Bannon falls in ongoing turmoil
Trump’s right-wing aide out after brief, rocky tenure
Stephen Bannon, the former right-wing editor who became one of President Trump’s top aides, was unceremoniously dropped from his post of power Friday, a victim of the growing uproar over the president’s political comments this week about white nationalists and his own abrasive style.
While the 63-year-old Bannon had long been rumored to be a politically dead man walking, Friday’s announcement came after days of fevered speculation about his fate, with nameless aides — no friends of the president’s chief strategist — telling reporters that Bannon’s exit had become not a question of if, but of when.
There were few answers in the brief, boilerplate statement White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders released shortly after 1 p.m., eastern time.
“White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and Steve Bannon have mutually agreed today would be Steve’s last day. We are grateful for his service and wish him the best.”
Bannon was quick to deny he was fired, saying in an interview Friday with the Weekly Standard magazine that he had always planned to leave this month, which marks a year after he took over as director of Trump’s presidential campaign. He said he discussed his resignation with Trump and his new chief of staff, retired Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly, on Aug. 7.
He may have jumped before he was pushed, however, since Kelly has been talking about his vision for a completely reorganized White House staff, which
probably would not have included Bannon and other current aides.
Within hours of the announcement, Bannon was back at his old job as executive chairman of the online Breitbart News.
“Now I’m free,” he told the Weekly Standard. “I’ve got my hands back on my weapons . ... I am definitely going to crush the opposition.”
While Bannon, long seen by many as the president’s link to the dark side of American politics, may be gone, opponents looking for instant change at the White House are likely to be disappointed.
“Bannon was the shadow, but Trump was the person casting the shadow,” said John Pitney, professor of politics at Claremont McKenna College in Southern California.
The immediate Democratic reaction recognized that Trump is still president, and his policies haven’t changed.
“There is one less white supremacist in the White House, but that doesn’t change the man sitting behind the Resolute desk,” the Democratic National Committee said in a statement.
“Steve Bannon’s firing is welcome news, but it doesn’t disguise where President Trump himself stands on white supremacists and the bigoted beliefs they advance,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi added in a statement.
Bannon’s ouster raised worries among conservatives, who believe he is another victim of what they see as Trump’s move away from the populist stands and everyman appeal that carried him to victory in November.
Earlier this week Richard Viguerie, a longtime conservative activist, fired out a letter calling on conservatives to build “a groundswell of support” behind Bannon “to prevent the start of a complete purge of conservatives from the White House staff.”
There wasn’t much time for that support to develop, Viguerie said ruefully in an interview Friday.
“That cake was already baked,” he said. Trump’s new chief of staff, Kelly, and others “want to clean house of anyone who was a Trumpite.”
It doesn’t look good for conservatives, Viguerie added. “It’s not a disaster, but it is concerning.”
But Trump himself had given clues that Bannon was on the way out.
At the same impromptu Tuesday news conference where the president argued that some “very fine people” joined the white supremacists and neo-Nazis at last week’s deadly rally in Charlottesville, Va., Trump also argued that Bannon was a latecomer to his campaign team and declined to give his aide a vote of confidence.
“We’ll see what happens with Mr. Bannon,” he said.
It was almost certainly Trump who decided that Bannon had to go, said David Caputo, president emeritus and political science professor at Pace University in New York.
“It was Trump’s decision,” he said. “I don’t think the new chief of staff has the trust to be allowed to do it at this point, although he may have made the recommendation.”
The move was typical Trump, Caputo said, firing Bannon in an effort to shift the discussion away from the deluge of criticism he received for his response to the Charlottesville rally, and his continuing effort to cast blame on both the right-wing marchers and the protesters who showed up to oppose them.
As the boss at Breitbart, Bannon was happy to boast in July 2016 — a month before he joined the Trump campaign — that the news site was “the platform for the alt-right,” a loosely defined group on the far right with links to ideologies like white nationalism, isolationism, anti-Semitism, nativism and anti-Muslim views.
Bannon used his ties to get those groups behind Trump, where they played a part in his stunning victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton.
While Bannon didn’t join the campaign until “I went through 17 senators, governors, and I won all the primaries,” as the president said Tuesday, Trump dubbed him one of the “best talents in politics” when he brought him in last August to take over a campaign that was lagging behind Clinton.
After the victory, Trump named him his chief strategist and senior counselor and an equal partner to then Chief of Staff Reince Priebus as the president’s top aides. Priebus was pushed from his White House post last month.
Bannon’s power waned after those heady early days as Trump’s top policy maven, but few suggested he didn’t speak with the president’s voice.
His ouster, Caputo said, “was about personality and style rather than policy differences. He was never enough of a team player.”
Bannon also made the mistake of outshining the president in the press, which is a bad move in almost any administration but can be a firing offense when the president is as obsessed about his media image as Trump.
Trump reportedly was furious when Bannon, crowned “the Great Manipulator,” appeared on the cover of Time magazine in February, with a story that suggested he was “the second most powerful man in the world.”
NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” took that image — and the president’s anger — a step further in skits that portrayed Bannon as a Grim Reaper-like figure who had the bigger desk in the Oval Office and whom Trump humbly addressed as “Mr. President.”
Bannon “initially irritated Trump by upstaging him,” said Pitney of Claremont McKenna, but he added to that by continually clashing with other top White House aides, including Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law.
A new book, “The Devil’s Bargain,” by Joshua Green, didn’t help Bannon’s future when it suggested he deserved the credit for pulling disaffected young white men to Trump’s banner.
An interview this week with the liberal American Prospect magazine was probably the last straw, as Bannon slammed his rivals in the administration, dismissed “alt-right” types as clowns and losers, and suggested that Trump wasn’t being realistic when he talked of a military solution to the dispute with North Korea.
The question now is which way does Bannon jump? As he goes back to Breitbart, he can either continue the site’s current role as a cheerleader for Trump and his policies or he can take the opportunity to score points against the people he believes forced him out because they opposed his populist vision for a Trump presidency.
“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 in an interview with Bloomberg.
But Bannon, who has said that he believes Trump is being pushed toward the center by mainstream Republicans inside and outside of the White House, has not said whether those opponents of Trump — and himself — will be on his target list.
Joel Pollak, a senior editor at large for Breitbart, may have given a clue with a tweet he posted shortly after Bannon’s departure was announced.
“#WAR,” it read.