TimelyなTime

当選すれば少しは大人しくなるのではと思ったら次々と驚くべき大統領令を出して混乱を引き起こしているトランプ大統領。「一体何を考えているんだ」と思うのは自然のことで、腹心Steve Bannonに関心が集まりどこのメディアも取り上げるようになっています。興味が出たトピックは色々読み比べてみるといいかもしれません。

雑誌Timeもカバーストーリーにしていました。どんな人物か興味ある方は是非。読んでみると引き起こした混乱も喧嘩上等的な確信犯なんですね。honey badger（蜜穴熊）を引き合いに出しているところです。

NATION
Is Steve Bannon the Second Most Powerful Man in the World?
David Von Drehle
Feb 02, 2017

The essence of the place could be found in a viral video that made its debut around the time of Bannon's takeover of Breitbart. Over a piece of old nature footage, a clever narrator commented on a single-minded beast known as a honey badger. Through bee stings, snakebites and other degradations, the animal never stops killing and eating. "Honey Badger don't give a shit," the narrator summed up. Bannon adopted the phrase as a motto.

Official Washington and its counterparts around the globe are struggling to understand just how much the honey badgers are now running the show. There is no doubt the badgers are starving for change and don't care if they get stung by swarms of pundits, incumbents, lobbyists and donors--not to mention foreign leaders and denizens of Davos. In fact, they seem to like it.

The capital was in a lather over the immigration order, with denunciations pouring in from Republicans and Democrats alike. Rumors swirled of resignations from the Trump White House, when Trump's policy badger, Stephen Miller, a Bannon ally, calmly stepped before the cameras. "Anytime you do anything hugely successful that challenges a failed orthodoxy, you're going to see protests," he told CBS News. "In fact, if nobody is disagreeing with what you're doing, then you're probably not doing anything that really matters in the scheme of things."

話題にしているhoney badgerのvideoはこれかもしれません。


雑誌Economistもトランプ政権をカバーに持ってきていますが、こちらは外交を中心にしています。America first and lastというタイトルは今のままだとアメリカのためにならないアメリカを後回しにすることになるといいたいのでしょうか。同じように混乱はトランプ支持者が望んでいることだと指摘している部分です。

America first and last
What the visa ban shows about American foreign policy
A divided nation seeks a divided world

THE cavalier view some members of President Donald Trump’s inner circle take of the chaos they have unleashed since January 20th has startled both their opponents and many of their Republican colleagues. It should not. The insiders are doing things that Mr Trump promised to do on the campaign trail, and that they have long wanted to see done. And if they are doing it in a way that tramples other people’s sensibilities, then all the better; it is what their supporters would want.

雑誌TimeはBannon生い立ちや経歴、考え方などをエピソードを交えて紹介してくれます。彼が影響を受けた本にThe Fourth Turningというのがあるそうです。successive generations have fallen into crisis, embraced institutions, rebelled against those institutions and forgotten the lessons of the past--which invites the next crisisという4つのサイクルをアメリカの歴史は巡っていて今がその大きな変革の時期に当たっているというのです。

Sometime in the early 2000s, Bannon was captivated by a book called The Fourth Turning by generational theorists William Strauss and Neil Howe. The book argues that American history can be described in a four-phase cycle, repeated again and again, in which successive generations have fallen into crisis, embraced institutions, rebelled against those institutions and forgotten the lessons of the past--which invites the next crisis. These cycles of roughly 80 years each took us from the revolution to the Civil War, and then to World War II, which Bannon might point out was taking shape 80 years ago. During the fourth turning of the phase, institutions are destroyed and rebuilt.
In an interview with TIME, author Howe recalled that Bannon contacted him more than a decade ago about making a film based on the book. That eventually led to Generation Zero, released in 2010, in which Bannon cast the 2008 financial crisis as a sign that the turning was upon us. Howe agrees with the analysis, in part. In each cycle, the postcrisis generation, in this case the baby boomers, eventually rises to "become the senior leaders who have no memory of the last crisis, and they are always the ones who push us into the next one," Howe said.
But Bannon, who once called himself the "patron saint of commoners," seemed to relish the opportunity to clean out the old order and build a new one in its place, casting the political events of the nation as moments of extreme historical urgency, pivot points for the world. Historian David Kaiser played a featured role in Generation Zero, and he recalls his filmed interview with Bannon as an engrossing and enjoyable experience.

Generation Zeroという動画もYoutubeにありました。


そして"Our big belief, one of our central organizing principles at the site, is that we're at war."という考えに至っているようです。雑誌Economistの方では簡潔にまとめています。

Now I am the master
In 2014 Mr Bannon gave a remarkable address to a conservative conference at the Vatican. He described working-class communities betrayed by “people in New York that feel closer to people in London and in Berlin than they do to people in Kansas and in Colorado”. The corruption and greed of that rootless elite had caused a crisis in capitalism, Mr Bannon argued, “and on top of that we’re now, I believe, at the beginning stages of a global war against Islamic fascism.” His answer lay in the values of the “Judeo-Christian West”, in “strong countries and strong nationalist movements” and possibly in an accommodation with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. Though he called Mr Putin a kleptocrat, Mr Bannon suggested that this might matter less than securing Russia as an ally against radical Islamists.

Mr Bannon has the trust of the president on foreign affairs. Witness the decision to give him a guaranteed seat on the National Security Council (NSC), enjoying the same access to that inner sanctum as James Mattis, the defence secretary, and Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state. A move that gives a political strategist privileges no longer enjoyed by the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, who only attends when the agenda touches his military portfolio directly, has been lambasted by foreign-policy grandees as “stone-cold crazy” and “entirely inappropriate”.

TimeとEconomistの違いを指摘しようとするならTimeはエピソードを盛り込んでストーリー展開するのに対して、Econmistはあくまで分析的に整理して伝えようとしているところでしょうか。TimeはBannonの服装についても取り上げています。彼がスーツじゃなくてジャンバー多いのも意識してのことのようです。

Bannon's life became a crusade against political, financial and cultural elites of all stripes. Bannon's philosophical transformation showed in his clothes: no one could look at his preferred uniform of T-shirts, cargo shorts and stubble and think Goldman Sachs.



Economistの社説では社説という意見表明する場でもありBannonを外せということを明言しています。

America’s president
An insurgent in the White House
As Donald Trump rages against the world he inherited as president, America’s allies are worried—and rightly so

What to do? The first task is to limit the damage. There is little point in cutting Mr Trump off. Moderate Republicans and America’s allies need to tell him why Mr Bannon and his co-ideologues are wrong. Even in the narrowest sense of American self-interest, their appetite for bilateralism is misguided, not least because the economic harm from the complexity and contradictions of a web of bilateral relations would outweigh any gains to be won from tougher negotiations. Mr Trump also needs to be persuaded that alliances are America’s greatest source of power. Its unique network plays as large a role as its economy and its military might in making it the global superpower. Alliances help raise it above its regional rivals—China in East Asia, Russia in eastern Europe, Iran in the Middle East. If Mr Trump truly wants to put America First, his priority should be strengthening ties, not treating allies with contempt.

政権内でも共和党内でも異論が出ているので、このまま突っ走るのは難しいのかもしれませんが、長引けば長引くほど影響は大きなものになりそうです。