Steve Bannon, who was ousted from the White House on Friday, was the man who convinced Donald Trump he was onto something — that beneath Trump’s inchoate ideas and jarring dispositions there was a philosophy.
Why did Trump sometimes sound like a Republican and other times sound like a Democrat, but most of the time sound like neither? Why did no ideological framework fit the bombastic billionaire?
Bannon explained to Trump that populism was the consistent framework of Trump’s views and that economic nationalism was the policy stance that the people wanted.
Waving this flag, shouting “America First” (to the horror of many), and pledging to turn the Republicans into a “workers’ party” (to the horror of some and the laughter of others), Trump won the nomination and then the White House. He pulled off upsets in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, winning the Electoral College on the strength of his appeal to the disaffected.
There was a real insight here. America’s political system was susceptible to Trump and Bannon because the elites in both parties agreed with each other on some fundamental questions and were heedless of the swath of voters, Republican and Democratic, who were of a different mind. Both parties’ leaders advocated globalist immigration, military, and trade policies. This perspective has many virtues, but it often comes with a disregard or even a disdain for regular working people.
Bannon brought Trump to a couple of important principles that most politicians failed to grasp. Most importantly, Trump, channeling Bannon, made it clear that immigration policy and foreign policy needed to be oriented towards serving American interests. While lost on many elites, this is a definitional truth: The federal government’s duty is to the American people.
Embracing populism is something Republicans should have done long ago. Instead of sneering at the lower 47 percent, the party’s leaders should have seen that liberal cultural and economic policies were not serving the working class well, and thus reached out to them.
So Bannon brought to Trump arguments that contained truth. But that’s not enough for statesmanship. Prudence is necessary too. And Bannon didn’t bring enough of that to the White House.
When Jesus warned of false prophets, he said “you shall know them by their fruits.” Imprudent populism and unfiltered nationalism bore their bitter fruit in Charlottesville last weekend.
White nationalists who marched under the banner of “Unite the Right” felt emboldened by Trump. Trump did little to rebuke them, and that little encouraged them. Bannon, the populist voice in Trump’s ear, was in a position to steer Trump right on this.
He could have explained that nationalism was hurt when it became racial rather than economic, and indeed it became something else in kind not merely in degree. He should have made Trump understand that a productive populism was impossible when racists were wielding real torches. Bannon failed to do this, or else he never tried.
He was a bully and a cynic. A cynic because, being smart enough to know what ugly forces he stoked with his vagueness and ambiguity on racial matters, he nevertheless remained vague and ambiguous, not apparently wanting to alienate even those bought at the highest moral cost.
Both Bannon’s bullying, well-known to anyone who has spent any time with him, and his cynicism encouraged those tendencies in the president, who naturally shares them.
Bannon’s departure is welcome. If it is another token of chief of staff John Kelly acting determinedly to clean the White House, so much the better. It would be naive, though, to hope it will change the president’s worst behavior. But if it is, rather, a token of the Trump’s inability to let anyone share the limelight, as has been suggested, then it betokens no improvement and a further, lamentable, and dangerous isolation of a chief executive who has been in office hardly more than seven months.
