Bannon’s exit caps another week of White House turmoil
Fiery nationalist who helped engineer Trump’s election win ousted after clashes with West Wing rivals, candid phone call to journalist
WASHINGTON— Steve Bannon, the polarizing nationalist whose race-baiting tactics have been an incendiary hallmark of U.S. President Donald Trump’s flailing young administration, was ousted on Friday in another indication of White House chaos that shows no sign of abating.
Bannon was the fourth top Trump aide to be fired or resign in less than a month, an alarming rate of turnover for a presidency just seven months old. He was the second aide, after Anthony Scaramucci, to be forced out after calling up a journalist and ranting about his colleagues.
The departure of Bannon, described by the White House as a mutual decision, comes as Trump’s new chief of staff, former Marine general John Kelly, tries to find a way to impose discipline on a dysfunctional organization mired in infighting, policy confusion and a race-related confidence crisis.
The move pleased, though did not satisfy, leaders of minority communities who had been aghast at the elevation of a person with Bannon’s views to a position of power. On the other side, some nationalist conservatives were alarmed that Trump’s inner circle is now nearly devoid of aides who subscribe to his racially inflammatory, economically protectionist populism.
“The Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over,” Bannon told the Weekly Standard magazine. “We still have a huge movement, and we will make something of this Trump presidency. But that presidency is over. It’ll be something else.”
Bannon blamed “the Republican establishment” for the failure of Trump’s attempts at unorthodoxy.
“The Republican establishment has no interest in Trump’s success on this. They’re not populists, they’re not nationalists, they had no interest in his program. Zero,” he said.
Bannon was beloved by segments of the president’s base, including trade hawks, opponents of immigration and antiMuslim bigots.
His take-no-prisoners attitude toward Trump’s critics and the media, which he gleefully labelled “the opposition party,” made him a symbol and a proponent of Trump’s unusually antagonistic public message.
It was far from clear Bannon’s exit would change anything about Trump’s behaviour. The president, resistant to advice of all kinds, has sounded Bannon-like notes on race and trade for decades.
“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 Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said.
Scaramucci, press secretary Sean Spicer and chief of staff Reince Priebus all preceded Bannon in leaving the White House over the past 30 days, a period during which Trump has threatened North Korea with nuclear war and triggered global condemnation by defending participants in a white supremacist demonstration in which a woman was allegedly murdered by an alleged racist.
As Trump’s campaign CEO for the last three months before election day, Bannon helped engineer one of the most improbable triumphs in U.S. political history. As a presidential strategist, he had few victories.
He was a leading proponent of the base-first, outreach-last strategy has kept Trump in the good graces of Republicans but also kept his overall approval rating stuck at historically low levels. And though he cultivated a reputation as a Machiavellian mastermind, he was often outmanoeuvred by aides with more liberal and more conventional views.
Bannon is now free to scheme as he wishes. Sources close to him told media that he would wage a fierce battle from the outside against the former internal rivals, such as Jared Kushner and Gary Cohn, whom he believes are establishment “globalists” insufficiently committed to Trump’s “America First” campaign agenda.
Joshua Green, author of a book on Bannon, said Bannon was returning immediately to Breitbart News — the website he had once turned into a “platform” for the white supremacist “alt-right” — leaving the White House to chair the website’s evening editorial meeting.
Bannon told Green that he would be fighting on Trump’s behalf, not against him.
“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.
Bannon’s history of bigotry, including years of unconcealed anti-Muslim sentiment and Breitbart fearmongering about Black people and Hispanic immigrants, had made him the most controversial adviser to Trump. Democrats had demanded Trump remove him in the wake of the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Va., on Saturday.
But this is probably not why Bannon was shuffled out. Trump de- fended Bannon at a press conference on Tuesday, saying he was “not a racist.” Ominously, he added: “We’ll see what happens with Mr. Bannon.”
Among people pushing for Bannon to be fired, according to the New York Times, was media titan Rupert Murdoch, an informal Trump adviser. Politico reported Kelly did not understand what Bannon was actually doing, or why he was so disliked by the rest of the team.
Bannon had feuded with several of his colleagues, including Trump’s son-in-law, Kushner, and was suspected to have irked Trump by appearing to orchestrate a campaign to discredit national security adviser H.R. McMaster. He had angered Trump and others this week by phoning a left-leaning journalist, unprompted, and sharing candid thoughts about North Korea policy and other administration figures.
Bannon’s remarks on North Korea, in which he said the idea of a military strike was unrealistic given the regime’s ability to devastate Seoul, were seen as undercutting the president’s own threat of “fire and fury,” confusing Asian allies.
Some of Trump’s irritation with Bannon was not about policy at all. U.S. media outlets have reported that Trump resented the credit Bannon has received for election success that Trump sees as his own.
Trump was said to be especially annoyed by a Time magazine cover of Bannon in February that labelled the strategist “The Great Manipulator” and by Green’s Bannon-focused book on the campaign, Devil’s Bargain.
“Mr. Bannon came on very late — you know that,” Trump said Tuesday when asked if he still had confidence in Bannon. “I went through 17 senators, governors and I won all the primaries. Mr. Bannon came on very much later than that, and I like him, he’s a good man.” Bannon, who has pushed Trump to take an aggressive stand on NAFTA, was even the subject of controversy in Canada. This week, NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair called on Gerald Butts, Bannon’s counterpart in the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, to “immediately disavow” the supposed friendship the New Yorker magazine reported Butts had developed with Bannon.
In addition to encouraging Trump to embrace race-baiting, Bannon also served as a resident skeptic of military action and advocate of leftleaning economic proposals like hiking taxes on millionaires. The New Yorker suggested Bannon was partly inspired by Butts’s account of Trudeau’s success with such a tax hike.
In a rare public appearance, at a conservative conference in Washington in February, Bannon drew cheers by advocating the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” by urging a focus on “sovereignty” and by railing against the “corporatist, globalist media.”
Bannon had sounded confident in his standing in the administration as recently as Tuesday, when he boasted of his plans to get some of his rivals fired. “They’re wetting themselves,” he said.