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Who is Stephen Bannon? How he fits in Trump’s unusual inner circle, and why he worries so many



President-elect Donald Trump’s West Wing team is beginning to take shape, and it includes an unusually prominent role for the conservative media mogul whose site – known for white-supremacist, misogynist rhetoric – helped bring the Republicans to power. Here’s a guide to who does what in the Trump White House.

The firebrand: Stephen Bannon, chief strategist and senior counsellor

Who is he? The late Andrew Breitbart, who founded the far-right website Breitbart News in 2007, once admiringly called Mr. Bannon the Leni Riefenstahl of the Tea Party movement, a reference to the German filmmaker who became the Nazi regime’s leading propagandist. Mr. Bannon, an investment banker turned media mogul, initially had a fairly mainstream film-industry career – he was a co-executive producer on 1999’s Titus, starring Anthony Hopkins, and he made a deal that left him with a share of Seinfeld royalties. But in the 2000s he turned his admiration for Reagan-era conservatism into a career making documentary films championing the nascent Tea Party, endearing him to the anti-immigration and white-supremacist circles of the “alt-right.” In 2012, when Mr. Breitbart died, Mr. Bannon became executive chairman of the website, and under his tenure it became known for incendiary headlines like “Would you rather your child had feminism or cancer?” and for anti-Semitism, once calling conservative commentator Bill Kristol a “Republican spoiler, renegade Jew.” During the 2016 election, Breitbart turned its full support behind Mr. Trump, and in August – when Mr. Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was fired under a cloud of suspicion over reported ties to pro-Russian groups in Ukraine – the Republican candidate hired Mr. Bannon to take his place.

What is his job? As Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, Mr. Bannon, 62, is at the heart of the president-elect’s inner circle, and the Trump campaign has said he’ll work “as equal partners” with Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, Reince Priebus.

What are the concerns? His presence in the Trump inner circle has raised red flags with human-rights groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center, who called him “the main driver behind Breitbart becoming a white ethno-nationalist propaganda mill.” Personal accusations of prejudice have Jewish Americans worried about his new role in the White House. His ex-wife, Mary Louise Piccard, said in court papers obtained by Associated Press that he made anti-Semitic remarks when the two battled over sending their daughters to private school nearly a decade ago; in a sworn court declaration following their divorce, she said her ex-husband had objected to sending their twin daughters to an elite Los Angeles academy because he “didn’t want the girls going to school with Jews.” (Alexandra Preate, a spokeswoman for Mr. Bannon, denied he’d ever said such things.) Since Mr. Bannon’s appointment was announced, Mr. Priebus has taken steps to soften his image, telling NBC’s Today show on Monday that Mr. Bannon has exhibited none of the racist, sexist or other qualities attributed to him and the Breitbart website, and that the site’s more inflammatory content wasn’t Mr. Bannon’s writing.


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