Donald Trump hired Steve Bannon as his campaign manager, gave him a job in the White House, and signed an executive order to give him a seat at meetings of the National Security Council’s principals committee, giving him access to some of America’s most sensitive secrets, even as his erstwhile adviser helped to make him the most powerful man on earth.
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But now the two are fighting as if they find one another deplorable and irredeemable.
Bannon is quoted savaging multiple members of the Trump family in excerpts from a forthcoming book by the journalist Michael Wolff. And Trump now insists that a man he recently entrusted with a key national-security post is crazy and has nothing to do with his presidency. “When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind,” the president declared Wednesday in a statement. “Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was. It is the only thing he does well.”
</section><section id="article-section-2">What happens when an unpopular president propelled to power by the populist right feuds with a man who runs perhaps the most popular website on the populist right?
The answer may turn on unknowns including these:
- Is Steve Bannon correct in his judgment that there is a big enough constituency to refashion the Republican Party in the style of Pat Buchanan by electing anti-globalist, anti-Muslim, anti-immigration, anti-establishment candidates to the House and the Senate? Or is Trumpism inseparable from Donald Trump himself and his singular celebrity and charisma?
- If Buchananite primary challenges are possible, is Bannon savvy enough to judge which candidates are viable and which are not because, for instance, they dated young teenagers in their 30s or embraced anti-Semitism?
- How secure is Bannon in his perch at Breitbart? Is it in the financial interest of the site to break from Trump? Could it do so and retain its audience?
- What is the most damaging information that Bannon has about Donald Trump, his eldest sons, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, and others in their orbit?
- If Trump continues to sign legislation and appoint federal judges like an establishment Republican, even as he wages a scorched-earth culture war on Twitter and elsewhere, will that be enough to satisfy loyalists in his base?
- Will the billionaire Mercer family give him money in the future?
But it may be that Bannon has destroyed himself regardless. I’m hesitant to reach that conclusion because I do not understand the course that he has chosen, but I don’t understand it precisely because it looks so much like self-immolation. His words seem likely to permanently alienate both the
National Review-wing of establishment conservatism that already hates him and loyal Trump supporters.
</section><section id="article-section-3">The Bannon quotes excerpted in
The Guardian, pertaining to a meeting at Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer and Trump’s inner circle, are particularly inflammatory.
My colleague David Graham
characterizes their significance:
In describing the Trump Tower meeting as “treasonous” and “unpatriotic,” Bannon becomes the first major Trump insider to say what is at this point clear to anyone willing to look at the facts: Whether or not there were any crimes committed, Trump aides colluded with Russia. The pattern runs from George Papadopoulos’s conversations with Russian agents, through the Trump Tower meeting, and up to Michael Flynn’s conversations with then-Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, about which he has pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents.
At
Hot Air, Allahpundit
asks, “What is Bannon thinking,
legitimizing the Russiagate investigation when everyone else in populist media has spent a year insisting it’s a witch hunt based on lies and innuendo? At the very least you’d expect him to blame people like Carter Page and George Papadopoulos for driving the suspicion, not the Trump family. He might have gotten away with slamming Jared since their feud is public knowledge but going after Don Jr is an attack on POTUS himself. He’s practically forcing
Breitbart fans to choose between him and Trump now, particularly by using a term
as loaded as ‘treasonous.’ And
Breitbart’s not challenging the veracity of the Bannon quotes, mind you.”
