Breitbart: Steve Bannon’s downfall unmasks the facade of his American patriotism
Scraggy, bedraggled, and button-down shirts, T-shirts and blazers in a millefeuille clobber - this is white supremacist, ultranationalist, rebel, slugger, street fighter and tough talker Steve K Bannon. It was only after Donald Trump swept to power in a tsunami that altered the American political history forever, the sartorial rebel in Bannon cooled down to a single shirt, a tie and a suit. He started conforming to the West Wing dress code only to turn a rebel again after being booted out as Trump’s chief strategist.
Weeks after being chucked out, “Sloppy Steve” was back in two black shirts inside a black blazer detailing the Republican plan to rout Hillary Clinton and boasting his unwavering loyalty to Trump on CBS’s 60 Minutes with Charlie Rose.
But the bigger "rebel" in blue-collar Bannon - his disdain for the wealthy, especially the filthy rich GOP members, and the establishment - was as uncompromising and relentless as during the hustings and in Team Trump. That is what the former Goldman Sachs investment banker made Americans believe by employing a blustering and empathetic narrative of how his AT&T telephone lineman dad lost $100,000 during the 2008 financial hurricane even as the government bailed out the financial institutions who had perpetuated it.
Add to it his vociferous opposition to immigration, free trade deals, and the call for White supremacy, Bannon had a perfect political potboiler which propelled another anti-establishment fanatic, but a billionaire to the White House.
Bannon’s meteoric rise as the executive chairman of Breitbart News Network to the "shadow president" and the subsequent fall, which resulted in his ouster from the White House and the far-right American news website, was impending.
The day Bannon hopped onto Trump’s campaign, the intricate threads of his blue-collar mask - which were as complicated as his shirts stacked on top of one another inside a military jacket -were unravelled. American author-journalist Michael Wolff’s book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, was the final nail in the coffin.
Born to middle-class working parents, Bannon slogged since his post-graduation often working at a local junkyard. The Virginia Tech graduate earned his master’s in national security studies from Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and finally joined the navy. After leaving the navy, he earned an MBA from Harvard Business School.
During his navy stint, the failure of Operation Eagle Claw in the Iran hostage crisis in 1980 turned Bannon against the Jimmy Carter regime, igniting his anti-establishment feelings, which were stoked further by 9/11.
“I wasn’t political until I got into the service and saw how badly Jimmy Carter f**ked things up. I became a huge Reagan admirer. Still am. But what turned me against the whole establishment was coming back from running companies in Asia in 2008 and seeing that Bush had fucked up as badly as Carter,” he said.
The turning curve in Bannon’s career arrived when he met Breitbart founder, conservative-media critic Andrew James Breitbart in 2011. One year down the line, Andrew’s sudden death catapulted Bannon to the position of executive chairman of the right-wing website. The stark difference between what Andrew had envisioned for Breitbart and how his "Dr Frankenstein" turned it into a grotesque, self-aggrandising monster soon emerged. The former Drudge Report editor wanted to achieve his conservative goals by targeting the liberals in politics, entertainment and the media, not by supporting individuals for government offices. But with the rudder in his hands, Bannon steered Breitbart to only politics and advancing his dangerous, ultra-nationalist agenda and support the pro-western values alt-right movement.
Camouflaged as a virulent patriot who wanted to the blow the establishment to smithereens with his "hatred" for both the Dems and the GOP, Bannon always hobnobbed with the mighty, powerful and billionaires.
"The Great Manipulator", screamed the Time magazine’s February 2016 cover after he became the star of Team Trump. Much before he had signed the Devil’s Bargain with Trump and stormed the US presidency, Bannon’s conservative views resonated with Manhattan heiress Rebekah Mercer, daughter of hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer and an avid patron of the tycoon.
The Mercers funnelled millions into conservative causes, including Breitbart. According to Wolff, “It was Rebekah Mercer - who had bonded with Bannon, and whose politics were grim, unyielding, and doctrinaire - who defined the family.”
Much before Trump announced his candidacy, the Bannon-Mercer double team had plotted to instal an outsider, so-called anti-establishment in the Oval Office in 2011. In fact, it was Rebekah, who had introduced Trump to Bannon, and thus began the bluster-fluster plan, which portrayed the realty magnate as the new beacon of hope for Americans.
Bannon got the initial porthole to unabashedly lob his ultranationalist and pro-American bombs on Blacks and Muslim immigrants.
Soon, he was to lay his hands on the "Big Bertha" (Trump) to explode his vituperative WMDs. Bannon and Trump immediately found themselves to be on the same wavelength - their disdain for immigrants, especially Muslims, African-Americans, free trade deals and the Dems and the GOP alike.
In an interview with Vox’s Andrew Prokop, Joshua Green, who wrote the book Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency, said: “Both of them had a real talent for kind of stoking resentment and channelling that resentment into a political force that they could direct at more mainstream Republicans and at Democrats.”
Once he had his hands on the campaign gun trigger, Bannon became the "Dirty Harry", who would breach all ethical limits to hunt down Hillary. His hypocrisy was starkly evident when the book targeting the Clinton Foundation, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, came out in 2015.
In fact, it was the Mercer Family Foundation, which had pumped $4.7m into the Government Accountability Institute, run by Bannon, to publish the book.
While Bannon portrayed himself as the torchbearer of a movement out to dislodge the establishment, tax the wealthy and calling for fiery brand of nationalism, he colluded with the tax-evading Mercers, who had an offshore investment vehicle in Bermuda.
According to The Guardian, Robert is the director of eight Bermuda companies in the Paradise Papers.
While the Republicans had hung up their boots in desperation thinking that the real estate mogul would hobble to a shameful failure in the race for the Oval Office, Trump romped home in "sneakers" designed intricately by his campaign CEO Bannon.
Bannon and Rebekah’s .30 calibre conservative round dangerously transformed into .50 cal bullet with the new Don in the White House. According to the Centre for Responsive Politics, the Mercers had donated a whopping $23.7 million to the GOP campaigns during the 2016 election.
During the transition, Bannon and another conservative Kellyanne Conway were pushed into key positions by Rebekah in the Cabinet. Wolff wrote, “Theirs was a consciously quixotic mission. They would devote vast sums - albeit just a small part of Bob Mercer’s many billions - to trying to build a radical free-market, small-government, homeschooling, anti-liberal, gold-standard, pro-death-penalty, anti-Muslim, pro-Christian, monetarist, anti-civil-rights political movement in the United States.”
It was the political apprentice’s pit bull, who commanded his master - Bannon, aided by Stephen Miller, got the first Muslim travel ban published to trigger maximum mayhem with the intention of dividing the US between conservatives and liberals, according to Wolff. Bannon gloated in the scathing comments of the media and the black hole towards which he was hurtling the Trump administration at breakneck speed.
“Darkness is good. Dick Cheney, Darth Vader, Satan. That’s power. It only helps us when they get it wrong. When they’re blind to who we are and what we’re doing,” he had told The Hollywood Reporter.
In the end, Bannon’s transformation from a monster to Godzilla, self-aggrandisement, the eruption of his feud with Javanka and his increasingly overreaching grip on the West Wing caused his downfall.