Late last week, as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell proudly announced that he had the votes to overhaul the nation’s tax code, the orange-and-black homepage of Breitbart News had other priorities. The stories splashed across the site were vintage Breitbart fare, focused on the gross sexual behavior of leftist-media elites like Matt Lauer and Harvey Weinstein; or the latest in the immigration culture wars, like the stunning acquittal of undocumented Mexican immigrant Jose Ines Garcia Zarate who was charged in the 2015 death of Kate Steinle, a 32-year old white woman innocently walking the streets of San Francisco, a sanctuary city. There was one essay titled “In Defense of the Cisgender Heterosexual Male,” and another piece blasting British politicians for “whining” about President Donald Trump’s anti-Muslim tweets.

When the Senate version of the bill passed early Saturday morning, Breitbart led not with news of the tax cuts themselves, but with a story cheering the elimination of the “fascist” Obamacare individual mandate, a provision inserted into the tax bill. The fact that Breitbart was largely dancing around details of a mammoth piece of legislation that provides the biggest tax cut for corporations in the history of the United States underscored the conundrum of Steve Bannon’s political life outside the White House. Now in a self-declared war on the Republican establishment, Bannon, once again Breitbart’s executive chairman, is returning to his outsider roots, using cultural resentment to stir up fury against the country-club elites of “the permanent political class.” But McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan, charter members of the permanent political class that Bannon has in his sights, are the very same Republicans enabling, and even shaping, Trump’s business-friendly agenda. “When I left the White House, I said I was going to war with the Republican establishment,” Bannon told me last month when I interviewed him in New Hampshire for Good Luck America, my Snapchat show. “I am trying to stop them from trying to stop President Trump’s agenda on Capitol Hill.”

There’s just one problem with that mission: they aren’t. Trump’s actual policy agenda is the same as that of mainstream Congressional Republicans. In fact, underneath the tweets and the media attacks and the Russia drama, Trump’s domestic policy agenda is pretty much whatever Republicans in Congress tell him it is. The president was ready to sign the Graham-Cassidy health-care reform bill if it had passed, and he will rubber stamp whatever tax bill heads to his desk. At the same time, Republicans in Congress, with only a handful of exceptions, are excusing Trump’s norm-breaking behavior and racialized cultural attacks in exchange for the holy grail of tax cuts. “The president is giving us the kind of leadership we need to get the country back on the right track,” Ryan memorably told Sean Hannity on September 27, the very same day our president was tweet-attacking N.F.L. players for kneeling during the national anthem.

Trump is the president and he has the power to set the macro-agenda. But when it comes to the details, he’s mostly going along with whatever menu is being cooked up by McConnell, Ryan, and their respective committee heads, the very same insiders Bannon is targeting. And that menu includes tax reform, a package that does much more to help people running private-equity funds than the working class “deplorables” who flocked to Trump in 2016.

This isn’t to argue that Bannon should be out there rallying his ground troops on the populist right against a tax bill that does exactly what conservatives have been lusting over for years. After all, it cuts taxes, and Republicans love tax cuts. But the tax plan, as it takes shape, dramatically reimagines the American economy in a way that overwhelmingly benefits the wealthiest among us. And that’s a strange look for a president who vaulted to power appealing to the concerns of laid-off factory workers and middle-class suburbanites. The Trump administration reminds me of that scene from Wayne’s World when Wayne and Garth get backstage passes to see Alice Cooper in Milwaukee. On stage, in public view, the show is a sea of noise and head-banging and throbbing male energy. Backstage, it’s wine and cheese and Gary Cohn.