Trump or Bannon?

No. Trump does that because that's what pathological liars do. Just because Bannon may also be a pathological liar and is certainly a sleazebag, doesn't mean tRump isn't one in his own right.

Worse for Bannon was that his portrayal as Trump’s puppet-master — as #PresidentBannon — on Saturday Night Live and elsewhere infuriated a boss sharply attuned to his media image and allergic to sharing the stage, especially with someone thought to be controlling him. The killer blow was a February 13 Time cover featuring Bannon’s menacing visage above the headline “The Great Manipulator.”

Soon after the Time cover, encouraged by his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, Trump humiliated Bannon by stripping him of his position on the National Security Council, cutting him out of key meetings, and declining to voice his faith in Bannon, who he pointedly told The Wall Street Journal was just “a guy who works for me.” He later added that he was his own strategist.

  New York Magazine

Which is true. And which is why things are going so badly for him.

[Kushner's unreported meetings with Russians], Bannon told White House allies at the time, were certain to become a problem. News accounts of White House battles between “nationalists” like Bannon and “globalists” like Kushner began popping up everywhere. When friends from his old life as chairman of Breitbart News warned Bannon about taking on the president’s son-in-law, Bannon scoffed. Watch, he replied, Trump won’t hesitate to sideline Kushner if he has to.

Also true. And we haven't heard a lot out of Kushner since.

By May, Kushner’s situation had worsened considerably. After months of Trump fuming over the Russia probe, the president was considering firing FBI director James Comey, a move Kushner backed. Kushner and Bannon disagreed about the wisdom of the move. “You can’t fire the FBI,” Bannon told Trump, according to a White House official.

And, proving that tRump is his own strategist, he decided that he could.

According to advisers inside and outside the White House, Trump grew frustrated with his son-in-law, not just over the Russia stories but over reports that members of Kushner’s family, in an effort to entice Chinese investors seeking EB-5 visas to back a New Jersey real-estate project, hinted at their Trump connection. Both issues hastened Bannon’s resurrection.

[...]

By the time he left for Saudi Arabia on May 19, Trump had awakened to the danger the Russia investigation poses to his presidency. So he brought Bannon out of the doghouse and gave him a familiar mission: to organize a defense, go after his enemies, and head off the latest threat to Trump’s political career. Bannon’s first task was to create an outside war room to “put a prophylactic around the Oval Office,” as a White House official put it, one that would shield Trump from the encroaching crisis.

It doesn't seem to be working. I guess there isn't a prophylactic for such a big dick.

Bannon was convinced that Trump needed his own Lanny Davis — Clinton’s pit-bull lawyer and TV surrogate — to go against Mueller, according to a source familiar with his thinking. (Bannon even called Davis to consult him.) [...] “Bannon is right that Trump needs a team like Clinton had,” says Davis. “But his boss might kill him if he followed my advice: The way you deal with the media is answer all their goddamn questions and get it over with. The model only works if the person who’s being shoveled all the nasty questions has something to say.”

[...]

“Defending against Russia is the worst duty you can pull in the Trump White House, an impossible job where you can’t make the boss happy,” says GOP strategist Liam Donovan.

And tRump is doing nothing to help.In fact, he just keeps making it worse. I wonder if it was his team of lawyers who told him to damper that tweet about the cyber security unit he'd said he and Putin were working on together and then tweeted something to contradict his earlier statement.

One critical element of the Lanny Davis model, says Davis, is having a president who has a firm enough grasp of the legal and political stakes that he’s willing to focus on his day job and let his lawyers do the talking for him.

Yeah, that's not tRump.

But even some of Trump’s defenders admit that not only is the president unlikely to show such deference, he is never more than a bad news cycle away from firing Mueller.

[...]

Nobody has ever really had the power to control Trump for long — a fact beleaguered White House officials can agree on. Bannon is less “The Great Manipulator” than Trump’s indispensable henchman, the man he turns to when everything’s going to hell.

[...]

“One thing that’s always dangerous is telling Donald Trump that he can’t do something,” says Roger Stone. “Because then he wants to do it.”

That's more like it.

“At the end of the day,” says Sam Nunberg, “the question is, are we going to stand with Trump when he fires Mueller? Steve will do it.”

[...]

“If the whole White House is backed up against the wall facing a firing squad, Steve will stay there,” says Ken Cuccinelli, president of the Senate Conservatives Fund. “Reince [Priebus] and the other guys will run.”

So Bannon is as stupid as tRump.

It’s not that Bannon can’t be a shrewd tactician — he often is — but his tactics are usually directed at tearing down his enemies, something he’s done on Trump’s behalf since the earliest days of the president’s political rise. [...] Bannon told an associate that one reason he set up the war room outside the White House, rather than inside, was so that his team would have more freedom to “throw some fucking haymakers.”

And just as nasty.

I suspect we are going to find Steve Bannon behind much of the collusion with Russia.

The great test arrived on October 7, when David Fahrenthold, a reporter at the Washington Post, was leaked outtake footage from a 2005 Trump appearance on the NBC show Access Hollywood. “When you’re a star, they let you do it,” Trump told host Billy Bush. “You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy.”

It looked like Trump had finally said something that even he couldn’t rebound from, and Republican officials quickly began abandoning the campaign. “I am not going to defend Donald Trump — not now, not in the future,” Paul Ryan told his House colleagues in a private call. As New York reported, Reince Priebus urged Trump to quit or “go down with a worse election loss than Barry Goldwater’s.” Bannon stood firm, although even he feared Trump might be finished. Still, he told an associate, it wouldn’t be a total loss. “Our backup strategy,” he said of Clinton, “is to fuck her up so bad that she can’t govern. If she gets 43 percent of the vote, she can’t claim a mandate.” Psyching himself up, he added, “My goal is that by November 8, when you hear her name, you’re gonna throw up.”

[...]

With Bannon by his side, Trump would navigate the greatest crisis of his campaign by putting his foot on the gas. When I reached Bannon to ask about the strategy for the upcoming debate, he didn’t miss a beat: “Attack, attack, attack, attack.”

[...]

When Trump won the election, the lesson the 45th president took away from the campaign seemed to be that if he fought hard enough, he could survive anything.

I hope he's wrong.

But [...] personal attacks diminished in late June, after John Dowd, a prominent Washington attorney and veteran of the Justice Department, joined Trump’s defense. References to a “war room” have also been dropped for the more tempered “president’s outside legal team.” And on June 28, Trump’s lawyers decided to postpone filing a Justice Department complaint against Comey for having helped leak memos about his conversations with Trump to reporters — a move Bloomberg News attributed to a new attitude of “professional courtesy” toward Mueller. “It could become an adversarial relationship, but at present the legal team decided it was best to hold off and not file those complaints,” says Mark Corallo, the spokesman for the legal team. Which is not to say that Bannon’s bare-knuckled instincts have vanished, but rather that he’s come to understand that going after Mueller personally isn’t the best move — at least right now.

[...]

“There is huge danger in attacking Mueller directly,” says Davis. “[White House counsel] Don McGahn, Bannon, and the political side of the White House ought to be listening.” For now, they seem to be. And at least for the time being, Trump, too, has shifted his target from Mueller and Comey to Mika Brzezinski and CNN.

Mueller's investigation isn't directly in the news much. tRump has other more immediate things to squawk-tweet about. When we get closer to the conclusion of the investigation, he'll go after Mueller personally, I have no doubt.

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.