Op-ed by Frank Bruni @ NYTimes.com, Oct. 7

Remember all the talk, before Steve Bannon was expectorated from the Trump administration, that he’d be a worse menace on the outside than on the inside?

Turns out it was true.

He popped up last week in a picture as unsettling as any image from Puerto Rico, North Korea or Las Vegas. It showed the potbellied Pygmalion beside a new protégé, Michael Grimm, who is hoping to reclaim, from a fellow Republican, the congressional seat that he had to vacate a few years back when he was convicted of felony tax fraud and sent off to the clink. Bannon apparently wants to help.

Why? Excellent question. Grimm’s botched effort to enrich himself by hiding $1 million of his restaurant-business earnings doesn’t exactly scream populism. He has as much to do with draining the swamp as Cheetos do with nutrition.

But he’s loud, obnoxious and a thorn in the side of the Republican establishment, and those are the real criteria to be a minion in Bannon’s motley brigade. That picture of the two of them in Bannon’s Washington townhouse — the Breitbart Embassy, it’s called — was a declaration of Bannon’s real intent, which is to inflict as much pain and ugliness on the G.O.P. as he can. He’s not an ideologue. He’s an arsonist. And he doesn’t care who or what is reduced to ashes [....]