Wall Street Journal
By Lukas I. Alpert and Sarah Rabil
August 18, 2017
Steve Bannon is headed back to where he came from.
The conservative media executive turned chief adviser to President Donald Trump is rejoining Breitbart News after leaving the White House amid a political shake-up, the site announced late Friday.
Hours after Mr. Bannon’s departure from the White House, Breitbart said he chaired the conservative news site’s evening editorial meeting.
“The populist-nationalist movement got a lot stronger today,” Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow said, according to a story about Mr. Bannon’s return that was posted on the site. “Breitbart gained an executive chairman with his finger on the pulse of the Trump agenda.”
His quick return to the site raises the question of whether he would return to the role of a pugilistic outsider he occupied before joining the Trump campaign in August 2016, and if he plans to take the fight to his former colleagues on policy and personal feuds.
Mr. Bannon and Breitbart executives didn’t respond to messages seeking comment.
There were early signs that Breitbart won’t be pulling any punches. Mr. Bannon’s ouster “may turn out to be the beginning of the end for the Trump administration, the moment Donald Trump became Arnold Schwarzenegger, ” according to an article published on the site earlier on Friday, in the hours after Mr. Bannon’s departure from the White House was made public.
The author of the article, Joel B. Pollak, said the comparison was supposed to be between two celebrities who ran as political outsiders but eventually abandoned the base that thrust them into office. Mr. Pollak also tweeted: “#War.”
Trump spokespeople defended the president-elect’s pick of Steve Bannon for senior White House strategist. Democrats and advocacy groups denounced Bannon as a proponent of the alt-right, a movement that includes white nationalists. (Originally published Nov. 4, 2016)
Mr. Bannon has been a voice for populism in the administration, from trade policy to immigration, and has battled internally with colleagues to steer the debate. A person close to Mr. Bannon said Breitbart will be “critical [of Mr. Trump] if he veers away from the agenda they are pushing for.”
“Steve has always expressed it that he views Trump as an imperfect vessel for the ideas that matter to him,” the person said.
“Breitbart’s pace of global expansion will only accelerate with Steve back,” Larry Solov, Breitbart’s chief executive officer and president, said in the statement.
Christopher Ruddy, chief executive of conservative-media organization Newsmax and a friend of Mr. Trump, said he believes Mr. Bannon can have even more influence outside the White House than inside it. He doesn’t see an all-out war between Breitbart and the Trump administration.
“I don’t expect that Steve will become a Trump critic. I believe he still likes the president, and the president still likes him. I think he’ll be critical of the people around [the president],” he said.
Mr. Ruddy said he encouraged Mr. Bannon to resign over the past week. “The handwriting was on the wall that he was going to be terminated,” he said.
Mr. Bannon’s ascension to the halls of power had thrust Breitbart from a place on the political fringe into the center of the media conversation. The site hitched its wagon to the Trump campaign early on and pushed a hard line on immigration and trade.
Mr. Trump’s embrace of the issues Breitbart advocated threw a monkey wrench into the longstanding order of the conservative mediascape, with the site noisily challenging more traditional right-of-center viewpoints including the National Review and even Fox News. At the same time, Breitbart pushed to the fore of a conservative digital media sphere, fighting for influence with sites like the Daily Caller and the Drudge Report.
The site has been controversial with many readers and advertisers, in part because its fare has made it popular with the “alt-right”—a loose conglomeration of groups, some of which embrace white supremacy and view multiculturalism as a threat.
Like many media outlets, Breitbart enjoyed a traffic surge during the presidential election season, growing from about 13 million unique monthly visitors early in the primary season to north of 20 million by the time of the election, but it has since lost those gains. In July, Breitbart recorded 12.4 million unique visitors in the U.S., according to comScore Inc. By comparison, the Daily Caller had 4.8 million unique visitors in July, and the Blaze had 4.3 million.
Ben Shapiro, a former Breitbart editor-at-large and now editor in chief of the Daily Wire, who has been critical of Mr. Bannon, wrote in a column that Mr. Bannon is preparing for the possibility of war with Mr. Trump. In an interview, he said Mr. Bannon returning to Breitbart would help him maintain his national prominence.
“Bannon is going to try to position himself as the conscience of the nationalist, populist right,” he said. ”He’ll go to war with a bunch of people around Trump, and if he feels like Trump is going to go down in flaming wreckage, then he’ll turn on Trump.”
Kurt Bardella, who worked as an outside spokesman for Breitbart News until he resigned early last year, likewise predicted in an emailed statement that Mr. Bannon will “continue to use his weapon of choice, Breitbart, to attack his adversaries inside the West Wing,” along with Republican leaders in Congress.
“Now, he will be able to operate openly and freely to inflict as much damage as he possibly can on the ’globalists’ that remain in the Trump Administration,” he wrote.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
No comments:
Post a Comment