Steve Bannon

The sudden resignation of Steve Bannon, senior advisor to President Trump has come as a surprise to many. No one thought he would last the whole four years; but almost everyone who had taken a look at that blotchy, bloated, permanently hungover countenance, had presumed he would die on the job. Bannon, a former editor at the Breitbart website, and a right-wing mover and shaker for some years, seemed like the Dorian Gray portrait of Trump’s politics, a countenance only regularly exposed to the glare of day — haggard, haunted and very, very white.

Bannon’s “resignation” — it scarce needs to be said that this is a sacking by White House chief-of-staff John Kelly, and others — would appear to be the product of a brief and final power struggle resulting from the Charlottesville white supremacist demonstration and the killing of an anti-fascist protest in a car attack. Trump initially condemned violence on both sides, then, under pressure from within and without, condemned racism explicitly — and then returned to his original “even-handed” condemnation of both sides, and lamented the removal of pro-Confederate statues.

The reversal, and the specific charge that the country was forgetting its history by removing Confederate statues, was pure Bannon, for whom the Trump campaign in 2015-2016 proved a wholly unexpected opportunity to get to the heart of power in the US. Bannon is a former navy man, Goldman Sachs broker, maker of propaganda documentary films, and latterly, the editor of the website started by right-wing editor, the late Andrew Breitbart. Both Bannon and Breitbart were part of a California-based “alt-right”, their politics “evolving” from a libertarian hatred of the progressive state, to, in Bannon’s case, a melange of social Darwinism and ethno-nationalism.

Bannon’s ideas — tying the US as a white/Christian/European-descended society, to global competition for power between civilisations, and big government in matters economic — provided much of the heft for Trump’s campaign, as he began to require more than insults and gimmicks. The idea of big infrastructure funding, and repudiation of neoliberal trade deals was what swung Trump’s victories in the rust-belt. Few of them were interested in the alt-right’s more grandiose theories of civilisational rise and fall.

But these were Bannon’s obsessions; for him, the revival of the rust-belt and industrial America merely a means to the end of continued American dominance, or even survival. Nor was this a conception of American “greatness”, as embodied by the late 90s Project For a New American Century, which saw America’s continued dominance as being part of God’s plan for a global conservative-liberal order. For Bannon and others there is no abstract “humanity”; simply large civilisations embodied by states and empires, in perpetual competition. Such a conception of global politics is both more realistic — and also more threatened. It sees the growth of non-white populations within the US as the expansion of an enemy within.

Bannon’s removal marks the end of one idea of what the Trump presidency was. Bannon was the last surviving member of that crowd in the White House who had Trump’s ear; now the only people close to him are his daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner. They are both more socially liberal, and more neoliberal economically. Bannon had a grand conception: that he would go to war against free-market small government politics at the heart of power, and have Trump create a $1 trillion infrastructure fund, funded in part by increased taxes on the very wealthy ($5 million plus). Bannon was a right-wing Keynsian in this respect; zero/negative interest rates represented for him, both a signal that the western economy was beset with a lack of demand, and that money was cheap enough for a major refloat to be funded. The need for an infrastructure reboot was deemed to be as much military as it was social and economic; the US could not defend itself with its creaking, “third world” airports, roads and bridges. Bannon had every intention of getting the plan through, using Democrat votes, if he could not find sufficient Republican ones.

Bannon is gone, and Trump is now so toxic that it is far more difficult for Democrats to co-operate with him on this. His taking-back of his denunciation of racism occurred at a press conference where the infrastructure push was being announced; it entirely overshadowed it. Furthermore, Trump has little of the drive and skill to get the proposal through Congress. The complexity of the proposal is phenomenal; it would take great command of detail and vast stamina to get it through. Obama had that, and that was what got through the Affordable Health Care Act. This proposal is equal to or greater than that. It’s possible Ivanka Trump and Kushner will take it over. If they don’t, then the proposal is dead, and Congress will make its own budgets, which will be unremarkable.

Bannon’s departure leaves the Trump presidency in a precarious state. Bannon is returning to Breitbart; he has intimated that he will be turning the blowtorch on the White House, and the Ivanka/Jared faction, which he sees as Clintonistas in disguise. He is being chipper about it, but it’s an obvious comedown from the White House, and returns the alt-right to their insurgent, outsider status. Other fervent pro-Trump supporters such as valkyrie commentator Ann Coulter have become increasingly impatient with Trump’s inability to get anything done. Their bewilderment is bizarre; how could such insider figures not twig that this fast-food chomping, TV-addicted Caddyshack character would not have the set of abilities required to be even a mediocre president? Did they believe his brew of narcissism, one-upmanship and melange of Reaganism, nationalism and imperial psychosis amounted to a program? Quite possibly they did. In the trauma created by Obama’s re-election in 2012, they were inspired by someone who appeared to be the anti-Obama, and they mistakenly believed that Trump shared their own view of the world: that life was politics, and politics was about defining an enemy, and imposing your will upon them. No one with any will watches much TV; Trump appears to do little else.

The situation is thus one of political contradiction, arising from the structure of the American political system. The presidency was created in 1787, because the concept of a set of United States of North America had almost immediately failed; under fear of re-invasion from Britain (which happened in 1812), a nation-state was created, with the strange office of US president, whose power overlaps a range of areas — and which has no prime minister, drawn from the assembly as an opposite number or substitute. There have been malign presidents, and there have been poor ones. There have been those who ran “executive” presidencies, delegating much of the work to cabinet and advisors.

But there does not appear to have been a president to date, who simply wanted to be a spectator to the process of government, that they themselves are meant to be leading. Bizarrely, given the fears of how authoritarian a Trump presidency might be, what is now defining it is a fatal lack of will, an absence of desire to impose any sort of order on the country he took power in, and the world it dominates. Previous contenders, such as Warren G Harding, and Ulysses Grant now look like titans of purpose and organization compared to Trump. The only real comparison is with Ronald Reagan’s last years. After 1986, he was exhausted, discredited by Iran-Contra, and possibly had the beginnings of Alzheimer’s. The presidency was more or less run by a committee of aides, with Reagan signing bills and making ceremonial appearances.

But the aides in question were a tight band of neoconservatives, anchored within the Republican party, and with a relentless and detailed agenda. Trump’s crew was an ad-hoc mix of family, chancers and ideologues, anchored in no enduring tradition. Half of them are gone, and Kelly, Trump’s chief-of-staff appears to have no strong ideology (though he is clearly of the right) other than that there be a national executive government. The nation is thus stuck with an absent centre where leadership — good or bad, radical or reactionary — should be, and no way to remove it, other than the extreme recourse of impeachment and conviction.

There is some possibility that the Trump administration will climb out of this; it’s only been in power six months, even though it seems like six years. The first Clinton administration was pretty shambolic by comparison. But their chaos was a product of wanting to do too much, all at once; the first baby boomer administration had to learn to channel their will to transform. The chaos of the Trump era is arising from the exact reverse. Whatever it is going to become, it is not what it was going to be, even a month ago. Surely the next act must be that some rival power or force will perceive this situation as one in which to make audacious moves; everything from a territorial grab (of a US client state) to revising the dollar-based global monetary system. This squalor and chaos, this has been nothing other than the opening act, one feels. What has been a crisis for the “Trump project” has not yet been a crisis for the republic. But that is coming; after it has begun, the last half-year, nerve-shredding and packed with incident, will appear in retrospect as mere prelude, to the era’s defining moment.