Steve Bannon’s alt-right Breitbart publication spins President Donald Trump’s Afghanistan speech as a “flip-flop.”
Steve Bannon is back at Breitbart and, as promised, he’s not pulling any punches.
“Trump reverses course, will send more troops to Afghanistan,” read the headline on Breitbart’s homepage after President Donald Trump’s address Monday night on U.S. military strategy in Afghanistan. “Defends flip-flop in somber speech.”
Trump’s speech — in which he further committed troops to the nation’s longest war but offered few specifics — represented another clash between Trump and Bannon, who returned to Breitbart as its executive chairman Friday, the same day he was ousted as Trump’s chief strategist.
“The speech was a disappointment to many who had supported his calls during the campaign to end expensive foreign intervention and nation-building,” wrote Breitbart’s Pentagon correspondent Kristina Wong in the site’s lead article. “He acknowledged the frustration that Americans felt after 16 years of war without an end in sight.”
Bannon previously told Bloomberg News he won’t be going to war against the president, but on his behalf,.
“If there’s any confusion out there, let me clear it up: I’m leaving the White House and going to war for Trump against his opponents — on Capitol Hill, in the media and in corporate America,” Bannon said.
Despite his assurances, Bannon’s site was rough on the president Monday.
A top architect of Trump’s nationalist agenda, Bannon has long opposed sending additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan, which put him at odds with Trump’s national security adviser H.R. McMaster.
Instead, Bannon recruited Erik Prince, a founder of the private security firm Blackwater Worldwide, to develop proposals to have private contractors continue fighting in Afghanistan instead of U.S. troops, according to The New York Times.
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis declined to include Bannon’s strategy in the review of Afghanistan policy he led with McMaster, according to the Times.
In a Breitbart article that went up before Trump began his much-anticipated address, Prince told the conservative news site that he anticipated Trump would “roll over and accept the same failed DOD paradigm of the last 16 years.”