“Egomaniacal.” “Purely Machiavellian.” A man summed up by three words: “fear and bullying”.



Former employees do not lack for words to describe Donald Trump’s new campaign chief, a Wall Street veteran who found his flock on the far right, with a site associated with conspiracy theories, provocation and notions unspoken on cable TV. For staffers of Breitbart News, Steve Bannon’s words were law.

A former Goldman Sachs banker with an MBA from Harvard, Bannon was appointed this week by Trump to help channel the populist tide that drove him to the top of the Republican ticket. Bannon has no experience running a campaign, but a number of employees who left Breitbart under his stewardship had warnings for campaign staff: expect expletive-laced phone calls at all hours of the night.

“There will be screaming matches between Steve and every other person in the office,” said Ben Shapiro, a former editor at Breitbart News.

“But there will be no screaming matches between Steve and Trump. Steve knows where his bread is buttered.”

A steady stream of emails leaked in the days following Trump’s hiring of Bannon paint a picture of a shrewd businessman with a scorched-earth approach to the Republican establishment. Former Breitbart staffers interviewed by the Guardian recall a man driven less by an ideological crusade than the desire to emerge on top – not unlike the candidate who now employs him.

To some, the Trump-Bannon partnership simply marks the consummation of a long, happy rapport. During his tenure as the executive chairman of Breitbart, Bannon spent the greater part of the last year promoting Trump’s candidacy: where others fled or scolded Trump’s declaration that Mexican immigrants were “rapists” and “killers”, Breitbart News echoed the call.

Bannon was a presence in the newsroom, often hopping on daily editorial calls and making his views clear. Staff present for the discussions, including Shapiro and Kurt Bardella, who previously served as a media consultant to Breitbart, said Bannon aggressively pushed stories against immigrants, and supported linking minorities to terrorism and crime.

It was catnip for the site’s growing audience of the so-called “alt-right”, a far-right group that merges race and nationalism and has largely embraced Trump. For all his antagonism toward the media, the Republican nominee has publicly lavished praise on Breitbart, even though his former campaign manager Corey Lewandoski was charged with battery against one of the website’s reporters, Michelle Fields, when she tried to ask Trump a question.

Bannon, rather than defend Fields, used Breitbart as a vehicle to discredit her story and her character. Fields resigned, as did Shapiro and Bardella.

“That was really a crystallization of how his pursuit of a relationship with Trump superseded the welfare of his reporters,” Bardella said. “It was that moment of clarity where they’re so in for Trump that they’re willing to throw one of their own overboard even when that person is the victim of the situation.”

Shapiro soon rebranded Breitbart as “Trump Pravda”, and said that many staffers were increasingly concerned about their future. The site was spinning away from its crusade to hold liberal media and establishment Republicans to account, they felt. They worried about instead turning into shills for the Trump campaign.

It was not just the obvious support for Trump that troubled employees, but also the clear objective of Bannon to diminish the former reality TV star’s opponents in the Republican primary. The website ran overwhelmingly unfavorable coverage of Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, both established Florida politicians, especially with articles about the bilingual candidates’ support for immigration reform.

“His whole mindset in general was: ‘We need to go after Rubio, we need to go after Bush,’” said Bardella.

The focus on Rubio was particularly relentless, as the Florida senator emerged as one of the final candidates in the race. Stories ran near daily with headlines asserting that, if Rubio were elected president, immigrants and terrorists would stream across the US border.

Marco Rubio: a friend to immigrants and terrorists, according to Steve Bannon’s Breitbart. Photograph: Lynne Sladky/AP

“He hates Marco,” said one former employee, who requested anonymity to speak freely. “There was definitely a decision to promote the work of writers with an extreme anti-Rubio bent.”

Similar treatment has been directed toward House speaker Paul Ryan in recent months, with Bannon working behind the scenes to push his long-shot primary challenger, Paul Nehlen. One story criticized Ryan for having a fence around his home in Wisconsin, with the implication that the speaker was willing to wall off his own house but not the US border.

Bannon was “absolutely fuelling the energy” behind Nehlen, a former staffer said.

Spokespeople for Ryan and Rubio declined to comment.

Even Ted Cruz, an ultraconservative senator once covered favorably by Breitbart, was not spared the site’s acidic treatment of Trump’s opponents. A report published by the Hill detailed how Bannon slowly turned against the Texas senator. In particular, Breitbart seized on Trump’s attacks on Cruz’s citizenship – the senator was born to an American mother in Canada – much in the way it spread false “birther” ideas against Barack Obama.

It was a remarkable turnaround, given that just under a year prior, Breitbart reporter Matthew Boyle had been invited to observe Cruz’s bedtime ritual with his children – and subsequently produced a report portraying the senator in a glowing light.

Although they criticized his methods, those who worked under Bannon acknowledged a tireless devotion to creating an empire too influential to ignore, and his success so far.

Given its popularity among grassroots conservatives and Bannon’s “take-no prisoners” approach, few Republican candidates or lawmakers are brazen enough to pick a fight with the website.

Both Rubio and Bush continued to engage with Breitbart during the Republican primary, for example, even as they were targeted by much of its coverage.

At the height of the primary, a visibly frustrated Rubio mocked Breitbart’s credibility on Fox News, accusing them of publishing “conspiracy theories”. He has nonetheless continued to provide at least some of their reporters with interviews dubbed exclusives.

Bannon “has taken where the Breitbart brand essentially was before the election – considered by many as outliers – and made it a sheer force of will”, Bardella said. “He’s been able to advance an agenda.

“And now he’s the right-hand person to a would-be president.”

Though Bannon has only had a few days in charge of Trump’s campaign, his former employees said he would stand in stark contrast to former chairman Paul Manafort, who resigned on Friday. While Manafort tried to steer Trump toward a more moderate general election strategy, little will be off limits for Bannon, they said.

His motto, as Shapiro put it, will be simple: “Let Trump be Trump.”