United States President Donald Trump’s chief strategist Stephen Bannon has emerged as the key force behind White House decision-making in the last few days.
He, along with another adviser Stephen Miller, overruled career officials at the Department of Homeland to include U.S. green card holders in the ambit of the travel ban for people from seven Muslim-majority countries, according to the CNN. The White House has since excluded green card holders from the ban, but Mr. Bannon — who ran the right wing news portal Breitbart website and calls himself an “economic nationalist” — is only expanding his influence.
Mr. Trump has given him a permanent seat at the principals committee meeting of the National Security Council, the highest inter-agency forum on security and defence. While the Chief of Staff has sat on this committee always, Mr. Bannon is a political adviser without a clearly defined role. Moreover, the new structure of the NSC meetings relegates the role of the Director of Central Intelligence, or the DNI, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who will be attending only when matters directly pertaining to them are discussed. Both were permanent attendees during Obama years. Former Defence Secretary Robert Gates — who recommended Rex Tillerson to Mr. Trump as Secretary of State — said in a TV interview that “pushing them out of the National Security Council meetings, except when their specific issues are at stake, is a big mistake."
Ideologue of Trump movement
Mr. Bannon is the ideologue of the Trump movement. He, in fact, shaped the thinking of the President as they moved along together, arguing with Mr. Trump that the “country is more than an economy,” during an interview in 2015. The topic of that discussion was H-1B visas.
Mr. Bannon argued for “tougher” measures against the H-1B visa programme when Mr. Trump was a Republican primary candidate in November 2015. “Well. I got to be tougher…when two thirds or more of the CEOS in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or Asia…A country is more than an economy. We are a civic society,” Mr. Bannon told Mr. Trump.
“We have to keep them legally,” responded Mr. Trump. “When people come in, they have to come in legally. I want people to come in, Steve. And I have said many times. I am building a wall. Like Israel did. When these characters say the wall does not work... the wall in Israel works. I still want people to come in. Those people who are waiting in queue for years to get in are being bypassed by illegal people,” said Mr. Trump.
Recalls Modi
Mr. Bannon believed that the victory of Narendra Modi in 2014 was the start of a global revolt against the capitalist order that had turned against the interest of the common people. Capitalism has lost its moral moorings as it got detached from the Judeo-Christian values, Mr. Bannon believes. “And that centre-right revolt is really a global revolt. I think you’re going to see it in Latin America, I think you’re going to see it in Asia, I think you’ve already seen it in India. Modi’s great victory was very much based on these Reaganesque principles, so I think this is a global revolt,” he said a month after the 2014 Indian election.
