In 2011, the New York Congressman was a darling of the Democratic grassroots with sky-high ambitions. Founded as an alternative to mainstream media by the late Andrew Breitbart, the website was an immediate disruptive force in U.S. Trump leveraged this growing power to bypass the traditional gatekeepers of power–the media, the political parties, the elected and unelected bosses.īannon’s background at Breitbart taught him the same lessons. In the history of human beings, it has never been easier to organize groups, for good or ill, or to communicate both truth and lies, to question authority and to undermine the answers that authority gives. When mixed with the economic frustrations of a globalized economy, this power unleashed a new populism. Technology has placed a communications revolution in nearly every American palm. But Trump won the election in part by understanding that this is no ordinary time. is more adamantly resistant to pushing than Washington. In that sense, as one veteran Republican said, “It’s already over, and Bannon won.” By marking Trump’s first days so vividly, Bannon has put the accent on Trump the disrupter. And they will likely continue to pull him in opposite directions. While other advisers have tried to change Trump, Bannon has urged him to step on the gas.īoth of these images, the orderly office and the glorious crusade, have genuine appeal for the President. And he is the one who has been most successful in focusing Trump on a winning message. Still, Bannon possesses that dearest of Washington currencies: walk-in privileges for the Oval Office. “You’re going to see probably a slower, more deliberative process,” one official told TIME. Nothing flows that hasn’t been scheduled by his deputy Katie Walsh. Everything goes through chief of staff Reince Priebus, he directed. According to senior Administration officials, Trump hauled in some half-dozen of his key advisers for a brisk dressing-down. Yet Bannon’s prominence in the first 10 days of the Administration–and the scenes of confusion and disorder that are his disruptive hallmark–has rattled the West Wing and perhaps even dismayed the President. 30 that the national media was his “opposition party,” he was echoing Bannon’s comment a few days earlier to the New York Times. His fingerprints were suddenly everywhere: when Trump tweeted on Jan. Having already helped draft the dark and scathing Inaugural Address and impose the refugee ban, Bannon proceeded to light the national-security apparatus on fire by negotiating a standing invitation for himself to the National Security Council. But Bannon avoided this gathering of the elites he believes to be doomed, and remained at the White House to continue the shock and awe. Protesters grabbed markers and cardboard scraps and raced to airports from coast to coast, where television cameras found them by the thousands.Īs the storm reached the gates of the White House on Saturday, many of the West Wing’s senior staff had departed to attend the secretive Alfalfa Club annual dinner, an off-the-record black-tie soiree where politicos drink and tell jokes with billionaires. customs and border agents began collaring airline passengers covered by the order, including more than 100 people whose green cards or valid visas would have been sufficient for entry if only they had taken an earlier flight. 27–with little or no explanation to agency heads, congressional leaders or the press–Trump shut down America’s refugee program for 120 days (indefinitely in the case of Syrian refugees), while barring travelers from seven majority-Muslim countries. The Administration was barely a week old when, on the evening of Jan. This forceful presence has already opened cracks in West Wing. “What we are witnessing now is the birth of a new political order,” Bannon wrote in an email to the Washington Post. Bannon is the one who keeps the doctrine pure, the true believer, who is in it not for money or position, but to change history. Having launched his campaign as a can-do chief executive, he came to see himself as the leader of a movement–and no movement is complete without its commissar. Trump told America many times in 2016 that his would be no ordinary Administration. Bannon, a director who deploys ravenous sharks, shrieking tornadoes and mushroom clouds as reliably as John Ford shot Monument Valley.Īct I of the Trump presidency has been filled with disruption, as promised by Trump and programmed by Bannon, with plenty of resistance in reply, from both inside and outside the government. Most modern Presidents chart their opening moves with the help of a friendly think tank or a set of long-held beliefs.ĭonald Trump’s first steps had the feel of a documentary film made by his chief strategist and alter ego Stephen K.

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