If you want to read a scary profile of Donald Trump's new campaign chief, Goldman Sachs alum and Breitbart News executive Steve Bannon, check out Bloomberg News's write up from last October. Bannon's an anti-establishment muckety-muck who's as prone to throwing grenades at old guard Republicans as he is at Democrats. But he's of interest now precisely because Trump has hired Bannon to help him throw those grenades at Hillary Clinton for the remainder of the campaign.
Bannon's philosophy for influencing politics relies, at least in part, on not limiting oneself to hyper-partisan echo chambers—conspiracy-theory conservative, in his case. His fingerprints were all over the right-wing book Clinton Cash, written by Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute (GAI), a conservative research organization that Bannon founded. The book inspired a round of mainstream articles tying Clinton's State Department dealings to the Clinton Foundation. Though the book was found to have numerous errors and its claims of impropriety were based on pure speculation, the damage was done once the concept had been floated by, in many cases, outlets that liberals read religiously, like the New York Times. Let's pick up Joshua Green's profile of Bannon right there:
What made Clinton Cash so unexpectedly influential is that mainstream news reporters picked up and often advanced Schweizer’s many examples of the Clintons’ apparent conflicts of interest in accepting money from large donors and foreign governments. (“Practically grotesque,” wrote Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig, who’s running for the Democratic presidential nomination. “On any fair reading, the pattern of behavior that Schweizer has charged is corruption.”) Just before the book’s release, the New York Times ran a front-page story about a Canadian mining magnate, Frank Giustra, who gave tens of millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation and then flew Bill Clinton to Kazakhstan aboard his private jet to dine with the country’s autocratic president, Nursultan Nazarbayev. Giustra subsequently won lucrative uranium-mining rights in the country. (Giustra denies that the Clinton dinner influenced his Kazakh mining decision.) The Times piece cited Schweizer’s still-unpublished book as a source of its reporting, puzzling many Times readers and prompting a reaction from the paper’s ombudswoman, Margaret Sullivan, who grudgingly concluded that, while no ethical standards were breached, “I still don’t like the way it looked.” [...]
“It seems to me,” says [Clinton ally David] Brock of Bannon and his team, “what they were able to do in this deal with the Times is the same strategy, but more sophisticated and potentially more effective and damaging because of the reputation of the Times. If you were trying to create doubt and qualms about [Hillary Clinton] among progressives, the Times is the place to do it.” He pauses. “Looking at it from their point of view, the Times is the perfect host body for the virus.”
So Bannon has a track record of both spreading whack-job misinformation at Breitbart and finding plausible ways to infect mainstream thinking from within through GAI. What’s unknown is exactly which role he’ll play at Trump’s campaign. Trump has made clear now that he doesn’t want to ever “pivot” or be “reined in,” so will Bannon’s Breitbart instincts fuel more outrageous broadside attacks against Clinton from his candidate, who already outdoes himself on a near daily basis? Or will Bannon be planting more specious “bombshells” with mainstream outlets (which would assume he has more up his sleeve)? Or both?
Hard to know, but hang on to your hats, folks.