Donald Trump’s campaign for the presidency was rife with refractory moments that roiled the nerves of contemporary outrage culture, and especially incensed Democrats and progressives keen on multiculturalism and social equality.
Then he got elected.
Now, Trump continues to madden political opponents as he works to shape an Administration that requires dozens of senior-leel positions to be filled, including over 4,000 other staffers and executives.
This week he tapped RNC chairman Reince Priebus to be his chief of staff, and campaign strategist Stephen Bannon became his chief strategist in the White House.
Here are five things to know about Bannon, who became a top heel of the internet in the past week:
He’s a former officer in the Navy
Bannon left his roots in working-class Norfolk, Virginia to pursue degrees at Virginia Tech and Georgetown University, where he mastered in National Security Studies. According to the Military Times, his stripe of conservatism appeared even at the Navy while he was aboard the USS Paul F. Foster as a Surface Warfare Officer.
His military career also included time at the Pentagon, where he served as a special assistant to the Navy’s top admiral.
He went from Goldman Sachs to Hollywood
It was revealed in a detailed Bloomberg News profile of Bannon last year that after a stint in the Navy, Bannon became relentless in his pursuit of ad agree from Harvard Business School. The allure of investment-banking was all the rage, and that led him to a recruiting party where he met John Weinberg Jr., whose dad ran the firm.
Some associates he met at Goldman Sachs joined him to form Bannon & Co., which specialized in the valuation of media such as movies and TV programming. The firm accepted a stake in five shows, including “Seinfeld” — for which he still gets royalty checks.
After his firm was bought out and Bannon became a made man, but he soured on investment banking. “I turned on Wall Street for the same reason everybody else did: The American taxpayer was forced to cut mook deals to bail out guys who didn’t deserve it.”
He had already rubbed elbows in Hollywood long enough to become a film producer.
His Ronald Reagan documentary helped create an ‘alt-right’ news empire
Bannon’s transformation continued, when in 2004 he produced a documentary over the 40th president of the United States, which railed against communism and heralded Ronald Reagan as the American hero who stared down the spread of socialistic policies and preserved America’s glory amidst trying times.
That earned him a spotlight with Fox News, which he then used to produce documentaries on Sarah Palin and the Tea Party as well. At a screening for the Reagan film, he met Andrew Breitbart — an understudy and contemporary of Matt Drudge, who had learned to use the internet to push the envelope of conservative news passed what they were comfortable with over at Fox.
As the executive chairman of Breitbart LLC, the company took an alt-right and nationalistic approach and produced such clickable headlines as “Two Months Left Until Obama Gives Dictators Control of Internet,” “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy,” and “Political Correctness Protects Muslim Rape Culture.”
He chairs the Government Accountability Institute
Gannon sits on the board of the Washington-based GAI, whose stated interest is “to investigate and expose crony capitalism, misuse of taxpayer monies, and other governmental corruption or malfeasance.”
According to the Bloomberg News profile, the institute collaborated with Newsweek, ABC News, and CBS’s 60 Minutes on “stories ranging from insider trading in Congress to credit card fraud among presidential campaigns.”
After publishing “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich,” the Hillary For America campaign was constantly facing probes into the candidate’s ties to foreign money and potential pay-for-play scandals that added to her email bona fides.
He quarterbacked the Trump-Pence campaign down the stretch
In August of 2016, barely three months away from Election Day, Trump shook up his staff for the second time and brought on Kellyanne Conway as the new campaign manager and Bannon as its top strategist.
After critics painted Bannon as a bare-knuckled brawler and shadowy Machiavellian operative with dangerous ambition, Conway went to bat for him. She has said, “he is as brilliant a tactician—and our campaign general, frankly, on the field—as everyone is also saying.”
She continued: “I know him well, I worked hand-in-glove with him. I feel that these charges are very unfair.” Conway suggested his patriotism is the key component to
Seeing him as a voice of racism, The Southern Poverty Law Center, Council on American-Islamic Relations, Anti-Defamation League and Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism have all denounced Bannon’s elevation to a top White House role. It remains to be seen how traditional Republicans will treat his selection of Counselor to the President, after Paul Ryan and many others were targeted over the years at Breitbart.