Bannon bruised and BATTERED
Strategist saw himself as a Thomas Cromwell figure to Trump’s Henry VIII
Stephen Bannon’s move to step down from Breitbart News Network is a humbling denouement for a figure who had reached the uppermost levels of power only a year ago.
The executive chairman ended his relationship with the far-right website that he helped become widely influential and which in turn abetted his rise as a political adviser and would-be kingmaker.
Bannon’s departure, just days after his public criticisms of former White House colleagues led to a spectacular falling-out with US President Donald Trump and his allies, leaves him with no evident platform to promote his views and no major financial backer for his preferred candidates.
Bannon left Breitbart in August 2016 to join Trump’s presidential campaign and later served as chief strategist in the White House. He was fired by Trump almost exactly a year after formally signing up with him.
Bannon maintained his visibility by rejoining Breitbart in August and directing it to serve his political ends as the insurgent voice of the “antiestablishment” wing of the Republican Party, a faction that many critics saw as a socially intolerant and racist fringe of white nationalism.
His departure from Breitbart followed what appears to have been a vote of no confidence from a key investor, Rebekah Mercer, who with her father, hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer, own a minority share.
Bannon provoked Rebekah Mercer’s ire by making critical comments about Trump and his family to author Michael Wolff in the book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump
White House, published last week. Bannon is quoted as saying that Trump’s son, Donald Trump jnr, and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, engaged in “treasonous” behaviour by secretly meeting Russian representatives during the campaign to get unflattering information about Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton.
“Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind,” the President said. He later attacked Wolff and the book. Rebekah Mercer said: “I support President Trump and the platform upon which he was elected,” adding that her family had “not communicated with Steve Bannon in many months and have provided no financial support to his political agenda, nor do we support his recent actions and statements”.
Although Bannon continued to chair Breitbart’s editorial meetings and host its satellite-radio programme, Mercer’s comments appeared to signal his end. Breitbart’s readers seemed to side with Trump in the spat.
A person close to Bannon said “there is no mass exodus” at Breitbart. “It’s not personality-driven anymore,” the Bannon ally said of the website. “We get to focus on the agenda. When it’s about issues, Breitbart wins. We hopefully won’t have the cult of personality tearing us down.”
Bannon has told associates he plans to focus on creating a political operation in 2018, the person said, and is banking that Trump eventually will need him again and that congressional Republican leaders will eventually desert the President. It is unclear if he can attract donors or operatives for his operation, though, and the person said that those around Bannon were frustrated by his moves in Alabama and his comments in Wolff's book.
Bannon’s ouster came on a day that underscored not only his fade from the power centres of the Republican Party but also his ideology’s struggle to gain hold in Congress and at the White House. Trump, who nearly a year ago at his inauguration spoke of “American carnage” and struck nationalist tones, announced that he would head to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland — a gathering Bannon detests — and signalled that he would be willing to work with Democrats on a deal to protect “Dreamers,” the thousands of children of illegal immigrants, from deportation.
As his prospects seemed to cloud in recent days, Bannon grew darkly wistful, two people close to him said. They said he referenced Thomas Cromwell as a historical parallel of sorts to his own experience in private conversations. Cromwell famously served as the high-profile adviser to King Henry VIII of England in the 16th century, but fell out of favour and was executed.
Some conservatives who have worked closely with Bannon were harsh in response, all but writing his political obituary. “He’s gone from the top of the mountain to the deepest valley, and it was all self-inflicted,” said veteran GOP strategist Edward Rollins, who has worked with Bannon and is chairman of Great America, a pro-Trump group. “Breitbart was his voice and it’s been taken away from him, leaving him with nothing.”
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich cast Bannon as a minor player. “The groundskeeper at the country club didn’t do a good job, so the President got a new groundskeeper,” Gingrich said, describing Bannon’s exit from the White House. He added: “If you decide that you’re so important that you can take on the president’s daughter, son-in-law, and two sons, and you lose, it has a lot of consequences”.
In a statement carried on Breitbart’s website, Bannon said, “I’m proud of what the Breitbart team has accomplished in so short a period of time in building out a world-class news platform.”
Bannon introduced the Mercers to the site’s founder, Andrew Breitbart, in 2011, and helped persuade them to invest US$10 million in Breitbart’s vision of an insurgent conservative media outlet that would take on Hollywood, the news media and established Washington figures, including conventional Republicans. When Breitbart died of a heart condition months later, Bannon took over the operation. He then set about turning it into a clarion of economic populism and nationalist sentiment. It advocated for strict limits on immigration, particularly from Latin America and from Muslim-majority nations, and for an “America first” agenda in trade. Bannon, at one point, described Breitbart as “the platform for the alt-right,” a phrase that became associated with white separatism, anti-Semitism and generally racist sentiments. Breitbart’s editors insisted that the site endorsed none of those views.
Nevertheless, Breitbart soared under Bannon, reaching 37 million unique readers a month before Trump won the 2016 presidential election. Following his return to Breitbart, Bannon sought to assert his political muscle by assembling a field of like-minded candidates to challenge incumbents in Republican primaries. His support for twice-defrocked former judge Roy Moore in the Alabama senate race turned out to be a disaster.
At the same time, Breitbart’s business fortunes have been in decline.
Monthly traffic has fallen to around 15 million unique readers, according to ComScore, a level that makes Breitbart a leader among conservative news and commentary sites but is far from its election-era peak.