Bannon vows to wage war for Trump by crushing White House opposition

Donald Trump took to Twitter on Saturday to praise Steve Bannon, speaking out amid the turmoil that followed his chief strategist’s departure and left the president increasingly isolated within the White House.

One day after Bannon became the latest high-profile official to part company with the administration, Trump tweeted: “I want to thank Steve Bannon for his service. He came to the campaign during my run against Crooked Hillary Clinton – it was great! Thanks S.”

The president’s tweet marked his first public comments on Bannon, whose tumultuous tenure in the West Wing finally ended following months of speculation. Bannon’s dismissal came as the White House struggled to contain the fallout from Trump’s response to the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a white supremacist drove a car into counter-protesters at a rally, leaving one dead and several injured.

Bannon, a leader of the so-called “alt-right” movement, had played an instrumental role in crafting the nationalist message at the core of Trump’s presidential campaign. The president’s controversial insistence that “both sides” were at fault in Charlottesville, which placed neo-Nazis and white supremacists on the same footing as protesters from the left, was widely perceived as a testament to Bannon’s influence.

Bannon has now returned to Breitbart News, the rightwing website he once proclaimed “the platform for the alt-right”. Breitbart’s editor-in-chief confirmed Bannon was resuming his role as its executive chairman, the position he occupied before joining Trump’s campaign in August 2016.

In an interview with the conservative Weekly Standard, Bannon signalled he was prepared to go to war with his adversaries in the White House while declaring: “The Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over.”

“I feel jacked up. Now I’m free. I’ve got my hands back on my weapons,” Bannon said. “Someone said, ‘it’s Bannon the Barbarian’. I am definitely going to crush the opposition. There’s no doubt.”

“I built a fucking machine at Breitbart,” he added. “And now I’m about to go back, knowing what I know, and we’re about to rev that machine up.”

The remarks were interpreted by political observers as a threat to the so-called “globalists” in the administration, such as Trump’s National Economic Council chair Gary Cohn and national security adviser HR McMaster, who clashed with Bannon behind the scenes over trade, immigration and foreign policy. The president’s family members, son-in-law Jared Kushner and daughter Ivanka, both senior advisers in the White House, had also sparred with Bannon and sought his exit.

Bannon made clear in another interview, with Bloomberg Businessweek’s Joshua Green, the author of a book on Bannon’s rise, that he was committed to aiding Trump from the outside.

“If there’s any confusion out there, let me clear it up: I’m leaving the White House and going to war for Trump against his opponents on Capitol Hill, in the media and in corporate America,” Bannon said.

Those familiar with Bannon’s tactics suggested he would be even more powerful while rallying Trump’s base from outside the White House. “In many ways, he’ll have just as much or, at least over time, more influence on the outside than on the inside,” Kurt Bardella, a former Breitbart spokesman and political commentator, told the Guardian.

Be it the continuing investigation into potential ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, or Trump’s failure to secure any legislative accomplishments, Bardella said, the scrutiny over his presidency would be no less pronounced.

“As Trump continues to struggle … Steve will be all too ready and eager to be the Trump whisperer again,” Bardella said, while adding of Bannon and Breitbart: “They’ve not been shy about their intention to, at least in their mind, hold the ‘globalists’ or GOP establishment accountable if they try to move Trump more to the middle and away from the nationalistic themes he campaigned on.”

The split over the president’s response to Charlottesville is emblematic of the extent to which the Bannon-Breitbart worldview has become ingrained in the Republican base. A CBS poll found that 67% of Republicans approved of Trump’s handling of the aftermath, even as 55% of Americans disapproved, and 68% of Republicans said Trump was accurately assigning blame to “both sides”, standing in contrast to the flurry of criticism from Republicans in Congress. Other polls have similarly found views strongly divided along partisan lines.

Trump initially denounced both sides, but grudgingly issued a statement 48 hours later that explicitly condemned white supremacists and neo-Nazis. He then reversed course once more in a dramatic press conference last Tuesday, equating the racially motivated Unite the Right rally-goers, who chanted phrases such as “Jews will not replace us”, to counter-protesters from the left.

Trump’s remarks drew a sharp reaction from across the spectrum, with politicians, business executives and faith leaders condemning the president for elevating neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Several CEOs resigned from Trump’s business advisory panel, citing their disappointment with the president’s statement, forcing him to disband the so-called American Manufacturing Council. At least three major fundraisers cancelled planned events at Trump’s Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago.

Among them was the American Cancer Society, which referred in a statement to its “values and commitment to diversity”. “It has become increasingly clear that the challenge to those values is outweighing other business considerations,” it said.

While most members of Trump’s unofficial board of evangelical advisers stood by him, at least one, New York City megachurch pastor AR Bernard, stepped down over what he called “a deepening conflict in values” with the administration.

Meanwhile, thousands of students at Lehigh University, one of three colleges to give Trump an honorary doctorate, called for it to be revoked.