(reposting by request from re: #536 kirkspencer)

re: #345 HappyWarrior

Do you guys agree with my accessment about the three wings within the Trump admin power structure? Is it too simplified? Too complex? Thoughts. It’s really difficult to decide which one Trump is favoring the most at the moment. One might say the racists since he’s pushed their EO but he also did the corporatists a huge solid by signing the EO that weakened Dodd-Frank.

So I’m leaning toward a different sort of break of the structure. It starts with a core assumption, that there are two tiers to the power structure. There are the people who were part of Team Trump before he won the nomination, and there are the people who came after.

The second tier tends to break as you said, with the caveat that these are the people who Trump - or someone in the first tier - thinks Trump needs, wants to connect with, or owes. At the same time they’re expendables.

The real power is that first tier. And here I’m still working out what they are more accurately.

I mean, you’ve got Kushner. He’s the corporatist who also happens to be a racist who is driven by the need to prove Daddy was right.

You’ve got Bannon who at root is bent on destroying America-as-is so he can make America-as-desired. It’s important, I think, to remember that even though the America he wants is an internally inconsistent mix of isolationist and white center of a world empire, the need to destroy what is comes first.

Not easy to categorize, and the rest of the core is just as complex.

But I think that the big cracks to come are driven by the tier break more than ideological breaks.