WASHINGTON
When Steve Bannon
gave a free-wheeling interview to a small left-wing magazine this week,
he spoke as if he — the White House's 'great manipulator' — was back on
top.
By Friday, President Donald Trump had sacked him.
By Friday, President Donald Trump had sacked him.
However,
in a matter of hours Bannon vowed to go to war for the president and
keep fighting what he called his enemies in Congress and elsewhere.
Some
reports suggest that Trump's strategy chief already knew his days were
numbered when he picked up the phone to make a surprise call to the
American Prospect.
But he gave no hint of it as he
regaled editor Robert Kuttner with plans to push aside his rivals within
Trump's administration and start a trade war with China.
NUCLEAR THREAT
"To me, the economic war with China is everything. And we have to be maniacally focused on that," he declared.
This
week, however, the national security establishment was focused on North
Korea's nuclear threat — a crisis dismissed as a "sideshow" by Bannon.
And
much of the media and the US public was focused on a threat much closer
to home: white nationalism and the rise of the so-called "alt-right."
In
his interview, Bannon was dismissive of the torch-bearing "clowns" in
polo shirts and khakis who brought violence to Charlottesville last
week.
But — for all he would like to be seen as the
mastermind behind Trump's improbable rise to power — Bannon's image is
still linked to those white nationalists.
Before
joining Trump's campaign, Bannon the self-described "economic
nationalist" was the publisher of Breitbart, the provocative right-wing
news outlet which he rejoined within hours of leaving the White House.
NAZI SYMPATHISER
This
site was and is, in Bannon's own words, a platform for the alt-right, a
loosely defined movement of mainly young white men espousing far-right
and white nationalist ideas.
Any temptation to laugh
off the alt-right as online poseurs evaporated on Saturday when a white
supremacist rally in Charlottesville degenerated into violence.
A suspected Nazi sympathiser then drove his car into a crowd of anti-racism demonstrators, leaving one woman dead.
When
Trump himself drew fire for defending some of the right-wing crowd as
"fine people," eyes also turned to Bannon, as the figurehead of the
"nationalist" camp within the White House.
In his first
comments since his departure was announced, Bannon vowed to keep
fighting for the president from outside the White House.
"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," the far-right
firebrand said in an interview with Bloomberg News.
POWER STRUCTURE
And Breitbart News said he was coming back as executive chairman.
In
an op-ed on the site, Breitbart writer Joel Pollak suggested that Trump
ousted Bannon in "an effort to save his presidency after
Charlottesville" but warned the president not to turn his back on his
right-wing supporters.
"Steve Bannon personified the Trump agenda," Pollak wrote.
The
63-year-old former navy lieutenant turned political operative was seen
as the brain behind Team Trump's decision to rail against a "global
power structure" opposed to American values — a favourite theme of
nationalist conspiracy-mongers.
After making his name
at Goldman Sachs during the 1980s boom years, Bannon founded his own
investment bank before selling it to Societe Generale in 1998 and going
on to be a Hollywood producer.
AGENDA
Some
of his projects were standard entertainment fare, but political
documentaries that he produced on late president Ronald Reagan, populist
darling Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement brought him into
right-wing circles.
Bannon became an investor in
Andrew Breitbart's eponymous media venture — focused around a site
designed to buck what its founder saw as the progressive left's grip on
the news agenda.
Democrats and liberals were in the
site's crosshairs, but mainstream Republican lawmakers also felt its
lash, accused of failing to stand up strongly enough to then president
Barack Obama.
When Breitbart died in 2012, Bannon took over.
The
site, which had been the ultimate outsider force, latched on to the
Trump phenomenon and helped drive the billionaire to the White House.
TRUMP
Victory
also brought Bannon to the West Wing and, for a while the ultimate
anti-establishment outsider became one of the most powerful insiders on
the planet, just a few steps away from Trump's Oval Office.
He
quickly raised hackles in Washington, especially at the State
Department and the Pentagon, where officials resisted Bannon's
determination to exile his supposedly "globalist" foes and replace them
with nationalists.
But his power rested on his
relationship with Trump, who came to resent the way Bannon was portrayed
as the all-powerful eminence grise behind the scenes at the White
House.
Now he is an outsider again, but one who swears he's not finished fighting for Trump.
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