Steve Bannon is an awful father and a wife beater

[GreyhoundFan]

7 minutes ago, GrumpyGran said:

Steve Bannon asking people who hate him to let him break the rules. You know I think he may have early onset. He does seem to be spinning out of control. You can't exist in the military with the views he exhibits now. He could not have been this deranged for this long and not been locked up.

I wonder if he is a drinker. He certainly has the look of someone who has a long relationship with the bottle.  And he doesn't care about anyone hating him. In fact, it seems to thrill him.

[GrumpyGran]

3 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I wonder if he is a drinker. He certainly has the look of someone who has a long relationship with the bottle.  And he doesn't care about anyone hating him. In fact, it seems to thrill him.

Whenever I see him I think of "Men In Black" the movie and was it Vincent D'Onofrio who's character was the guy who had been infected by the bugs? He wandered around kind of stumbling and disheveled but very evil? I just keep thinking of that when I see Bannon.

[WiseGirl]

9 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

And he doesn't care about anyone hating him. In fact, it seems to thrill him.

Classic behaviorism, negative attention is better than none at all. 

[onekidanddone]

10 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I wonder if he is a drinker. He certainly has the look of someone who has a long relationship with the bottle.  And he doesn't care about anyone hating him. In fact, it seems to thrill him.

I think it is his goal. Stir up the hate and when people come out against him it proves his point. "Look at these Jews, people of color, 'Mexicans',... see how they hate the white man. Lets him say "See this is why we need to get ride of them.

[bea]

I wonder if he is a drinker. He certainly has the look of someone who has a long relationship with the bottle.  And he doesn't care about anyone hating him. In fact, it seems to thrill him.

It’s not drinking I wonder about.
It’s where he’s hidden his last horcrux.

[GreyhoundFan]

Just the thought of this makes me go : "“I Have Power”: Is Steve Bannon Running for President?"

Spoiler

Around the time Donald Trump took off from the Philippines aboard Air Force One at the end of his 12-day Asia tour, Stephen K. Bannon touched down at Tokyo International Airport. It was the evening of November 14, and the president’s former chief strategist flew to Japan to deliver a hard-edged anti-China speech at a conference for human-rights activists. “I’m not really a human-rights guy,” he told me as we boarded the plane in New York. “But this is a chance to talk to them about populism.”

A polite airline representative whisked Bannon and his entourage through the terminal. Tej Gill, a goateed ex-Navy SEAL security guard with tattoo-sleeved arms, stuck close by Bannon’s side. “I’ve had a couple assassination plots,” Bannon told me, “I got it from an intelligence source.” They were trailed by a short, barrel-chested ex-SEAL in a knit beanie cap, by a videographer named Dan Fleuette who co-wrote Bannon’s documentary Clinton Cash, and a redheaded body man, Bannon’s 26-year-old nephew, Sean. In moments we were escorted through a V.I.P. immigration lane and into an elevator that descends to an underground garage, where a motorcade awaited. Bannon climbed into the back seat of a black BMW 7 Series and sped off towards the Peninsula hotel to catch a few hours of sleep. The rest of the staff followed in a pair of minivans.

The next morning, Bannon was pacing in front of a packed auditorium in a squat building on the grounds of the Olympic Village built for the ‘64 Tokyo Summer Games. “I feel like I’m at a Trump rally!” he said, pointing out a young woman sporting a Make America Great Again hat. For the next hour, Bannon held court, microphone in hand. “The elites in our country have been under a very false premise that as China became more prosperous and economically developed that there would be an underlying increase in democracy,” he said. “What we found out over the last decade is the exact opposite has happened.” He speculated that dark unseen forces are at work. “The question has to be asked: Are the elites in the United States that stupid? Did people actually sit there year after year after year and not understand what was going on? Or was something else going on? Were these elites either bought off or did they just look the other way? That question is going to have to be answered.”

Bannon’s core message—a clueless, corrupt ruling class (many of whom, of course, reside in blue states) has sold out American workers to a hegemonic China, and it’s up to a vanguard to take our country back before the world tips toward cataclysm—is the same, whether he’s speaking to Alabamian Roy Moore voters or Chinese dissidents. But he adjusts his vocabulary to fit his audience—here in Tokyo, he was in full prophetic mode.

Bannon is a voracious reader, who sometimes stays up until dawn powering through books, obscure journals, and news articles, scrawling notes in a pocket-size green diary as he goes (during our trip he used downtime to read a Robespierre biography). This was evident as he freestyled about Hillary Clinton, the opposition party media, artificial intelligence, Thucydides, Hollywood, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, the opioid crisis, Boeing jets, Brown University, Brexit, the Cloud, the Civil War, the Peloponnesian War, the American Revolution, the Great Depression, Churchill, Napoleon, Hitler, and J.D. Vance. “It’s not going to be O.K.,” he concluded ominously. “The world is on a knife’s edge. We have what I call a long, dark valley ahead of us, like the 1930s.”

The message is that the world needs saving—but who’s going to save it? Looking around, it’s not hard to see Steve Bannon’s best answer. Four months ago, Bannon was a supporting player, with a whiteboard and telephone. Now he’s made himself the star—not only the chief strategist but in many ways the candidate, the frontman of his own movement. With his motorcade, retinue of advisers, and security men, his Asia trip was a mirror of President Trump’s.

When he left the White House in August, Bannon said, “the Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over.” In private, Bannon told people he was disillusioned with Trump’s shambolic governing style. Trump, in turn, sees Bannon as a self-promoter. “The president views Steve as just a guy who works for him,” a White House official said.

While the two men harbor contempt for each other that can ignite into rage, they can’t quit each other, either. Since Bannon left the West Wing, he’s had five phone calls with Trump, most initiated by the president, according to the White House official. “The few conversations Steve and the president have had since he was fired this summer have primarily been opportunities for Steve to beg for his job back,” said the White House official. A Bannon spokesperson countered, “anyone around Steve since he left the White House can see he is very happy now out of the White House!”

Bannon insists that his real opponent is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. “The G.O.P. establishment, as personified by Mitch McConnell, has not done a good job supporting the president’s agenda,” Bannon told me. During a recent speech he declared a “season of war” on the G.O.P. and he is drafting insurgent candidates to challenge seven of eight G.O.P. senators up for election in 2018. Bannon’s war is just ramping up. Through his nonprofit, Government Accountability Institute, he’s planning to release a Clinton Cash-style book that takes aim at the G.O.P. establishment in general and McConnell in particular.

The primary insurgents Bannon has tried to recruit, dubbed “The League of Extraordinary Candidates” by Breitbart, is a ragtag band including former Arizona State Senator Kelli Ward; Blackwater founder Erik Prince; mega-donor Foster Friess; and Danny Tarkanian, son of U.N.L.V. basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian, all of whom inarguably fall far short of Bannon’s stated populist principles.

And now Roy Moore’s Alabama Senate candidacy was threatening to implode. When I met Bannon at John F. Kennedy Airport, an hour before boarding the Tokyo flight, he’d turned the first-class lounge into a makeshift war room. A few days earlier, The Washington Post published allegations that Moore had pursued romantic and sexual relationships with teenagers in the 1970s while he was an assistant district attorney. One woman told the paper he molested her when she was 14—and he was 32. Moore’s initial response had been a disaster. He came across as evasive during a radio interview with Sean Hannity. A chorus of Senate Republicans, led by McConnell, were calling on Moore to end his campaign; the Republican National Committee severed all fund-raising ties. Most worrisome for Bannon, the White House put out a statement that Moore should leave the race if the allegations were true.

The situation, and the various arrayed forces for and against Moore, closely resembled two earlier crises Bannon had weathered with Trump: the release of the Billy Bush tape and the aftermath of the white nationalist march in Charlottesville. In both, Trump ultimately followed Bannon’s tactical playbook—doubling down at all costs—with large success in the first instance and a highly questionable result in the second.

Bannon huddled over his BlackBerry firing off e-mails to Breitbart reporters he’d dispatched to Alabama to discredit the Post story. “I got my two best guys down there,” he said while waiting for Moore campaign chairman Bill Armistead to call. Bannon’s orders: deny, deny, deny. “One of the things I realized during the campaign is that, like in the military, it all comes down to one or two decisions in the heat of battle,” he said. “You have to double down.” In Moore, he knew he had a less capable candidate. (His first choice had been Alabama congressman Mo Brooks.) “I’m gonna tell Judge Moore to do his thing,” Bannon said. “They’re not cut out for this, though.”

Bannon let the White House know that he wanted Trump to back Moore. But Trump seemed reluctant at first. White House political director Bill Stepien reportedly told Trump to stay out of the race. The conventional wisdom was becoming that Moore was done, and that Bannon was wrong this time.

Bannon’s frenetic pace is part of his strategy. “I realized if you’re not out there for the hobbits, you’re not in their lives,” Bannon said, using his affectionate moniker for Trump voters. During the week I traveled with him from New York to Tokyo to South Florida, for what was Bannon’s first major profile since leaving the White House, he made a half dozen speeches to conservative groups, hosted Breitbart’s talk-radio show, and helped market a new biography Bannon: Always the Rebel. Inside the right-wing echo chamber, Bannon is lionized as a conquering folk hero. Well-wishers flock to snap selfies, press the flesh. At one event I chatted with an elderly man waiting his turn on the receiving line. “If I could ask him one question, it would be, why aren’t you president?’”

That has at least been a passing thought. In October, Bannon called an adviser and said he would consider running for president if Trump doesn’t run for re-election in 2020. Which Bannon has told people is a realistic possibility. In private conversations since leaving the White House, Bannon said Trump only has a 30 percent chance of serving out his term, whether he’s impeached or removed by the Cabinet invoking the 25th amendment. That prospect seemed to become more likely in early December when special counsel Robert Mueller secured a plea deal from former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Bannon has also remarked on the toll the office has taken on Trump, telling advisers his former boss has “lost a step.” “He’s like an 11-year-old child,” Bannon joked to a friend in November.

While Bannon praised Trump during our conversations—he said he’s the best orator since William Jennings Bryan—he doesn’t deny he was unhappy in the White House. “It was always a job,” he said. “I realize in hindsight I was just a staffer, and I’m not a good staffer. I had influence, I had a lot of influence, but just influence.” He told me he now feels liberated. “I have power. I can actually drive things in a certain direction.”

Not surprisingly, the idea of Bannon as a political figure, let alone a presidential candidate, inspires ridicule and venom from the Republican establishment. The Wall Street Journal editorial page called Bannon’s roster of candidates a bunch of “cranks and outliers.” Former McConnell chief of staff Josh Holmes said Bannon is a “white supremacist.” Stuart Stevens, a veteran of five Republican presidential campaigns, told me that Bannon is “an odd, strangely repulsive figure who is trying to use the political process to work through personal issues of anger and frustration.” He added, “like many people in their first campaign, he confused his candidate winning with the fantasy voters supported him.”

A prominent Republican described Bannon’s crusade as a vanity exercise doomed to fail. “I think there was a lot of rage when he was in the White House,” the Republican said. “Steve had to subsume his ego to Donald, who Steve thinks is dumb and crazy. With Steve, it’s not about building new things—it’s about destroying the old. I’m not sure he knows what he wants.” As evidence, he pointed out the recent Virginia governor’s race, where Republican Ed Gillespie got crushed by nine points running on a Bannon-esque platform defending Confederate monuments and inciting fear over illegal immigrant crime. “The issues didn’t just fail, they failed miserably,” the Republican said.

Bannon’s response to all this criticism is a variation on his personal motto: Honey badger don’t give a shit. “I don’t give a fuck,” he told me when I visited him one morning at the Bryant Park Hotel. “You can call me anything you want. Do you think I give a shit? I literally don’t care.”

A few hours after the Tokyo speech, Bannon’s security chief Tej Gill escorted me and a group of Japanese television journalists up to Bannon’s suite. Bannon was padding around the room in a black blazer over two collared shirts, quaffing a can of Pocari Sweat, a popular Japanese energy drink. “Dude, the biggest story out there has got to be Alwaleed and Murdoch. It’s a monster story,” he said, referring to the billionaire Saudi financier, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who’d been arrested on orders from Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Until a few years ago, Alwaleed was the largest non-Murdoch voting shareholder of News Corp. “Uhhh, note to self: Alwaleed’s like the 25th richest guy in the world, and he’s going to have his head on the end of the scimitar! Rupert Murdoch does not exist unless this guy was stroking him checks in the 90s.”

Bannon’s nephew Sean cradled a phone asking room service to send up cans of Red Bull, but was informed the hotel doesn’t have any. He asked for Cokes and coffee instead. “We have to get him revved,” he told me.

Bannon was revved already. “The Bush presidency is the most destructive presidency in history. James Buchanan included. It’s not even close,” Bannon said when I brought up the Bushes. “And by the way,” he continued unprompted, “I haven’t even gotten to 9/11. I mean, 9/11! Think about if 9/11 had happened on Trump’s watch. We would have gotten 100 percent of the blame by the Bush guys. And they said, well, we just got here. What do you mean you just got here? That’s what gets me about them coming after Trump. I really detest them. I mean, the old man is a pervert. He’s a pervert. Grabbing these girls and grabbing their asses?”

A few minutes later, the Japanese crew was ready to start taping, but Bannon didn’t like the camera position. “I got the most stunning shot in Japan right here and you want to shoot a wall?” he said, pointing at the postcard view of the Imperial Palace out the window. The cameraman struggled in broken English to explain that shooting in that direction wasn’t possible because of the lighting. “Then why don’t we just go to a Marriott,” Bannon grumbled.

The producers began moving the cameras. Since we arrived in Tokyo, Roy Moore’s prospects had worsened. News outlets reported overnight that Moore had been banned from a shopping mall in the 80s because he cruised for teens. “He’s denied it,” Bannon said. He pulled out his BlackBerry and showed me an e-mail from Breitbart reporter Aaron Klein. “Klein’s on something big,” he said. I catch a glimpse of the e-mail, it said something about the stepson of one of Moore’s accusers claiming she’d made up the allegations for money.

Despite the new headlines, Bannon was confident that his strategy was working. He sensed he had a deep understanding of the electorate. “This is Alabama,” he explained. “The age of consent is 16 for a reason.”

Bannon’s conviction was forged from surviving the darkest moments of the 2016 campaign. “This is exactly like Billy Bush weekend,” he said. “So I’ve heard it all and seen it all.” During our conversations, Bannon proudly told me multiple times how he counseled Trump not to back down after the Access Hollywood tape leaked. He recalled how then-R.N.C. Chairman Reince Priebus told Trump he would lose in a historic landslide if he stayed on the ticket. “It was such an overreaction! I’ve seen the same cast of characters all run for the exits, right? You gotta remember, on Saturday morning of Billy Bush weekend, he tried to pitch Trump to get off the ticket. I’m like, are you insane?”

A producer motioned that it was time to start the interview. Bannon was pleased the camera was positioned as he requested. He excused himself and sat down with a fresh cup of black coffee.

Billy Bush Weekend cemented Bannon’s bond with Trump. But when Trump became Mr. President-Elect, on another plane, the relationship became much more complicated. Trump was deeply galled that the media portrayed Bannon as the wizard behind the curtain. “I like Steve, but you have to remember he was not involved in my campaign until very late,” Trump told the New York Post. “I had already beaten all the senators and all the governors, and I didn’t know Steve. I’m my own strategist.” (In fact, Trump had known Bannon since 2011). In July, Bloomberg Businessweek journalist Joshua Green published a best-selling book, Devil’s Bargain, that gave a substantial amount of credit for Trump’s win and overall vision to Bannon. Trump tweeted in response: “I love reading about all of the ‘geniuses’ who were so instrumental in my election success. Problem is, most don’t exist. #Fake News! MAGA . . .”

Meanwhile, Trumpworld, which had been unified by the shared goal of defeating Hillary Clinton, cleaved into warring factions within hours of Trump’s unexpected win. On election night, Bannon said he disagreed with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump over the content of Trump’s victory speech. Kushner and Ivanka wanted it to strike a tone of unity, whereas Bannon wanted to keep up the attack. “I didn’t think it was the right time to talk about uniting,” he said. “I think some of that stuff comes off as phony.”

The battle intensified in the White House. On one side was a group of advisers Bannon dismissively dubbed “the Democrats,” comprising Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Gary Cohn, and Dina Powell. On the other were the nationalists: Bannon, Jeff Sessions, Stephen Miller, Sebastian Gorka, and Peter Navarro (Kushner’s camp called them “the crazies” or “Breitbart”).

The nationalists prevailed in the early days of the administration, as Trump signed a flurry of executive orders on trade and regulations from a list of campaign promises Bannon had scrawled on a whiteboard in his West Wing office. “You had to be a disruptor and keep people on their back heels. That’s why we were doing three E.O.s a day,” Bannon explained. “I told Reince that if you slow down, they’ll pick us apart with the palace intrigue stuff, which is what they really want to write.”

On the afternoon of Friday, January 27, the White House announced a travel ban barring immigrants from eight Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States, including all Syrian refugees. It sparked protests at airports nationwide. Bannon explained this was by design. “Why did we drop the travel ban on a Friday evening? Because the resistance is our friend,” he told me. “Our thing is to throw gasoline on the resistance. I love it. When they”—the Democrats—“talk about identity politics, they’re playing into our hands. Because you can’t win [elections] on that.” I asked Bannon about the charges he’s cultivated white supremacist groups. “These guys are beyond clowns,” he said. “It’s the left media that makes them relevant because 25 of them show up, and it’s like a hundred cameras. They’re losers.”

The backlash to the travel ban proved to be a political and legal disaster for the White House and Bannon’s standing in it. As courts blocked the ban and Trump’s poll numbers sank to historic lows, Bannon’s enemies, led by Kushner, moved to marginalize him. (Bannon aided Kushner’s cause by installing himself on the National Security Council, which infuriated Trump, the White House official said.) To Bannon, a former Naval officer who worked his way into Harvard Business School and Goldman Sachs, Kushner was a callow elitist in way over his head. “He doesn’t know anything about the hobbits or the deplorables,” Bannon said. “The railhead of all bad decisions is the same railhead: Javanka.” According to a person close to Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law viewed Bannon as a leaker at best, and a racist at worst.

Any chance of Bannon and Kushner salvaging a working relationship collapsed over Kushner’s role in the decision that many see as the possible linchpin of Trump’s downfall. In early May, Bannon and Kushner tangled over Trump’s plan to fire F.B.I. director James Comey.

Over the weekend of May 6 and 7, Bannon was in Washington when Kushner, Ivanka, and Stephen Miller accompanied Trump to his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, where the decision to fire Comey was finalized. The White House announced Comey’s dismissal on the afternoon of Tuesday, May 9. Bannon was furious when he found out. “It’s the dumbest political decision in modern political history, bar none. A self-inflicted wound of massive proportions,” he later said. “Especially in light of recent news, for the country, the president’s best decision was firing James Comey. His second best decision was firing Steve Bannon, bar none,” a White House official said.

Bannon believed the Russia collusion case was meritless, but he blamed Kushner for taking meetings during the campaign that gave the appearance the Trump team sought Putin’s help. “He’s taking meetings with Russians to get additional stuff. This tells you everything about Jared,” Bannon told me. “They were looking for the picture of Hillary Clinton taking the bag of cash from Putin. That’s his maturity level.”

“Steve Bannon may regret not being in the White House anymore, but that is not an excuse for him peddling false stories about Jared or anyone else,” said Kushner’s attorney Abbe Lowell.

The blowback pitched the West Wing into another crisis. On Wednesday, Bannon was meeting with chief of staff Priebus in Priebus’s office when Kushner walked in.

“We have a communications problem,” Kushner said.

“No we don’t,” Bannon shot back. “We have a decision-making problem. We make a lot of bad decisions, and the bad decisions have to do with you.”

“It got uglier from there,” Bannon later recalled.

“As stated a dozen times, after Jared was told of the decision that had been made to fire director Comey, he supported it,” Lowell said.

Comey’s firing triggered the outcome Bannon was worried about: the appointment of a special counsel. Bannon threw himself into setting up a war room to contain Robert Mueller’s investigation. “Goldman Sachs teaches one thing: don’t invent shit. Take something that works and make it better,” Bannon said, explaining how he consulted with Bill Clinton’s former lawyer Lanny Davis about how the Clintons responded to Ken Starr’s probe. “We were so disciplined. You guys don’t have that,” Bannon recalls Davis advising him. “That always haunted me when he said that,” Bannon told me. Bannon said he grew increasingly disillusioned that Trump wasn’t taking the investigation seriously. He told Trump the establishment was trying to nullify the election and he was in danger of being impeached.

The relationship between Kushner and Bannon worsened through the spring. At one point, Bannon said, Trump called an Oval Office meeting to broker peace. Attending were Bannon, Kushner, and Ivanka Trump. She blamed Bannon for the leaks.

“She’s the queen of leaks,” Bannon argued back.

“You’re a fucking liar!” Ivanka said.

Trump tried to adjudicate, but the meeting did little to diffuse tensions.

Bannon was also fighting to save one of his closest allies in the administration. Since March, Trump had been irate at Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia investigation. On the morning of Monday, July 24, hours before Kushner was scheduled to testify in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Trump called Sessions “beleaguered” in a tweet about his failure to investigate Hillary Clinton. “He hung Sessions out to dry to cover Jared, and the media never covered Jared, and they covered Sessions,” Bannon later said. (A White House official denied this.)

The next day, Bannon said he called Sessions into a meeting. He knew Sessions had already tried to resign once. “Look, I have a question for you,” Bannon said. “Is there any doubt in your mind that it was Divine Providence, the Hand of God that got us this victory?”

“No doubt,” Sessions replied.

“You’re sure?” Bannon continued.

“There’s no doubt.”

“Then where’s your commitment here?”

“I will never leave,” Sessions assured him. “I may get fired, but I’ll never leave.” (A Justice Department spokesperson did not comment.)

By this point it was Bannon who was on the way out. In late July, Trump replaced Priebus with John Kelly and gave the retired four-star Marine general a stated mandate to bring the warring West Wing factions to heel. Among Kelly’s first orders of business was firing communications director Anthony Scaramucci. Another, according to White House officials: telling Bannon he needed to go. Bannon told me he always planned to leave by the one-year anniversary of joining Trump’s campaign, and he told Kelly on August 7 he wanted to resign.

Whatever the case, Bannon said he knew Trump might try to control the narrative of his departure, so he told Kelly not to tell Trump. But later that night, Bannon said Trump called him after learning of the decision from White House lawyer John Dowd. Bannon said he told Trump he wanted to attack his G.O.P. detractors from the outside. “I said the establishment is trying to nullify your election,” he recalls. “Forget the Democrats. We got our own thing with the three committees” investigating Russia collusion. According to Bannon, Trump was reluctant at first to let him leave. And the threat of Bannon turning Breitbart loose on Trump and his family loomed. “He was very nervous about it,” Bannon said. “He just fuckin’ knows I’m a junkyard dog, and I was pissed at the time.” Bannon said Trump told him he needed to think about it.

Trump’s instinct to stoke racial conflict delayed Bannon’s departure. During the weekend of August 12, neo-Nazis marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting “Jews will not replace us” to protest the removal of Confederate monuments. During clashes with counter-protesters, a white supremacist rammed his car into a crowd killing a 32-year-old woman named Heather Heyer and wounding dozens. Trump fanned outrage by blaming the violence on “many sides.” Kushner and Ivanka implored him to apologize, and other members of the administration contemplated resigning. Bannon told the president on a phone call that apologizing would never satisfy the critics. “I said it’s not enough and it’s too late. Nothing you can say could be good enough.”

As the uproar over Charlottesville grew louder, Bannon quietly plotted his next move. White House officials say Bannon tried calling Trump and lobbied members of Congress to pressure Trump to change his mind. On Thursday, August 17, he held a five-hour strategy meeting with billionaire mega-donor Robert Mercer at his Long Island estate. That same day, The American Prospect published a remarkable score-settling interview Bannon had given to its editor Robert Kuttner. The fact that Bannon spoke to a magazine aligned with the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party got people’s attention. But what likely got Bannon fired were his comments that there was no military solution to the North Korean nuclear crisis. The remark sent the stock market tanking. If Trump understands one thing, it’s money, and he approved Bannon’s dismissal. That night, Bannon left his office for the last time, taking nothing with him.

When news of Bannon’s exit broke on the afternoon of Friday, August 18, he was already back to work at Breitbart’s Washington headquarters, a stately row house blocks from the Capitol known as the Breitbart Embassy. Staffers showered him with a hero’s welcome. “I don’t think Trump understands how dangerous Steve is. He just runs in and conquers shit, like Charlemagne,” a Breitbart journalist told me at the time.

That night, Bannon signaled to Trump he was going to continue the wars he waged in the West Wing from the outside. “Now I’m free. I’ve got my hands back on my weapons,” he boasted to the Weekly Standard.

Bannon’s campaign role model may surprise you. “It’s the Obama model,” he told me. He wants to bring together a new coalition of evangelicals, libertarians, pro-gun activists, and union members. “Remember when Rudy Giuliani came up on that stage in 2008 and starting mocking Obama and said, ‘What’s a community organizer’? And the whole place roared in laughter. Well, we now know—it’s somebody that can kick your ass.”

But Bannon’s campaign against McConnell complicated his already complicated relationship with Trump. In early September, 60 Minutes asked the White House to book Trump for an interview for the season premiere, but after Bannon did an interview with Charlie Rose, sources said Trump didn’t agree to do it, in part because he didn’t want to follow in Bannon’s footsteps. Breitbart attacked Trump for cutting a deal with Democrats to raise the debt ceiling. In the Alabama Senate primary, Bannon backed Moore while Trump supported Luther Strange. During a phone call in October, according to a source, Bannon and Trump debated for 15 minutes about who should get credit for Arizona Senator Jeff Flake’s decision to retire. The following month, perhaps as an act of trolling, Bannon reportedly encouraged Trump’s nemesis, billionaire Mark Cuban, to run for president—as a Democrat.

Bannon’s own transformation from political adviser to a quasi-politician has also transformed Breitbart; it’s become a site that promotes his campaign. On the day of Bannon’s Tokyo speech, his name appeared in seven different headlines on the homepage. In December, Bannon signed a deal to host Breitbart’s daily satellite radio show. His message, however, isn’t quarantined inside the right-wing media bubble. That’s because Bannon has a canny ability to cultivate mainstream journalists. My own experience with him illustrates how he operates.

In August 2015, I received an e-mail from Kurt Bardella, who at the time handled Breitbart’s public relations. “Thought I’d reach out and just say that if you ever wanted to talk with Bannon on background, I think he’d def be willing to touch base with you,” Bardella wrote. I was shocked by his note—and also intrigued. For the previous three years, Bannon had tried to destroy my professional reputation. During this time I was researching a biography of the late Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes. A legendary paranoiac, Ailes waged an elaborate campaign to discredit my book that included having me followed by private detectives and commissioning a 400-page dossier about my life. Bannon and Breitbart played a crucial role in the effort. He worked out of Fox News headquarters strategizing with Ailes about how to attack my book. Breitbart published many thousands of words about me, at turns calling me a “Soros-backed attack dog,” “harasser,” “stalker,” and “Jayson Blair on steroids,” a reference to the former New York Times fabulist. After one Breitbart article, my wife and I received a threatening phone call at home. We called the police.

A few days after Bardella e-mailed, I met Bannon for lunch at the Bryant Park Grill in Midtown Manhattan. I found him at an outdoor table, wearing an untucked shirt and cargo shorts. His hair was a tangled nest of platinum gray and it looked like he hadn’t shaved in days. If I didn’t know him I’d have thought he just rolled off a bus at the Port Authority. Bannon shook my hand graciously. He told me he enjoyed my book on Ailes. What about all the hit pieces he published? “Ha! Those were love taps, dude. Just business.” We proceeded to have a highly entertaining lunch swapping media and political gossip.

As much as I wanted to loathe Bannon—the Breitbart attacks were genuinely terrifying—I found myself liking him. He was strange and charismatic and slightly unhinged, and he possessed a sophisticated and encyclopedic knowledge of the modern political-media landscape. He personally knew the players, from the on-air talent and programming executives to the candidates and billionaire donors. And he was a gifted talker. He exaggerated but didn’t quite lie (at least most of the time). And during conversations he fired off laser-accurate descriptions of famous people that would make the best insult comics proud. In that way, he was like another New York blowhard: Trump.

“Later Nazi! Have fun at your Klan rally!”

A kid in a green hoodie was heckling Bannon as he led his entourage through baggage claim at John F. Kennedy Airport after touching down from Tokyo.

“That’s what I call a New York good morning,” Bannon said, flashing a satisfied grin.

The siege on Roy Moore’s campaign continued. The previous day, Ivanka Trump told the Associated Press “there’s a special place in hell for people who prey on children.” Bannon was incredulous she’d make the comment. “What about the allegations about her dad and that 13-year-old?” he said, referring to the California woman who alleged Trump raped her when she was a teen (the suit has since been dropped.) “Ivanka was a fount of bad advice during the campaign.”

Bannon was eager to get Trump on the phone. He told me Trump’s presidency was at stake. His theory was that, if McConnell succeeded in forcing Moore out, it would open Trump up to having every sexual harassment and assault allegation against him relitigated in the court of public opinion. “It’s a firebreak,” he later said.

Bannon’s eyes were circled with dark rings and his ruddy nose was approaching Rudolph-level red. But on his campaign schedule there was no time to slow down. We climbed into a pair of black Suburbans and rolled out.

An hour later Bannon boarded a Hawker 850 private jet at Teterboro Airport bound for Florida. He was due in Palm Beach to deliver a keynote speech at Restoration Weekend, the annual gathering of right-wingers hosted by former New-Leftist-turned-conservative provocateur David Horowitz. “The thing about Restoration Weekend,” Bannon had told me earlier, “is you got a lot of Jewish Palm Beach matrons who used to be superhot. They were all left-wing in the 60s. That was before they locked down successful Palm Beach business guys. Now they’re hardcore. You half expect them to throw their panties at Horowitz. They’re all Trump people.”

A pilot climbed aboard and sealed up the door. “We got a planeload of patriots,” he said.

The engines whirred, and as we taxied towards the runway, Bannon explained why, despite his competition with Trump, he needs to defend him at all costs. “Trump’s at war with the permanent political class in D.C. I have this whole theory about the nullification of the 2016 election by the Democrats, the opposition party and the Republican establishment,” he said. “Can you believe they had that Senate committee meeting that talked about the president’s ability to use nuclear weapons? It’s unreal!”

Once we’re airborne I asked Bannon how the presidency had changed Trump. “He’s much more moderate,” Bannon said, sipping a Fiji water. “He’s an accommodationist. Trump’s tendency is to always get Maggie Haberman in there. He reads The New York Times. To him that’s the paper of record.” For a presidency defined by Twitter, Bannon said Trump has a limited grasp of new media. “He doesn’t go online. That’s a huge thing. I mean Orrin Hatch”—who’s 83—“goes online! Trump reads printouts.”

Bannon paused and looked out the window. “I was born down there,” he said, pointing at the hazy Virginia coastline below.

Bannon’s blue-collar upbringing and conservative Catholic faith undergird his populist ideas. He argues that his platform of economic nationalism has been misrepresented by critics that label it racist. Cutting immigration and erecting trade barriers will help people of color by tightening the labor market, thereby raising wages. In the White House, he argued to increase tax rates on the wealthy and has problems with the G.O.P. tax plan (although he ultimately supports it). Bannon also argued to end the country’s decades-long entanglement in Afghanistan and spend the money at home. “You could rebuild America! Do you understand what Baltimore and St. Louis and these places would look like?” And he told me he thinks the government should regulate Google and Facebook like public utilities. “They’re too powerful. I want to make sure their data is a public trust. The stocks would drop two-thirds in value.”

Raheem Kassam, a former adviser to Nigel Farage who now edits Breitbart London and travels in Bannon’s entourage, told me, “I wouldn’t be surprised to see Bannon and Bernie campaigning together in a couple years.”

There’s not much evidence that that notion is more than a fantasy. Not only because of Bannon’s pariah status on the left, but also because it’s difficult to reconcile Bannon’s homilies about helping minorities with a worldview that America is a Western European, Judeo-Christian culture that must close its borders and build a wall at a time when the immigrants are brown-skinned people. “My theory, our philosophy, is that we’re more than an economy. It’s one of the reasons the Republicans and the Paul Ryans of the world and Paul Singers got off track with this Ayn Rand Austrian economics where everything’s about the economy. Well, it’s not the economy. We’re a civic society with borders and values.”

When he’s talking up the virtues of strengthening civic bonds he sounds like Robert Putnam. But Bannon’s Breitbart mobilizes its readers by taunting the left, and can often seem to be the entirety of his program. Rage-stoking is not populism, and politicians Bannon has backed mainly seem interested in pissing off liberals, rather than passing legislation that fundamentally makes America a more equitable society. After all, before Bannon found Trump, there was Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann.

Bannon said his candidates aren’t wing nuts, they’re just regular people. “They’re not blow-dries,” he said. “I don’t want the Marco Rubios that have been in the R.N.C. since they were 9 years old with a briefcase. It’s all bullshit. Our guys can be a little rough around the edges. They’re gonna say some crazy shit, O.K. You know why? Because people are going to identify this guy’s real and he’s a fighter.”

Bannon had been on the radio for nearly two hours when I walked into his Breakers hotel suite in Palm Beach. The room had been turned into a makeshift studio. A soundboard sat on a side table while CNN played on mute. During a commercial break, Bannon sipped black coffee and scanned e-mails on his BlackBerry. Then he was back. “It’s November 17 in the year of our Lord, two thousand and seventeen, as dawn breaks over the greatest country in mankind’s history,” he boomed into a headset. “It is a blistering news day, a lot of news out of Alabama.”

Breitbart’s SiriusXM show gives Bannon a powerful megaphone. And all morning, he was using it to push a narrative that Moore was the victim of an establishment plot to stop his populist campaign.

He had no evidence that Moore’s accusers were politically motivated—in fact, several of them are Trump voters. But it didn’t matter. At that moment, it seemed that Bannon’s tactic was working—as Moore denounced his accusers, his poll numbers went up. After conversations with the White House, Trump came around to endorsing Moore, forcing the Republican Party to reverse itself and support him. In the days leading up to the December 12 election, it looked like Moore would defeat Doug Jones.

Bannon flew to Alabama to celebrate the victory. But when he saw the exit polls, he told me he knew the night wouldn’t go his way. “The percentage of write-ins was at 1.5 percent. I looked at the pollster right there and I said he’s going to lose this,” Bannon recalled. He blamed McConnell for orchestrating Alabama’s senior Senator Richard Shelby to announce on CNN on the Sunday before the election he didn’t vote for Moore. “That was the inflection point,” Bannon said.

Moore’s loss further damaged Bannon’s standing with Trump. “The president was annoyed Steve lost the Alabama seat to a Democrat because Steve thought he was a big shot,” a White House official told me. Meanwhile, Bannon’s critics gleefully framed Alabama as proof that Bannon’s political acumen has been vastly overstated. “Mr. Bannon is for losers,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote. Steven Law, the head of the McConnell-aligned Senate Leadership Fund, released a statement: “Not only did Steve Bannon cost us a critical Senate seat in one of the most Republican states in the country, but he also dragged the president of the United States into his fiasco.”

Two days after Moore’s defeat, I met Bannon for breakfast in New York before he headed back to Tokyo to give another anti-China speech. A bearded bodyguard sat nearby with a pistol tucked into his waistband. Despite the setback, Bannon was in high spirits. “Dude you don’t know the firestorm that’s coming,” he said, picking over a crumb muffin and sipping coffee. “The civil war will go to an even higher, more intense level.” Bannon said McConnell, in his machinations against Moore, revealed that G.O.P. elites are aligned with Democrats against the deplorables. “The G.O.P. establishment would rather have control and give up seats to the radical progressive left.”

He insisted his Senate candidates in 2018 will be fully vetted to avoid another Moore. He pointed out Montana State Auditor Matt Rosendale, West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, and Kevin Nicholson, an Iraq combat veteran with degrees from Dartmouth and Harvard Business School, who’s running in Wisconsin. As we talked, news broke that Paul Ryan is possibly not going to run for re-election in 2018. Bannon saw this as another victory, a sign that the field was tilting in his favor. Bannon said his allies in the House Freedom Caucus will have “a huge role” in picking the next speaker.

And Trump, having flirted with the establishment, has come home. Since Charlottesville, Trump has governed almost exclusively for Bannon’s base. For all the tsuris Bannon causes the president, the two need each other. “He momentarily has lapses when he’s convinced by people around him in the White House to do ridiculous things like support Big Luther Strange, another genius move by Jared,” Bannon said. “But look at how many things he approved right after Alabama to get us back on board. I think the establishment has to understand something. Their day of running the Republican Party is over.”

Moore’s defeat could well be the Waterloo of Bannon’s movement, though it’s far too soon to tell. In his view of history, it’s always 1933, but he projects an unrelenting optimism about his own future and those of his projects. It’s a salesman’s gift, one he shares with Trump. Create enough chaos, and the world will re-align. Or it won’t.

As the White House sinks deeper into scandal, along with Roy Moore’s crushing defeat, it’s hard not to see Trump and Bannon as survivors huddled together on a shrinking spit of dry land. Meanwhile, with 2018 looming, even Bannon recognizes the Democrats’ growing strength. “The reason the Democrats did so well in Virginia is because they’re angry. Anger gets people to do things. I admire that,” he said.

During one conversation this fall, Bannon seemed to accept that his campaign might not succeed. But he said people are mistaken if they equate losing elections with failure. “I’m not a political operative,” he said, “I’m a revolutionary.”

The fact that anyone listens to him or does his bidding is incredible. And terrifying.

[GrumpyGran]

58 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Just the thought of this makes me go : "“I Have Power”: Is Steve Bannon Running for President?"

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Around the time Donald Trump took off from the Philippines aboard Air Force One at the end of his 12-day Asia tour, Stephen K. Bannon touched down at Tokyo International Airport. It was the evening of November 14, and the president’s former chief strategist flew to Japan to deliver a hard-edged anti-China speech at a conference for human-rights activists. “I’m not really a human-rights guy,” he told me as we boarded the plane in New York. “But this is a chance to talk to them about populism.”

A polite airline representative whisked Bannon and his entourage through the terminal. Tej Gill, a goateed ex-Navy SEAL security guard with tattoo-sleeved arms, stuck close by Bannon’s side. “I’ve had a couple assassination plots,” Bannon told me, “I got it from an intelligence source.” They were trailed by a short, barrel-chested ex-SEAL in a knit beanie cap, by a videographer named Dan Fleuette who co-wrote Bannon’s documentary Clinton Cash, and a redheaded body man, Bannon’s 26-year-old nephew, Sean. In moments we were escorted through a V.I.P. immigration lane and into an elevator that descends to an underground garage, where a motorcade awaited. Bannon climbed into the back seat of a black BMW 7 Series and sped off towards the Peninsula hotel to catch a few hours of sleep. The rest of the staff followed in a pair of minivans.

The next morning, Bannon was pacing in front of a packed auditorium in a squat building on the grounds of the Olympic Village built for the ‘64 Tokyo Summer Games. “I feel like I’m at a Trump rally!” he said, pointing out a young woman sporting a Make America Great Again hat. For the next hour, Bannon held court, microphone in hand. “The elites in our country have been under a very false premise that as China became more prosperous and economically developed that there would be an underlying increase in democracy,” he said. “What we found out over the last decade is the exact opposite has happened.” He speculated that dark unseen forces are at work. “The question has to be asked: Are the elites in the United States that stupid? Did people actually sit there year after year after year and not understand what was going on? Or was something else going on? Were these elites either bought off or did they just look the other way? That question is going to have to be answered.”

Bannon’s core message—a clueless, corrupt ruling class (many of whom, of course, reside in blue states) has sold out American workers to a hegemonic China, and it’s up to a vanguard to take our country back before the world tips toward cataclysm—is the same, whether he’s speaking to Alabamian Roy Moore voters or Chinese dissidents. But he adjusts his vocabulary to fit his audience—here in Tokyo, he was in full prophetic mode.

Bannon is a voracious reader, who sometimes stays up until dawn powering through books, obscure journals, and news articles, scrawling notes in a pocket-size green diary as he goes (during our trip he used downtime to read a Robespierre biography). This was evident as he freestyled about Hillary Clinton, the opposition party media, artificial intelligence, Thucydides, Hollywood, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, the opioid crisis, Boeing jets, Brown University, Brexit, the Cloud, the Civil War, the Peloponnesian War, the American Revolution, the Great Depression, Churchill, Napoleon, Hitler, and J.D. Vance. “It’s not going to be O.K.,” he concluded ominously. “The world is on a knife’s edge. We have what I call a long, dark valley ahead of us, like the 1930s.”

The message is that the world needs saving—but who’s going to save it? Looking around, it’s not hard to see Steve Bannon’s best answer. Four months ago, Bannon was a supporting player, with a whiteboard and telephone. Now he’s made himself the star—not only the chief strategist but in many ways the candidate, the frontman of his own movement. With his motorcade, retinue of advisers, and security men, his Asia trip was a mirror of President Trump’s.

When he left the White House in August, Bannon said, “the Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over.” In private, Bannon told people he was disillusioned with Trump’s shambolic governing style. Trump, in turn, sees Bannon as a self-promoter. “The president views Steve as just a guy who works for him,” a White House official said.

While the two men harbor contempt for each other that can ignite into rage, they can’t quit each other, either. Since Bannon left the West Wing, he’s had five phone calls with Trump, most initiated by the president, according to the White House official. “The few conversations Steve and the president have had since he was fired this summer have primarily been opportunities for Steve to beg for his job back,” said the White House official. A Bannon spokesperson countered, “anyone around Steve since he left the White House can see he is very happy now out of the White House!”

Bannon insists that his real opponent is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. “The G.O.P. establishment, as personified by Mitch McConnell, has not done a good job supporting the president’s agenda,” Bannon told me. During a recent speech he declared a “season of war” on the G.O.P. and he is drafting insurgent candidates to challenge seven of eight G.O.P. senators up for election in 2018. Bannon’s war is just ramping up. Through his nonprofit, Government Accountability Institute, he’s planning to release a Clinton Cash-style book that takes aim at the G.O.P. establishment in general and McConnell in particular.

The primary insurgents Bannon has tried to recruit, dubbed “The League of Extraordinary Candidates” by Breitbart, is a ragtag band including former Arizona State Senator Kelli Ward; Blackwater founder Erik Prince; mega-donor Foster Friess; and Danny Tarkanian, son of U.N.L.V. basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian, all of whom inarguably fall far short of Bannon’s stated populist principles.

And now Roy Moore’s Alabama Senate candidacy was threatening to implode. When I met Bannon at John F. Kennedy Airport, an hour before boarding the Tokyo flight, he’d turned the first-class lounge into a makeshift war room. A few days earlier, The Washington Post published allegations that Moore had pursued romantic and sexual relationships with teenagers in the 1970s while he was an assistant district attorney. One woman told the paper he molested her when she was 14—and he was 32. Moore’s initial response had been a disaster. He came across as evasive during a radio interview with Sean Hannity. A chorus of Senate Republicans, led by McConnell, were calling on Moore to end his campaign; the Republican National Committee severed all fund-raising ties. Most worrisome for Bannon, the White House put out a statement that Moore should leave the race if the allegations were true.

The situation, and the various arrayed forces for and against Moore, closely resembled two earlier crises Bannon had weathered with Trump: the release of the Billy Bush tape and the aftermath of the white nationalist march in Charlottesville. In both, Trump ultimately followed Bannon’s tactical playbook—doubling down at all costs—with large success in the first instance and a highly questionable result in the second.

Bannon huddled over his BlackBerry firing off e-mails to Breitbart reporters he’d dispatched to Alabama to discredit the Post story. “I got my two best guys down there,” he said while waiting for Moore campaign chairman Bill Armistead to call. Bannon’s orders: deny, deny, deny. “One of the things I realized during the campaign is that, like in the military, it all comes down to one or two decisions in the heat of battle,” he said. “You have to double down.” In Moore, he knew he had a less capable candidate. (His first choice had been Alabama congressman Mo Brooks.) “I’m gonna tell Judge Moore to do his thing,” Bannon said. “They’re not cut out for this, though.”

Bannon let the White House know that he wanted Trump to back Moore. But Trump seemed reluctant at first. White House political director Bill Stepien reportedly told Trump to stay out of the race. The conventional wisdom was becoming that Moore was done, and that Bannon was wrong this time.

Bannon’s frenetic pace is part of his strategy. “I realized if you’re not out there for the hobbits, you’re not in their lives,” Bannon said, using his affectionate moniker for Trump voters. During the week I traveled with him from New York to Tokyo to South Florida, for what was Bannon’s first major profile since leaving the White House, he made a half dozen speeches to conservative groups, hosted Breitbart’s talk-radio show, and helped market a new biography Bannon: Always the Rebel. Inside the right-wing echo chamber, Bannon is lionized as a conquering folk hero. Well-wishers flock to snap selfies, press the flesh. At one event I chatted with an elderly man waiting his turn on the receiving line. “If I could ask him one question, it would be, why aren’t you president?’”

That has at least been a passing thought. In October, Bannon called an adviser and said he would consider running for president if Trump doesn’t run for re-election in 2020. Which Bannon has told people is a realistic possibility. In private conversations since leaving the White House, Bannon said Trump only has a 30 percent chance of serving out his term, whether he’s impeached or removed by the Cabinet invoking the 25th amendment. That prospect seemed to become more likely in early December when special counsel Robert Mueller secured a plea deal from former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Bannon has also remarked on the toll the office has taken on Trump, telling advisers his former boss has “lost a step.” “He’s like an 11-year-old child,” Bannon joked to a friend in November.

While Bannon praised Trump during our conversations—he said he’s the best orator since William Jennings Bryan—he doesn’t deny he was unhappy in the White House. “It was always a job,” he said. “I realize in hindsight I was just a staffer, and I’m not a good staffer. I had influence, I had a lot of influence, but just influence.” He told me he now feels liberated. “I have power. I can actually drive things in a certain direction.”

Not surprisingly, the idea of Bannon as a political figure, let alone a presidential candidate, inspires ridicule and venom from the Republican establishment. The Wall Street Journal editorial page called Bannon’s roster of candidates a bunch of “cranks and outliers.” Former McConnell chief of staff Josh Holmes said Bannon is a “white supremacist.” Stuart Stevens, a veteran of five Republican presidential campaigns, told me that Bannon is “an odd, strangely repulsive figure who is trying to use the political process to work through personal issues of anger and frustration.” He added, “like many people in their first campaign, he confused his candidate winning with the fantasy voters supported him.”

A prominent Republican described Bannon’s crusade as a vanity exercise doomed to fail. “I think there was a lot of rage when he was in the White House,” the Republican said. “Steve had to subsume his ego to Donald, who Steve thinks is dumb and crazy. With Steve, it’s not about building new things—it’s about destroying the old. I’m not sure he knows what he wants.” As evidence, he pointed out the recent Virginia governor’s race, where Republican Ed Gillespie got crushed by nine points running on a Bannon-esque platform defending Confederate monuments and inciting fear over illegal immigrant crime. “The issues didn’t just fail, they failed miserably,” the Republican said.

Bannon’s response to all this criticism is a variation on his personal motto: Honey badger don’t give a shit. “I don’t give a fuck,” he told me when I visited him one morning at the Bryant Park Hotel. “You can call me anything you want. Do you think I give a shit? I literally don’t care.”

A few hours after the Tokyo speech, Bannon’s security chief Tej Gill escorted me and a group of Japanese television journalists up to Bannon’s suite. Bannon was padding around the room in a black blazer over two collared shirts, quaffing a can of Pocari Sweat, a popular Japanese energy drink. “Dude, the biggest story out there has got to be Alwaleed and Murdoch. It’s a monster story,” he said, referring to the billionaire Saudi financier, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who’d been arrested on orders from Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Until a few years ago, Alwaleed was the largest non-Murdoch voting shareholder of News Corp. “Uhhh, note to self: Alwaleed’s like the 25th richest guy in the world, and he’s going to have his head on the end of the scimitar! Rupert Murdoch does not exist unless this guy was stroking him checks in the 90s.”

Bannon’s nephew Sean cradled a phone asking room service to send up cans of Red Bull, but was informed the hotel doesn’t have any. He asked for Cokes and coffee instead. “We have to get him revved,” he told me.

Bannon was revved already. “The Bush presidency is the most destructive presidency in history. James Buchanan included. It’s not even close,” Bannon said when I brought up the Bushes. “And by the way,” he continued unprompted, “I haven’t even gotten to 9/11. I mean, 9/11! Think about if 9/11 had happened on Trump’s watch. We would have gotten 100 percent of the blame by the Bush guys. And they said, well, we just got here. What do you mean you just got here? That’s what gets me about them coming after Trump. I really detest them. I mean, the old man is a pervert. He’s a pervert. Grabbing these girls and grabbing their asses?”

A few minutes later, the Japanese crew was ready to start taping, but Bannon didn’t like the camera position. “I got the most stunning shot in Japan right here and you want to shoot a wall?” he said, pointing at the postcard view of the Imperial Palace out the window. The cameraman struggled in broken English to explain that shooting in that direction wasn’t possible because of the lighting. “Then why don’t we just go to a Marriott,” Bannon grumbled.

The producers began moving the cameras. Since we arrived in Tokyo, Roy Moore’s prospects had worsened. News outlets reported overnight that Moore had been banned from a shopping mall in the 80s because he cruised for teens. “He’s denied it,” Bannon said. He pulled out his BlackBerry and showed me an e-mail from Breitbart reporter Aaron Klein. “Klein’s on something big,” he said. I catch a glimpse of the e-mail, it said something about the stepson of one of Moore’s accusers claiming she’d made up the allegations for money.

Despite the new headlines, Bannon was confident that his strategy was working. He sensed he had a deep understanding of the electorate. “This is Alabama,” he explained. “The age of consent is 16 for a reason.”

Bannon’s conviction was forged from surviving the darkest moments of the 2016 campaign. “This is exactly like Billy Bush weekend,” he said. “So I’ve heard it all and seen it all.” During our conversations, Bannon proudly told me multiple times how he counseled Trump not to back down after the Access Hollywood tape leaked. He recalled how then-R.N.C. Chairman Reince Priebus told Trump he would lose in a historic landslide if he stayed on the ticket. “It was such an overreaction! I’ve seen the same cast of characters all run for the exits, right? You gotta remember, on Saturday morning of Billy Bush weekend, he tried to pitch Trump to get off the ticket. I’m like, are you insane?”

A producer motioned that it was time to start the interview. Bannon was pleased the camera was positioned as he requested. He excused himself and sat down with a fresh cup of black coffee.

Billy Bush Weekend cemented Bannon’s bond with Trump. But when Trump became Mr. President-Elect, on another plane, the relationship became much more complicated. Trump was deeply galled that the media portrayed Bannon as the wizard behind the curtain. “I like Steve, but you have to remember he was not involved in my campaign until very late,” Trump told the New York Post. “I had already beaten all the senators and all the governors, and I didn’t know Steve. I’m my own strategist.” (In fact, Trump had known Bannon since 2011). In July, Bloomberg Businessweek journalist Joshua Green published a best-selling book, Devil’s Bargain, that gave a substantial amount of credit for Trump’s win and overall vision to Bannon. Trump tweeted in response: “I love reading about all of the ‘geniuses’ who were so instrumental in my election success. Problem is, most don’t exist. #Fake News! MAGA . . .”

Meanwhile, Trumpworld, which had been unified by the shared goal of defeating Hillary Clinton, cleaved into warring factions within hours of Trump’s unexpected win. On election night, Bannon said he disagreed with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump over the content of Trump’s victory speech. Kushner and Ivanka wanted it to strike a tone of unity, whereas Bannon wanted to keep up the attack. “I didn’t think it was the right time to talk about uniting,” he said. “I think some of that stuff comes off as phony.”

The battle intensified in the White House. On one side was a group of advisers Bannon dismissively dubbed “the Democrats,” comprising Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Gary Cohn, and Dina Powell. On the other were the nationalists: Bannon, Jeff Sessions, Stephen Miller, Sebastian Gorka, and Peter Navarro (Kushner’s camp called them “the crazies” or “Breitbart”).

The nationalists prevailed in the early days of the administration, as Trump signed a flurry of executive orders on trade and regulations from a list of campaign promises Bannon had scrawled on a whiteboard in his West Wing office. “You had to be a disruptor and keep people on their back heels. That’s why we were doing three E.O.s a day,” Bannon explained. “I told Reince that if you slow down, they’ll pick us apart with the palace intrigue stuff, which is what they really want to write.”

On the afternoon of Friday, January 27, the White House announced a travel ban barring immigrants from eight Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States, including all Syrian refugees. It sparked protests at airports nationwide. Bannon explained this was by design. “Why did we drop the travel ban on a Friday evening? Because the resistance is our friend,” he told me. “Our thing is to throw gasoline on the resistance. I love it. When they”—the Democrats—“talk about identity politics, they’re playing into our hands. Because you can’t win [elections] on that.” I asked Bannon about the charges he’s cultivated white supremacist groups. “These guys are beyond clowns,” he said. “It’s the left media that makes them relevant because 25 of them show up, and it’s like a hundred cameras. They’re losers.”

The backlash to the travel ban proved to be a political and legal disaster for the White House and Bannon’s standing in it. As courts blocked the ban and Trump’s poll numbers sank to historic lows, Bannon’s enemies, led by Kushner, moved to marginalize him. (Bannon aided Kushner’s cause by installing himself on the National Security Council, which infuriated Trump, the White House official said.) To Bannon, a former Naval officer who worked his way into Harvard Business School and Goldman Sachs, Kushner was a callow elitist in way over his head. “He doesn’t know anything about the hobbits or the deplorables,” Bannon said. “The railhead of all bad decisions is the same railhead: Javanka.” According to a person close to Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law viewed Bannon as a leaker at best, and a racist at worst.

Any chance of Bannon and Kushner salvaging a working relationship collapsed over Kushner’s role in the decision that many see as the possible linchpin of Trump’s downfall. In early May, Bannon and Kushner tangled over Trump’s plan to fire F.B.I. director James Comey.

Over the weekend of May 6 and 7, Bannon was in Washington when Kushner, Ivanka, and Stephen Miller accompanied Trump to his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, where the decision to fire Comey was finalized. The White House announced Comey’s dismissal on the afternoon of Tuesday, May 9. Bannon was furious when he found out. “It’s the dumbest political decision in modern political history, bar none. A self-inflicted wound of massive proportions,” he later said. “Especially in light of recent news, for the country, the president’s best decision was firing James Comey. His second best decision was firing Steve Bannon, bar none,” a White House official said.

Bannon believed the Russia collusion case was meritless, but he blamed Kushner for taking meetings during the campaign that gave the appearance the Trump team sought Putin’s help. “He’s taking meetings with Russians to get additional stuff. This tells you everything about Jared,” Bannon told me. “They were looking for the picture of Hillary Clinton taking the bag of cash from Putin. That’s his maturity level.”

“Steve Bannon may regret not being in the White House anymore, but that is not an excuse for him peddling false stories about Jared or anyone else,” said Kushner’s attorney Abbe Lowell.

The blowback pitched the West Wing into another crisis. On Wednesday, Bannon was meeting with chief of staff Priebus in Priebus’s office when Kushner walked in.

“We have a communications problem,” Kushner said.

“No we don’t,” Bannon shot back. “We have a decision-making problem. We make a lot of bad decisions, and the bad decisions have to do with you.”

“It got uglier from there,” Bannon later recalled.

“As stated a dozen times, after Jared was told of the decision that had been made to fire director Comey, he supported it,” Lowell said.

Comey’s firing triggered the outcome Bannon was worried about: the appointment of a special counsel. Bannon threw himself into setting up a war room to contain Robert Mueller’s investigation. “Goldman Sachs teaches one thing: don’t invent shit. Take something that works and make it better,” Bannon said, explaining how he consulted with Bill Clinton’s former lawyer Lanny Davis about how the Clintons responded to Ken Starr’s probe. “We were so disciplined. You guys don’t have that,” Bannon recalls Davis advising him. “That always haunted me when he said that,” Bannon told me. Bannon said he grew increasingly disillusioned that Trump wasn’t taking the investigation seriously. He told Trump the establishment was trying to nullify the election and he was in danger of being impeached.

The relationship between Kushner and Bannon worsened through the spring. At one point, Bannon said, Trump called an Oval Office meeting to broker peace. Attending were Bannon, Kushner, and Ivanka Trump. She blamed Bannon for the leaks.

“She’s the queen of leaks,” Bannon argued back.

“You’re a fucking liar!” Ivanka said.

Trump tried to adjudicate, but the meeting did little to diffuse tensions.

Bannon was also fighting to save one of his closest allies in the administration. Since March, Trump had been irate at Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia investigation. On the morning of Monday, July 24, hours before Kushner was scheduled to testify in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Trump called Sessions “beleaguered” in a tweet about his failure to investigate Hillary Clinton. “He hung Sessions out to dry to cover Jared, and the media never covered Jared, and they covered Sessions,” Bannon later said. (A White House official denied this.)

The next day, Bannon said he called Sessions into a meeting. He knew Sessions had already tried to resign once. “Look, I have a question for you,” Bannon said. “Is there any doubt in your mind that it was Divine Providence, the Hand of God that got us this victory?”

“No doubt,” Sessions replied.

“You’re sure?” Bannon continued.

“There’s no doubt.”

“Then where’s your commitment here?”

“I will never leave,” Sessions assured him. “I may get fired, but I’ll never leave.” (A Justice Department spokesperson did not comment.)

By this point it was Bannon who was on the way out. In late July, Trump replaced Priebus with John Kelly and gave the retired four-star Marine general a stated mandate to bring the warring West Wing factions to heel. Among Kelly’s first orders of business was firing communications director Anthony Scaramucci. Another, according to White House officials: telling Bannon he needed to go. Bannon told me he always planned to leave by the one-year anniversary of joining Trump’s campaign, and he told Kelly on August 7 he wanted to resign.

Whatever the case, Bannon said he knew Trump might try to control the narrative of his departure, so he told Kelly not to tell Trump. But later that night, Bannon said Trump called him after learning of the decision from White House lawyer John Dowd. Bannon said he told Trump he wanted to attack his G.O.P. detractors from the outside. “I said the establishment is trying to nullify your election,” he recalls. “Forget the Democrats. We got our own thing with the three committees” investigating Russia collusion. According to Bannon, Trump was reluctant at first to let him leave. And the threat of Bannon turning Breitbart loose on Trump and his family loomed. “He was very nervous about it,” Bannon said. “He just fuckin’ knows I’m a junkyard dog, and I was pissed at the time.” Bannon said Trump told him he needed to think about it.

Trump’s instinct to stoke racial conflict delayed Bannon’s departure. During the weekend of August 12, neo-Nazis marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting “Jews will not replace us” to protest the removal of Confederate monuments. During clashes with counter-protesters, a white supremacist rammed his car into a crowd killing a 32-year-old woman named Heather Heyer and wounding dozens. Trump fanned outrage by blaming the violence on “many sides.” Kushner and Ivanka implored him to apologize, and other members of the administration contemplated resigning. Bannon told the president on a phone call that apologizing would never satisfy the critics. “I said it’s not enough and it’s too late. Nothing you can say could be good enough.”

As the uproar over Charlottesville grew louder, Bannon quietly plotted his next move. White House officials say Bannon tried calling Trump and lobbied members of Congress to pressure Trump to change his mind. On Thursday, August 17, he held a five-hour strategy meeting with billionaire mega-donor Robert Mercer at his Long Island estate. That same day, The American Prospect published a remarkable score-settling interview Bannon had given to its editor Robert Kuttner. The fact that Bannon spoke to a magazine aligned with the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party got people’s attention. But what likely got Bannon fired were his comments that there was no military solution to the North Korean nuclear crisis. The remark sent the stock market tanking. If Trump understands one thing, it’s money, and he approved Bannon’s dismissal. That night, Bannon left his office for the last time, taking nothing with him.

When news of Bannon’s exit broke on the afternoon of Friday, August 18, he was already back to work at Breitbart’s Washington headquarters, a stately row house blocks from the Capitol known as the Breitbart Embassy. Staffers showered him with a hero’s welcome. “I don’t think Trump understands how dangerous Steve is. He just runs in and conquers shit, like Charlemagne,” a Breitbart journalist told me at the time.

That night, Bannon signaled to Trump he was going to continue the wars he waged in the West Wing from the outside. “Now I’m free. I’ve got my hands back on my weapons,” he boasted to the Weekly Standard.

Bannon’s campaign role model may surprise you. “It’s the Obama model,” he told me. He wants to bring together a new coalition of evangelicals, libertarians, pro-gun activists, and union members. “Remember when Rudy Giuliani came up on that stage in 2008 and starting mocking Obama and said, ‘What’s a community organizer’? And the whole place roared in laughter. Well, we now know—it’s somebody that can kick your ass.”

But Bannon’s campaign against McConnell complicated his already complicated relationship with Trump. In early September, 60 Minutes asked the White House to book Trump for an interview for the season premiere, but after Bannon did an interview with Charlie Rose, sources said Trump didn’t agree to do it, in part because he didn’t want to follow in Bannon’s footsteps. Breitbart attacked Trump for cutting a deal with Democrats to raise the debt ceiling. In the Alabama Senate primary, Bannon backed Moore while Trump supported Luther Strange. During a phone call in October, according to a source, Bannon and Trump debated for 15 minutes about who should get credit for Arizona Senator Jeff Flake’s decision to retire. The following month, perhaps as an act of trolling, Bannon reportedly encouraged Trump’s nemesis, billionaire Mark Cuban, to run for president—as a Democrat.

Bannon’s own transformation from political adviser to a quasi-politician has also transformed Breitbart; it’s become a site that promotes his campaign. On the day of Bannon’s Tokyo speech, his name appeared in seven different headlines on the homepage. In December, Bannon signed a deal to host Breitbart’s daily satellite radio show. His message, however, isn’t quarantined inside the right-wing media bubble. That’s because Bannon has a canny ability to cultivate mainstream journalists. My own experience with him illustrates how he operates.

In August 2015, I received an e-mail from Kurt Bardella, who at the time handled Breitbart’s public relations. “Thought I’d reach out and just say that if you ever wanted to talk with Bannon on background, I think he’d def be willing to touch base with you,” Bardella wrote. I was shocked by his note—and also intrigued. For the previous three years, Bannon had tried to destroy my professional reputation. During this time I was researching a biography of the late Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes. A legendary paranoiac, Ailes waged an elaborate campaign to discredit my book that included having me followed by private detectives and commissioning a 400-page dossier about my life. Bannon and Breitbart played a crucial role in the effort. He worked out of Fox News headquarters strategizing with Ailes about how to attack my book. Breitbart published many thousands of words about me, at turns calling me a “Soros-backed attack dog,” “harasser,” “stalker,” and “Jayson Blair on steroids,” a reference to the former New York Times fabulist. After one Breitbart article, my wife and I received a threatening phone call at home. We called the police.

A few days after Bardella e-mailed, I met Bannon for lunch at the Bryant Park Grill in Midtown Manhattan. I found him at an outdoor table, wearing an untucked shirt and cargo shorts. His hair was a tangled nest of platinum gray and it looked like he hadn’t shaved in days. If I didn’t know him I’d have thought he just rolled off a bus at the Port Authority. Bannon shook my hand graciously. He told me he enjoyed my book on Ailes. What about all the hit pieces he published? “Ha! Those were love taps, dude. Just business.” We proceeded to have a highly entertaining lunch swapping media and political gossip.

As much as I wanted to loathe Bannon—the Breitbart attacks were genuinely terrifying—I found myself liking him. He was strange and charismatic and slightly unhinged, and he possessed a sophisticated and encyclopedic knowledge of the modern political-media landscape. He personally knew the players, from the on-air talent and programming executives to the candidates and billionaire donors. And he was a gifted talker. He exaggerated but didn’t quite lie (at least most of the time). And during conversations he fired off laser-accurate descriptions of famous people that would make the best insult comics proud. In that way, he was like another New York blowhard: Trump.

“Later Nazi! Have fun at your Klan rally!”

A kid in a green hoodie was heckling Bannon as he led his entourage through baggage claim at John F. Kennedy Airport after touching down from Tokyo.

“That’s what I call a New York good morning,” Bannon said, flashing a satisfied grin.

The siege on Roy Moore’s campaign continued. The previous day, Ivanka Trump told the Associated Press “there’s a special place in hell for people who prey on children.” Bannon was incredulous she’d make the comment. “What about the allegations about her dad and that 13-year-old?” he said, referring to the California woman who alleged Trump raped her when she was a teen (the suit has since been dropped.) “Ivanka was a fount of bad advice during the campaign.”

Bannon was eager to get Trump on the phone. He told me Trump’s presidency was at stake. His theory was that, if McConnell succeeded in forcing Moore out, it would open Trump up to having every sexual harassment and assault allegation against him relitigated in the court of public opinion. “It’s a firebreak,” he later said.

Bannon’s eyes were circled with dark rings and his ruddy nose was approaching Rudolph-level red. But on his campaign schedule there was no time to slow down. We climbed into a pair of black Suburbans and rolled out.

An hour later Bannon boarded a Hawker 850 private jet at Teterboro Airport bound for Florida. He was due in Palm Beach to deliver a keynote speech at Restoration Weekend, the annual gathering of right-wingers hosted by former New-Leftist-turned-conservative provocateur David Horowitz. “The thing about Restoration Weekend,” Bannon had told me earlier, “is you got a lot of Jewish Palm Beach matrons who used to be superhot. They were all left-wing in the 60s. That was before they locked down successful Palm Beach business guys. Now they’re hardcore. You half expect them to throw their panties at Horowitz. They’re all Trump people.”

A pilot climbed aboard and sealed up the door. “We got a planeload of patriots,” he said.

The engines whirred, and as we taxied towards the runway, Bannon explained why, despite his competition with Trump, he needs to defend him at all costs. “Trump’s at war with the permanent political class in D.C. I have this whole theory about the nullification of the 2016 election by the Democrats, the opposition party and the Republican establishment,” he said. “Can you believe they had that Senate committee meeting that talked about the president’s ability to use nuclear weapons? It’s unreal!”

Once we’re airborne I asked Bannon how the presidency had changed Trump. “He’s much more moderate,” Bannon said, sipping a Fiji water. “He’s an accommodationist. Trump’s tendency is to always get Maggie Haberman in there. He reads The New York Times. To him that’s the paper of record.” For a presidency defined by Twitter, Bannon said Trump has a limited grasp of new media. “He doesn’t go online. That’s a huge thing. I mean Orrin Hatch”—who’s 83—“goes online! Trump reads printouts.”

Bannon paused and looked out the window. “I was born down there,” he said, pointing at the hazy Virginia coastline below.

Bannon’s blue-collar upbringing and conservative Catholic faith undergird his populist ideas. He argues that his platform of economic nationalism has been misrepresented by critics that label it racist. Cutting immigration and erecting trade barriers will help people of color by tightening the labor market, thereby raising wages. In the White House, he argued to increase tax rates on the wealthy and has problems with the G.O.P. tax plan (although he ultimately supports it). Bannon also argued to end the country’s decades-long entanglement in Afghanistan and spend the money at home. “You could rebuild America! Do you understand what Baltimore and St. Louis and these places would look like?” And he told me he thinks the government should regulate Google and Facebook like public utilities. “They’re too powerful. I want to make sure their data is a public trust. The stocks would drop two-thirds in value.”

Raheem Kassam, a former adviser to Nigel Farage who now edits Breitbart London and travels in Bannon’s entourage, told me, “I wouldn’t be surprised to see Bannon and Bernie campaigning together in a couple years.”

There’s not much evidence that that notion is more than a fantasy. Not only because of Bannon’s pariah status on the left, but also because it’s difficult to reconcile Bannon’s homilies about helping minorities with a worldview that America is a Western European, Judeo-Christian culture that must close its borders and build a wall at a time when the immigrants are brown-skinned people. “My theory, our philosophy, is that we’re more than an economy. It’s one of the reasons the Republicans and the Paul Ryans of the world and Paul Singers got off track with this Ayn Rand Austrian economics where everything’s about the economy. Well, it’s not the economy. We’re a civic society with borders and values.”

When he’s talking up the virtues of strengthening civic bonds he sounds like Robert Putnam. But Bannon’s Breitbart mobilizes its readers by taunting the left, and can often seem to be the entirety of his program. Rage-stoking is not populism, and politicians Bannon has backed mainly seem interested in pissing off liberals, rather than passing legislation that fundamentally makes America a more equitable society. After all, before Bannon found Trump, there was Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann.

Bannon said his candidates aren’t wing nuts, they’re just regular people. “They’re not blow-dries,” he said. “I don’t want the Marco Rubios that have been in the R.N.C. since they were 9 years old with a briefcase. It’s all bullshit. Our guys can be a little rough around the edges. They’re gonna say some crazy shit, O.K. You know why? Because people are going to identify this guy’s real and he’s a fighter.”

Bannon had been on the radio for nearly two hours when I walked into his Breakers hotel suite in Palm Beach. The room had been turned into a makeshift studio. A soundboard sat on a side table while CNN played on mute. During a commercial break, Bannon sipped black coffee and scanned e-mails on his BlackBerry. Then he was back. “It’s November 17 in the year of our Lord, two thousand and seventeen, as dawn breaks over the greatest country in mankind’s history,” he boomed into a headset. “It is a blistering news day, a lot of news out of Alabama.”

Breitbart’s SiriusXM show gives Bannon a powerful megaphone. And all morning, he was using it to push a narrative that Moore was the victim of an establishment plot to stop his populist campaign.

He had no evidence that Moore’s accusers were politically motivated—in fact, several of them are Trump voters. But it didn’t matter. At that moment, it seemed that Bannon’s tactic was working—as Moore denounced his accusers, his poll numbers went up. After conversations with the White House, Trump came around to endorsing Moore, forcing the Republican Party to reverse itself and support him. In the days leading up to the December 12 election, it looked like Moore would defeat Doug Jones.

Bannon flew to Alabama to celebrate the victory. But when he saw the exit polls, he told me he knew the night wouldn’t go his way. “The percentage of write-ins was at 1.5 percent. I looked at the pollster right there and I said he’s going to lose this,” Bannon recalled. He blamed McConnell for orchestrating Alabama’s senior Senator Richard Shelby to announce on CNN on the Sunday before the election he didn’t vote for Moore. “That was the inflection point,” Bannon said.

Moore’s loss further damaged Bannon’s standing with Trump. “The president was annoyed Steve lost the Alabama seat to a Democrat because Steve thought he was a big shot,” a White House official told me. Meanwhile, Bannon’s critics gleefully framed Alabama as proof that Bannon’s political acumen has been vastly overstated. “Mr. Bannon is for losers,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote. Steven Law, the head of the McConnell-aligned Senate Leadership Fund, released a statement: “Not only did Steve Bannon cost us a critical Senate seat in one of the most Republican states in the country, but he also dragged the president of the United States into his fiasco.”

Two days after Moore’s defeat, I met Bannon for breakfast in New York before he headed back to Tokyo to give another anti-China speech. A bearded bodyguard sat nearby with a pistol tucked into his waistband. Despite the setback, Bannon was in high spirits. “Dude you don’t know the firestorm that’s coming,” he said, picking over a crumb muffin and sipping coffee. “The civil war will go to an even higher, more intense level.” Bannon said McConnell, in his machinations against Moore, revealed that G.O.P. elites are aligned with Democrats against the deplorables. “The G.O.P. establishment would rather have control and give up seats to the radical progressive left.”

He insisted his Senate candidates in 2018 will be fully vetted to avoid another Moore. He pointed out Montana State Auditor Matt Rosendale, West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, and Kevin Nicholson, an Iraq combat veteran with degrees from Dartmouth and Harvard Business School, who’s running in Wisconsin. As we talked, news broke that Paul Ryan is possibly not going to run for re-election in 2018. Bannon saw this as another victory, a sign that the field was tilting in his favor. Bannon said his allies in the House Freedom Caucus will have “a huge role” in picking the next speaker.

And Trump, having flirted with the establishment, has come home. Since Charlottesville, Trump has governed almost exclusively for Bannon’s base. For all the tsuris Bannon causes the president, the two need each other. “He momentarily has lapses when he’s convinced by people around him in the White House to do ridiculous things like support Big Luther Strange, another genius move by Jared,” Bannon said. “But look at how many things he approved right after Alabama to get us back on board. I think the establishment has to understand something. Their day of running the Republican Party is over.”

Moore’s defeat could well be the Waterloo of Bannon’s movement, though it’s far too soon to tell. In his view of history, it’s always 1933, but he projects an unrelenting optimism about his own future and those of his projects. It’s a salesman’s gift, one he shares with Trump. Create enough chaos, and the world will re-align. Or it won’t.

As the White House sinks deeper into scandal, along with Roy Moore’s crushing defeat, it’s hard not to see Trump and Bannon as survivors huddled together on a shrinking spit of dry land. Meanwhile, with 2018 looming, even Bannon recognizes the Democrats’ growing strength. “The reason the Democrats did so well in Virginia is because they’re angry. Anger gets people to do things. I admire that,” he said.

During one conversation this fall, Bannon seemed to accept that his campaign might not succeed. But he said people are mistaken if they equate losing elections with failure. “I’m not a political operative,” he said, “I’m a revolutionary.”

The fact that anyone listens to him or does his bidding is incredible. And terrifying.

Ugh, could not get all the way through it, but what a douchebag.

[Cartmann99]

@GreyhoundFan, we live in each other's heads, don't we?  I just posted a quote from this article about Bannon in the main Trump thread.

[GreyhoundFan]

19 minutes ago, Cartmann99 said:

@GreyhoundFan, we live in each other's heads, don't we?  I just posted a quote from this article about Bannon in the main Trump thread.

Great minds...

[onekidanddone]

1 hour ago, GrumpyGran said:

“I’m not really a human-rights guy,” he told me as we boarded the plane in New York.

Really? I never would have known if your hadn't told me Steveo.  

[GreyhoundFan]

[GreyhoundFan]

I love Alexandra Petri: "What is a Steve Bannon, anyway?"

Spoiler

Friends, I regret to say, I still remember Steve Bannon. This is, I am sure, a glitch.

I do not think I made him up. I could swear that, for a while, he was President Trump’s chief strategist. Trump has issued a statement to say that he was “a staffer” who worked for him “after I had already won the nomination,” which is, I guess, a way of describing your chief strategist, a person you put on the National Security Council, whose picture even appeared on the cover of Time magazine.

I am writing this in case anyone else remembers. I could swear he was a significant figure. He was always talking to the media, and other people talked about him, too. Anthony Scaramucci (also a real person, I think) said that he possessed a, er, flexibility and self-regard that most human beings lack. Would I have made that up? That seems like a mental image I wouldn’t choose to have. Similarly, if I were making someone up, I would have made him look more like Oscar Isaac.

I looked at “Saturday Night Live,” but they just had a man in a Grim Reaper suit, which seems like a weird choice and gave me no clues as to whether the physical form I remember Bannon possessing is the right one. It can’t be.

No, I am starting to doubt. On Wednesday news broke that he had given a quote to Michael Wolff calling the meeting in Trump Tower with ostensibly dirt-bearing Russians “treasonous” and insisting that soon, on television, Donald Trump Jr. would be cracked open like an egg.

So now he is vanishing. We are learning that Steve Bannon was a nobody, just like Paul Manafort and What’s His Name before him. The Trump White House was apparently staffed entirely by invisible men, nobodies and people who may have gotten coffee one or two times. The campaign was a ghost ship, manned by no human hand, that drifted into port with Trump strapped to the mast. There was no discernible strategy, just a roving cloud of nepotism, dog whistles and a few loose bats. Why bother with a chief strategist?

Trump boasted that he would surround himself with the best people, and he made Steve Bannon his chief strategist? Steve Bannon, who ran Breitbart, the alt-right platform. The Steve Bannon I remember was given to pronouncements like “Darkness is good” and “I am Thomas Cromwell in the court of the Tudors.” They thought this Steve Bannon was a man with the strategic capacity to play 18-dimensional chess and give six interviews a day.

This does sound made-up, to be quite frank with you. I am starting to doubt my own mental capacity.

Then again, Trump put Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, in charge of the Middle East, a fact I think is still true, so who knows!

Disappearances like Bannon’s happen regularly. One morning, you are the president’s chief confidant and blood brother. The next, it turns out that you were just a low-level staffer. Then it turns out that you didn’t even go there. You wake up one morning and your fingers are gone. Then your torso starts to fade away. Soon your screaming voice is only audible to AM radio listeners and the occasional Fox News viewer in that frozen moment after the channel has changed.

But I still remember some of them. Manafort. Flynn. Bannon. I could swear that they were real, and in charge of things, and everyone was very worried about it.

Probably someone is just fiddling with the timeline, trying to fix it. Maybe what I remember is a past that no longer exists. Maybe this is why people disappear from the White House memory at a rate previously reserved for Soviet official portraits or boardrooms on the Death Star.

If whatever traveler is doing this takes the whole presidency, then, go in peace. I would gladly forget Steve Bannon. I would gladly forget all of this.

That last paragraph is so very true.

[GreyhoundFan]

Interesting theories: "What in the world was Stephen Bannon thinking? 3 theories."

Spoiler

It has been about 24 hours since Michael Wolff's new book reported that Stephen K. Bannon accused Donald Trump Jr. of treason, among a number of other brutal quotes. And despite thorough denunciations from the White House, Bannon has yet to dispute any of it. In fact, he seems to be trying to make nice with Trump.

But why? Why would Bannon tell Wolff things that would clearly alienate the  president, especially when Bannon said today  that “nothing will ever come between us and President Trump and his agenda.” Why risk something, well, coming between you and that agenda?

Here are three theories.

1. Bannon was just spouting off.

It seems unlikely that a man who runs a media company would speak so loosely on the record with a reporter — especially after what happened with Anthony Scaramucci. But he has certainly shown before that he is frustrated with the direction of the White House. He even said upon his firing last year that “the Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over.” And Bannon's internal feuding with the “globalists” in the West Wing and even Trump's own family, especially Jared Kushner, has been the subject of plenty of reporting.

Maybe Wolff, who was apparently granted a stunning amount of access in the White House, simply caught Bannon in a vulnerable moment — or five.

2. Bannon is indeed trying to “burn it all down.”

This is the most conspiratorial option on this list — but it's the one to which the White House appears to subscribe.

At the end of Trump's remarkably strong statement against Bannon on Wednesday, he unmistakably accused Bannon of “simply seeking to burn it all down” — a reference to the country that Trump, in contrast, was trying to restore. That choice of words is one that has regularly been associated with Bannon, including by yours truly. Here's what I wrote last month when Bannon insulted Mitt Romney by saying that his children served on Mormon missions rather than in the military (despite Mormons being a small but vocal and devoted part of the GOP base):

Bannon's comments would seem not terribly helpful for Trump and his 2020 campaign. Trump struggled mightily with Mormon voters in 2016, and for a time it seemed as though he might even lose Utah because of the presence of a Mormon Utahn third-party candidate, Evan McMullin. . . .

And even apart from 2020 concerns, Romney is someone Trump may soon have to work with if Romney becomes a senator. In addition, Bannon's comments risk raising Trump's Vietnam deferments, which Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) seemed to raise recently (although he later denied that he was talking specifically about Trump).

Just as Trump's loyalty to the Republican Party has long been highly suspect, so too is Bannon's. There is a difference between being a partisan and being an ideologue, and Bannon is certainly the latter. And just as with Trump, he seems to regard chaos as a means to an end. Exactly what  end is that? That's the big question.

But if his goal were truly to burn it all down, you have to wonder why Bannon would try to mend fences with Trump rather than follow through and double down on his comments. As I wrote today, that's the kind of thing that could truly facilitate the burning down of the Trump-led Republican Party.

3. Bannon is trying to distance himself from the Russia probe.

If Bannon does think Trump Jr. committed treason — or something short of that — perhaps he simply wants to put himself as far as possible from how the broader Russia investigation might view that meeting with a Russian lawyer. Bannon has repeatedly warned Trump about what the probe might mean for his presidency, with some of his pleas apparently falling on deaf ears.

Bannon's name has been conspicuously missing from many of the developments in the Russia probe, as Politico's Darren Samuelsohn recently reported, but he's expected to be a key witness given his high-ranking roles on the Trump campaign and in the Trump White House.

I'm going back and forth between numbers one and three.

[GreyhoundFan]

Kettle, you're black...

[GreyhoundFan]

"Led by the Mercers, Bannon’s Allies Abandon Him"

Spoiler

WASHINGTON — Enthusiasm for Stephen K. Bannon’s plans for a fiery Republican revolution had already been fading among some of the donors and candidates upon whom he was relying to upend the party’s establishment.

But his provocative remarks about President Trump and his family, reported in a new book now scheduled to be published this week, and Mr. Trump’s angry response, further alienated some of Mr. Bannon’s most important backers — including the family of the hedge fund magnate Robert Mercer — leaving Mr. Bannon confronting a dire fate for a publicity-hungry provocateur: political irrelevance.

The Mercers were blunt on Thursday in cutting the cord, reiterating support for Mr. Trump while disavowing Mr. Bannon’s remarks and disowning his political endeavors. “My family and I have not communicated with Steve Bannon in many months and have provided no financial support to his political agenda, nor do we support his recent actions and statements,” Rebekah Mercer, Mr. Mercer’s daughter, said in a statement.

Mr. Bannon’s predicament highlights a stark reality in American politics, unchanged even after Mr. Trump’s convention-defying victory: The influence of even the most influential political strategists is inextricably linked to the donors behind them and the politicians in front of them.

“If Trump is openly breaking with him, that dramatically lowers his capital,” said Dan K. Eberhart, an Arizona oil investor and Republican donor who has spoken to Mr. Bannon about his plans to build an antiestablishment political operation. “He is a strategic thinker, and a lot of the things he said make sense, but this stuff from the book — I’m not going to defend that.”

The Mercer family, which had largely subsidized Mr. Bannon’s enterprises, began drifting from Mr. Bannon months ago amid concerns about how the controversy he was generating was affecting the family, according to family associates. The Mercers were upset further when they learned that Mr. Bannon had privately boasted that they would back him if he ran for president, according to one family associate. The Mercers cut off their funding for Mr. Bannon’s personal protective detail, the associate added.

As happy as I am about this development, I'd love to see the Mercers and the Kochs out of politics.

[Howl]

52 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

 

ha ha ha ha *slaps knee and gasps for air* ha ha ha ha ha heeee heeeee *starts making snerk noises*  ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha *rolling on the floor laughing/crying/snerking uncontrollably

[GreyhoundFan]

@Howl  -- yeah, that was pretty much my reaction too.

 

Callum Borchers wrote this analysis: "Bannon didn’t hit back at Trump because he couldn’t"

Spoiler

When President Trump goes low, Stephen K. Bannon goes high?

The Breitbart News chairman seemed to channel Michelle Obama on Wednesday night (let that sink in) when he called Trump “a great man” hours after the president said that Bannon had “lost his mind.”

“I support him day in and day out,” Bannon said of Trump, on a Breitbart satellite radio show.

“BANNON TAKES HIGH ROAD,” read a subsequent headline on the Breitbart website.

Bannon's tame response to the president's vitriol was out of character for a man who likens his work at Breitbart to waging war. Yet he had little choice but to submit to Trump's rhetorical lashing.

Ardent support for Trump is so central to the Breitbart brand that Bannon can't turn on the president without damaging his own media empire. Breitbart's top editor, Alex Marlow, recently told CNN that the site continued to back Roy Moore in Alabama's U.S. Senate race last month — Marlow called Moore a “uniquely terrible candidate” — because it thought doing so would help Trump. That's a remarkable level of dedication — sacrificing some of Breitbart's own standing in service of Trump.

But what would Breitbart be, if not a place to find a relentlessly pro-Trump perspective? Were Bannon to disavow Trump in the way that Trump disavowed him, Bannon would effectively have to create a whole new identity for Breitbart.

(One thing to ponder is whether Trump's furious statement about Bannon was a product of emotion, calculus or some combination. Did the president know that his former chief strategist would not retaliate and, therefore, exploit Bannon's restraint to assert dominance? Or did Trump just get angry and act on impulse?)

In any case, Bannon's radio remarks on Wednesday appeared to foreshadow how he will navigate the situation.

“President Trump, with the whole swamp up there, the D.C. apparatus, the nullification project, everything going on — he is fighting every day,” Bannon told listeners. “There's no doubt in your mind, right? And maybe things get off track, or stuff gets said, and all this heated stuff, but, however, this is a guy, you voted for him, you supported him, is there any doubt in your mind he's been fighting for and working for you, the deplorables, the forgotten man and woman, the silent majority, every day he's been there?”

It looks as if Bannon's plan is to shrug off Trump's insults as “heated stuff” that “gets said” when the “swamp” messes with the president's thinking. Such a course would be consistent with Breitbart's coverage since Trump took office.

Breitbart was sharply critical of Trump's decision to send more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, for example, but pinned much of the blame on national security adviser H.R. McMaster. Trump has failed to deliver on his promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but that is the fault of congressional Republicans, according to Breitbart.

Bannon didn't even hold Trump responsible for, in Bannon's view, picking the wrong Senate candidate (Luther Strange) in Alabama.

“A real, you know, review has to be done of how President Trump got the wrong information and came down on the wrong side,” Bannon said on Sean Hannity's Fox News show in September.

Bannon is willing to criticize some of Trump's decisions but readily offers excuses for him. In the latest case, the obvious excuse is that Bannon touched a nerve when he told author Michael Wolff that Donald Trump Jr.'s 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer was “treasonous.” Bannon styles himself as a teller of hard truths, and one of the hard truths that he and Breitbart have told consistently is that members of the president's family are bad influences because they are too liberal or lack political savvy.

Bannon and Breitbart can move on by attributing Trump's fury to familial protectiveness and the “D.C. apparatus.” They really have no other choice.

 

[47of74]

2 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Led by the Mercers, Bannon’s Allies Abandon Him"

  Hide contents

WASHINGTON — Enthusiasm for Stephen K. Bannon’s plans for a fiery Republican revolution had already been fading among some of the donors and candidates upon whom he was relying to upend the party’s establishment.

But his provocative remarks about President Trump and his family, reported in a new book now scheduled to be published this week, and Mr. Trump’s angry response, further alienated some of Mr. Bannon’s most important backers — including the family of the hedge fund magnate Robert Mercer — leaving Mr. Bannon confronting a dire fate for a publicity-hungry provocateur: political irrelevance.

The Mercers were blunt on Thursday in cutting the cord, reiterating support for Mr. Trump while disavowing Mr. Bannon’s remarks and disowning his political endeavors. “My family and I have not communicated with Steve Bannon in many months and have provided no financial support to his political agenda, nor do we support his recent actions and statements,” Rebekah Mercer, Mr. Mercer’s daughter, said in a statement.

Mr. Bannon’s predicament highlights a stark reality in American politics, unchanged even after Mr. Trump’s convention-defying victory: The influence of even the most influential political strategists is inextricably linked to the donors behind them and the politicians in front of them.

“If Trump is openly breaking with him, that dramatically lowers his capital,” said Dan K. Eberhart, an Arizona oil investor and Republican donor who has spoken to Mr. Bannon about his plans to build an antiestablishment political operation. “He is a strategic thinker, and a lot of the things he said make sense, but this stuff from the book — I’m not going to defend that.”

The Mercer family, which had largely subsidized Mr. Bannon’s enterprises, began drifting from Mr. Bannon months ago amid concerns about how the controversy he was generating was affecting the family, according to family associates. The Mercers were upset further when they learned that Mr. Bannon had privately boasted that they would back him if he ran for president, according to one family associate. The Mercers cut off their funding for Mr. Bannon’s personal protective detail, the associate added.

As happy as I am about this development, I'd love to see the Mercers and the Kochs out of politics.

Yeah I was just coming here to make note of Bannon getting cut off by his sugar mommy.  I wonder how long it'll be until Bannon rolls over on her (yeah, I know, pleasant image). 

[Howl]

Bannon has slunk back into the fold, and now claims that he meant MANAFORT, and not Junior.  Really, it's pathetic.  Yet another person reduced to groveling, and who ever thought that it would be Steve Bannon.  Mind you, I love Sloppy Steve  as a groveling penitent.  It's just the grotesque power that Trump has come to wield that is terrifying. 

[GrumpyGran]

2 hours ago, Howl said:

Bannon has slunk back into the fold, and now claims that he meant MANAFORT, and not Junior.  Really, it's pathetic.  Yet another person reduced to groveling, and who ever thought that it would be Steve Bannon.  Mind you, I love Sloppy Steve  as a groveling penitent.  It's just the grotesque power that Trump has come to wield that is terrifying. 

He gambled and lost. He never thought Dumpy would cut him. The Mercers also cut him. He's got nowhere to go so he has to slink back to the tribe with his tail between his legs. Poor Manafort, everybody's dog now, the kicks just keep on coming. If I were him I'd be throwing people under the bus so fast the Mueller team would be working 24-7.

[AmazonGrace]

http://edition.cnn.com/2018/01/08/politics/bannon-mercers-trump-document-2015/index.html

Washington (CNN)Before Donald Trump and Steve Bannon were enemies, they were allies. And not long before that, Bannon was part of an effort to sink Trump's presidential hopes -- even if Trump didn't know it.

A conservative watchdog group led by Bannon tried to discredit Trump in the early stages of the 2016 Republican presidential primary by shopping a document alleging that Trump had ties to mobsters, according to conservative sources and a copy of the document reviewed by CNN.

Spoiler

 

The anti-Trump opposition research was the work of author Peter Schweizer for the Government Accountability Institute, which he cofounded with Bannon in 2012. It described years of alleged business connections between Trump companies and organized crime figures, allegations that have circulated among Trump detractors for years.

The New York Times reported on the document on Friday.

The GAI is backed by the Mercer family, one of the largest benefactors for Trump's campaign. Rebekah Mercer, the daughter of hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, is listed as the group's chairwoman on its website. But in 2015, when the document was produced, the Mercers were backing the campaign of one of Trump's rivals, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, and Bannon had not yet joined the Trump campaign.

In early 2016, at the height of the Republican primary fight, Cruz cited possible mob ties as one reason for Trump to release his taxes. Cruz and his campaign cited published news accounts at the time as the basis for making the charge.

The document offers a glimpse at behind-the-scenes efforts by conservatives to derail Trump's presidential bid. The document is similar to opposition research produced for both Republicans and Democrats targeting Trump. The best known of those is one produced by the Washington firm Fusion GPS alleging ties between Trump and Russians, which now has helped spawn a broad investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller.

"We research political figures from all political parties and our basic premise is follow the money. That's what guides our research approach," Schweizer told CNN.

A source familiar with GAI's work said the group conducted research on all Republican and Democratic candidates running in the 2016 election. Bannon and the Mercers were not involved in the "day to day machinations of the research," but the source said they were aware of the effort to drill down on candidates and share some of that research with news organizations.

A GOP operative provided CNN a copy of the anti-Trump document. Two sources confirmed that GAI shopped copies of the document to donors for Trump rivals during the GOP primary.

"We did not and would not share that with any candidates," the source familiar with GAI's work said. "There would be no sharing with candidates, with political operatives or anybody of that category."

Bannon declined to comment.

Bannon, Schweizer and the Mercers went on to curry favor with Trump when he became the GOP nominee and, later, the President.

Trump brought on Bannon as CEO of his presidential campaign in August 2016. But Bannon's subsequent West Wing tenure as Trump's chief political strategist was brief. He was fired in August 2017, but remained in contact with the President. Their friendship hit rocky times last week with the publication of comments by Bannon in Michael Wolff's book disparaging Trump and his family.

The President issued a blistering statement against his former political guru, saying Bannon has "lost his mind," and later slapped him with the nickname "Sloppy Steve" via Twitter.

Bannon said Sunday he regretted not responding sooner to comments attributed to him in Wolff's book that were critical of Donald Trump Jr.

It's not clear whether Trump knew of Bannon's and the Mercers' ties to the document aimed at discrediting him when they became his allies in 2016. However, the Mercers' prior support for Cruz was widely known.

Trump regularly cited some of Schweizer's other work on the campaign trail, notably that on Hillary Clinton and alleging corruption. He touted Schweizer's 2015 anti-Clinton book "Clinton Cash", which made use of research by GAI, and urged an investigation of allegations of corruption involving the Clinton Foundation.

The book's allegations formed at least part of the basis for some FBI field offices to open preliminary inquiries into the Clinton Foundation. Those investigations stalled in 2016 amid the election. But CNN reported Friday that the inquiries have been given new life and are now led by the FBI office in Little Rock, Arkansas.

 

Absolutely none of these people believe in anything.

"Hey we think this person might have mob ties... but it's all good, we'll try to make him president anyway."

[Howl]

.......aaaaand Bannon's out at Breitbart.  No link, it will be all over the news soon.  Bet the door slammed into his ass on the way out. 

[GrumpyGran]

15 minutes ago, Howl said:

.......aaaaand Bannon's out at Breitbart.  No link, it will be all over the news soon.  Bet the door slammed into his ass on the way out. 

yes, I was over looking at the Philip Cantrell facebook page and saw this there. Would Rebekah not forgive him?

[GreyhoundFan]

Here's a link

Spoiler

Stephen K. Bannon stepped down as executive chairman of Breitbart News Network on Tuesday, ending his relationship with the far-right website that he helped become widely influential and which in turn abetted his rise as a political adviser and would-be kingmaker.

Bannon’s departure was a humbling denouement for a figure who had reached the uppermost levels of power only a year ago. It leaves him with no evident platform to promote his views and no financial basis for his preferred candidates.

Bannon left Breitbart in August 2016 to join Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and later served as President Trump’s chief White House strategist. He was fired by Trump almost exactly a year after formally signing up with him.

Bannon maintained his visibility by rejoining Breitbart in August and directing it to serve his political ends as the insurgent voice of the “anti-establishment” wing of the Republican Party, a faction that many critics saw as a socially intolerant and racist fringe of white nationalism.

His departure from Breitbart followed what appears to have been a vote of no confidence from a key supporter and investor in the website, Rebekah Mercer, a wealthy political donor, people at the company said. Mercer and her father, hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer, own a minority share Breitbart and are influential voices in its operation.

Bannon provoked Rebekah Mercer’s ire by making critical comments about Trump and his family to author Michael Wolff in a book, “Fire and Fury,” published just last week. Bannon is quoted in the book as saying that Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, engaged in “treasonous” behavior by secretly meeting with Russian representatives during the campaign to get unflattering information about Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton.

Trump replied to Bannon’s comments with a statement savaging his former confidant. “Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind,” the president said. He later attacked Wolff and the book in a tweet in which he referred to Bannon as “Sloppy Steve.”

Mercer weighed in with a rare statement of her own on Thursday that distanced her from Bannon. “I support President Trump and the platform upon which he was elected,” she wrote. “My family and I have not communicated with Steve Bannon in many months and have provided no financial support to his political agenda, nor do we support his recent actions and statements.”

Although Bannon continued to chair Breitbart’s editorial meetings and host its satellite-radio program, Mercer’s comments appeared to signal his end, people at the media company said. Breitbart’s readers seemed to side with Trump in the spat.

In statements carried on Breitbart’s website, Bannon said, “I’m proud of what the Breitbart team has accomplished in so short a period of time in building out a world-class news platform.”

The site’s chief executive, Larry Solov, said, “Steve is a valued part of our legacy, and we will always be grateful for his contributions, and what he has helped us to accomplish.”

The Mercers were largely responsible for Bannon’s place at Breitbart, and vice versa; Bannon introduced them to the site’s founder, Andrew Breitbart, in 2011, and helped persuade them to invest $10 million in Breitbart’s vision of an insurgent conservative media outlet that would take on Hollywood, the news media and established Washington figures, including conventional Republicans.

In exchange for their investment, the Mercers secured a seat for Bannon on Breitbart’s board. When Breitbart died of a heart condition months later, Bannon took over the operation.

He then set about turning it into a clarion of economic populism and nationalist sentiment. It advocated for strict limits on immigration, particularly from Latin America and from Muslim-majority nations, and for an “America first” agenda in trade negotiations. Its political philosophy was amplified by Trump when he announced his candidacy in 2015, although Breitbart steered a relatively even line during the early primaries between Trump and Republican challenger Ted Cruz, the Mercers’ preferred candidate.

Bannon at one point described Breitbart as “the platform for the alt-right,” a phrase that became associated with white separatism, anti-Semitism and generally racist sentiments. Breitbart’s editors insisted the site endorsed none of those views.

Nevertheless, Breitbart soared under Bannon, reaching 37 million unique readers a month before Trump upset Hillary Clinton to win the 2016 election. Among the writers he championed was Milo Yiannopoulos, who elicited both a rapturous response from Breitbart’s readers but heavy criticism elsewhere for columns about lesbians, blacks and Muslims.

The surprising election results in November 2016 turned out to be Bannon’s high-water mark; he would soon join Trump in the White House as the new president’s chief strategist.

But his tenure there was beset by a series of bruising internal fights and rivalries that would cost Bannon his White House job just seven months after he started it. Specifically, he clashed with chief of staff Reince Priebus and Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, for access and influence with Trump.

He privately disparaged those he felt were insufficiently committed to Bannon’s agenda, including economic adviser Gary Cohn, as “globalists,” a term that Breitbart had raised to a high insult. Bannon hastened his own demise by criticizing administration rivals in a magazine interview in August.

Following his return to Breitbart that month, Bannon sought to assert his political muscle by assembling a field of like-minded candidates to challenge incumbents in Republican primaries. His most recent and boldest foray — supporting twice-defrocked former judge Roy Moore in the Alabama senate race — turned out to be a disaster.

Moore, credibly accused by several women of preying on them when they were teenagers and he was in his 30s, lost what had been considered a safe seat for Republicans to Democrat Doug Jones.

Yiannopoulos also turned out to be a liability when videos of him appearing to endorse sexual relations between men and teenage boys surfaced in early 2017. Breitbart ended its relationship with him shortly thereafter.

At the same time, Breitbart’s business fortunes have been in decline. Monthly traffic has fallen to around 15 million unique readers, according to ComScore, a level that makes Breitbart a leader among conservative news and commentary sites but is far from its election-era peak. The site has also lost thousands of advertisers due to a social-media campaign organized by a mysterious liberal group called Sleeping Giants. Insiders say the privately held company, owned in part by Breitbart’s widow Susie, lost money last year.

Up until very recently, the site has showered Bannon with laudatory coverage, treating him as if he were a leading newsmaker and political philosopher. While most news organizations are reluctant to tell their readers or viewers about their own executives, Breitbart covered Bannon’s statements and public appearances religiously. It even covered what other news organizations said about him.

The flattering press notices gave Breitbart the air of a personality cult built around Bannon, all the more so because Bannon was in charge of directing what Breitbart reported.

 

[onekidanddone]

On 1/8/2018 at 8:23 AM, Howl said:

Bannon has slunk back into the fold, and now claims that he meant MANAFORT, and not Junior.  Really, it's pathetic.  Yet another person reduced to groveling, and who ever thought that it would be Steve Bannon.  Mind you, I love Sloppy Steve  as a groveling penitent.  It's just the grotesque power that Trump has come to wield that is terrifying. 

Bannon was one of Trump's greatest supporters. The champion of the alt-right, the hopes and dreams of the anti establishment Neo-Nazis. There is no love lost for Bannon, but it very scary how somebody who was so high in he Trump movement could fall so fast.  No descent is allowed. None.

Is Bannon the new Trotsky? Because look at what happened to him.  If I were Steve, I'd stay clear of ice axes in Mexico.

ETA: Anybody want to start a betting pool for how long it takes for Stevie to become that creepy guy walking around with a sandwich board saying "Will spew racists fear mongering for food"? He already has the disheveled, smelly, greasy look down pat.

Edited January 10, 2018 by onekidanddone
Added more visuals to skive you out.