Steve Bannon is a parasite abroad in search of a new host to ruin
The exiled former Trump aide and Breitbart chief is looking for a new home with the European far-right and he's changing his rhetoric to make it work.
Before TIME Magazine dubbed him “The Great Manipulator” for his role in helping Donald Trump become president, Steve Bannon was a man without a candidate.
When I first met Steve in 2013, his political figurehead of choice was former Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin. At this point in time, Palin was probably the highest profile Republican figure willing to attach herself to Bannon and the Breitbart platform.
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By November, Steve had a new political favorite, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul. After a plagiarism controversy derailed Paul's weekly column with the Washington Times, Bannon orchestrated moving it to Breitbart.
By the 2014 midterm elections, Steve was fully entrenched with the Tea Party movement, weaponizing the Breitbart platform to support conservative Senate primary challengers in Mississippi, Kentucky, Louisiana, Tennessee and Kansas. While every single one of the Bannon-backed candidates lost, it became clear that Steve had greater ambitions for his role in the political world beyond playing in congressional primaries.
With a very broad field expected to run for the Republican nomination in 2016, he saw an opening to play kingmaker.
His candidate of choice was Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. Once again, Steve deployed the only weapon in his arsenal, Breitbart, to ingratiate himself with Cruz and his inner circle. The flattering coverage was so blatant that it soon attracted scrutiny from mainstream media outlets like Politico, which ran a story headlined “How Breitbart.com, partly funded by a top Ted Cruz donor, became the Texas senator’s media lifeline.”
The moves from Palin to Paul to Cruz were seamless. My own observation at the time was that this was a natural progression, less opportunistic than pragmatic.That all changed, however, when I watched Bannon jump on the Ben Carson train.
In November 2015, Carson had surged to the front of the GOP pack and was leading in national polls. Steve was in constant contact with Carson’s right-hand man, Armstrong Williams. According to Steve, Armstrong wanted him to serve as chief of staff when Carson won. That was the first time I ever heard Steve talk about playing a direct, hands-on role for a political figure. It changed the way I viewed his shifts from candidate to candidate. I began to see them more as a grab for power than an ideological crusade.
By the end of November, Carson was fading and Trump was rising. Bannon once again shifted allegiances and, once again, used his platform at Breitbart to do it. Trump began to make frequent appearances on the Bannon-hosted Breitbart News Daily program on SiriusXM Patriot.
By normal Breitbart standards, a figure like Trump, who had a long history of donating to Democrats, would be a non-starter. For Bannon however, the objective was more about building proximity to power than strict adherence to an ideological doctrine. He wasn’t the leader of a conservative movement. He was a parasite looking for a host.
That explains why in recent days, Bannon has been spotted in Italy and France. After being jettisoned by Trump, forced to resign from Breitbart and cut off from top donor Rebekah Mercer, Bannon has found himself in complete political exile in the United States.
With no host, he has fled to a new opportunity — a chance to find, amid the political turmoil in France and Italy, a new lease on life and with it a second political act.
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As he has done so many times in the past, Bannon is evolving his rhetoric to suit his hosts.
Last year, Bannon declared that the racial elements within the Republican Party would be “burned out over time.” Speaking in France last weekend, he offered a different take to France’s far-right National Front: “Let them call you racists. Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativists. Wear it as a badge of honor.”
Mind you, this is the same guy who referred to white nationalists who marched in Charlottesville, Va. last summer as “a collection of clowns” and “losers.” Now he’s openly encouraging extremists in France and Italy to wear their racist and xenophobic tendencies as a “badge of honor.”
Bannon by himself is nothing. He is not a leader. He is not an ideologue. He is singular organism that must live off another. Like the Costa Rican parasitic wasp, Bannon attaches himself to a host, poisons it to gain control over it and builds a home from within while the host ultimately dies off.
It is a pattern we have seen from Bannon time and again. From Palin to Paul, Cruz to Carson, Trump to perhaps Le Pen, the story always ends the same way: the host loses everything and Steve searches for a new home.
Kurt Bardella, a member of USA Today’s Board of Contributors and a former spokesman for congressional Republicans and Breitbart News, left the Republican Party last year to become a Democrat. Follow him on Twitter: @kurtbardella