For weeks, White House chief strategist Steve Bannon has been locked in combat with another faction of administration officials — and both Bannon’s job and the future of the Trump administration may be at stake.
Bannon’s rivals, led by senior White House adviser and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner and former Goldman Sachs president Gary Cohn — and with the crucial backing of President Trump’s daughter Ivanka — are an informal group of aides that has been pushing for the administration to take a more establishment-friendly turn. Which means less of Steve Bannon, the bomb-throwing outsider.
This faction is sometimes called the “New York moderates” or “centrists,” though in many respects they often seem to agree with the Republican establishment. But their internal critics disparagingly refer to them with the epithets “globalists” or — as the Washington Post’s Philip Rucker and Robert Costa reported last month — even “Democrats.” (Cohn is a registered Democrat, and Kushner comes from a Democratic family.)
Bannon’s allies in particular have reacted to the rising influence of this faction with dismay. They’ve been so enthusiastic about Trump because he promised to break with the corporate, financial, and political establishments on issues like immigration, trade, and US involvement abroad.
But on more and more issues, the establishment seems to be emerging triumphant. Trump announced Wednesday that he wouldn’t name China a currency manipulator, and clearly affirmed his commitment to NATO. The previous week, he ordered a missile attack on Syria to enforce an international norm against chemical weapons use. Plus, a spate of leaks suggests Bannon is falling out of favor and his job could be at risk.
Overall, this is a battle that cuts to the core of the contradictions around Donald Trump’s character, his campaign, and his presidency.
In one sense, Trump came to the presidency as an outsider to the political establishment, who won the enthusiasm of many Republican voters by challenging the bipartisan consensus on immigration and trade, and by promising to stand up to “corporations” and “elites” who he said had “rigged” the system against average Americans.
Yet all along, Trump was of course a very rich New York real estate mogul who did business across the world and was closely tied to a web of business, financial, and political elites. It is true that he disagreed with the elite consensus on some topics and long seemed to feel insecure about his place among them, but he indisputably had a place among them.
Now, as he’s struggling to govern the nation, Trump has quickly been forced to realize that it’s much easier to say on the campaign trail that you’ll make sweeping change than to actually bring it about — and that it’s much easier to have the establishment on your side than to be constantly attacking it.
1) What is a globalist?
The term “globalist” is almost exclusively used by people who are criticizing or condemning “globalists.” But what they are essentially complaining about is a bipartisan consensus among the lion’s share of US corporate, financial, and political elites that has long existed on three major topics:
- That the US should be very engaged abroad, including in international institutions and agreements
- That trade agreements are generally good for the US and should be expanded further
- That immigration is generally good for the US
The critics of this consensus say that in all three areas, the policies generally preferred by US elites in both parties have put the well-being of foreigners above Americans. (Conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones go further, saying they’re part of a fiendish plot to undermine US sovereignty in hopes of establishing a global government.)
Of course, not everyone who thinks immigration and trade are generally good and who want the US to play a leadership role abroad are part of some nefarious “elite” cabal — far from it. Such ideas in fact tend to poll quite well among the general public. And people sympathetic to these ideas argue that they benefit Americans, not just foreigners.
Still, it is true that educated and wealthy Americans are particularly likely to hold these beliefs, and that dissenters from this consensus have tended to be relegated to the fringes of the US political scene — until Donald Trump.
In both his primary and general election campaigns, Trump proclaimed that elite policies on foreign intervention, trade, and immigration had been disastrous for ordinary Americans, and he used the slogan “America First” to signal his commitment to nationalism over globalism. And he won. Those who styled themselves as critics of globalism were overjoyed and tremendously excited about what they could accomplish now that an apparent ally was in power.
2) Who is supposedly a globalist?
Again, few people would actually proclaim themselves to be “globalists” — this is an epithet used by their critics.
But the Bannonites essentially use the term to disparage anyone in politics who’s less hardline on immigration restrictionism and protectionism than they are.
That means both the Democratic establishment and the Republican establishment — the Bush family, the Clinton family, and Barack Obama are all deemed globalists. And one Breitbart article from last October proclaimed that House Speaker Paul Ryan has “a progressive, globalist worldview, which is at odds with Trump’s ‘America first’ approach.” (The author, Julia Hahn, now works in the White House for Bannon.)
Most bankers, executives of multinational corporations, pre-Trump political leaders and donors in both parties, think tank staffers, intellectuals, and members of the media, all generally concentrated in cities, usually get the label too.
If you’re noticing an uncomfortable set of stereotypes there, you’re not alone. Last year, Yochi Dreazen explained how this sort of rhetoric has long been used for anti-Semitic purposes:
Jews have long been accused of controlling the global financial system. Jews have long been accused of controlling the media. And Jews have long been accused of being disloyal citizens secretly working to maneuver governments to pursue disastrous policies solely for their own benefit.
Here too, two of the top Trump aides being deemed untrustworthy globalists — Gary Cohn and Jared Kushner — are Jewish.
Still, this isn’t entirely about anti-Semitic conspiracy-mongering. There are real underlying policy differences at play here. The Bannonites want to drastically shake up the US status quo on trade, immigration, and international involvement, and the establishment, well ... doesn’t.
3) Who are Trump’s “New York” advisers?
The rising “New York” faction in the Trump administration generally has four main names associated with it: Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Gary Cohn, and Dina Powell.
Jared Kushner: The 36-year-old is a real estate heir who took over his father’s multibillion-dollar development company in 2008. He also bought and ran the New York Observer. Most importantly, however, he married Ivanka Trump in 2009, making him a member of the Trump family.
When Donald Trump ran for president, Kushner made himself indispensable, and was often said to be the true campaign manager. Importantly, Trump allies he clashed with, like original campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and Trump’s initial transition chief, Chris Christie, both fell out of favor after tensions with Kushner arose. Ominously, Kushner is now said to be clashing with Bannon.
On paper, Kushner is below Priebus and Bannon in the White House pecking order (he’s a “senior adviser”), and in practice, he has seemed to have less influence than either of them on the administration’s strategy so far. Due to early stumbles by both, though, the dissatisfied president has increasingly turned to Kushner in recent weeks.
Still, it is not really clear what Kushner, who has no background in politics or public policy, actually believes or what he wants the president to do, besides remaining on the good side of the business community.
Ivanka Trump: The 35-year old first daughter will, of course, always have the president’s ear, and last month she became an official White House staffer too. She is often said, in leaks to media outlets, to be counseling her father to shy away from controversy and adopt more mainstream policies — particularly on social issues like women’s rights or LGBTQ rights. However, through the campaign and the controversial early days of the administration, it sure didn’t seem that the president was listening to her all that much.
Gary Cohn: Cohn joined the administration after spending two and a half decades at Goldman Sachs, where he was president and COO (the No. 2 position at the company). A longtime donor to Democrats, he suddenly shifted his political giving to the Republican Party in 2009, when Democrats were pushing the Dodd-Frank law to more stringently regulate the banking industry.
Cohn did not publicly support Trump during the campaign, but Kushner invited him in to meet with the president-elect during the transition, and Cohn apparently really wowed him — after a few more meetings, he was named National Economic Council director, making him the top economic policy staffer in the White House. Since Trump had fulminated against bankers and promised restrictive trade policies on the campaign trail, the appointment of Cohn, a consummate insider, was viewed as a major concession to the economic and business elite.
Now, the NEC director has often played second fiddle to the Treasury secretary, since the position has much less formal authority and fewer resources. However, it makes up for that somewhat with its added closeness to the president — Cohn is the staffer primarily charged with briefing Trump on the economy, and with presenting recommendations from different agencies on contested policy topics.
And in an administration where personal proximity to Trump is viewed as crucial, Cohn appears to have parlayed this gig — and a good relationship with Kushner — into significant influence. By February, profiles from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal portrayed him as the leading administration voice on economic policy.
Another element to his influence is that Trump appears to deeply respect Cohn for his wealth and success. During his recent interview with the Times, Trump responded to a question about tax reform by singling out Cohn (who was in the room). “This man was the president of Goldman Sachs,” Trump marveled. “I mean, he was, like, the president of Goldman Sachs.” Another Times report contained this amusing anecdote:
One of the only other people whom Mr. Trump views as a peer is his top economic adviser, Gary Cohn. ... In a recent meeting in the Oval Office, Mr. Cohn was speaking when Mr. Trump interrupted him. “Let me finish,’’ Mr. Cohn interjected, according to a person with knowledge of the interaction.
Mr. Trump, unaccustomed to ceding the floor, let him make his point.
Dina Powell: Finally, there’s Dina Habib Powell, a close Ivanka ally who also has stronger Republican Party credentials and deeper government experience than the others said to be in this faction — she’s worked in Congress, for the Republican National Committee, for George W. Bush’s White House (including as personnel director) and then in the State Department (where she focused on public diplomacy for the Middle East). But for the past decade, she has worked at Goldman Sachs, heading the firm’s philanthropic foundation.
Powell’s entree into the administration came via Ivanka Trump, whom she began advising during the transition. Overall, Powell seems to be a fantastic networker in corporate, finance, and political circles. Politico’s Annie Karni has chronicled how Ivanka has lately been relying on Powell’s “Rolodex” and “vast, Davos-style network” to put her in contact with big names in the corporate and finance worlds.
On January 12, the president-elect announced that Powell would get a White House job as senior counselor for economic initiatives, saying she would focus on “entrepreneurship, small business growth, and the global economic empowerment of women.” Her rank, “assistant to the president,” was one generally given to the top level of White House staffers, but it wasn’t clear exactly how she’d fit into the economic team’s policymaking structure.
But an unexpected opportunity soon appeared for Powell on the foreign policy team. After National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was fired, his replacement, H.R. McMaster, wanted to bring in his own people. The problem was that, given the Washington foreign policy establishment’s antipathy to Trump during the campaign, several of Trump’s top foreign policy appointees have so far publicly struggled to find deputies who are both qualified and trusted by the White House.
McMaster arrived at the clever solution of asking Powell, who was already trusted by the president’s daughter, to take a top NSC job as “Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategy” — effectively allying himself with the Jared/Ivanka faction of the administration, rather than trying to bring in an outsider with no backing from any internal faction.
4) What do the New York advisers want?
Kushner, Ivanka Trump, and Cohn all have only weak ties to the Republican Party, which has provided the opportunity for Bannon’s allies to attack them as “globalist” outsiders whom good Republicans shouldn’t trust.
But on many topics — especially the ones they seem to be winning internal fights over — their policy preferences seem to be totally in line with the Republican Party’s pro-business and interventionist establishment.
It’s difficult to say which policies, exactly, the New Yorkers want, but overall they seem to like tax cuts (including for rich people), to prefer generally corporate- and business-friendly policies, and to want fewer regulations (especially on the finance industry).
Meanwhile, they don’t want a major shake-up of the global trading system, and they want the US to reaffirm its commitment to NATO and international institutions generally.
More broadly, they seem not to want Trump to do extremely controversial, unpopular, and disruptive things. All of the above is pretty uncontroversial among mainstream Republican elites, and probably in line with what Priebus and Vice President Mike Pence would prefer to see too.
Now, as urban New Yorkers who seem to have liberal views on social issues and environmentalism, there are also accounts of Kushner, Ivanka, and Cohn arguing internally against measures intended to roll back abortion rights or LGBTQ rights, or in favor of attempting to address climate change.
If this is true, though, they don’t appear to be having much success so far. Trump just signed a bill that will let states target Planned Parenthood funding, he instructed his Environmental Protection Agency administrator to dismantle Obama’s climate rules, and he seems to be giving movement conservatives what they want on judicial appointments, a crucial topic for them.
5) Why is the Bannon wing clashing with the New York wing?
Well, one reason for the feud is that Bannon himself appears to be on the outs — Trump himself recently publicly rebuked him. Meanwhile, Kushner and the New York advisers appear to be on the rise. And Bannon and Kushner have reportedly butted heads personally.
There are also stylistic differences. Bannon is provocative and loves to cause controversy. When he ran Breitbart, he used “honey badger don’t give a shit” as a staff motto. This attitude proved useful during the campaign, but now that Trump is in office, the New York Times’s Peter Baker, Maggie Haberman, and Glenn Thrush report that Kushner “has said privately that he fears that Mr. Bannon plays to the president’s worst impulses.”
More broadly, Bannon’s allies style themselves as trying to ensure Trump fulfills his campaign promises — Bannon displays a whiteboard in his office where many promises are listed. But they also hope to use the president to implement their own agenda of dismantling “globalist” policies. (Not long before he joined the campaign, Bannon told Vanity Fair’s Ken Stern that Trump was “a blunt instrument for us,” adding, “I don’t know whether he really gets it or not.”)
So naturally, the Bannonites view the rising influence of any group of advisers that’s not on board with this agenda as a threat. According to multiple reports, some of Cohn’s detractors in the administration refer to him as “Globalist Gary.” And Jonathan Swan of Axios has reported that some Bannon allies refer to Cohn in text messages simply with the “globe” emoji.
Per White House source: In text messages between Bannon allies the shorthand for Gary Cohn is either just or CTC (Carbon Tax Cohn.) https://t.co/wxPwPW0rqP
— Jonathan Swan (@jonathanvswan) April 8, 2017
Even more juicily, the Daily Beast’s Asawin Suebsaeng claims Bannon has been using a far more offensive term to describe Kushner:
One official said Bannon has lately complained about Kushner trying to “shiv him and push him out the door” and likened him to a fifth column in the White House. “[Steve] recently vented to us about Jared being a ‘globalist’ and a ‘cuck’…He actually said ‘cuck,’ as in “cuckservative,’” the administration official told The Daily Beast.
Still, it’s worth considering that while it is indeed true that this rising group of advisers are from New York and have weaker Republican ties than most past GOP White House aides, they don’t appear to have changed Trump administration policy in any significant way that the GOP establishment wouldn’t also support — at least not yet.
That poses the possibility that this focus on “New York” and “Democrats” is a red herring of sorts from Bannon’s allies, who are merely trying to sling mud at their own internal rivals by drumming up hysteria about them among other Republicans.
6) Who is winning?
When the Washington Post’s Philip Rucker and Robert Costa reported on the New York advisers back on March 18, it was possible for an anonymous internal rival to brag to the paper that the group was marginalized. “Show me one New York win,” this adviser said.
That’s no longer possible. Trump has fully committed to NATO, said he won’t in fact declare China a currency manipulator, attacked Syria to enforce an international norm against chemical weapons use, kicked Bannon off the National Security Council, and even rebuked Bannon in public.
On trade especially, the “nationalists” have been just smoked. As Matt Yglesias has written, Trump has delivered almost nothing on his trade agenda apart from dropping the Trans-Pacific Partnership — something Hillary Clinton had pledged to do as well. This is in large part due to opposition from advisers like Cohn, who have argued that the nationalists’ preferred policies would lead to a destructive trade war. By March, a Financial Times report portrayed Cohn as having mostly marginalized Peter Navarro, the most anti-trade White House official.
Importantly, immigration is a different story. The administration is engaged in an effort to dramatically ramp up detentions and deportations of unauthorized immigrants. It’s still defending the travel ban in court. And as the Daily Beast’s Betsy Woodruff reminds us, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, one of the most hardline immigration hawks, remains in place at the Department of Justice, where he has a great deal of power.
Overall, the real reason the New York advisers are rising in influence is because the other administration factions have repeatedly fallen on their faces. Priebus and the GOP establishment spearheaded the failed health reform effort, while Bannon’s “nationalists” botched Trump’s travel order. More broadly, they’re the two people who’ve been in charge of the administration. The result of their leadership is Trump’s record-low approval ratings for a new president, with no major accomplishments to speak of.
So if Trump is looking for someone to blame, Priebus and Bannon are the obvious culprits. And the New Yorkers may seem like an appealing alternative — both because they genuinely seem more competent than the bunglers currently in charge and because they hold the promise of a new and different approach. (Even if their approach is in many ways similar to what the GOP establishment would want, it certainly has the advantage of being less difficult than something like the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”)
The oh-so-slight problem is, of course, that Trump repeatedly promised to do a lot of what the Bannonites wanted during the campaign. Generally, he portrayed the US as a desiccated hellscape that needed his firm leadership and dramatic change to be fixed. The apparent new agenda of “general continuity, with measured deregulation and tax cuts” seems a poor fit for Trump’s political base. It may, however, be a better fit for the Trump family’s brand rehabilitation strategy.