Bannon’s fall from grace shows Trump looking beyond the base

A month ago, Steve Bannon was the de facto chairman of the Republican Party. His guy, Roy Moore, won the Alabama Republican runoff for the Senate. At the same time, Bannon was smirking over the retirements of Jeff Flake and Bob Corker, threatening the career of Dean Heller, Nevada’s senior senator, and giving Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, a bad rash. From the looks of things, Bannon had his brain wired to the pulse of the Republican base.

Not anymore. In less than 24 hours, Bannon had been publicly pummeled by the president of the United States, and reportedly left for dead by Robert and Rebekah Mercer, his benefactors and partners at Breitbart. In that blink of an eye, the GOP reminded Bannon that it was Trump who was their king, and that when push came to shove, the party’s base would choose Trump over his wingman.

{mosads}Said differently, with Trump, Republicans get reality television and “The Apprentice.” With Bannon, they get the show’s producer, and as is usually the case, fame wins out and celebrity triumphs. But there’s more there than just ratings. Practically speaking, Trump bonded with his voters as few politicians ever do, a fact that Bannon generally appreciated.

When Trump said that he could get away with murder on Fifth Avenue, he was not kidding, and the Billy Bush tape proved him right. Despite a tempestuous personal life, the evangelical community sang Trump’s hosannas. The president’s ties to his core was organic.

Did that mean that Republicans would fall into line with whatever Trump said? Clearly not.  When it came to a wholesale repeal of the Affordable Care Act, Trump’s base said no. They “got” that they would be cutting off their nose to spite their face. The Great Recession had taken its toll, and enough of Trump’s voters were still hurting and looked to the government for a leg up.

Would they vote for Luther Strange in the Alabama runoff, as Trump had asked? Nope. Strange was McConnell’s guy, and he lacked authenticity. There was no way that Strange had ever watched “Duck Dynasty.” On the other hand, Roy Moore was everything that Strange was not, and Trump, they suspected, understood that. Both Trump and Strange, each in his own way, were outlaws.

Sure, as the crow flew, Trump Tower and Gadsden, Ala., were more than 800 miles apart, but the distance between Trump’s and Strange’s voters was easily bridged, and Moore lost. Faced with a choice between Trump being Trump and Bannon going off the reservation, it was a no-brainer. Bannon’s self-perceived accuracy in describing Trump took second place to Bannon having wounded their leader. At a minimum, treachery called out for banishment.

Does this translate into permanent pariah status for Bannon? Only time will tell.  But one thing is for sure. Bannon will need to kiss Trump’s ring, early and often, if he is to have any shot at redemption. Calling Trump a “great man”, as Bannon did on Wednesday night, was only the first of many, many dishes of humble pie.

As for Trump, Bannon’s exile will likely leave him with a void. No one else around Trump has Bannon’s intuition of what Trump’s base wants. Although Trump brags that he would have made it to the White House without Bannon, that “reality” sounds awfully like “alternative facts.” A month before Trump announced his candidacy in June 2015 and more than a year before Bannon joined the campaign, Trump was searching out Bannon at a conservative confab, the South Carolina Freedom Summit, asking, “Where’s my Steve?”

Still, a sidelined Bannon will likely bring the temperature down in intra-party squabbles. The pro-forma demands that Republicans select the most extreme candidate in their primaries will be tempered by Trump’s and the GOP’s existential imperative to retain control of the House and Senate, regardless of the cost. As Sen. Susan Collins and her vote on the tax bill showed, a squishy Republican is still a Republican, and a sometimes-ally is better than full-time adversary.

Yet, as Trump’s full-throated embrace of the tax bill demonstrates, Trump is moving away from “Trumpian” orthodoxy. In the end, the rich and the corporations won the lion’s share of benefits, while working Americans were stuck with disappearing tax cuts and a chained consumer price index, hardly the stuff that “make America great again” was originally thought to be made of.

No matter. Undoubtedly, as long as Trump keeps talking about building a big and beautiful wall and doing the cultural resentment thing, Trump’s base will give him the benefit of the doubt. Will that be enough for the Republicans to keep both houses of Congress, or to lure Bannon back into the fold? We will learn soon enough.

Lloyd Green was the opposition research counsel to the George H.W. Bush campaign in 1988 and later served in the U.S. Department of Justice.