In the past, Trump has been loath to move against the former Breitbart ringleader, or to personally fire anyone, for that matter. But with John Kelly as White House chief of staff, the president might finally have someone to do the dirty work for him. Both have reportedly been upset by a vicious smear campaign against McMaster, launched in early August by a variety of far-right agitators and activists who accuse him of sabotaging Trump’s nationalist agenda. Breitbart led the charge, raising suspicions that Bannon was supplying the dirt behind the headlines: “NSC Purge: McMaster ‘Deeply Hostile to Israel and to Trump’”; ”H.R. McMaster promised Susan Rice she could keep her security clearance in secret letter”; and so on. One particularly odious attack sought to link McMaster to billionaire George Soros, who is frequently portrayed as a sort of globalist puppeteer on the far right. Outside of Breitbart, other outlets piled on: InfoWars accused McMaster of “leaking intel to Soros almost daily,” while Cernovich urged his followers to submit dirt to McMasterLeaks.com. Scurrilous rumors that McMaster has a drinking problem floated around the periphery.

Bannon has insisted that he had nothing to do with the anti-McMaster campaign. Denizens of the Breitbart diaspora agree. Lee Stranahan, a former Breitbart reporter, current Sputnik host, and fellow force behind #FireMcMaster, told me that he believed the “deep state” was actually the ones pushing this narrative—not McMaster specifically, but the intelligence community and the career civil servants who allegedly want Bannon gone. “They’re clearly getting stories planted, which, whatever. That’s the game. I get it,” he told me. Patrick Howley, a former Breitbart reporter who now runs Big League Politics, also described the effort to oust Bannon as the product of shadowy forces. “Really, what it is, is [them] just trying to push the president away from the things that he actually believes in and making him even more marginalized in his own White House,” he told me. “I’m not concerned about [Bannon’s] relationship with the president. What I’m concerned about is, is it really possible for someone like President Trump to be able to come in and drain the swamp and win these battles?”

Nobody I spoke to, however, thought that Bannon needed to remain in the White House to influence the president. On the contrary, multiple people told me that they thought the chief strategist would be more powerful on the outside, where he could return to his previous role as a conservative media bomb-thrower. Whether Bannon himself has such a strategy in mind is another matter. Stranahan claimed that he knew of several people within Breitbart who had e-mailed Bannon suggesting that he return to the company, though their e-mails went unanswered. And Cernovich had an even more trollish answer: “It’s in my selfish interest for Bannon to get fired, actually,” he said, adding that he missed the hell-raising Bannon of old. “It would be a lot more fun if Bannon were back in the game, as it were.”

If there is one thing that Bannon and McMaster have in common, it is an outsize hold on the public imagination. In the mainstream press, Bannon is frequently portrayed as a kind of mad prophet—a characterization that he has happily fueled by name-checking obscure, proto-fascist philosophers and extolling apocalyptic theories such as “The Fourth Turning.” McMaster is a similar sort of boogeyman for the right, the tip of a neoconservative, deep-state, globalist spear aimed directly at the heart of Trump’s agenda. Both are likely nowhere near as influential as their enemies fear. “McMaster doesn’t have that much power in the White House, it’s all Jared [Kushner] and Ivanka. But going after Jared and Ivanka is going to get you nowhere,” Cernovich conceded.