Steve Bannon has been fired after a tumultuous seven-month stint as President Donald Trump’s chief strategist. With his strong nationalist views, he often clashed with the White House’s more moderate factions who eventually turned against him. He pushed for America’s withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement, reportedly opposed Trump’s strike in Syria in April and gained a reputation for leaking.
He was also the architect of the US travel ban on citizens of Muslim countries which, of all else, showed his fervent right-wing stripes and white supremacist views. Almost immediately after taking office in January, Trump issued an executive order aimed at temporarily banning travel from certain countries while the US government reviewed and strengthened its vetting procedures. In both substance and execution the order Bannon’s team drew up was in the extreme, throwing airports all over the country and in many countries in the world into chaos. It led to the sudden detention of hundreds of people with many others being turned away from flights or sent back from the US after landing there. It also led to massive protests across the country and, eventually, the courts stepping in to block it. A scaled-back version went into effect months later.
It was a fiasco. Bannon huddled with fellow anti-immigration hardliners in the administration to craft the details with hardly any consultation from the agencies that would implement them or the lawyers who would be tasked with defending them in court. The ban was so ill-prepared and Bannon and his ilk were in such a hurry to implement it that it was stopped dead in its tracks when it landed in the court of the first judge who ruled on it.
The big blow came last week when in an interview he suggested that America’s military option with North Korea was off the table when only a few days earlier Trump had said he would meet Pyongyang with “fire and fury”. In the same interview, Bannon criticized some of his rivals in the administration by name, and explained his plans to reshuffle State Department personnel when he did not have the authority to do so.
As former head of Brietbart.com, a widely read conservative news and opinion site that serves up an anti-establishment agenda, Bannon’s xenophobia and misogyny were on full display. Part of its strategy involved stoking white voter resentments of various “others” — immigrants, Muslims, Black Lives Matter protesters — beyond what was previously considered acceptable by the Republican establishment. The site spotlights tales of crimes committed by illegal immigrants, Muslims and African Americans.
The bigger picture is that after seven months of the Trump administration under Bannon, the president’s approval rating is down at 37 percent. That’s hardly all Bannon’s fault. But much of Trump’s failure to start off his presidency on a more positive note should indeed be laid at Bannon’s feet who often seemed more focused on pleasing the Brietbart base than on making Trump a successful and popular president.
On the day he was fired, Bannon returned to Brietbart where he said he will remain loyal and will go to war for Trump against his opponents. At least he will be doing so from outside the White House.
