Populist right voice Bannon pushed out
>> BRIDGEWATER: 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 on Friday after a turbulent tenure shaping the fiery populism of the president’s first seven months in office.
Mr Bannon’s exit, the latest in a string of high-profile West Wing shakeups, came as Mr Trump is under fire for saying that “both sides” were to blame for last week’s deadly violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. Critics accused the president of “channelling” Mr Bannon when he equated white supremacists and neo-Nazis with the leftwing protesters who opposed them.
“White House chief-of-staff John Kelly and Steve Bannon have mutually agreed today would be Steve’s last day,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said. “We are grateful for his service and wish him the best.”
Mr Bannon’s influence on the president, captured in a February cover of Time magazine with the headline, “The great manipulator”, was reflected in the response to his departure.
Conservatives grumbled they had lost a key advocate inside the White House and worried aloud that Mr Trump would shift left, while cheers erupted on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange when headlines about Mr Bannon’s ouster appeared. Both the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index and the Dow Jones industrial average immediately rose, although they ended the day slightly down.
His removal is a victory for Mr Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general whose mission is to impose discipline on White House personnel. A caustic presence in a chaotic West Wing, Mr Bannon frequently clashed with other aides as they fought over trade, the war in Afghanistan, taxes, immigration and the role of government.
In an interview this week with The American Prospect, Mr 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.
Mr Trump had recently grown weary of Mr Bannon, complaining to other advisers that he believed his chief strategist had been leaking to reporters and was taking too much credit for the president’s successes. The situation had become untenable long before Friday, according to advisers close to Mr Trump who had been urging the president to remove Mr Bannon; in turn, people close to Mr Bannon also were urging him to step down.
By Friday night, Mr Bannon was back at the right-wing website Breitbart News, chairing an editorial meeting at the organisation he helped run before joining Mr Trump’s campaign and where he can continue to advance his agenda.
Mr Bannon can still wield influence from outside the West Wing. He believes he can use his perch at Breitbart — which has given a platform to the so-called alt-right, a loose collection of activists, some of whom espouse openly racist and anti-Semitic views — to publicly pressure the president.
And he may still play an insider’s role as a confidante for the president, offering advice and counsel, much like other former advisers who still frequently consult with Mr Trump. Mr Bannon had formed a philosophical alliance with Mr Trump, and they shared an unlikely chemistry.
Mr Bannon has indicated to people that he does not intend to harm Mr Trump and he has promised to be somewhat reserved about other administration officials, including Jared Kushner, Mr Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, and his wife, Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter.
“In many ways I think I can be more effective fighting from the outside for the agenda President Trump ran on. And anyone who stands in our way, we will go to war with,” Mr Bannon said Friday.
But his former colleagues in the West Wing are uncertain how long that will last.
Breitbart executive Joel Pollack tweeted after Mr Bannon’s departure was made public a single word with a hashtag: “#WAR.” Mr Bannon called reporters to suggest Mr Pollak had gone too far, but he also acknowledged his own disappointment at departing the White House.
He told The Weekly Standard: “The Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over. 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. And there’ll be all kinds of fights, and there’ll be good days and bad days, but that presidency is over.”
Mr Bannon later clarified to The New York Times that he did not mean the Trump agenda was over; instead, he said he was referring to his direct work with Mr Trump, from the end of the campaign to the first stages of his presidency.
Still, allies of the president predicted that Mr Bannon’s ouster would help Mr Trump’s agenda.
“I think it’s going to be good for both Steve and for the president,” said Christopher Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax Media who has known Mr Trump for years.
“The president has a major hurdle in the fall, I think, in getting legislation passed,” Mr Ruddy said. He cited several lawmakers who had told the White House “that they had a real problem with Steve because of Breitbart, and Breitbart’s been a thorn in the side for a lot of congressional Republicans.”
Mr Bannon had become increasingly critical of Mr Trump, said a person close to both men, complaining that the president lacked the political skills and discipline to avoid a series of self-inflicted public relations disasters.
But ultimately, he viewed the president as losing sight of what propelled Mr Trump to the White House. On one hand, Mr Bannon told friends that Mr Trump was a populist savant who had a deeper connection with the alienated white working class than any politician in the last half-century. But Mr Bannon, a former naval officer, also saw the president as increasingly trapped by the generals he surrounded himself with, and moving toward an interventionist foreign policy.
Mr Bannon frequently clashed with Mr Kushner and others in the administration who sought a more traditional, globalist approach to the world’s problems. He also had a long-running feud with Lt Gen HR McMaster, the national security adviser.
There were different interpretations of how Mr Bannon left his job, which had been long anticipated in Washington.
One White House official, who would not be named discussing the president’s thinking, said Mr Trump has wanted to remove Mr Bannon since he ousted Mr Priebus three weeks ago. Since then, Mr Kelly has been evaluating Mr Bannon’s status, according to the official.
But a person close to Mr Bannon insisted the parting of ways was his idea and that he had submitted his resignation on Aug 7.