The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Bannon out at the White House
Chief strategist helped shape president’s first seven months in office.
Stephen Bannon, the embattled chief strategist who helped President Donald Trump win the 2016 election by embracing their shared nationalist impulses, departed the White House Friday after a turbulent tenure in which he shaped the fiery populism of the president’s first seven months in office.
Bannon’s exit, the latest in a string of high-profile West Wing shake-ups, came as Trump is under fire for saying that “both sides” were to blame for the deadly violence at a Virginia rally last week. Critics of Bannon accused the president of channeling his chief strategist when he equated white supremacists and neo-Nazis with the left-wing protesters who opposed them.
“White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and Steve Bannon have mutually agreed today would be Steve’s last day,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said in a statement. “We are grateful for his service and wish him the best.”
The conservative Breitbart News Network reported Friday that Bannon had returned to its former role as its executive chairman.
A caustic presence in a chaotic West Wing, Bannon frequently clashed with the president’s other aides as they fought over trade, the war in Afghanistan, taxes, immigration and the role of government. In an interview this week, Bannon mocked his colleagues, including Gary Cohn, one of the president’s chief economic advisers, saying they were “wetting themselves” out of a fear of radically changing trade policy.
Trump had recently grown weary of Bannon, complaining to other advisers that he believed his chief strategist had been leaking information to reporters and was taking too much credit for the president’s successes. The situation had become untenable, according to advisers close to Trump who were urging the president to remove Bannon — and, in turn, people close to Bannon were urging him to step down — long before Friday.
Bannon’s removal is a victory for Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general whose mission is to impose discipline on White House personnel. Yet Bannon may still prove to be a confidant for the president, offering advice and counsel from the outside, much like other former advisers who still frequently consult with Trump. Bannon, in particular, had formed a philosophical alliance with Trump and they shared an unlikely chemistry.
The loss of Bannon, who helped propel some of Trump’s campaign promises into policy reality, raises the potential for the president to face criticism from the conservative media base that supported him over the past year.
Bannon’s many critics bore down after the violence in Charlottesville. Outraged over Trump’s insistence that “both sides” were to blame for the violence that erupted at a white nationalist rally, leaving one woman dead, human rights activists demanded that the president fire nationalists working in the West Wing. That group of hardright populists in the White House was led by Bannon, who had described Breitbart as “the platform for the alt-right.”
On Tuesday at Trump Tower in New York, Trump refused to guarantee Bannon’s job security but defended him as “not a racist” and “a friend.”
Bannon’s dismissal followed an Aug. 16 interview he initiated with a writer for the progressive publication the American Prospect. In it, Bannon mockingly played down the U.S. military threat to North Korea as nonsensical: “Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that 10 million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here, they got us.”