Fired White House aide Steve Bannon is a quintessential Ferris Bueller. My late friend Andrew Breitbart created the media empire that regrettably still bears his name. When he died, Bannon took over the parade Andrew launched.

Bannon followed the same playbook in the 2016 presidential race. He boarded the Trump train late and pretended he’d been the conductor all along. As Trump himself put it: “I like Steve, but you have to remember he was not involved in my campaign until very late. I had already beaten all the senators and all the governors, and I didn’t know Steve. I’m my own strategist, and it wasn’t like I was going to change strategies because I was facing crooked Hillary.”

In the recent Alabama GOP runoff for U.S. Senate, Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell supported incumbent Senator Luther Strange, whose weakness as a candidate could be attributed to his near-total lack of charisma and the dodgy circumstances of his appointment to fill Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ former Senate seat. (As Alabama’s attorney general, Strange pushed to delay the impeachment of the governor, creating the appearance of a backroom deal.)