Channeling Breitbart From Behind the Resolute Desk

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/breitbart-behind-the-resolute-desk/538239/

Channeling Breitbart From Behind the Resolute Desk

When President Trump describes his aides as “globalists,” he’s adopting the language of outsiders even as he sits in the Oval Office.

McKay Coppins Aug 28, 2017 Politics


Steve Bannon may have vacated the premises, but it appears Breitbartism is alive and well in the Trump White House.

Over the past two days, Axios—a scoopy news site whose reporters are among the best-sourced in Trumpworld—has published two inside-the-West-Wing stories that portray a president who has fully internalized Breitbart’s framing of national politics in America today.

On Sunday, Axios reported on a recent Oval Office meeting between President Trump and a gaggle of top aides—including economic adviser Gary Cohn, then-chief-strategist Steve Bannon, two trade advisers, and newly installed chief of staff John Kelly. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the administration’s plans to investigate Chinese theft of American intellectual property—but the conversation reportedly devolved into a presidential venting session.



Then, in a Monday morning story about the fate of Rex Tillerson, Axios reported that Trump is getting “more and more fed up” with his secretary of state. Why? “Rex just doesn’t get it,” Trump is quoted as saying. “He’s totally establishment in his thinking.”

In both cases, Trump’s dissatisfaction with some of his top aides is expressed in distinctly Breitbartian terms. The advisers whom the president believes are failing to advance his trade agenda are not inept or insufficiently obedient, they are “globalists”; the secretary of state is struggling not because he lacks competence, or because he fundamentally differs with Trump on key foreign-policy questions, but because he is too “establishment.” This may sound like somewhat benign language, but spend some time on the Breitbart homepage, you’ll realize these terms are among its strongest epithets.

In Breitbart’s view of American politics, the most important conflicts are not necessarily between left and right, but between globalists and nationalists; elitists and populists; insiders and outsiders. Sometimes the villains in its coverage are unauthorized immigrants and radical jihadists—but just as often, they are the political and media elite who are selling out the little guy (read: the average Breitbart reader) in order to hoard power and pursue a self-sustaining agenda. This is the worldview that Bannon brought with him to the White House, and as my colleague Rosie Gray has reported, it’s the attitude that Breitbart will likely double down on now that he’s back at the helm.

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I have written before about Trump’s lifelong revenge march against the sneering Manhattan elites who have long treated him with disdain. Sitting inside the Oval Office doesn’t appear to have changed how he thinks. He behaves—even from behind the Resolute Desk—like he’s stuck outside with his face pressed up against the window, free to voice his resentment, but unable to act.