Trump appoints Stephen Bannon as senior counselor

Stephen Bannon as senior counselor

Here he is speaking in 2014 about Russia’s aggression toward the Ukraine––Bannon felt that President Obama wasn’t doing enough to counter the rival power:

The Russians are very serious about this. They’re not going to let Ukraine fall into the sphere of the United States and the European Union without a fight. And we’re going to see in a couple weeks what they’re prepared to do about it and what we’re prepared to do. And I think it’s very scary, whether you’re a liberal Democrat or a right-win Republican, the president has not comported himself with the gravitas you need when you’re up against really tough hombres like Vladamir Putin and his guys. I think it’s going to get a lot more serious before it gets better.

What he said over the last couple days is really quite infantile… It’s very ironic this happens in the same weak Obama’s Secretary of Defense is going to cut the army to less than World War II levels… They’re out to cut America’s core strength. And part of that core strength is our military apparatus. And they’re doing everything possible to make the military weaker. We’re going to start to see the payoff for that in places like Ukraine when the Soviets can have force projection and we’re sitting there basically hapless: we don’t have the political will; we don’t have the leadership; and we don’t have the military force projection to really do anything, we have to stand by helplessly.

This seems to be an earnest expression of alarm at an American president who, in Bannon’s eyes, possesses neither the knowledge nor the inclination to aggressively counter Russia. Bannon felt an assertion of American strength was geopolitically important.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/the-radical-anti-conservatism-of-stephen-bannon/496796/