For those of us who wish (or hope) that Donald Trump may ultimately settle into something resembling a conventional president, his ex-chief strategist Stephen Bannon offered a glimmer of encouragement last week.
Bannon, of course, was removed from his White House perch last month by Trump’s no-nonsense chief of staff, General John Kelly, and has retreated to Breitbart News to resume the struggle that first brought him to Trump’s attention. For a populist insurgent, Bannon’s venue for his first post-White House appearance was unconventional—an interview with Charlie Rose on CBS’s 60 Minutes—but the message was not just conventional but historic.
Bannon, an ex-naval officer, regards loyalty as a cardinal virtue in politics, and not without reason. He argued to Rose, and with justification, that members of the White House staff who (anonymously) criticized Trump’s comments on the Charlottesville riots did their boss no favor and ought to resign. But the real enemy, in Bannon’s estimation, is not Trump’s nominal and numerous antagonists but the Republican establishment—specifically Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and House speaker Paul Ryan—which is “trying to nullify the 2016 election.” In effect, let Trump be Trump.
The irony of Bannon’s argument may have been lost on Charlie Rose, and Bannon himself seemed oblivious as well. For during his brief tenure in power, Bannon seems to have expended much of his considerable energy and talent on waging (anonymous) behind-the-scenes campaigns against colleagues he considered insufficiently loyal to Donald Trump. Indeed, more than anything done or not done by Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell, it could be argued that Bannon’s guerrilla warfare did much to shape perceptions of a chaotic, ineffectual Trump White House. And by pledging to 60 Minutes to man the barricades, Bannon echoed an earlier, and unsuccessful, insurrection.
It’s largely forgotten now, but when Ronald Reagan was elected president a generation ago, he had to contend with some earlier incarnations of Stephen Bannon. Political activists such as the direct-mail mogul Richard Viguerie, gadfly commentator John Lofton, and columnist Kevin Phillips and publications such as Human Events and Conservative Digest were not just determined to keep Reagan true to their faith but equally persuaded that Reagan was immersing himself in a Republican establishment determined to nullify the 1980 election.
Let Reagan be Reagan, they argued. And unlike Bannon, they didn’t wait until Inauguration Day to express their discomfort. The addition of George H. W. Bush to the national ticket had the same disheartening effect on certain conservative activists as John F. Kennedy’s choice of Lyndon Johnson in 1960 had on their liberal equivalents. And in particular, the postelection appointment of James Baker as White House chief of staff, along with the recruitment of certain Ford and Nixon veterans, left Human Events, for example, feeling “somewhat distraught. . . . The euphoria in the conservative community is already dissipating.” That was in February 1981.
Here it may be useful to pause and consider the importance of one basic distinction between Reagan and Trump. Ronald Reagan had come of age politically in the 1950s and ’60s as an outsider-insurgent; but by 1980, he had also served two successful terms as governor of the nation’s largest state and seen the Republican establishment evolve in his direction. In other words, Reagan was a talented and experienced politician who understood from the outset that the success of his presidency—a political upheaval more profound than Trump’s—depended on skill as well as disruption. Reagan was shrewd enough not only to engage with critics on all sides—including his let-Reagan-be-Reagan right flank—but to surround himself with pragmatists as well as true believers.
The political landscape now is significantly altered. Much of what made Reagan so traumatic to the left—free-market economics and a robust foreign policy, expressed without apology—has since gone mainstream. And social media, which exacerbates division and discord, didn’t exist. At the same time, President Reagan faced obstacles unfamiliar to President Trump: a legislative branch firmly (and historically) in opponents’ hands and a narrow, exclusive, and reliably hostile press. One of the many paradoxes of the Trump presidency has been his inability, or unwillingness, to exploit the advantage any Republican president enjoys on Capitol Hill and, thanks to the Internet, reap the benefits of an infinitely larger, and more expansive, media.
In that sense, the defenestration and exile of Stephen Bannon is a net benefit, along with Bannon’s pledge of disloyalty to conservative principles. The architects of policies that transformed public opinion, ended the Cold War, and successfully engaged the challenge of radical Islam enjoy Bannon’s “complete and total contempt.” And the two politicians able and willing to make Trump look good—McConnell and Ryan—will be held “accountable” if they fail to satisfy Stephen Bannon. Or put another way: Let Trump be Bannon.
As always, the opportunity to miss this opportunity rests in the hands of President Trump. The question is whether the first nine months of his presidency are prologue or a prelude to the Great American Second Chance.
Philip Terzian is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
