The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
– Global power –
According to insider news platform Axios, Bannon has met with conservative billionaire Bob Mercer to work together to push his agenda outside the White House.
He plans, the report said, to “go thermonuclear” on his foes still inside the administration.
Reports suggest Bannon may also be heading back to Breitbart — one of its writers, Joel Pollak, tweeted simply “#WAR” when news of his sacking broke.
In an op-ed on the site, Pollak suggested that Trump ousted Bannon in “an effort to save his presidency after Charlottesville” but warned the president not to turn his back on his right-wing supporters.
“He was also the conservative spine of the administration,” Pollak wrote. “Steve Bannon personified the Trump agenda.”
The 63-year-old former navy lieutenant turned political operative was seen as the brain behind Team Trump’s decision to rail against a “global power structure” opposed to American values — a favorite theme of nationalist conspiracy-mongers.
After making his name at Goldman Sachs during the 1980s boom years, Bannon founded his own investment bank before selling it to Societe Generale in 1998 and going on to be a Hollywood producer.
Some of his projects were standard entertainment fare, but political documentaries that he produced on late president Ronald Reagan, populist darling Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement brought him into right-wing circles.
– Ultimate outsider –
Bannon became an investor in Andrew Breitbart’s eponymous media venture — focused around a site designed to buck what its founder saw as the progressive left’s grip on the news agenda.
Democrats and liberals were in the site’s crosshairs, but mainstream Republican lawmakers also felt its lash, accused of failing to stand up strongly enough to then president Barack Obama.
When Breitbart died in 2012, Bannon took over.
The site, which had been the ultimate outsider force, latched on to the Trump phenomenon and helped drive the billionaire to the White House.
Victory also brought Bannon to the West Wing and, for a while the ultimate anti-establishment outsider became one of the most powerful insiders on the planet, just a few steps away from Trump’s Oval Office.
He quickly raised hackles in Washington, especially at the State Department and the Pentagon, where officials resisted Bannon’s determination to exile his supposedly “globalist” foes and replace them with nationalists.
But his power rested on his relationship with Trump, who came to resent the way Bannon was portrayed as the all-powerful eminence grise behind the scenes at the White House.
Now he is an outsider again.
