Trump has lost his ventriloquist

Now that Steve Bannon has been banished from both the White House and Breitbart News, it will be interesting to see whether Donald Trump becomes a totally different president. When Bannon was his chief strategist and was in his ear every minute of the day, pushing Breitbart News's most radically conservative views, it was tempting to regard the top adviser as an expert ventriloquist, with him secretly spouting policy from the side of his mouth while the president sat on his knee with a glazed, wooden look on his face. In other words, Trump was Bannon's dummy. But The Ventriloquist has gone, and after his unwise comments to Michael Wolff to help make his book on the Trump White House an instant bestseller which produced a torrent of angry tweets from the Big Man, Bannon can't even pick up the phone and chat to his erstwhile friend. So not a whiff of Bannon anymore. Trump is on his own. The change is already showing. So pissed off was the president at being called mentally not there that he invited the media in to eavesdrop on his talks with Congressional leaders about immigration, just to prove that, mentally, he is really a genius! And then came the surprising very-non-Bannon remark. Despite everything he has said in the past about the so-called Dreamers, the 700,000 undocumented immigrants who came to the US as babies and feel they have a right to stay, he told the Congressional types that he would consider the Dreamers as a separate issue - separate, that is, from The Wall. He had always linked the two before. You want the Dreamers, he used to tell the Democrats, you've got to give me my wall. But this time, he said he would be happy to have a "clean" bill to protect the Dreamers from deportation - no conditions. Everything the Democrats said during the meeting got Trump noding his head in agreement. The Republicans looked increasingly alarmed. Where was The Ventriloquist, they must have been thinking. Someone ring Bannon, for God's sake. But no, The Ventriloquist is history. Trump is on his own. Maybe, just maybe, this might be good for everyone.