August 22, 2017--Steve Bannon: A Picture Is Worth 1,000 Words

Anyone wondering what happened to Steve Bannon, why Donald Trump fired him after declaring many times in public that Bannon was an invaluable and loyal advisor, need only look at the photo on the cover of Joshua Green's revealing page-turner, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency. 

When it comes to Trump a picture is worth many thousands of words.

If Trump hated the idea that Time Magazine put Bannon on its February cover anointing him "The Great Manipulator: Second Most Powerful Man In the World"--with us left to draw our own conclusions about who was being manipulated--one can only imagine what Trump thought when Green's book is so much more about Bannon and his perverse brilliance than Trump, who is largely described as an intuitive political prodigy.

Bannon is not quite labeled Trump's brain, but Devil's Bargain comes pretty close to asserting that he is. But again, if the cover of the book featured Trump, just Trump, I suspect Bannon would still be in the White House.

It turns out, as Trump put it to the New York Post, "I'm my own strategist. Steve's  just a guy who works for me." And as hired help,  like one of Trump's immigrant golf course workers, he's gone.

When I ran this idea by Rona, she said,"Since we read from left to right, if the image of Trump on the book jacket had been on the right, where our eyes come to rest, I suspect Trump would have less of a problem with the book, since as everyone knows, he doesn't read."