Is Trump trying to build a media empire?
If you thought the old Trump campaign was crazy, said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post, just wait until you see the new one. The Republican presidential nominee was apparently feeling “boxed in” and “controlled” by the few people around him who actually knew something about politics. So Trump last week demoted his campaign chairman Paul Manafort (who was facing awkward questions in any case about his financial ties to the deposed Ukrainian leader Viktor Yanukovych, and later resigned from Trump’s team). In the driving seat now is a man named Stephen Bannon, who is sure to “not only let Trump be Trump but encourage him to be even Trumpier”. Bannon runs Breitbart News, a fiercely right-wing website, and is a “practised provocateur” and propagandist: the site’s late founder, Andrew Breitbart, once described him, admiringly, as the “Leni Riefenstahl of the Tea Party movement”.
With his polls sinking fast, Trump “needed to make a change”, said Olivia Nuzzi on The Daily Beast. And the irrepressible Bannon – a former naval officer and Goldman Sachs banker who has also had stints in Hollywood – is a man very much in the Trump mould. However, Bannon has never run a political campaign, so it remains to be seen whether he can do anything to improve Trump’s general election prospects.
The theory doing the rounds is that this campaign reshuffle isn’t about trying to win the election, said John Cassidy in The New Yorker. Rather, it’s a “business play”: Trump is “laying the groundwork for a new conservative media empire” to challenge Fox News, the cable news network founded by Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes. Trump apparently resents the fact that his campaign has brought in huge ratings for many news organisations, and wants to get in on the action. This idea seems all too plausible, said Levi Tillemann and Julian E. Zelizer in the Los Angeles Times. Trump has hinted before that America needs a new network, and has clashed with Fox News. With the help of Bannon and Ailes – who was recently ousted from Fox News over sexual harassment claims and is now advising Trump ahead of next month’s presidential debates – he is well placed to shake up the conservative media establishment just as he’s shaken up the GOP. We’ve seen Trump hotels, Trump University and Trump wine. “Up next, Trump TV.”