Following a seven-month stint as senior counselor to President Trump, Stephen K. Bannon is out of the White House and back with Breitbart News, a right-leaning news site.
What can we expect from Breitbart moving forward? Will the site remain supportive of the president or will it shift gears? Does Bannon blame his premature departure on Jared and Ivanka, and is he prepared to go to war against them as some sources suggest?
Ami spoke with Joel Pollak, the Orthodox Jewish in-house counsel for Breitbart, who has been serving as their senior editor-at-large since 2013.
Is Bannon back in LA?
I don’t know.
You haven’t seen him yet?
I’m actually on vacation right now, so I’m in Oregon, not in Los Angeles.
Have you interacted with him through email or something like that?
I’ve spoken to him and emailed him, but I haven’t seen him and I don’t know where he is.
In your estimation, why was Bannon fired?
I think that he technically resigned, but I think he left the administration because my impression is that the administration is moving in a somewhat different direction on some issues, although I’m not sure exactly what those would be. To me, firing or letting him go was a poor decision, because to me he personifies the Trump agenda. He’s the one person who you can say reliably knows why Trump was elected and which issues motivated voters to come out and vote for him. I’m not sure that anyone else in the administration has anything like that idea or intuition.
You can say that Jared Kushner has some idea because he was on the campaign trail, but not about other people in the administration who are in positions of influence and power, such as Director of the National Economic Council Gary Cohn, for example, who did not contribute anything to the campaign and was not a Trump supporter of any kind, or National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, who was also not part of the campaign or part of its development and is really a Washington insider. He has a very decorated and distinguished record, but he’s not in any way part of what got Trump into office. Therefore, there’s a concern that major mistakes are being made in the effort to satisfy the administration’s stylistic critics, or alternatively to perhaps change the policy direction—it isn’t clear which. In any case, Steve personifies the agenda upon which Trump was elected, so seeing him go is a worrying sign, and we’ll have to watch closely in the coming days to see whether Trump remains close to the reasons and the agenda for which he was elected.
Is it possible that Bannon didn’t have the president’s ear in the weeks leading up to his leaving, and that he wasn’t all that influential at this point anyway?
I don’t know about that. My impression is that, at least until very recently he was very influential. I think that the decision to leave the Paris Climate Accord, for example, was heavily influenced by Steve Bannon, and that wasn’t so long ago. There were other moves, as well, in recent days that were heavily influenced by Steve, including the very significant move by the administration to investigate China for intellectual property theft, which took place on the very day he left. So I think that he had significant influence on very important decisions right until the end, but there were other decisions on which he had no influence even from the beginning, which is a part of being part of an administration.
There isn’t one adviser who has veto power or untrammeled influence. It’s been reported that Steve advised Trump not to fire James Comey, for example, because he thought it would be more trouble than it’s worth by creating more of a scandal than exists. I think that advice was correct, and I think that Trump knows it was correct in retrospect, but of course it wasn’t the advice he chose to follow. I can tell you that certainly many of the people who oppose Trump also oppose Steve. They have many enemies in common—the Republican establishment, which never liked Trump also doesn’t like Steve, and the Democrats who don’t like Trump also don’t like Steve. However, most of the people who voted for Trump like Steve Bannon, and while they might not identify with all of his known policy positions or all of his known views, they at least identify with his willingness to fight and his courage in the face of media criticism. So I think that for many conservatives in the administration it’s very tough to see him leave the White House.
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