Steve Bannon: De facto president?

“He wants to be the intellectual, strategist bomb-thrower”, says former House Speaker and informal Trump adviser Newt Gingrich, who sees Bannon as the ideal ally to the president in disrupting the status quo.

Trump loves Bannon for his loyalty and strategic help during Trump’s surprisingly successful election campaign.

Steve, not Stephen, has changed his Twitter bio to: “Nothing to do with USA politics or running the White House”.

Bannon had a blue-collar upbringing, but he quickly became part of the very establishment he rails against.

“The president made that clear right at the beginning: If it’s an NSC meeting, you may not appear”, Bolten told conference attendees in September.

According to Kelly Magsamen, who served on the NSC under former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Bannon’s inclusion on the council is the first time a president’s chief political strategist will be able to attend the NSC meetings.

“President Trump’s reorganization of the NSC is deeply troubling, and it reflects a misguided desire to place political considerations above the valued and sober advice of any president’s most experienced military and intelligence advisors”, Warner said in a press release.

Trump’s move to add Bannon to the National Security Council has drawn howls from Democrats and even some Republicans.

Earlier on Thursday, Pelosi slammed President Trump’s Saturday decision to install Bannon onto the National Security Council while speaking to reporters in the U.S. Capitol on Thursday, saying that having a “white supremacist, Bannon“, on the NSC would make the U.S.

The appointment is unprecedented. I sat on the sidelines as a silent observer with [former White House Press Secretary Robert] Gibbs because we would be called upon to publicly discuss the president’s decision on that critical matter and the process by which he arrived at it.

But it is the work Bannon is doing outside of the Council that is troubling Washington insiders the most.

And all this comes as Mr Trump – who faces multiple challenges overseas – is the least-prepared president on foreign issues for decades.

Under some previous administrations, Bannon’s counterpart was allowed sporadic access but never given a permanent seat. Before his role with the Trump administration, he worked as an investment banker, as a Hollywood producer and documentarian, and finally as the executive chairman of the controversial news site Breitbart.com, before finally joining up with the Trump administration. Joseph McCarthy, believing that some broad, vague enemy is threatening the foundations of the “American way of life”, and the only way to stop it is with outright authoritarianism. Though he is not as outward about it as many other American conservatives, the political and religious are deeply intertwined for Bannon.

“He is a terrifying man”. It is another talent Bannon has in common with his boss: making deals that largely enrich himself. The Special Initiatives Group has several task forces, including on cyber issues, veterans issues and USA manufacturing, he said.

Don’t get me wrong. “They’re all about protecting the president rather than seeing the bigger scope that people in the State Department, people in the Department of Defense, people in the Treasury department understand”.