Bannon may be endangered at White House
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 he 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 foxhole 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, Virginia. 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.
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 a 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.