Media Molding Bannon into Populist Bogeyman

The press is in a feeding frenzy, finding new narratives every week seeking to damage President Donald Trump and waylay his agenda.

The latest narrative of questionable veracity doesn’t involve administration ties to Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin. It isn’t Trump erasing scientific data from federal websites. Nor is it hyperbolic claims that Trump’s tweets threaten world peace.

“They’re still pushing this story … Trump runs the White House. Steve Bannon doesn’t run the White House.”

The narrative today is that Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, is an evil mastermind, threatening to topple the status quo in Washington, D.C. Some media outlets are even going as far as to suggest Bannon is the “real” president.

Bannon was recently put on the cover of TIME magazine, with the cover proclaiming, “The Great Manipulator.” Inside, the headline asks: “Is Steve Bannon the Second Most Powerful Man in the World?”

Outside the White House, protesters are singing the same notes. “Impeach President Bannon,” one sign reads, held by a protester who frequently shows up on Pennsylvania Avenue.

It’s the Democrats and media’s third attempt to turn the narrative back to Bannon. They tried the first time when Trump, in August, plucked Bannon from his post as CEO of Breitbart News.

Trump was looking to establish stability in his final push for the presidency, so the choice of Bannon seemed counter-intuitive. Bannon is a disruptor who is dissatisfied with the political status quo, as his documentaries and his time at Breitbart made clear.

But Bannon is also a businessman. He has an MBA from Harvard University and he brought a consistency and a new bare-knuckle strategy to the presidential race as Trump’s campaign CEO. There is little doubt he brought new discipline to Trump’s campaign apparatus.

[lz_ndn video=31948765]

The media simply had too much on their plates to make Bannon a consistent campaign issue. But after Trump won and it became clear Bannon would enter the White House with Trump, new attention turned to the 63-year-old Republican.

Bannon was “alt-right,” his critics noted. He is a white nationalist and even a “white supremacist,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi recently charged, repeating silly attacks on Bannon.

But the attacks had to be again postponed. The Democrats and media moved on to a new narrative that Russia interfered in the election. After Trump weathered that narrative and moved into the White House, attention slowly turned back to Bannon. Now the glare is white-hot.

Politico even devoted two reporters to finding out what Bannon reads. In a story published on Tuesday morning, Eliana Johnson and Eli Stokols wrote that “Bannon’s readings tend to have one thing in common: the view that technocrats have put Western civilization on a downward trajectory, and that only a shock to the system can reverse its decline. And they tend to have a dark, apocalyptic tone that at times echoes Bannon’s own public remarks over the years — a sense that humanity is at a hinge point in history.”

Read between the lines and you see the suggestion that Bannon is Trump’s Rasputin. Grigori Rasputin was an eccentric adviser to the last Russian tsar, Nicholas II. His influence arguably led to the fall of the Russian monarchy in 1917.

Charging the president has a Rasputin or a heartless manipulator as an adviser is an old left-wing tactic. The Democrats, who often become obsessed not with presidential policy but White House advisers, tried to cast former White House official Karl Rove as a dangerous Rasputin too.

In 2012, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said she thought of arresting Rove when he was President George W. Bush’s adviser from 2001 to 2007.

“I could have arrested Karl Rove on any given day,” Pelosi told reporters in June 2012. “I’m not kidding. There’s a prison here in the Capitol … If we had spotted him in the Capitol, we could have arrested him.”

In May 2008, a writer at Daily Kos wrote, “Karl Rove: Evil Personified.”

Today, Bannon is the new Karl Rove. To undermine Trump, Bannon will now be subject to the same frenzy of anonymous charges and rhetoric.

[lz_third_party align=center includes=https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/828575949268606977]

Part of the strategy is to divide the White House staff and create chaos. And Trump seems to be irritated by the suggestion he is not calling the shots. On Monday morning, Trump made clear he is in control. He also indicated he knows what the narrative is attempting to do.

“I call my own shots, largely based on an accumulation of data, and everyone knows it,” Trump tweeted. “Some FAKE NEWS media, in order to marginalize, lies!”

For now, the “Saturday Night Live” skits will continue. (Last Saturday’s opening skit portrayed Bannon as the Grim Reaper.) The media, Democrats, and activists will eventually burn out on the Bannon talk, as Trump powers through his first-year agenda.

In the meantime, some media talkers and pundits are tiring of the anti-Bannon frenzy.

“They’re still pushing this story,” said Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Tuesday. “Trump runs the White House. Steve Bannon doesn’t run the White House.”