wage in a competitive market because you don't have millions of illegal aliens that are prepared to work for slave... look, we can't have a country that's based upon servitude. That's what this is."

Said Steve Bannon, quoted in "Steve Bannon’s Battle for the Soul of MAGA," today's episode of the NYT podcast "The Daily" (audio and transcript at Podscribe).

"Mr. Trump had been under pressure from the noninterventionist wing of his party to stay out of the conflict, and was having lunch that day..."

".... with one of the most outspoken opponents of a bombing campaign, Stephen K. Bannon, fueling speculation that he might hold off. It was almost entirely a deception. Mr. Trump had all but made up his mind to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, and the military preparations were well underway for the complex attack. Less than 30 hours after Ms. Leavitt relayed his statement [that he would make a decision about whether or not to strike Iran 'within the next two weeks'] he would give the order for an assault.... Mr. Trump’s 'two weeks' statement was just one aspect of a broader effort at political and military misdirection that took place over eight chaotic days, from the first Israeli strikes against Iran to the moment when a fleet of B-2 stealth bombers took off from Missouri for the first American military strikes inside Iran since that country’s theocratic revolution in 1979...."

From "Shifting Views and Misdirection: How Trump Decided to Strike Iran/When Israel began its assault on Iran, President Trump kept his distance. But within days he was on a path that led to an extensive bombing mission aided by political and military ruses" (NYT).

"I think most men are gay in DC — either out or closeted depending on whether they’re Democrats or Republicans."

"I want to marry someone who allows me to protect feminine energy in a world that is forcing me to be a girl boss because they keep sending Steve to prison. Perhaps I have…"

Said Natalie Winters, quoted by Katy Balls in The London Times, "My night out with Trump’s young Maga crowd in Washington."

"Steve" = Steve Bannon. Winters works as a White House correspondent for Steve Bannon’s "War Room."

"What is the social scene like in Maga term two? '‘I think there is more of a diversity of ways that groups enter this movement, so you get a broader… For instance, Maha — it’s more the trad wife, pro-natalist people who are really into that. It all mixes. It’s a bigger tent,' says Winters. There is also a bunch of tech bros in town, but to the disappointment of some in the Maga coalition and some of the young Republicans looking for husbands, they rarely come out...."

Are women today thinking about themselves in terms of "feminine energy"? A quick search for the term will turn up some very lightweight stuff. I won't link to any of it. I'll just quote the 2 times the phrase has come up on my blog:

2013: "If you are truly a feminine woman at your core, but don’t know how to let your femininity surface, you will end up unhappy, feeling miserable and depleted.... Being able to claim your feminine energy is at the heart of your own happiness, and most definitely the happiness of your relationship." 

That's a quote from Renee Wade.

2025: "And I, I just think we kind of swung culturally to that part of the, the kind of the spectrum where, you know, it's all like, okay, masculinity is toxic. We have to like get rid of it completely. It's, like, no, like it's, both of these things are good, right? It's like you want, like, feminine energy, you want masculine energy. Like I, I think that that's like you're gonna have parts of society that have more of one or the other. I think that that's all good."

And that's a quote from Mark Zuckerberg.

Ironically, some of us would have empathized with Biden if we'd been allowed to hear this at the time.

It's the coverup that really hurts.

The scandal is MUCH worse than the Biden WH not releasing the tape. The so-called “independent” Merrick Garland crooked Justice Dept was SUBPOENAED by Congress to release it, he defied that subpoena after jailing Steve Bannon for defying one, then DOJ refused to jail Garland. https://t.co/TLzzdrosZf

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) May 16, 2025

"I can tell you... '16 was providential. That was the hand of God.... The pandemic and the stealing of the 2020 election was also the hand of God."

"At the time, it didn't seem that [way] but if we had gone right into a second term, it would have been like trench warfare. It would have been like the Western Front in World War I, just two sides dug in, and they kind of had Trump surrounded. God's hand worked that we would step back.… We had the time to regroup. Trump had the time to think.... You had those four years of preparation."

Said Steve Bannon.

That made me think about something Ross Douthat said in that podcast blogged 2 posts down: 

If you want to get excited about 2028, here are the names that have emerged thus far: Walz, Buttigieg, and Pritzker.

Yikes!

I'm reading "Buttigieg, Walz and Other Democrats Start the 2028 Chatter Early/Pete Buttigieg says he’s keeping his options open. Tim Walz went to Iowa. JB Pritzker’s off to New Hampshire. It’s too early to run for president, but some Democrats seem to be exploring the idea" (NYT).

Also mentioned in the article: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rahm Emanuel, Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan Andy Beshear, and Gavin Newsom.

Newsom just started a podcast, and he had Steve Bannon as a guest. Frankly, I think Newsom should use Bannon as an adviser. I see things like "Gavin Newsom draws Democratic ire for hosting Steve Bannon on his podcast/‘I don’t think we should give him oxygen on any platform, ever, anywhere,’ Kentucky governor Andy Beshear says" (The Guardian). But Bannon asserts that he's a Democrat, criticizes the Democratic Party for becoming the party of the elite, and earnestly and continually argues that government should operate for the benefit of the working class.

"I was open to the idea behind Gavin Newsom’s new podcast, in which the California governor has been breaking out of his political bubble..."

"... to talk at length with right-wing media stars such as Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon. Democrats need to get better at speaking to people who don’t share their assumptions and at long-form conversations requiring improvisation and spontaneity.... Trying to leverage Kirk and Bannon’s notoriety to reach new audiences could have been an interesting experiment. Instead, it’s a protracted exercise in self-harm for both Newsom and any liberal who decides to listen to him. That’s because the governor frequently seems less interested in arguing than in finding common ground, assuming the good faith of people who have next to none. He leaves wild right-wing claims unchallenged and repeatedly concedes Republican premises. When Bannon described rebuilding his movement after what he claimed was the stolen 2020 election, Newsom’s response was, 'Well, I appreciate the notion of agency.'"

Writes Michelle Goldberg, in "What on Earth Is Gavin Newsom Doing?" (NYT).

"He’s still not a populist nationalist, he’s a globalist. He and I have a chasm that is probably insurmountable."

Said Steve Bannon, quoted in "The Populist vs. the Billionaire: Bannon, Musk and the Battle Within MAGA/President Trump has made clear he wants to keep both men and their allies within his movement, but the tensions are growing" (NYT).

Mr. Bannon vigorously disagrees with Mr. Musk’s support for H-1B visas, which allow high-skilled individuals to work in America. Mr. Bannon has also warned that billionaires like Mr. Musk and other tech executives — many of whom supported Democrats before backing Mr. Trump — will abandon the MAGA movement.

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: "Is this a mixed metaphor: 'He and I have a chasm that is probably insurmountable'?" And: "I think a good writer would see the concrete images behind these words and keep things coordinated. I believe George Orwell — 'Politics and the English Language' — supports my position."

But Bannon wasn't writing. He was speaking. 

"'Dark MAGA' spreads as conservatives embrace Musk’s influence on Trump."

A headline at AP (AP, which, by the way, is suing Donald Trump for excluding it from White House access because it won't use the new sobriquet for the southward Gulf).

The AP writer, Adriana Gomez Licon, saw a lot of the black MAGA hats at CPAC. Does wearing the black version of the MAGA hat represent affiliation with Musk? 

Also: "Speakers at CPAC frequently brought up DOGE, playfully named after a meme coin with the face of a Shiba Inu dog popularized by Musk in 2021. They variously referred to him as a 'white knight,' a 'hero of free speech,' and according to one of his harshest critics, Steve Bannon, 'Superman.'"

"Musk is a parasitic illegal immigrant. He wants to impose his freak experiments and play-act as God without any respect for the country’s history, values or traditions."

Said Steve Bannon, quoted in "Bannon Calls Musk a ‘Parasitic Illegal Immigrant’/Stephen Bannon, a top adviser during President Trump’s first term and a popular figure among his supporters, said Elon Musk wants to 'play-act as God' as part of his push to overhaul the federal government" (NYT).

He appeared to be referring to news reports that Mr. Musk, who was born in South Africa and who has become an aggressive voice against undocumented immigrants, overstayed his visa as he built a company in the United States. Mr. Musk has denied the accusation....

“It’s pretty evident the president’s using [Musk] as an armor-piercing shell that’s delivering blunt force trauma against the administrative state,” Mr. Bannon said in the interview....

"In technofeudalism, you’re just a digital serf. Your value as a human being, as someone built and made in the image and likeness of God..."

"... and endowed with the life spirit of the Holy Spirit — they don’t consider that. Everything is digital to them. They are, at the end of the day, transhumanist. And what is transhumanist? Transhumanist is somebody who sees Homo sapien here and Homo sapien plus on the other side of what they call the singularity. And that’s why they’re all rushing — whether it’s artificial intelligence, regenerative robotics, quantum computing, advanced chip design, CRISPR, biotech, all of it — to come to this point of which the oligarchs are going to lead that revolution. And why are they going to do it? No. 1, when you get to know them and see where they’re spending the money, it’s because they want eternal life. You know why? Because they’re complete atheistic 11-year-old boys that are kind of science fiction 'Dungeons & Dragons' guys, and we’ve turned the nation over to that. And yes, I’m going to fight it every fucking step of the way. This is taking us back a millennium to feudalism.... They’re all superprogressive liberals, they’re all technofeudalists, they don’t give a flying fuck about the human being.... And they have to be stopped. If we don’t stop it, and we don’t stop it now, it’s going to destroy not just this country, it’s going to destroy the world...."

Said Steve Bannon, in "Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism/The fight for Donald Trump’s ear" (NYT)(listen and read the transcript without a pay wall here, at Podscribe).

"I will have Elon Musk run out of here by Inauguration Day. He will not have a blue pass to the White House..."

"... he will not have full access to the White House, he will be like any other person. He is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy. I made it my personal thing to take this guy down. Before, because he put money in, I was prepared to tolerate it; I’m not prepared to tolerate it anymore.... This thing of the H-1B visas, it’s about the entire immigration system is gamed by the tech overlords, they use it to their advantage, the people are furious.... Peter Thiel, David Sachs, Elon Musk, are all white South Africans. He should go back to South Africa. Why do we have South Africans, the most racist people on earth, white South Africans, we have them making any comments at all on what goes on in the United States? We have been fighting this fight for ten years.... We are going to expose the entire corruption of the American system, of how money controls everything...."

Says Steve Bannon, quoted in "'I Will Do Anything' to Keep Elon Musk out of the White House" (Breitbart).

"In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me"/"And guess what, we broke them and now they’re whining like little children"/"Hitler knows that he will have to break us...."

This blog has a theme today.

The quotes in the post headline are from the first 2 posts of the day, below. The Bannon article has 2 more quotes about breakage:

• Spoken in a new interview: "Somebody’s got to break the system so somebody else can come in and build it. People have roles in life, right?"

• Spoken on January 5, 2021: "All hell is going to break loose tomorrow."

"They’re all infesting the Cotswolds. F*** them. They’re not resilient … They had every advantage of state power. They had the high ground."

"And guess what, we broke them and now they’re whining like little children...."

Said Steve Bannon, from his house in Arizona, referring to Ellen DeGeneres and others who are relocated, out of fear of the Trump administration.

Quoted by Louise Callaghan in "Steve Bannon: Maga can rule for 50 years and Farage will be PM/For the firebrand Trump guru, beating ‘whining’ Democrats was just the beginning — at home and abroad" (London Times).

“We are so close,” he tells me. “We just need to see this through.” Trump may have won the presidency, but to enact the sweeping changes he wants to make — chief among them destroying the administrative state and deporting millions of undocumented migrants — he needs to move fast, with the support of his party.

"He should stand up and say: 'Hey, I’ve won this. And we have teams right now that are going to make sure that this thing is not going to be stolen.'"

Said Steve Bannon, quoted in "Trump, Preparing to Challenge the Results, Puts His 2020 Playbook Into Action/Step by step, Donald J. Trump and his allies are following the strategies that caused chaos four years ago. Election officials say they are ready this time" (NYT)(gift link, because there's a lot of procedural detail to see).

In recently filed court papers naming Mr. Bannon as a co-conspirator in Mr. Trump’s federal election interference case, the special counsel, Jack Smith, noted that Mr. Bannon had said the same thing four years ago. 

“What Trump’s going to do is just declare victory, right?” he said, according to the records, later adding, “That doesn’t mean he’s the winner, he’s just going to say he’s the winner.”

I presume that under at least some circumstances, Kamala Harris would also want to say "Hey, I’ve won this. And we have teams right now that are going to make sure that this thing is not going to be stolen." It's all about when you say that, and not that you'd never say that. If the win is narrow enough, there are challenges. There's litigation. There's such a strong need, for the Harris campaign, to portray Trump as demonic for going as far as he did in January 2021, but that can't mean that it plans to concede immediately if the initial announcement says Trump won.