He will never acknowledge it. He will never admit it. His reward for being played is that he will continue to allow himself to be played, specifically so he need never face the truth.
Last night, I read news stories about Priebus, the outgoing GOP head, had been appointed to a “co-equal” position with Steve Bannon, CEO of the white nationalist propaganda/hoax news site Breitbart turned CEO of Trump’s campaign. I had a vivid flashback to back in the summer, when Bannon and pollster/PR flack Kellyanne Conway were appointed to “co-equal” positions “running” Trump’s campaign.
In the time since then, Bannon has sat at Trump’s right hand, whispering in his ear, shaping his policies and connecting him to constituencies that had a lot to do with delivering him the White House.
Conway, for her sins, was reduced to an apologetic cable news tour, always forced to put a palatable spin on whatever Bannon and Trump cooked up, smiling to keep from crying as she denied, denied, denied, and sometimes pathetically reduced to saying what she would say to the man whose campaign she had been hired to manage, if she were able to.
While others who were loyal to Trump are being sized up for cabinet positions or influential roles in the White House, all signs indicate her reward for her job will be to keep doing it, in one form or another.
The common view is that in appointing Priebus, a member of the GOP establishment, to be his Chief of Staff and Banon, a member of what is euphemistically termed the “alt-right” (the modern face of white nationalists and fascists), as his Chief Strategist, Trump is signaling a sort of balanced, big-tent approach. Traditional conservatives and those looking for reasons to be optimistic are hopeful that Trump will use Bannon to bring his Neo-Nazi followers “into the fold”, moderating them into mainstream Republicans.
If how he ran his campaign is any indication of how he will be president, this is not what we will see. The fascist extremists will not join the mainstream but become the mainstream. Priebus will continue his thankless task of selling the more moderate, more grounded members of his party on a jackbooted vision of America, putting a suit and tie over the brown shirts and telling the GOP that this is all good for the party and the country, actually.
This is his reward for staying the course when much of his party wanted to bail out from Trump’s downward spiral. He spent months shoveling Trump’s manure, and the reward for that is a bigger shovel, with which he can dig an even bigger hole for himself.
If only the rest of us weren’t going down with him.