Nothing has demonstrated the difference between campaigning and governing more forcefully in Donald Trump’s White House than the demotion of Steve Bannon from the National Security Council. Though Bannon remains a relatively powerful White House aide for now, he's clearly fallen out of favor after what many deem to be a failed power struggle with Jared Kushner and Ivanka, both official presidential aides now.
But Bannon planted the seeds of his demise all on his own. From the poorly planned and politically disastrous Muslim ban Bannon engineered to the Devin Nunes folly that has now claimed both him and Nunes as casualties, Bannon is finding out that governing is a little more complicated than it looks.
Emboldened by a campaign steeped in bombast and laced with white supremacist flourishes, Bannon figured they could run the White House the same way. Screw consensus—compromise and coalition building is for losers. Trump had won the election courtesy of the 40 percent of bitter enders salivating to see him shoot someone on 5th Avenue just so they could say they voted for him anyway. Bannon brought that political lesson to the White House, leading to a stream of completely unqualified and deleterious agency nominees that immediately incensed the progressive base.
That set up Bannon’s first overt stumble and the White House's first irreparable defeat: the Muslim ban. From the very day it was issued, it turned out thousands of protesters coast to coast and was so ill thought out and constructed that it may have dealt a fatal legal blow to any future effort.
Bannon also played a costly role in the healthcare debacle—alienating the House maniacs by issuing them a "no choice" ultimatum in voting on the bill. Anyone with a clue about coalition building would know that if you're staking out a take-no-prisoners approach to governing, then you can't afford to lose the Freedom Caucus because you already foreclosed the option of reaching out to Democrats.
The final flub that broke Bannon's grip on the White House was the absurd Nunes scheme—the circular White House-to-Nunes, Nunes-to-White House farce of a revelation that ultimately proved nothing other than Nunes was a terrible liar incapable of leading an impartial investigation.
Bannon's continuous stream of ill-begotten initiatives drove Trump's approval ratings down faster and lower than any president in the history of Gallup's polling: 35 percent. Whatever “mandate” Trump claimed to have following the election was squandered at lightening speed once he set foot in the Oval.
Bottom line: you might be able to win an election driven by the passion of a fiercely loyal base, but you can't govern on that passion alone, which is exactly the path Bannon sought to take.
Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump (who was brought in right after the Nunes fiasco blew up), and national security adviser H.R. McMaster all appear to have been contributing forces to Bannon's change in fortunes in the White House. But the case they leveraged against Bannon was all of his own making.