Steve Bannon. While not much in the news lately since his falling out of the Trump administration in late August, there is no doubt that he was highly influential in the unlikely success of Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign (and perhaps in similar campaigns in Europe). This is the central argument in Joshua Green's 2017 book Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency, which seeks to highlight what Green terms the underestimated "missing piece of the puzzle" in the complex set of factors and circumstances most often cited in order to explain Donald Trump's victory in November 2016, such as "James Comey, the Russians, the media, 'fake news,' sexism" and so on (Green, 2017, p. 20). In other words, Green claims that one can't tell the (complete) story of Trump without examining the story of Bannon.
Utilizing a common literary device, Green opens with a chapter showing the victory of the Trump campaign, before entering into a flashback for the rest of the book to explain this implausible outcome, chronicling Bannon's biographical background and his rise to Trump's campaign. Green does a great job of making sense of a very convoluted story, showing how Bannon made his mainstream political debut after drifting through a Catholic high school, Virginia Tech, the Navy, Harvard, Goldman Sachs, Hollywood (in his bankrolling and aiding in the production of right-wing films, such as the Islam-focused In the Face of Evil in 2004), and ending up in the right-wing media organization Breitbart News. In all of these instances, Green helps trace the ideological evolution of Bannon throughout his long and varied career, with each experience confirming a weakness of the United States (such as the Iran-Contra scandal and failed hostage rescue) that could only be rectified through an embrace of a no-nonsense, far-right populism/nationalism. Green writes that "everywhere Bannon looked in the modern world, he saw signs of collapse and an encroaching globalist order stamping out the last vestiges of the traditional" (Green, 2017, p. 206).
By the time he reached Donald Trump's campaign, he was convinced of the need to help this far-right populist ideology gain mainstream appeal in order to save America (and Western civilization) from the combined menaces of Islamic terrorism, immigration, feminism, socialism, political correctness, and (of course) the Clinton machine that was in cahoots with the hated globalist-oriented establishment. The vessel that would ultimately carry Bannon's Breitbart ideology away from the fringes was Donald Trump, with this ideology a crude cudgel to wield against the hated establishment. However, this was not the end of Bannon's strategy to mainstream far-right ideology. Bannon made further back-room partnerships with right-wing donors like the Mercer family to set up a multitude of organizations that would help to legitimize his preferred ideology, such as Breitbart News, the Government Accountability Institute (GAI), Christian film company Glittering Steel, and data analytics company Cambridge Analytica.
Therefore, Bannon brought his shrewd right-wing intellectualism and his connections with the above organizations to Trump's campaign, allowing for the commencement of Bannon's strategy to take down Hillary Clinton in the election. This next phase of Bannon's plan to legitimize an establishment-destroying "revolution" was to set a series of fact-based traps for Hillary Clinton, most of which were seeded within liberal-leaning mainstream news organizations such as The New York Times as these organizations picked up on narratives concerning the Clinton machine, corruption, and the Clinton emails from Breitbart News and Wikileaks (which themselves drew deep from the non-indexed "Deep Web" portion of the Internet, dubbed by the GAI as "the Matrix") and other right-wing media sources (Green, 2017, p. 155). The ultimate result of this strategy was not to gain Trump support necessarily (Bannon and Trump were counting on Trump's base of mostly old, white, rural and blue-collar workers to win election day), but to sow doubt within Hillary Clinton's base of reliably liberal urban, suburban, women and minority voters (i.e. to persuade these voters to stay home on election day).
But wait, there's more! This strategy of sowing doubt aligned with the Trump campaign's other media strategy of distracting from various scandals (such as the infamous Access Hollywood tape) by pointing to what Bannon and Trump saw as equivalent (but unfairly unacknowledged) scandals on the Clinton side (such as Bill Clinton's sexual misconduct in the 1990s). In the end, anger, doubt, and distraction won Trump the day.
Overall, while the book comes out a bit dated as it concludes by predicting Bannon's eventual dismissal as the Trump administration tries to govern in a more mainstream way that is antithetical to Bannon's notion of blowing up government (Bannon was fired in August), it nevertheless succeeds by helping to elucidate the ideological and organizational foundations of Trump's campaign, thereby providing insight into the Trump governing philosophy. In addition, it provides yet another warning that the nationalist/populist tide on the rise in both America and in the European democracies has largely succeeded as a result of shrewd media and political messaging strategies that help to bring previously fringe ideologies into the political mainstream. Only time will tell if Trump and other similarly-founded administrations in Europe can succeed in governing with such extreme right-wing ideologies.
Works Cited:
Green, Joshua. (2017). Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency. New York: Penguin Press.
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