As he looks to advance his Republican Party insurgency, Breitbart News head and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon could well prove more powerful outside Donald Trump's administration than inside it.
Bannon has variously been described as a white nationalist, an "ethno-nationalist" and an apologist for the overtly racist alt-right movement. (He reportedly once described himself as a "Leninist," although it's not clear he knows what the word means in ideological terms.) He has pledged to unconditionally support and advance Trump's agenda, and has begun by promoting hand-picked candidates to challenge the Republican establishment.
If the aftermath of the 2016 delivered one clear lesson, it's that the Republican Party's establishment — and the Washington establishment as a whole — is in trouble.
"If there’s any confusion out there, let me clear it up: I’m leaving the White House and going to war for Trump against his opponents — on Capitol Hill, in the media, and in corporate America," Bannon said as he departed the White House.
Ironically or otherwise, Bannon's first favored candidate, former Alabama Supreme Court chief justice Roy Moore, was actually opposed by Trump in that state's recent Republican Senate primary. Moore is surely one of the most extreme fringe candidates ever to win a major party's nomination for national office. While the Deep South is full of Christian conservatives, Moore is better described as a Christian nationalist. He once wrote an op-ed arguing that Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., shouldn't be allowed to serve in Congress because he is a Muslim. (Certain far-right Christians view Islam as an illegitimate religion used to conceal an insidious political ideology.)
Moore has continuously promulgated the false and racist conspiracy theory that former President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. Moore has said "there are some communities under Sharia law right now in our country," and believes the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, occurred because America has distanced itself from God.
None of that, unfortunately, is a joke. This is a real candidate who handily won the Republican primary, and is likely to become a senator this December.
As for Trump, he went along with top Republicans who encouraged him to support the establishment-favored candidate, appointed incumbent Sen. Luther Strange. After Strange was defeated, the president rapidly backtracked, deleted tweets urging Alabamians to vote for Strange and writing that that Moore "sounds like a really great guy."
Bannon has also reportedly encouraged Erik Prince, the war profiteer and founder of the private mercenary firm Blackwater, to run for Senate in Wyoming against incumbent John Barrasso, a conservative Republican who is not known to have had any disagreements with Trump or Bannon, public or private. Prince has already placed himself inside Trump's circle and served as an informal adviser for Trump's transition team, which he did largely in secrecy.
According to various reports, Prince has repeatedly pitched a proposal to privatize the war in Afghanistan using his current China-based logistics and aviation firm, Frontier Services Group. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis was apparently not interested.
Prince's lengthy and controversial past has quietly been swept under the carpet as he has risen to new prominence, aided by the politics of the Trump administration. Trump's current plan for Afghanistan does not differ much from the plans that have failed for the last 16 years under two previous presidents.
If and when that plan does fail, it's almost too easy to predict that the Bannon-backed plan designed by Prince will find its way back into mainstream discourse. Faced with the prospect of losing control of Afghanistan to the Taliban after all these years and all those billions, Trump could well argue we have nothing to lose.
Bannon's overall movement is larger and even more dangerous than the rise of the Tea Party that was sparked by Obama's election. The figures Bannon has sought to elevate present a far more divisive and regressive danger, if that seems possible. His success so far can, at least in part, be attributed to decades of "populist" frustration over Washington's establishmentarian politics, which have been designed to cater to so few and to disenfranchise and demoralize so many.
Breitbart has referred to Bannon's emerging roster as "The League of Extraordinary Candidates," as if they were the heroes of a hip comic book. A recent article describes them as "a distinct slate of U.S. Senate and House candidates, as well as key gubernatorial contenders, all united in their focus on breaking the logjam in Congress."
Movement leaders view establishment Republicans and Democrats alike as a force blocking, slow-walking, or stonewalling the agenda that President Donald J. Trump campaigned on, and aim to elect new voices by riding a new economic nationalist electoral wave in 2018 meant to mirror and surpass what happened in previous wave elections like 2010 — which saw the rise of the Tea Party.
"We’re planning on building a broad anti-establishment coalition to replace the Republican Party of old with fresh new blood and fresh new ideas," Andy Surabian, a senior adviser to the Great America Alliance and former White House aide, told Breitbart.
Those "fresh new ideas" are likely to feature echoes of the chants heard at Charlottesville and the campaign promises made by Trump as a candidate — the same promises many in the pundit class insisted were mere boasts that could never be accomplished once he was in office.
It would be naive to blame the result of the 2016 election on one single thing, given how many factors and variables were involved. But it would be equally naive to ignore the fact that the narrative of anti-establishment rage and frustration was a major reason Trump won last November, and that Washington remains poorly equipped to combat it.
The emergence of the alt-right and of figures like Trump, Bannon and Richard Spencer -- and at the opposite pole, perhaps the emergence of Bernie Sanders as well -- reflected the fact that voters had become fed up with the status quo and were willing to contemplate previously unthinkable options. These phenomena were decades in the making, and they're not going away overnight either.
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