BANNON: YOU'D BE IMPRESSED AT HOW WELL TRUMP GETS THIS TRUMPISM THING

Sounding like a guy who's worried that the suckers are starting to figure out his pyramid scheme, Steve Bannon appeared on a Breitbart satellite radio show today and argued that Republicans need to redouble their commitment to Trumpism:

Bannon said the lesson from Republican gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie’s defeat on Tuesday night is that “if you’re going to win, you’ve got to embrace the entire Trump agenda, and you’ve got to do it early, and you’ve got to be dedicated to it.”

“You can’t phone it in,” he said. “You’ve got to do rallies. You’ve got to get the president out with you. You’ve got to go all-in on this....

“There’s just not enough of those Establishment types left to make a significant difference. You’ve got to bring out the Trump voters, and you’ve got to bring them out in a way that they’re enthusiastic in getting other Trump voters out. I think it’s incumbent upon people. You know, we won in a coalition.... That coalition has to stick together. But the key thing is we won in a coalition but we were selling the Trump program. I think that’s a lesson that hopefully candidates throughout the country learn.”

And do you know who's really committed to Trumpism? Donald Trump! No, really.

“We’re celebrating the one-year anniversary on the Eighth of this great accomplishment we had last year. Remember, we had a candidate in Donald Trump that believed it to the marrow of his bones because he’s really the embodiment of the Trump movement,” [Bannon] said.

Isn't that weird? I mean, of course Donald Trump is the embodiment of the Trump movement. But Bannon says this as if it might not necessarily be the case.

He continues:

“Remember, the powerful thing about Trump is that he’s had these beliefs and articulated these beliefs over 20, 25, 30, 35, 40 years, so it wasn’t like you had to program him. In fact, all we did when I took over was just make sure the message was a little more coherent and presented every day, and hammered every day....

“He knew the topic, knew the material, so well because it’s his belief system,” Bannon said of Trump.

It's clear what Bannon is really saying: This is my belief system. I define what Trumpism is -- it's whatever I believe. It just so happens that Trump is a Trumpist -- I mean, obviously Trump wasn't a Trumpist when he endorsed that swamp dweller Luther Strange, or when he hired Globalist Gary Cohn. But apart from that and a few other ideological deviations, Trump is a reasonably solid Trumpist.

We know that Bannon said privately during the campaign that Trump was an "imperfect vessel" for the Bannon message. Now Bannon calls his own message "the Trump agenda," and he seems pleasantly surprised that Trump is on board with it -- until Trump's inevitable next deviation from Trumpism, I guess.