Steve Bannon Departs White House, Returns To Breitbart

Steve Bannon, the former Goldman Sachs banker and right-wing Breitbart News executive who helped Donald Trump become president and then took a role as his chief White House strategist, left office Friday, ending seven tumultuous months leading the West Wing's faction of hard-right populists

"White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and Steve Bannon have mutually agreed today would be Steve's last day," White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement. "We are grateful for his service and wish him the best."

Within hours after Bannon's departure from the White House, he was back at work as executive chairman of Breitbart News, the aggressively conservative website he helped guide before joining Trump’s campaign.

“The populist-nationalist movement got a lot stronger today,” Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow said in story on the site under the headline “'Populist Hero’ Stephen K. Bannon Returns Home to Breitbart.”

Whether Bannon uses his return to Breitbart to back Trump or slam him is unknown.

“The Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over," Brannon told The Weekly Standard after leaving the White House. "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.”

His position in the White House had been in peril from the time Trump took office, it seemed, with reports variously suggesting the right-wing nationalist was on the outs, then safe, then out again. As chief strategist, Bannon pushed for an almost absolutist line on squashing immigration — both legal and illegal — and advocated nationalist policies that put the country's interests above all other considerations and worked to distance the United States from its allies.

While at Breitbart before joining Trump's campaign, Bannon led a strategy to stoke white nationalism and then count on the radical right to build Trump’s base. The strategy made supporters out of Neo-Nazis and white supremacists during the campaign, and they have become more emboldened since their candidate became president.

After the spectacle of thousands of them descending on Charlottesville carrying torches and chanting Nazi slogans, the political costs of courting them became apparent and Bannon became a fresh target as the man who courted them.

On Wednesday, The American Prospect, a liberal-leaning magazine, published an interview with Bannon in which he said "there was no military solution to North Korea," a view completely at odds with Trump's earlier threats that any misstep by North Korea would be answered with military action.

In the same interview, Bannon referred to those on the fringe-right, among Trump's most ardent supporters, as "clowns." He seemed to revel in the uproar over the president's insistence that the left shared the blame for the recent violence in Charlottesville, effectively providing aid and comfort to the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who descended on the town. Bannon framed the controversy over the president's remarks as a political victory. The president had forced Democrats to talk about race, which was making it increasingly easier to "crush" them, he reasoned.

Administration officials told the New York Times that the president told his closest advisers Friday that he had decided to fire Brannon, who Trump called "a friend" last week. Bannon said he was not fired but left voluntarily, telling the president on Aug. 7 that he was resigning effective Aug. 14. He delayed his departure a few days because of the fallout over Trump's Charlottesville remarks.

The Drudge Report was the first to break the news about Bannon.

He became the most recent of a string of high-ranking White House officials to depart the administration. His tenure had been met by opposition from outside and inside the administration. Most recently, allies of National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster held Bannon responsible for a campaign by Breitbart News to vilify the security chief.

Trump repeatedly resisted pressure to get rid of Bannon, a staunch nationalist who once boasted to Mother Jones Magazine that Breitbart News was the platform of the "alt-right," the movement that rejects mainstream conservatism and appeals to white nationalists and anti-Semites.

Democrats and progressive activists had consistently spoken out against Bannon's position in the White House. Under Bannon, Breitbart not only published pro-Trump stories but was known to push stories with inflammatory headlines that were derogatory toward women and minorities.

“Steve Bannon’s firing is welcome news, but it doesn’t disguise where President Trump himself stands on white supremacists and the bigoted beliefs they advance," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said in a statement.

“President Trump’s growing record of repulsive statements is matched by his repulsive policies. Personnel changes are worthless so long as President Trump continues to advance policies that disgrace our cherished American values," Pelosi said. “The Trump Administration must not only purge itself of the remaining white supremacists on staff, but abandon the bigoted ideology that clearly governs its decisions.”

Conservative media figures expressed sympathy with Bannon on his ouster.

Rep. Ted Lieu, a Democrat from California who is known for his sharp attacks on the Trump administration, echoed Pelosi's view that the problem still lay with the president.

Elijah Cummings, a Democrat from Maryland, said he welcome Bannon's firing but the president must also rid his administration of anyone who "sows hatred and bigotry in our country."

"Glad to see @WhiteHouse has fired the man who fanned the flames of intolerance from his time at Brietbart to his tenure at @WhiteHouse," Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, wrote on Twitter.

This report will be updated.

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