Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s chief strategist, isn’t just angry. He’s a bundle of rage, lashing out at “globalising elites” supposedly on behalf of the working class, while trumpeting white nationalism and promoting ethnic and religious bigotry.
Given his apparently deep influence on Mr Trump’s thinking, rhetoric and policies, Mr Bannon’s wrath must be taken seriously. And he has a narrative explaining it. Unfortunately, it may be the biggest extended non sequitur in modern American history.
Mr Bannon tells what’s supposed to be a moving saga about the betrayal of decent working-class Americans by heartless villains from the “globalising elite”.
This experience, he recently told The Wall Street Journal, completely redefined his political thinking: “Everything since then has come from there,” he insists. “All of it.”
So, what happened? His father, Marty Bannon, worked for 50 years for the American telecommunications giant, AT&T. In the process, he accumulated about $100,000 worth of company stocks.
During the 2008 financial crisis, Marty Bannon, now 95, watched the stock market collapsing with mounting dread. Panicked by dire warnings from clownish TV commentator Jim Cramer, he rashly sold these stocks at a considerable loss.
Marty Bannon did not consult his son, Steve, who was a Goldman Sachs investment banker for many years, or another investor son. He just saw some nonsense on television and made a terrible decision.
As the Journal put it: “His son Steve says the moment crystallised his own anti-establishment outlook and helped trigger a decade-long political hardening.”
Mr Bannon told the paper: “The only net worth my father had beside his tiny little house was that AT&T stock. And nobody is held accountable? There’s no one in jail.”
So far so good. It is indeed a repugnant scandal that the American middle and working class was fleeced to bail out banks deemed “too big to fail” and that the culprits of this debacle were in no way held to account.
The problem is the radical disconnect between any meaningful lessons to be drawn from the father’s financial ruin – even though Mr Bannon has more than enough money, acquired during his own stint as a “globalising elite”, to look after his dad’s needs – and the political attitudes the son says it informed.
Is the Trump administration that Mr Bannon guides pushing to punish, or even just restrain, these financial elites? To the contrary, Mr Trump and Mr Bannon have rewarded an unprecedented number of bankers and financial industry bigshots with senior government positions.
Are they moving to protect working Americans and ordinary investors from financial exploitation? To the contrary, they are seeking to scrap an Obama administration regulation requiring financial advisers and brokers to act in their clients’ best interests regarding their retirement accounts.
And they are trying to undo as much of the Dodd-Frank legislation, passed in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 fiscal meltdown to prevent such abuses from recurring, as they can.
Mr Bannon is supposedly animated by the fleecing of his father. But he and Mr Trump are doing everything possible to lift restrictions on the very banks responsible and remove what little protection the Marty Bannons of this world have from fiscal predators. If they can also be stripped of their health care to fund tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, all the better.
Mr Bannon’s rage is instead channelled against other working-class people, mainly undocumented Mexican and Central American migrants whom he wants to deport en masse for racial and cultural reasons. He is also driving the anti-Muslim agenda expressed by the travel ban, his numerous comments about a “war with Islam” and other hateful pronouncements.
The cognitive dissonance between Marty Bannon’s financial woes and Steve Bannon’s politics of rage is almost total. He’s not advocating a single thing to hold those responsible to account, prevent the next fiscal meltdown or protect people like his father.
Mr Bannon’s “working-class populism” seems in practice to boil down to little more than vicious, garden-variety racism, as if Mexicans and Muslims had been responsible for his father’s panicked decision to sell his nest egg.
Is this cynical or pathological? Can Mr Bannon really believe his white nationalist ideology is rooted in big banks’ bad behaviour in 2008 and their impunity and lack of accountability? Or is he just seeking to rationalise the hatred he champions against ethnic and religious minorities by appealing to unrelated elements of white working-class rage, and siphoning off justified anger against financial exploiters to fuel an indefensible fear and backlash against migrants and Muslims?
We may never know for sure. Such cognitive dissonance slips seamlessly into Trumpland, where lies are de rigueur and “alternative facts” reign supreme.
Yet even in the Trump White House, Mr Bannon’s narrative is exceptional. Nothing in modern American politics has ever made less sense.