BRIDGEWATER,
N.J. — Stephen K. Bannon, the embattled chief strategist who helped
President Trump win the 2016 election by embracing their shared
nationalist impulses, departed the White House on Friday after a
turbulent tenure shaping the fiery populism of the president’s first
seven months in office.
Mr.
Bannon’s exit, the latest in a string of high-profile West Wing
shake-ups, came as Mr. Trump is under fire for saying that “both sides”
were to blame for last week’s deadly violence in Charlottesville, Va.
Critics accused the president of channeling Mr. Bannon when he equated
white supremacists and neo-Nazis with the left-wing protesters who
opposed them.
“White
House Chief of Staff John Kelly and Steve Bannon have mutually agreed
today would be Steve’s last day,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White
House press secretary, said in a statement. “We are grateful for his
service and wish him the best.”
Mr.
Bannon’s outsized influence on the president, captured in a February
cover of Time magazine with the headline “The Great Manipulator,” was
reflected in the response to his departure.
Conservatives
groused that they lost a key advocate inside the White House and
worried aloud that Mr. Trump would shift left, while cheers erupted on
the floor of the New York Stock Exchange when headlines about Mr.
Bannon’s ouster appeared. Both the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index
and the Dow Jones industrial average immediately rose, though they
ended the day slightly down.
By
Friday night, Mr. Bannon was already back at the far-right Breitbart
News, chairing an editorial meeting at the organization he helped run
before joining Mr. Trump’s campaign and where he can continue to advance
his agenda.
Mr.
Bannon can still wield influence from outside the West Wing. He
believes he can use his perch at Breitbart — which has given a platform
to the so-called alt-right, a loose collection of activists, some of
whom espouse openly racist and anti-Semitic views — to publicly pressure
the president.
And
he may still play an insider’s role as a confidant for the president,
offering advice and counsel, much like other former advisers who still
frequently consult with Mr. Trump. Mr. Bannon had formed a philosophical
alliance with Mr. Trump, and they shared an unlikely chemistry.
Mr.
Bannon has indicated to people that he does not intend to harm Mr.
Trump and he has promised to be somewhat reserved about other
administration officials, including Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s
son-in-law and senior adviser, and his wife, Ivanka Trump, the
president’s daughter.
“In
many ways I think I can be more effective fighting from the outside for
the agenda President Trump ran on. And anyone who stands in our way, we
will go to war with,” Mr. Bannon said on Friday.
But his former colleagues in the West Wing are uncertain how long that will last.
Joel
Pollak, a Breitbart executive, tweeted after Mr. Bannon’s departure was
made public a single word with a hashtag: “#WAR.” Mr. Bannon called
reporters to suggest Mr. Pollak had gone too far, but he also
acknowledged his own disappointment at departing the White House.
He told The Weekly Standard:
“The Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over. We still
have a huge movement, and we will make something of this Trump
presidency. But that presidency is over. It’ll be something else. And
there’ll be all kinds of fights, and there’ll be good days and bad days,
but that presidency is over.”
Mr.
Bannon later clarified to The New York Times that he did not mean the
Trump agenda was over; instead, he said he was referring to his direct
work with Mr. Trump, from the end of the campaign to the first stages of
his presidency.
Here Are the Top Officials in the Trump White House Who Have Left
With the departure of Stephen K. Bannon, President
Trump’s chief strategist, at least eight top officials are no longer in
the White House.
Still, allies of the president predicted that Mr. Bannon’s ouster would help Mr. Trump’s agenda.
“I
think it’s going to be good for both Steve and for the president,” said
Christopher Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax Media who has known
the president for years.
“The
president has a major hurdle in the fall, I think, in getting
legislation passed,” Mr. Ruddy said. He cited several lawmakers who had
told the White House “that they had a real problem with Steve because of
Breitbart, and Breitbart’s been a thorn in the side for a lot of
congressional Republicans.”
The
president has struggled to overcome the dysfunction that has plagued
his administration. Bitter feuds among aides were frequently showcased
on cable news and in the pages of newspapers. Mr. Bannon was among those
suspected of repeatedly leaking the details of internal White House
debates.
“I’m
going to nominate this White House for a Tony Award for the most drama,
not the best drama but the most drama,” said Chicago Mayor Rahm
Emanuel, who served as President Barack Obama’s first chief of staff.
“I’ve lost track, eight months in, how many people have been fired? How
many have left?”
Mr.
Trump’s first year has been plagued by departures, including Anthony
Scaramucci and Michael Dubke, both of whom served as communications
director; Michael T. Flynn, the president’s first national security
adviser; Sean Spicer, the press secretary; and Reince Priebus, who was
chief of staff before Mr. Kelly.
The
sense of chaos continued on Friday as Carl Icahn, a billionaire
investor who was advising Mr. Trump on regulatory issues, announced he
was stepping down from that role. And A.R. Bernard, a pastor on the
president’s Evangelical Advisory Board, quit, citing a “deepening
conflict in values between myself and the administration.”
By
dismissing Mr. Bannon, the president loses the most visible avatar of
the nationalist agenda that propelled him to victory. Contentious and
difficult, Mr. Bannon was nonetheless a driving force behind the
president’s most high-profile policies: imposing a ban on travelers from
several majority-Muslim countries; shrinking the federal bureaucracy;
shedding regulations; and rethinking trade policies by aggressively
confronting China and other countries.
He
was also an opponent of Mr. Cohn, a former official at Goldman Sachs,
and Dina Powell, the deputy national security adviser who had also
worked on Wall Street. Mr. Cohn is a registered Democrat, and both he
and Ms. Powell have been denounced by conservative media outlets as
being antithetical to Mr. Trump’s populist message.
Mr.
Bannon had become increasingly critical of Mr. Trump, according to a
person close to both men, complaining that the president lacked the
political skills and discipline to avoid a succession of self-inflicted
public relations disasters.
But
ultimately, he viewed the president as losing sight of what propelled
Mr. Trump to the White House. On one hand, Mr. Bannon told friends that
Mr. Trump was a populist savant who had a deeper connection with the
alienated white working class than any politician in the last
half-century. But Mr. Bannon, a former naval officer, also saw the
president as increasingly trapped by the generals he surrounded himself
with, and moving toward an interventionist foreign policy.
Mr.
Bannon complained bitterly about the president’s provocative and
unscripted threats to North Korea and was especially concerned about a
wider attempt to reassert American military power in the Western
Hemisphere. He told his small circle of like-minded confidants in the
West Wing that he feared the president would be talked into an
intervention in Venezuela, where President Nicolás Maduro has been
cracking down on the opposition amid a deteriorating economic and
political situation.
Last
week, Mr. Trump suggested that a military option was under
consideration in Venezuela. Mr. Bannon told people close to him that the
statement indicated the president is relying too heavily on advisers
who want him to embark on “military adventures.”
Mr.
Bannon frequently clashed with Mr. Kushner and others in the
administration who sought a more traditional, globalist approach to the
world’s problems. He also had a long-running feud with Lt. Gen. H.R.
McMaster, the national security adviser.
There were different interpretations of how Mr. Bannon left his job, which had been long anticipated in Washington.
One
White House official, who would not be named discussing the president’s
thinking, said Mr. Trump has wanted to remove Mr. Bannon since he ousted Mr. Priebus three weeks ago. Since then, Mr. Kelly has been evaluating Mr. Bannon’s status, according to the official.
But
a person close to Mr. Bannon insisted that the parting of ways was his
idea, and that he had submitted his resignation to the president on Aug.
7, to be announced at the start of this week, timed to his one-year
anniversary of working for Mr. Trump.
According
to three people close to the discussions, Mr. Trump and Mr. Bannon
agreed during the previous week that he would depart. But the violence
in Charlottesville pushed Mr. Bannon closer to Mr. Trump; he encouraged
the president to stand by his impulses in his response and, one of the
three people said, sought to stay on longer.
That became untenable after the American Prospect interview,
in which he mocked colleagues, though he later said he thought was off
the record. In it, Mr. Bannon also contradicted Mr. Trump’s tough
threats toward North Korea, saying “there’s no military solution here,
they got us.” Privately, several White House officials said that Mr.
Bannon appeared to be provoking Mr. Trump.
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