Future unclear for Bannon as president is urged to oust firebrand
Once Trump’s point man, White House chief strategist and nationalist now a liability
Rupert Murdoch has repeatedly urged President Donald Trump to fire him. Anthony Scaramucci, the president’s former communications director, thrashed him on television as a white nationalist. Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, the national security adviser, refused to even say he could work with him.
For months, Trump has considered ousting Steve Bannon, the White House chief strategist and relentless nationalist who ran the Breitbart website and called it a “platform for the alt-right.” Trump has sent Bannon to a kind of internal exile, and has not met face-to-face for more than a week with a man who was once a fixture in the Oval Office, according to aides and friends of the president.
So far, Trump has not been able to follow through — a product of his dislike of confrontation, the bonds of a fox-
hole friendship forged during the 2016 presidential campaign and concerns about what mischief Bannon might do once he leaves the protective custody of the West Wing.
Not least, Bannon embodies the defiant populism at the core of the president’s agenda. Despite being marginalized, Bannon consulted with the president repeatedly over the weekend as Trump struggled to respond to the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va. In general, Bannon has cautioned the president not to criticize far-right activists too severely for fear of antagonizing a small but energetic part of his base.
But what once endeared him to the president has now become a major liability. After the president waited two days to blame white supremacists for the violence in Charlottesville, there is new pressure from Trump’s critics to dismiss Bannon.
“I don’t think that White House has a chance of functioning properly as long as there’s a resident lunatic fringe,” said Mark Salter, a longtime adviser to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. At best, he said, Bannon seems willing to “tolerate something that’s intolerable” in Trump’s base.
Bannon also has admirers, including Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C. and the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, who said that without Bannon, “there is a concern among conservatives that Washington, D.C., will influence the president in way that moves him away from those voters that put him in the White House.”
And Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa and an immigration hard-liner, said that shoving out Bannon would leave conservatives “crushed.”
Bannon, who adamantly rejects claims that he is a racist or a sympathizer of white supremacists, is in trouble with John Kelly, a retired Marine general and the new White House chief of staff. Kelly has told Trump’s top staff that he will not tolerate Bannon’s shadowland machinations, according to a dozen current and former Trump aides and associates with knowledge of the situation.
Bannon’s purported crimes: Leaking nasty stories about McMaster and other colleagues he deems insufficiently populist; feuding bitterly with Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner; and creating his own cadre within the West Wing that operates outside the chain of command.
One of his main sins in the eyes of the president is appearing to revel in the perception that he is the mastermind behind the rise of a pliable Trump. The president was deeply annoyed at a Time magazine cover article that described Bannon as the real power and brains behind the Trump throne. Trump was equally put off by a recent book, Devil’s Bargain, by the Bloomberg Businessweek writer Joshua Green, which lavished credit for Trump’s election on Bannon.
Others say Bannon’s continued presence in the White House is not serving the president’s interests.
“He’s got to move more into the mainstream, he’s got to be more into where the moderates are and the independents are,” Scaramucci, referring to the president, said in an interview Sunday on ABC’s This Week. “And so if he does that, he’ll have a very successful legislative agenda that he’ll be able to execute. And if he doesn’t do that, you’re going to see inertia and you’re going to see this resistance from more of the establishment senators that he needs to curry favor with.” Scaramucci is on friendly terms with Kushner.
Others say the problem is not Bannon’s closeness to the far right, it is that he has not done enough for them.
“I do think he’s in trouble, but it’s trouble of his own making,” said Roger J. Stone Jr., Trump’s sometimes adviser, who has publicly criticized Bannon as ineffective. “I don’t know why conservatives would be upset about him being fired. He has not delivered for them.”
Top administration officials like to joke that working for Trump is like toiling in the court of Henry VIII. Mick Mulvaney, the president’s budget director, recently handed out copies of the play A Man for All Seasons, about the last years of Sir Thomas More, Henry’s chancellor, who was executed for failing to endorse Henry’s split with Rome. Bannon read it, according to a person familiar with the situation, and was amused when an associate compared him to More.
From the start, Bannon, 63, has told people in his orbit that he never expected to last in his current position longer than eight months to a year, and hoped to ram through as much of his agenda as he could while he stood in the president’s favor. More recently he has told friends that he is working in the White House one day at a time, and constantly asks himself whether he could better pursue his to-do list — including cracking down on legal and illegal immigration — on the outside.
Bannon’s ability to hang on as Trump’s inhouse populist is, in part, because of his connections to a handful of ultrarich political patrons, including Sheldon Adelson, the pro-Israel casino magnate who is based in Las Vegas, Nev.
He is especially close to the reclusive conservative billionaire Robert Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah, who is a frequent sounding board for Bannon. In April, Mercer received assurances from Trump that he was not about to fire Bannon over his war with Kushner and moderates like Gary Cohn, the chairman of the National Economic Council and a top Trump adviser.
But Trump still publicly flayed Bannon, insulting him as a guy “who works for me.” It was a far cry from the lofty status Bannon enjoyed when he joined Trump’s faltering campaign in August 2016, when as a rich former investment banker he held the status of a near-peer and hell-raiser who shared his candidate’s daredevil approach to politics.
Still, Bannon is a survivor. He has been left for dead before. Trump is mercurial, and can easily change his mind.
This spring, as Kushner pressured Trump to fire Bannon, the president shot back at his sonin-law. He was not going to get rid of him, he said, just because Kushner wanted him to go.