Bannon’s betrayal of Trump occurred because the Breitbart exec became infected with the Trotskyite virus of “permanent revolution” and turned against his benefactor out of ideological spite for what he believed was the President’s “selling out” to “The Swamp”.
By now everyone is well aware of the Trump-Bannon breakup and there’s no need to rehash the details, but what’s sorely missing in this conversation is an explanation of why this is even happening in the first place.
It’s widely known that Trump has a huge ego and is very sensitive to anyone else, let alone a former underling like Bannon, stealing the spotlight, and he might have felt uncomfortable about Breitbart’s strident opposition over the months to his initial pick for the ultimately failed Alabama Senate race that just concluded.
Still, that doesn’t explain why Bannon allegedly told Michael Wolff very inflammatory things about the President’s family months beforehand, which is where the investigation into all of this drama needs to begin.
Bannon is regarded as a “revolutionary” who wants to tear down the existing system and rebuild it anew, very much like Trump’s own Kraken-esque vision and thus making each of them complementary to the other in principle.
Where they diverge, however, is over Trump’s willingness to pragmatically work with the hated “Swamp” in pushing through his domestic agenda, which he has to do if he wants any of his legislative initiatives to pass.
To a committed ideological revolutionary like Bannon, this is akin to treason and selling out to the same enemy who Trump promised to topple after his election, therefore explaining why Breitbart has taken a somewhat critical position against the President at times.
It’s very possible that Bannon became extremely troubled with Trump’s ideological “flexibility” early into his Presidency but remained mostly silent for a while owing to what he may have seen as the ironically pragmatic need to temporarily sacrifice his values for “the cause”, exactly as Trump was doing and which is the reason why Bannon was so perturbed with him to begin with.
This was an untenable position for Bannon, however, since his zeal was much too powerful to be contained even for a short period of time, and it looks as if he thought that it would be a smart tactical move to cavort with Trump’s Mainstream Media enemies like Wolff in an unsuccessful bid to put pressure on him from another angle, despite this amounting to what could plausibly be termed as “backstabbing”.
Bannon, being a revolutionary first and foremost, may have calculated that his interactions with Wolff could contribute to taking down Trump as payback for his “selling out” to The Swamp, essentially making the revelations that he shared in the book a form of “nuclear sabotage” by a wayward “ally” who had already concluded that his partner had irredeemably sacrificed “the cause” and was actually turning into the same enemy that they had both previously sworn to fight.
In a nutshell, the right-wing revolutionary became infected with the same Trotskyite virus of “permanent revolution” as his despised leftist counterparts, thereby blinding him to the self-destructive consequences of his ideologically motivated actions and ultimately threatening to divide the American Populist movement just like many other system-threatening grassroots campaigns in America and elsewhere across the world before it.
For Trump, being the fiercely loyal family man that he is, it was a bridge way too far for Bannon to criticize his children and even refer to one of their actions as “treasonous”, hence why the Kraken mercilessly attacked the Breitbart exec and even gave him the degrading nickname of “Sloppy Steve”.
Michael Wolff is a total loser who made up stories in order to sell this really boring and untruthful book. He used Sloppy Steve Bannon, who cried when he got fired and begged for his job. Now Sloppy Steve has been dumped like a dog by almost everyone. Too bad! https://t.co/mEeUhk5ZV9
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2018
The Kraken and the honey badger (the feisty critter that Bannon had previously referred to himself as and which serves as Breitbart’s mascot) are now openly clashing with one another, though the battle was over before it began because Bannon realized that it’s impossible for him to defeat Trump, which is why he’s chosen to take the “higher moral ground” in public and let his former boss air out his frustrations on Twitter until he eventually calms down.
Still, Bannon appears to have been neutralized at Breitbart through a de-facto “internal coup” that has seen the site since become visibly more supportive of Trump as opposed to what some people may have first expected after the news of the Trump-Bannon split first emerged, though this is likely nothing more than a prudent business decision by the company’s other leaders who know very well that the President’s loyal base would abandon the site if it turned into another iteration of the “Never Trump” movement.
This is the ultimate insult to Bannon, since the “creative but destructive genius” has now lost control of his vehicle and no longer has its influential informational infrastructure at his ideological disposal, all but castrating this once-proud revolutionary and rendering him an immediate has-been.
The story’s still not over, though, and Bannon might have some fight left in him that he’s saving for another day and possibly another platform, but if his insidious intent in spreading malicious gossip to Wolff was to take down Trump’s Presidency as revenge for “selling out” to The Swamp, then it’s completely backfired by taking down the revolutionary himself after he went way too far in his cause and backstabbed his former benefactor out of ideological spite.
DISCLAIMER: The author writes for this publication in a private capacity which is unrepresentative of anyone or any organization except for his own personal views. Nothing written by the author should ever be conflated with the editorial views or official positions of any other media outlet or institution.
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