What happens to Bannonism after Bannon?

[Roland99]

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/what-happens-to-bannonism-after-bannon

If Trump’s intervention sent Wolff and Holt into rapture, it created shock waves in the conservative universe, especially when it was followed by a separate denunciation of Bannon from his longtime financial sponsor, the hedge-fund heiress Rebekah Mercer, who is a part-owner of Breitbart, the scrappy Web site that Bannon turned into a platform for Trump and the alt-right. “My family and I have not communicated with Steve Bannon in many months and have provided no financial support to his political agenda, nor do we support his recent actions and statements,” Mercer said in a rare public utterance on Thursday.

Since then, much of Washington has been on a Bannon death watch. As Trump loyalists like Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge, and Roger Stone rushed to disassociate themselves from Bannon, rumors circulated that he was about to be fired from Breitbart, where he returned to the chairman’s role after being ousted from the White House, in August. The Wall Street Journal reported that “many members” of Breitbart's board of directors were supportive of dumping Bannon, but they were also mindful of Breitbart’s “contractual relationships with other entities, including Sirius XM radio,” where he has a show. On Friday morning, Trump revelled in Bannon’s woes, commenting on Twitter, “The Mercer Family recently dumped the leaker known as Sloppy Steve Bannon. Smart!”

As of Friday afternoon, Bannon’s fate still hadn’t been determined, and he was keeping a low profile. Axios reported that before Trump went nuclear on Thursday, Bannon had prepared a public statement expressing his loyalty to the President and contesting some of the details in Wolff’s book. “Some of Bannon’s closest allies are urging him to still issue such a statement and make peace with Trump and his family,” the Axios report said. “Bannon is resisting. He’s quite like Trump in this respect: he views any apology or admission of error as a sign of weakness.”

:
:

The first concerns the roles that Mercer and her father, Robert, a reclusive hedge-fund billionaire, will play in the future. When, in the summer of 2016, the Mercers pumped five million dollars into Trump’s campaign coffers and supplied him with a new campaign manager (Kellyanne Conway) and eminence grise (Bannon), they established a tie of sorts to the President-to-be. But, as Wolff relates, it doesn’t appear to be a particularly close relationship: “Trump thought the Mercers were as odd as everybody else thought. He didn’t like Bob Mercer looking at him and not saying a word; he didn’t like being in the same room as Mercer or his daughter. These were super-strange bedfellows—‘wackos’ in his description.”