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| Steve Bannon |
Furor and global protests over an executive order curbing
immigration? Just some whiners who can’t get over the fact that Donald
Trump is president. News media complaining about access and fake news?
They should keep their mouth shut and “just listen for a while”. No
mentioning of Jews in a statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day? No
regrets.
The reactions emanating from the White House to the latest
public controversies bear the fingerprints of a man who is emerging as
the most important power centre inside Trump’s inner circle (with the
possible exception of son-in-law Jared Kushner): Steve Bannon, top
political advisor and former chairman of Breitbart News, an outlet that
spreads white supremacist views and peddles racist and misogynist
conspiracy theories.
Like pre-November Trump, Bannon has never been elected to
office or gained governing experience. Before moving into Trump’s orbit
he had been a naval officer, investment banker, minor Hollywood player,
and political impresario whom Bloomberg Politics back in 2015 called
“the most dangerous political operative in America”.
In the early stages of the 2016 presidential campaign,
Bannon was instrumental in bringing down Jeb Bush and later Hillary
Clinton by feeding information of alleged financial shenanigans to
mainstream news media which gave those stories an aura of reliability –
and contributed to constant negative headlines about the Clinton
Foundation, for example.
After the election, Bannon’s appointment as a key Trump
advisor and strategist with office space in the White House caused an
uproar among Democrats and in the media. Countless Breitbart articles
were quoted as proof that Bannon is anti-Semitic, anti-minority or
anti-women. Bannon and Trump could not care less.
Last Friday, another outcry: Trump, reorganising the National Security
Council, the top inter-agency group advising the president on national
security, elevated his chief political strategist by making him a
permanent NSC member.
At the same time, the director of national intelligence and the chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff will now attend meetings only when “issues
pertaining to their responsibilities and expertise are to be
discussed”, according to the presidential memorandum issued Saturday.
“It is a startling elevation of a political advisor”, wrote the New York
Times, “to a status alongside the secretaries of state and defense, and
over the president’s top military and intelligence advisors”.
In theory, the move puts Bannon on the same level as Michael Flynn, the
national security advisor, a former Pentagon intelligence chief who was
Trump’s top advisor on national security issues before a series of
missteps reduced his influence.
But Bannon’s elevation does not merely reflect his growing influence on
national security. “It is emblematic of Trump’s trust on a range of
political and ideological issues. During the campaign, the sly and
provocative Bannon played a paradoxical role — calming the easily
agitated candidate during his frequent rough patches and egging him on
when he felt Trump needed to fire up the white working-class base,”
wrote the Times.
Trump respects Bannon because he is independently wealthy and therefore
does not need the job, and both men ascribe to a shoot-the-prisoners
credo when put on the defensive, according to the former Trump campaign
manager Corey Lewandowski.
Trump and Bannon share the same version of “America First,” something
former labour secretary Robert Reich calls outright “dangerous”. “Such a
vision would only alienate America from the rest of the world,
destroying our nation’s moral authority abroad and risking everything we
love about our country,” Reich, who is an economist at the University
of California, Berkeley, writes on his blog.
“Unsupervised by people who know what they’re doing, Trump and Bannon
could also bring the world closer to a nuclear holocaust,” Reich
concludes.
Reich’s assessment might be seen by many as over the top. Yet Bannon
believes that the West is already at war with a “new barbarity” of
Islamic terrorism that threatens to wipe out centuries of progress.
“We are in an outright war against jihadist Islamic fascism. And this
war is, I think, metastasizing far quicker than governments can handle
it. We’re at the very beginning stages of a global conflict, and if we
do not bind together as partners with others in other countries, then
this conflict is only going to metastasize,” Bannon said at a conference
in Rome in 2014.
“It’s going global in scale, and today’s technology, today’s media,
today’s access to weapons of mass destruction, it’s going to lead to a
global conflict that I believe has to be confronted today. Every day
that we refuse to look at this as what it is, and the scale of it, and
really the viciousness of it, will be a day where you will rue that we
didn’t act.”
Read more: Meet Steve Bannon, Trump’s front man to fight all wars | Euronews
