The former White House chief strategist’s comments about the president presented the pro-Trump media with a choice. Turns out it wasn’t that difficult

Ever since Steve Bannon’s comments to Michael Wolff about the president and his family were first reported, Bannon has been on borrowed time.

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Wolff’s book, Fire and Fury, forced a choice. Would pro-Trump media support the president, or the man who had hitherto given their movement its best propaganda, as well as what passed for its intellectual substance?

Most outlets haven’t found the choice to be at all difficult. Not even Breitbart, the website that until late on Tuesday, Bannon nominally controlled.

Over the last week, many of Breitbart’s articles uncritically relayed the insults hurled at Bannon by the president and his allies.

Last Thursday, resident media critic John Nolte penned a piece that included tweets from Don Jr blaming Bannon for the loss of the Alabama special Senate election. He called Bannon’s tenure a “nightmare of backstabbing, harassing, leaking, lying and undermining the president”.

On Saturday, Charlie Spiering offered an unvarnished report on the president’s remarks that his boss was “sloppy” and was “dumped like a dog”.

And just yesterday, Dylan Gwinn laid out an unsympathetic account of the way the White House spurned Bannon’s belated attempt to apologize.

But the brickbats for Bannon weren’t just coming from his paid writers.

Last Wednesday on Infowars, Alex Jones’s conspiracy swamp, Paul Joseph Watson gleefully reported that Breitbart’s readers were dumping on him in the comment threads of the site’s own articles.

On one of the main internet hubs of pro-Trump sentiment, the notorious “The Donald” subreddit, Bannon’s erstwhile status was also under threat. Among the general jeering were a few expressions of ambivalence, or confusion: “Tough case. He does promote an America First agenda, no doubt, but he is also fully responsible for bringing a SNAKE into the WH.”

Understandably, all of this fed into early speculation that Bannon and Breitbart might soon part company. With Trump angry, and the Mercer family rescinding their backing for Bannon’s personal political agenda, some of Bannon’s many enemies merrily pushed the idea he might be out of a job, too.



In The Federalist, where the right attempts outreach to thinking millennials, Ben Domenech argued that the damaging book entirely reflected Bannon’s own biases and world view (“Wolff fawns over Bannon repeatedly in ways that ought to make even the most credulous reader blush”). He compared it to Hillary Clinton’s campaign memoir, and then went on to push the other theme that pro-Trump conservatives have been working – that it’s pure fantasy from top to bottom.

Rush Limbaugh called Wolff’s story about his interactions at former Fox News boss Roger Ailes’s funeral “100% false”. Despite Limbaugh’s clear interest in hosing down the story, his remarks were duly reported as gospel.

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In trying to consign Fire and Fury to the #fakenews hole, Trumpies have had some help from liberal media. CNN’s Jake Tapper has never been a favorite of the president or his allies – as recently as last weekend they were railing at him after his hostile interview with White House aide, Stephen Miller. But Tapper’s criticisms of Wolff’s book – he called it “riddled with errors, and rumors” – were enough to get him some short-lived kudos from Twitchy, Hot Air, and others working to discredit Wolff’s lurid account of a White House gone mad.

With the money men walking away, and Trump rejecting Bannon’s attempt at rapprochement, Bannon was running out of options.

When the axe finally fell yesterday, and Breitbart’s CEO, Larry Solve, announced his departure from the site, it was Bannon’s old, “establishment” #nevertrump enemies who were ready to go with the first political obituaries.

Some were lacerating, like Jonah Goldberg at National Review, who opined that “no personality in modern political history has so completely squandered an opportunity to be an influential force in American life, particularly in so short a period of time”. The Trump skeptics at Redstate coined a new word, “Bannonfreude”, to encapsulate its glee.

Others were more equanimous. At the Weekly Standard (whose éminence grise has spent the last day on Twitter touting Oprah’s non-candidacy), Kevin Last claimed that he “always kind of liked Steve Bannon”. But really, he was just limbering up to dance on his grave.

A Bannon-less Breitbart, meanwhile, icily returned to business as usual.