For more than six months, the White House has been a chaotic mess—its internal processes disordered by feuds, its diplomacy and relations with Congress undermined by leaks and backbiting, its external communications confused by an undisciplined boss. John Kelly, made chief of staff in early August, has been tasked with bringing order to the chaos. We sincerely hope he succeeds, though we doubt any White House led by Donald Trump could be entirely free of pandemonium. He won the presidency by doing everything he wasn’t supposed to do, and he’s not going to change now that he’s president.
Trump alone is responsible for his administration’s internal troubles; he thrives on upheaval, and upheaval is what he gets. But that doesn’t alter the fact that some of the personalities working for him aggravate the problem. They bring out the worst in him and intensify the dysfunction. One of those personalities is chief political strategist Steve Bannon.
Bannon is a schemer. He is widely thought to be the source of scurrilous hit-pieces intended to damage National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster. Many of these pieces have shown up on alt-right websites with which Bannon has deep relationships, especially Breitbart News, the media outlet he headed before he joined the Trump campaign. He has also carried on semi-open feuds with Jared Kushner, the president’s son in law, and former chief of staff Reince Priebus (until allying with Priebus against Kushner and Ivanka Trump).
Any White House will be troubled by internal feuding from time to time, and it may be within Kelly’s powers to bring an end to the fights and targeted leaks. What Kelly can’t do anything about is the ideological affinity between Trump and Bannon.
This is politics, and we don’t begrudge the president and his strategists their own ideas and policy views, however strongly we may disagree with them. Even so, Bannon’s strident nationalism, though by no means synonymous with the “white nationalism” driving the mayhem Charlottesville, seems to have made Trump incapable of condemning what by any definition is an un-American creed.
One of the few opinions shared by almost every American citizen is that Nazi theories of racial superiority are garbage and unworthy of respect in our republic. The rabble in Charlottesville converged on the town to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, but Nazism and its stupid imitations have no part in any strain of American history. The feeble young men aping the Hitler salute and waving tiki torches paid homage to the Ku Klux Klan and the Third Reich—bands of masked thugs in the former case, perpetrators of genocide in the other. No public official, and certainly no U.S. president, should offer these imps any respect at all. And yet it took the president two days to issue an unequivocal statement condemning them—this despite the fact that one of them drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one and injuring others.
We don’t relish Washington’s culture of statement-making, with politicians feeling obliged to issue statements on every conceivable public event or trend, even of those things over which they have no influence. But Americans are not accustomed to seeing their fellow citizens performing torch-lit Sieg Heils and roughing people up. The president had a clear obligation to issue a direct denunciation. Instead he pointedly avoided naming the perpetrators’ ideology or assigning any descriptor to them at all, ambiguously referring only to “this egregious display of hatred, bigotry on violence on many sides.” His soft-pedaling was all the more jarring since, as Stephen F. Hayes documented, direct denunciations are what Trump does best.
It’s not hard to discern Bannon’s influence here. Although he may not be himself an adherent of any racist or racialist theories, he takes a complaisant view of groups that espouse them. There are “always elements who turn up at these things, whether it’s militia guys or whatever,” he said in a 2014 panel discussion. “Some that are fringe organizations. My point is that over time it all gets kind of washed out, right?” Bannon was among the first to see that the hordes of “alt right” users of websites such 4chan and reddit and Twitter, frustrated young men with vast energy and marked tendencies toward disruption, could give the Trump “revolution” (Bannon’s word) an energy unknown in American politics. “There is a growing global anti-establishment revolt against the permanent political class at home, and the global elites that influence them,” he said in 2014.
And so we were unsurprised to read in the New York Times that Bannon “consulted with the president repeatedly over the weekend as Mr. Trump struggled to respond to the neo-Nazi rally.” Bannon, the Times reports further, “has cautioned the president not to criticize far-right activists too severely for fear of antagonizing a small but energetic part of his base.”
Bannon and his allies value disruption for its own sake. They’re often portrayed as anti-establishment but it’s probably more accurate to say they are anti-stability. It was precisely this love of anti-establishmentarian chaos that rendered the president incapable of denouncing racism-inspired violence when he saw it. We don’t claim that Donald Trump adheres to any racialist theory, or to any theory at all, but it appears that the influence of Bannon and his ideological associates led the president into a serious moral failure.
Trump is reportedly unhappy with Bannon for attracting too much attention—he appears as a kind of Svengali in Joshua Green’s acclaimed book Devil’s Bargain, and before that he appeared on the cover of Time magazine as “the great manipulator.” If vanity leads the president to make a wise change for a silly reason, we won’t complain.
