Matt Taibbi insists that Steve Bannon has to go. According to Taibbi, Bannon is the guy who knows how to make racism work on a political level. A lot of people think the defense of Nazis we've heard out of Trump lately was put there by Bannon. Taibbi thinks it's the opposite; that it wasn't because Bannon would have made it work.
Fred Kaplan reminds us that Germany knows how to do war memorials that recall what happened without glorifying it. You know, there's another way to remove the reverence about most statues besides tearing them down. We could just release more pigeons into the vicinity.
Among the many leaders who rebuked Trump for his recent remarks were the chiefs of all four U.S. military services — the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and the Marines. Remember when Trump said that his main military policy would be to listen to the generals? Well, he's not listening now. Fred Kaplan (it's a two-fer!) tells us what it all means.
Trump keeps telling a story about General Pershing having terrorists executed with bullets dipped in pig blood. I guess the premise is that some people don't particularly mind being shot to death but they're really intimidated at the thought of being shot to death by bullets dipped in pig blood. That's when execution starts to be unpleasant. Anyway, Matt Yglesias notes that the story doesn't make a lot of sense and that historians seriously doubt it ever happened. Trump probably got it from a movie…you know, the same place Ronald Reagan learned history.