It's true that Bannon's marginalization or ouster from the White House would surely usher in a new era. If there is one guy who epitomizes the take-no-prisoners, nationalistic approach that Trump seized upon on the campaign trail, it's Bannon. He's the wild card adviser sitting next to the wild card president, with the two of them often sitting in a room full of more cautious, establishment types. And if the White House is indeed split between these wild cards/“Bannonites” and the “Goldman” team, the wild cards are now in serious danger of being outgunned.

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The Goldman team sure seemed to have a good day Tuesday. Trump summarily ditched his previous positions that NATO was obsolete, that China was a currency manipulator, that Federal Reserve Board Chair Janet L. Yellen was a liability, and that the Export-Import Bank was a bad thing. Trump's decision to strike Syria last week also ran afoul of the Bannon/anti-globalist crew which has pushed him in a more “America first” direction.

“It would appear that it’s not (or not just) Stephen K. Bannon’s personality that has worn thin for Trump,” remarked ABC News's morning newsletter, The Note.

But taking a step back, it's less clear that all of these things are part of some broader, orchestrated shift. As The Fix's Amber Phillips aptly pointed out, a couple of these changes — the NATO one and the China one — came after Trump met with the leaders of each. Those meetings undoubtedly made Trump's controversial positions more difficult to maintain. As for the Export-Import Bank, the writing has been on the wall for a couple of months that Trump may pull a 180 on it.

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But mostly, we should remember that nationalism far preceded Bannon joining Trump's campaign in August. Trump's shoot-from-the-hip style had already aided him in winning the GOP primary, he had already proposed a blanket ban on Muslim immigrants and refugees, and he had already proposed a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan.

Bannon is the guy who was supposed to have the grand vision. And he certainly supplied that, at least rhetorically.

“Like [Andrew] Jackson's populism, we're going to build an entirely new political movement,” he told the Hollywood Reporter last year. “It's everything related to jobs. The conservatives are going to go crazy. I'm the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. With negative interest rates throughout the world, it's the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Shipyards, ironworks, get them all jacked up. We're just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution — conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.”

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Bannon took Trump and tried to morph him into a would-be Andrew Jackson, implementing a modern-day New Deal and Reagan Revolution all rolled in one. But these were already Trump's ideas; Bannon just assembled them and melded them into a more coherent package. He's the guy who called for the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”

The flip side of all of this, of course, is that Trump is confronting plenty of realities as president and hasn't met with much success on his current path. He has remarked on a couple of occasions (health care, North Korea) that things are more complicated than he realized. The easiest solution to all of it is to tack to the middle. And if Bannon is sidelined — either officially or just has less power — the voices pushing Trump toward the middle could certainly be more successful in getting him there. Trump's policies are certainly malleable.

But we've been down this road before. Every time we think Trump may see the writing on the wall that it's in his best interest to “pivot,” it's proven a short-lived fantasy perpetrated by the people who tend to see moderation as the best and only logical path.