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liberals would have to oppose them.
Bannon’s mission was to puncture the global-liberal-emperor-wears-no-clothes bubble,
nowhere, in his view, as ludicrously demonstrated as the refusal to see the colossally
difficult and costly effects of uncontrolled immigration. He wanted to force liberals to
acknowledge that even liberal governments, even the Obama government, were engaged
in the real politics of slowing immigration—ever hampered by the liberal refusal to
acknowledge this effort.
The EO would be drafted to remorselessly express the administration’s (or Bannon’s)
pitiless view. The problem was, Bannon really didn’t know how to do this—change rules
and laws. This limitation, Bannon understood, might easily be used to thwart them.
Process was their enemy. But just doing it—the hell with how—and doing it immediately,
could be a powerful countermeasure.
Just doing things became a Bannon principle, the sweeping antidote to bureaucratic
and establishment ennui and resistance. It was the chaos of just doing things that actually
got things done. Except, even if you assumed that not knowing how to do things didn’t
much matter if you just did them, it was still not clear who was going to do what you
wanted to do. Or, a corollary, because nobody in the Trump administration really knew
how to do anything, it was therefore not clear what anyone did.
Sean Spicer, whose job was literally to explain what people did and why, often simply
could not—because nobody really had a job, because nobody could do a job.
Priebus, as chief of staff, had to organize meetings, schedules, and the hiring of staff;
he also had to oversee the individual functions of the executive office departments. But
Bannon, Kushner, Conway, and the president’s daughter actually had no specific
responsibilities—they could make it up as they went along. They did what they wanted.
They would seize the day if they could—even if they really didn’t know how to do what
they wanted to do.
Bannon, for instance, even driven by his imperative just to get things done, did not use
a computer. How did he do anything? Katie Walsh wondered. But that was the difference
between big visions and small. Process was bunk. Expertise was the last refuge of liberals,
ever defeated by the big picture. The will to get big things done was how big things got
done. “Don’t sweat the small stuff’ was a pretty good gist of Donald Trump’s—and Steve
Bannon’s—worldview. “Chaos was Steve’s strategy,” said Walsh.
Bannon got Stephen Miller to write the immigration EO. Miller, a fifty-five-year-old
trapped in a thirty-two-year-old’s body, was a former Jeff Sessions staffer brought on to
the Trump campaign for his political experience. Except, other than being a dedicated far-
right conservative, it was unclear what particular abilities accompanied Miller’s political
views. He was supposed to be a speechwriter, but if so, he seemed restricted to bullet
points and unable to construct sentences. He was supposed to be a policy adviser but knew
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