THEY HELD TRUMP AND BANNON DOWN AND FORCED THEM NOT TO BE WORKING-CLASS HEROES!

According to certain members of the commentariat, Steve Bannon and Donald Trump are helpless innocents who love the working man but are being dragooned into mainstream conservatism. Here's David Brooks on Bannon:

I continue to worry about Steve Bannon. I see him in the White House photos, but he never has that sprightly Prince of Darkness gleam in his eye anymore.

His governing philosophy is being completely gutted by the mice around him. He seems to have a big influence on Trump speeches but zero influence on recent Trump policies....

He was the guy with a coherent governing philosophy. He seemed to have realized that the two major party establishments had abandoned the working class....

Bannon had the opportunity to realign American politics around the social, cultural and economic concerns of the working class. Erect barriers to keep out aliens from abroad, and shift money from the rich to the working class to create economic security at home....

But Bannonesque populism is being abandoned. The infrastructure and jobs plan is being put off until next year (which is to say never). Meanwhile, the Trump administration has agreed with Paul Ryan’s crazy plan to do health care first....

The Trump budget is an even more devastating assault on Bannon-style populism.

Over at The New Republic, Brian Beutler portrays Trump himself as similarly helpless, if for different reasons:

Trump has ... delegated legislating to movement conservative legislators, and administrative tasks to movement conservative cabinet members, and the results thus far have been disastrous....

On Thursday, the Trump White House published its first budget, proposing massive cuts to domestic spending, with the goal of zeroing out everything from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to Meals on Wheels to the Appalachian Regional Commission, and pretty much everything the U.S. government does to combat climate change....

Trump presumably has no idea what this budget would entail, or that it would harm his own constituents as much as the non-white poor in the Democratic Party’s base. It bears his name only because someone convinced him to appoint Mick Mulvaney—a former congressman allied with Paul Ryan—to run his Office of Management and Budget.

... Trump’s White House is trying to distance itself from Ryan’s health care bill....

Here, again, Trump is largely a victim of his own ignorance. Trump appears to have no idea what’s in the American Health Care Act or care about it one way or another, except perhaps as a potential point on the board.

Can we just go back to Bannon's CPAC speech?

Senior adviser to the president Stephen K. Bannon discussed the three most important goals the White House is working towards at CPAC 2017: homeland security, economic nationalism, and "deconstruction of the administrative state." ...

BANNON: ... I think if you look at the lines of work, I kind of break it up into three verticals of three buckets. The first is kind of national security and sovereignty and that's your intelligence, the Defense Department, Homeland Security.

The second line of work is what I refer to as economic nationalism and that is Wilbur Ross at Commerce, Steven Mnuchin at Treasury, Lighthizer at -- at Trade, Peter Navarro, Stephen Miller, these people that are rethinking how we're gonna reconstruct the -- our trade arrangements around the world.

The third, broadly, line of work is what is deconstruction of the administrative state....

See anything about the working class on that list of "the three most important goals"? Of course not. Spare me Bannon's sob stories about his poor dad's retirement money -- Bannon poses as a working-class hero, but he's always been faking it. It's strategic positioning and nothing more. This is what he really cares about.

I shed no tears for Trump either, because I don't believe he desperately wants to be a champion of the working class and just isn't smart enough or well-informed enough or focused enough to make that happen. He seemed to want to be a hero to the proletariat during the campaign, but he's a Fox News junkie of many years' standing, and so he's fine with eliminating Meals on Wheels and Big Bird, along with regulations and upper-bracket taxes and funding to research climate change, because that's what he's been told is important day after day by Hannity and O'Reilly and Doocy. Fox has told him for years that government programs harm the people they serve (unless the people they serve are CEOs), so he believes that. He could have insisted on populist alterations to the budget if he cared to. Top aides would have included such provisions if they thought he cared. But he doesn't care, and his aides know it.

Bannon isn't a prisoner, and (at least in terms of agency) Trump isn't a child. They have the power to steer the administration in a pro-worker direction. They just don't choose to exercise it.