The downfall of Steve Bannon is a warning sign for Trump

Photographer: Andrew Kelly / Reuters

Steve Bannon’s arrest on prosecutors for defrauding donors to a right-wing immigration group for $ 1 million marks the end of a political era – the era when a Trumpian mix of economic populism and nativist immigration policy looked as it could, as Bannon once did. put it to me, the Republican Party is delivering “a hammerlock on Electoral College.”
At the time he made this assessment, in the days following Trump’s victory in 2016, it seems entirely plausible that Bannon, Donald Trump’s campaign president and future chief strategist, was right. Before Trump had proposed that the GOP lay its future in purifying its racist fringe and soft-pedaling its brand of laissez-faire economy toward a diversifying nation that won the 2012 Republican ticket of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan had shaken. The Republican Party’s “autopsy” took place in 2013 after its loss warned that the GOP risked falling into oblivion if it did not present a harsher face for immigrants, minorities and young people.
Trump is bidding, of course, by Bannon, instead of offering a turbocharged anti-immigrant nationalism that promised to make working class revival, a message that resonated especially among Rust Belt voters who had previously voted Democratic. He was sure that the Republican Party leaders would recognize this. ‘What a Reince [Priebus] and Paul Ryan realizes that now, “Bannon told me after the election,” is that our message was the good news and that it will deliver Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania to the Republican Party for a generation. “This was the Trump hammerlock.
If Trump had delivered on his promise and instituted the kind of labor populism that Bannon promoted in 2016, he would probably be in a better position than he is today. Sure, Bannon would be. But that never happened. “There was only one plan to get elected,” said Sam Nunberg, a former Trump aide. “There was never a plan to govern.”
Instead, it turned out that the Trump administration was chaotic from the start and the Trump-Bannon marriage soon blew apart. While in office, Trump lost all interest in economic populism and signed a tax return favoring the rich, while Bannon, who clashed with colleagues and family members, of Trump and had no experience in or talent for policy-making, was soon forced out of his job as a strategist.
Even after Bannon left the White House in 2017, he held on to his belief that a policy of hard-line nationalism could provide the right politician for the presidency. In love with his oyster – ‘I’m sick of playing a wet nurse for a 71-year-old man,’ he grumbled about Trump – Bannon began to fit himself for the role of political leader. When he left the White House, he sought to preserve a list of nationalist candidates, including the Alabama Senate, the hopeful Roy Moore, who would route the founding of the GOP and “bring Trumpism above Trump.”
Bannon was a powerful enough figure on the right that he traveled to Europe to spread Trump-style nationalist populism. At the same time, as I reported in 2018, Bannon began planning to start a new American political party which he intended to call the “National Union Party” – the temporary name Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party had adopted in 1864 to attracting war democrats and unionists – suggesting that he could unite popular populists at both ends of the political spectrum and make his own run at the White House.
Bannon’s fantasy never came to fruition. Instead, as so often happened, his indiscretion was undone. After writer Michael Wolff claimed that Bannon humiliated members of the Trump family, Trump angered him from the Republican Party. This included pressure from Rebekah Mercer, a major Trump donor and promoter of Breitbart News, to escape Bannon from his position at the top of the conservative publication.
Once robbed of his influence in the White House and on Breitbart News, Bannon came to understand that it was Trump, not Bannon or his ideas, that upset Republican voters. Furthermore, it became clear that any hope Bannon had of influencing national politics depended on his worming back into Trump’s good grace.
To do so, Bannon overcame his pride and began making boosterish appearances on Fox News to plead for the same president who had publicly destroyed his status in Republican politics and even issued a White House press release. that said, Bannon ‘had lost his mind. ”
To regain relevance, Bannon became active in anti-immigrant organizations such as We Build the Wall, whose leaders were indicted by federal prosecutors on Thursday, and anti-China groups such as the Committee on Current Danger (Bannon was arrested aboard a 150-foot yacht belonging to Chinese billionaire tycoon-in-exile Guo Wengui).
But Bannon was not more effective in implementing the policies that Trump had campaigned on than Trump was. The underlying goal of We Build the Wall was to build a privately funded barrier on the US-Mexico border – the one that Trump had promised to build in 2016 (and pay for) Mexico, but failed not to act as president. Just as Trump was selling a bill of goods to his followers, prosecutors claim that Bannon and the leaders of We Build the Wall were essentially grabbers who raised $ 25 million through a prey on the nativist political wishes of donors. “The suspects defrauded hundreds of thousands of donors, capitalizing on their interest in financing a border wall to raise millions of dollars, under the false pretense that all that money would be spent on construction,” U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss said in a statement.
The idea that Bannon and a group of right-wing extremists would actually build a border wall was ridiculous on his face. Last month, ProPublica discovered that part of a three-kilometer wall erected the group too close to the Rio Grande had already begun to erode and was in danger of falling. The real purpose of the project, as Trump himself seems to distinguish, was to get the sponsors’ attention, praise and money in a way that would attract the president’s announcement and help Bannon to paint his flatter image. to rehabilitate. “I have not been with him for a very long time,” Trump told reporters Thursday. “[I] know absolutely nothing about the project … I do not like that project. I thought it was done for showboating reasons. ”
The symbolism of Bannon’s great political project that ends in his indictment and arrest is timely, if nothing else. Exactly four years ago, he just took command of Trump’s sputtering, left-for-dead presidential campaign and was about to support it until the biggest rise in American political history.
But the political reshuffle that Bannon thought happened four years ago always depended on Trump delivering what he had on campaign. The details of Bannon accusation laid the path he has traveled since the days not so long ago when he was considered in some circles as “the second most powerful man in the world. ”
Although he avoids accusations, Trump’s path has not been much smoother. He has survived impeachment, but he has not delivered a boundary wall, middle-class prosperity or an American state that can be considered something ‘great’ again. It just takes a look at the election – Trump is behind in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania – to see that the election lock that Bannon proposed, like so much else, is a fiction and that Trump’s political career, like that of his former strategic, could be to close.