Steve Bannon, the Trump adviser who spent years mainstreaming white nationalism, explained

It’s been less than a week since Donald Trump was elected president, and he’s already in hot water over an appointment to his nascent administration.

The controversy centers on Steve Bannon, the Trump campaign’s CEO. On Sunday, the Trump team announced that Bannon would serve as the “chief strategist and senior counselor” in the upcoming Trump administration. It’s not exactly clear what Bannon’s responsibilities will be, but the press release describes the role as an “equal partner” to the chief of staff, typically the most powerful staff position in the White House.

This ignited an immediate firestorm, with prominent Democrats and media figures expressing fury at Trump’s choice.

“There should be no sugarcoating the truth here: Donald Trump just invited a white nationalist into the highest reaches of the government,” Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley said in a statement.

Merkley’s language may sound overheated, but actual white nationalists are celebrating his appointment. Here’s what Rocky J. Suhayda, chairman of the American Nazi Party, wrote in an email to CNN (random capitalization his):

I must admit that I was a wee bit surprised that Mr. Trump finally chose Mr. Bannon, I thought that his stable of Washington insiders would have objected too vociferously...Perhaps The Donald IS for 'REAL' and is not going to be another controlled puppet directed by the usual 'Wire Pullers,' and does indeed intend to ROCK the BOAT? Time will tell.

You see, Bannon isn’t your typical loyalist being rewarded by the president he shepherded into office: He’s a leading light of America’s white nationalist movement accused of using misogynistic, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic, and barely hidden racist language throughout his professional life.

His ex-wife has also alleged that he’s expressed anti-Semitic sentiments in his personal life as well: According to 2007 court papers alleging domestic violence, she said that Bannon had said he didn’t want his children going to a school that had a lot of Jewish students. Bannon strongly denies both the comments and the broader abuse allegations, though the school’s former director confirmed to New York magazine that Bannon asked why there were so many Hanukkah books in its library.

Most of the controversy surrounds his four years at the helm of Breitbart News, the hard-line conservative outlet. Under Bannon’s guiding hand, Breitbart has moved further and further toward a politics of open white resentment — to take one example, the site had an entire group of articles called “Black Crime.”

Bannon told a Mother Jones reporter in August that "we're the platform for the alt-right," an online movement shot through with racists and neo-Nazis. In a 2015 radio appearance, he referred to feminists as a “bunch of dykes.” He has implied that Sen. Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s vice presidential pick, is a Muslim Brotherhood agent.

As a result, leading anti-hate groups have decried Bannon’s appointment and urged Trump to rescind it. “It is a sad day when a man who presided over the premier website of the ‘alt-right’ — a loose-knit group of white nationalists and unabashed anti-Semites — is slated to be a senior staff member in ‘the people’s house,” Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. “Bannon must go,” the Southern Poverty Law Center declared.

In a normal administration, this kind of furor would likely destroy a new appointment. Generally speaking, connections to white nationalists and neo-Nazis are disqualifiers in modern American politics.

But the Trump campaign repeatedly defied this sort of rule, with the candidate himself sending out anti-Semitic graphics and retweeting fraudulent statistics about “black-on-white” crime with seemingly no consequences. Bannon was a key figure in the Trump campaign — and it seems like the lesson Trump took from this is that his ties to hate group are outweighed by his personal loyalty to the president-elect and clear skill at helping Trump articulate a message that successfully energized large numbers of white voters.

The controversy over Bannon, then, speaks to perhaps the central issues in American politics going forward: Will the Trump administration be a normal presidency — or will it be the kind of far-right, boundary-pushing thing many fear? And if a Trump White House normalizes racially charged rhetoric the way his campaign did, will the Republican establishment eventually decide to push back?

Steve Bannon, Breitbart, and the alt-right

(Breitbart)

To understand why people are so angry about Bannon’s appointment, you need to understand where Bannon is coming from — the ideas that animate him, and his precise connection to white nationalism.

Bannon has done a lot of things in his life: He’s a former naval officer, Goldman Sachs banker, and Hollywood investor who gets royalties from Seinfeld. But the defining moment of his current incarnation came at a 2005 movie premiere where he met a little-known conservative firebrand named Andrew Breitbart.

Bannon was intoxicated by Breitbart, who saw politics as a fight to save American culture from the insidious PC left. He became one of Breitbart’s closest advisers, helping him grow Breitbart.com from a news aggregator into a leading site for far-right news and opinion in the late 2000s. Breitbart once called Bannon the "Leni Riefenstahl of the Tea Party movement." The comparison to Nazi Germany’s most famous filmmaker and propagandist was meant as a compliment.

Breitbart died in 2012, and Bannon took effective control over the Breitbart media empire, which by then spanned several different sites covering everything from foreign affairs to Hollywood. "Steve ran the site and controlled the content as a dictator," former Breitbart spokesperson Kurt Bardella writes at the Hill.

Bannon had a grandiose view of Breitbart, seeing it as the voice of a new kind of conservatism. “Our vision — Andrew’s vision — was always to build a global, center-right, populist, anti-establishment news site," Bannon told Bloomberg’s Joshua Green.

Bannon frequently uses the word "populist" to describe his worldview, and that’s how he saw Breitbart’s coverage. The goal was to stand up for ordinary people against the elite in Washington, which he saw as across-the-board hostile to real conservative values. That meant championing politicians whom he saw as challenging. Breitbart’s coverage of Sarah Palin and pre-2016 Ted Cruz was fawning — though it paled in comparison to its hagiographic coverage of the Trump campaign, which had led many to liken it to Pravda, the Soviet-era propaganda machine.

Breitbart’s ethos also led it to publish harsh attacks on more mainstream Republicans, particularly on issues where Bannon believed the GOP was out of step with ordinary Republicans. Immigration is perhaps the best example: Under Bannon, Breitbart has been viciously, harshly opposed to amnesty for undocumented immigrants and really to immigration in general.

The site, like Donald Trump, believes immigrants bring crime and steal American jobs. Republicans who supported "amnesty" did so because they wanted to line big businesses’ pockets.

Breitbart stories frequently hype reports about crime involving immigrants, with headlines that sound like they came from tabloids (representative example: "One Sex Offender Illegal Alien Caught After Another Alleged Offender Legalized"). They viciously attack Republicans they believe are betraying true conservatism, blasting House Speaker — and occasional Trump foil -- Paul Ryan as a supporter of "radical amnesty-and-open-borders."

This anti-elite, anti-immigrant populism often bled into white identity politics — one defined by lurid, fearmongering coverage of minority groups, particularly African Americans and Muslims.

Breitbart once published a photo of an old Adidas shirt as evidence that Islamist terrorists are sneaking across the Mexican border. It published a piece titled “5 Devastating Facts about Black-on-Black Crime.” It has referred to conservative writer Bill Kristol as a "renegade Jew." It ran a piece last year encouraging male readers to tell women that "this isn’t going to suck itself."

This was all done with Bannon’s approval. He sees white identity politics, and the people who practice it, as a tool in his war to build a form of right-wing populism.

“Bannon has openly embraced the racist and anti-Semitic [fringe],” Ben Shapiro, a former Breitbart columnist who quit over the site’s pro-Trump drift, writes at the Daily Wire. “He’s happy to pander to those people and make common cause with them in order to transform conservatism.”

This, perhaps, is what Bannon found attractive about the so-called alt-right, a vocal group of dissidents who proudly stand apart from mainstream conservatives. It includes people whom the SPLC calls white nationalists, people like Richard Spencer of the National Policy Institute (who coined the term "alt-right") or American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor.

At the same time, it includes people who reject bigotry, at least in its overt forms, but whose views are still too reactionary for the conservative mainstream. Here I’m thinking of some so-called neoreactionaries, like Mencius Moldbug, who believe that democracy is “an ineffective and destructive system of government” and needs to be replaced with a form of enlightened despotism.

A few neoreactionaries aside, racism and sexism are defining elements of the alt-right movement; it could not exist in its own form without them.

Alt-righters tend to oppose mass immigration on the grounds that Latin Americans and Muslims dilute the excellence of white culture. They support what they call "white identity politics" — the idea that white Americans should organize and stick up for their own interests because minority groups do the same thing. They blame "globalists" in both the liberal and conservative elite for selling out white America through free trade and open borders.

Hot arguments on the alt-right include the idea that “the world makes much better sense when one understands that people of different races differ in average intelligence,” (that’s Taylor), that the United States should be remade into “a new society, an ethno-state that would be a gathering point for all Europeans” (Spencer), and that feminists support nonwhite immigration into America because “feminists want to be raped” (prominent alt-right blogger Matt Forney).

The themes are the same as the ones you hear at Breitbart — non-whites are dangerous, feminists are bad — but toned up and unapologetic.

Breitbart’s most famous writer, Milo Yiannopoulos, has openly courted the alt-right, singing their praises across Breitbart’s site. "Although initially small in number, the alt-right has a youthful energy and jarring, taboo-defying rhetoric that have boosted its membership and made it impossible to ignore," he wrote in a glowing Breitbart piece on the group co-authored with his protégé Allum Bokhari.

Alt-right figures, for their part, see Breitbart as a popularizer of their ideas. The site is not as openly white nationalist or anti-Semitic as they would like, but it shifts the mainstream in their direction. Its attacks on “globalists,” fearmongering about Latino criminality, and condemnation of the Republican leadership direct people in the right direction.

“Breitbart has elective affinities with the alt-right, and the alt-right has clearly influenced Breitbart,” Spencer told the Daily Beast in August. “In this way, Breitbart has acted as a ‘gateway’ to alt-right ideas and writers. I don’t think it has done this deliberately; again, it’s a matter of elective affinities.”

Much as I hate to agree with a white nationalist, he has a point. Breitbart, under Bannon, has been defined by a “not-open-white-nationalism-but-damn-close” ethos. They push the boundary of conservative opinion writing in that direction without claiming the white nationalist mantle, thus allowing them to insinuate themselves into the Republican mainstream.

"They have an incredible eye for an important story, particular ones that are important to conservatives and Republicans," Sen. Jeff Sessions, a Republican firebrand rumored to be a leading candidate for secretary of defense, told Bloomberg’s Green. "They’ve become extraordinarily influential. Radio talk show hosts are reading Breitbart every day. You can feel it when they interview you."

In other words: Steve Bannon’s career in conservative politics has been defined by his skill at taking ideas from the fringes of US politics and bringing them to the center.

And now he’ll have the power of the White House at his disposal.

Bannon will show if President Trump will behave like Candidate Trump

Kirk Irwin and Jonathan Bachman/Getty Images

It’s unclear whether Bannon plans to use the White House in the same way that he used Breitbart. But white nationalists are happy, if not overjoyed, about his appointment. “I am pleased that Steve Bannon will have an important policy role,” Jared Taylor, one of the leading figures in the alt-right, told me via email.

This support, together with Bannon’s history with the far right and love for conspiracy theories, would have disqualified many other picks for such a high-level post.

Think of two recent examples. In 2002, then-Sen. Trent Lott lost his bid for majority leader after he praised segregationist Strom Thurmond’s 1948 presidential run at the latter’s 100th birthday party. In 2009, Van Jones had to resign from a job advising Obama on green energy after his name showed up on a 9/11 truther petition. In both cases, the ties to what’s generally seen as fringe, unacceptable ideas were enough to derail political ambitions.

But that assumes normal politics. And the Trump campaign is anything but normal.

During the campaign, Trump got away with everything from calling Mexicans rapists or promising to ban Muslims from entering the country. In fact, he won because of comments like that. The best political science evidence we have suggests that Trump mobilized a new coalition of white voters, particularly during the primary, who were positively attracted to Trump’s overt racism and bigotry.

This coalition has now delivered Donald Trump the presidency. Appointing Bannon suggests that, far from running from this form of politics, Trump is doubling down on it.

“Bannon’s appointment is not simply a personnel choice,” Rebecca Hamilton, a professor at American University who studies citizen activism and ethnic conflict, writes at Just Security, a blog for national security experts. “It is about anointing deeply offensive values as having a place in the governance of America.”

Hamilton’s proposed response — calling on citizens to organize against Bannon’s appointment — has yet to emerge so far. And it’s hard to imagine that it would: Trump’s business history demonstrates a strong, almost mafia-like, commitment to personal loyalty (at least, as long as he’s winning). It would be very unlike him to ditch an ally like Bannon in the wake of a victory, especially over white nationalist affinities that have been public knowledge for some time.

The question now, then, isn’t whether Bannon will be peremptorily fired. It’s what this tells us about the Trump administration.

As of right now, we just don’t know how much of Trump’s actual legislative and executive agenda will be shaped by Bannon’s white nationalism. It’s possible, given his “strategist” title, that Bannon will be managing Trump’s political efforts and won’t have much of a role in shaping policy.

That’s far from a good thing, but it means there’s an open question as to whether Bannon’s priorities will be reflected in Trump policy — through an extremely aggressive deportation push, for example, or limiting Justice Department probes into police violence in black communities. Watching these issues will be critical to understanding whether the Trump administration, and not just Bannon alone, sees things the same way the white nationalists do.

The second question is about American society’s response more broadly.

Groups like the SPLC and ADL do not randomly condemn political appointments; they normally focus on the activities of neo-Nazis and white nationalist militias with a propensity toward — and ability to carry out — acts of actual violence. When they weigh in on a White House appointment, it reflects very serious concerns.

The test, then, is how the media and civil society respond to this. How will the Bannon appointment be explained to the public — as a sign of unacceptable extremism, or simply just another political appointment?

After Trump’s victory, many observers warned against “normalizing” Trump — about treating the absurd things he does as acceptable merely because he’s now the president. This requires maintaining the level of horror that many American felt the first time they heard Trump talk about banning Muslims or grabbing women “by the pussy.” It’s about “staying shocked,” as the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne put it in a memorable column.

This will be hard to do if frightening stuff, like appointing a white nationalist sympathizer to a powerful White House position, gets treated just like Trump appointing any other of his allies to serve in his administration. But as the initial shock of the Bannon appointment fades, it will be even easier for us to treat his role merely as a feature of our new American reality — nothing surprising, just the way things are.

This is a temptation that should be resisted. It means the appointment is a test — not just for Trump but for American society as a whole.

Bannon is a Republican other Republicans don’t particularly like

(Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

The Bannon appointment is also a big deal for Trump’s already strained relationship with the Republican leadership on Capitol Hill.

During his time at Breitbart, Bannon essentially declared war on the mainstream Republican Party. He argued that leading Republicans like Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Ryan were sellouts, and saw Breitbart’s mission as wresting power from them and redirecting it toward its form of conservative populism.

"At Breitbart, part of our explosive growth is because ... we don’t really believe that there’s a functional conservative party in this country," Bannon said during a 2013 panel appearance. In an email sent to conservative writer Ben Howe shortly after Breitbart’s death, reported by BuzzFeed’s McKay Coppins, he was more blunt.

"This is about power," Bannon wrote, "and who is going to exert it."

Ryan, in particular, was a target of Breitbart’s rage — as the site saw him as someone especially willing to support some kind of comprehensive immigration reform. Breitbart enthusiastically hyped his 2016 primary opponent, Paul Nehlen, and painted him as a de facto Hillary Clinton supporter. The site saw Ryan’s endorsement of Trump as evidence that they had won.

"The sitting Speaker of the House, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), has been brought to his knees, bowing down before the almighty nationalist populist movement, as his life’s work — a career in politics — flashes before his eyes," Breitbart writer Matt Boyle put it in an August piece. He continues:

Previously thought to be unbreakable in his strident push for the elites’ globalist agenda — unlimited open borders immigration from the third world into America coupled with amnesty for illegal aliens along with unchecked trade agreements that drain American jobs to China, Canada, Mexico, and elsewhere around the world — Ryan has been proven to be weak.

Now Bannon will have to work with the hated Republican leadership if he wants the new administration accomplish anything. The question is — will he be able to, or will he lead the Trump administration into war with its own party?

People who know Bannon are genuinely unsure.

“If Bannon’s leading ... that’s bad news for the Republican agenda,” Shapiro, the ex-Breitbart staffer, writes at the Daily Wire. “Bannon opposes the Republican Party, hates Paul Ryan. [He] wants to watch it all burn.”

If this is true, and Bannon ends up calling the legislative shots, then the Trump administration is in for a for a bumpier ride than its congressional majority suggests. If Bannon’s first goal isn’t passing laws but actually wresting control of the Republican Party from the Republican leadership, then the sweeping changes Democrats fear and Republicans dream of may not come to pass.

In other words: The Trump administration may be too busy trying to undermine Paul Ryan to pass Ryan’s budget or his other legislative priorities like replacing Obamacare.

Now, Bannon’s potential influence may be limited by Trump’s pick for chief of staff, Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus. Priebus is a Republican’s Republican, a team player to the end. If Priebus, not Bannon, ends up wielding more power over policy and legislation, than the Trump administration will likely end up looking quite different.

That means the Bannon appointment doesn’t just signal fights ahead with Republicans on Capitol Hill. It’s also a harbinger of bitter fights to come within the Trump administration itself.