Bannon apparently has decided that his absence from the White House means that the White House is now, functionally, a Democratic one, and that he is duty-bound to either bring it to heel or, if it won't cooperate, grind it into a fine red-white-and-blue dust. It's not difficult to see why he thinks this, if you adopt the mindset of a paranoid lunatic who viewed the job he just lost as a suicide mission to see how deeply he could embed his Breitbartian worldview in this administration's DNA before being forcibly expelled by his marginally less delusional counterparts: Jared Kushner was a Democrat. Ivanka Trump was a Democrat. Gary Cohn was a Democrat. Hell, even Trump himself was a Democrat for a while, until he figured out that pandering to simmering racial resentment and unvarnished xenophobia was a more tenable political strategy than running for office on the merits of his policy positions, to the extent that any such positions exist.
Bannon is bloviating like he has the power to end careers and shape Washington politics, but that is certainly not how the rank and file Republicans view him.
Courtesy of Yahoo News:
The ousted senior White House adviser may be back guiding Breitbart’s right-wing reactionary bomb-throwing, but he’s likely to find himself in the same position that left-wing sites like Daily Kos and Huffington Post occupied when Barack Obama became president in 2009, several Republicans told Yahoo News.
“These kinds of oppositional websites are much more potent when the movement they represent is not in the White House,” said one Republican close to House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisc. “Kos became irrelevant and HuffPo basically transformed itself into a mainstream news site. The reality was that Obama had a bigger megaphone than those sites. And Trump as president has a bigger megaphone and a more loyal following than Breitbart.
“I haven’t heard any congressional Republican leaders express concern about Bannon going back to Breitbart. He’s a guy with a website. How much of a problem can a guy with a website actually be? He was much more of a problem when he had daily, hourly, access to the Oval Office,” the Ryan ally said.
Alex Conant, who worked for Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s 2016 Republican presidential campaign, said that “Breitbart has targeted [Senate Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell and Ryan for years, with very limited impact. They’re both still their caucus leaders, and their support has never been stronger.
“I don’t know what changes, except Bannon has less power today than he did a week ago,” said Conant.
Breitbart once referred to IM as a "defunct website."
That might actually soon hold true for them now as well.
Currently Breitbart is identified mainly as the home of the same kind of white supremacists that ran down a counter protester in Charlottesville, and they have now lost the thing that provided them with any real relevance, which was their editor-in-chief's White House gig.
Those are some serious currents through which to swim back to prominence and influence.
However it will be fun to watch Bannon rage against the machine, and turn on the man who brought him onto the national stage in the first place.
That second part has already started.
Source http://ift.tt/2ioh19F
