Is this what it's really about? TBN (Trump Breitbart News), taking on Fox head to head?
Cassidy in The New Yorker: What Are Donald Trump, Roger Ailes, and Steve Bannon Really Up To?
What better way to mark the news that the head of Breitbart.com, the alt-right news site, is now running Donald Trump’s campaign than with a conspiracy theory? And, unlike some of the conspiracy theories that appear on Breitbart, this one might actually be true.
The theory making the rounds is that Trump’s latest campaign reshuffle isn’t really about trying to win the election. In bringing in Steve Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News, and recruiting Roger Ailes, the disgraced former head of Fox News, as an adviser, Trump is making a business play: he’s laying the groundwork for a new conservative media empire to challenge Fox.
The official story is that the shakeup—which saw Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chairman, eclipsed—is all about defeating Hillary Clinton. “I have known Steve and Kellyanne both for many years,” Trump said in a press release announcing the changes, referring to Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, a pollster he brought in to be his new campaign manager. “They are extremely capable, highly qualified people who love to win and know how to win.” In an interview with the Wall Street Journal’s Monica Langley and Janet Hook, who broke the story, Trump added, “I’m going to do whatever it takes and do it the way I think will win.” As for Ailes, the Trump campaign denies that he is playing any official role. (It hasn’t denied the New York Times revelation that Ailes met with Trump on Sunday in New Jersey.)
Does this official explanation withstand inspection? Hardly.
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Bannon, a former investment banker who took over Breitbart News in 2012, after the sudden death of its eponymous founder, also has large ambitions, and they involve taking on the mighty Fox News. In a lengthy column posted earlier this month, Bannon compared the burgeoning rivalry between Breitbart and Fox to the Peloponnesian War. “The incumbent Athenians might as well know that the Spartans are coming for them, and there’s not a damn thing they can do about it,” he wrote. “Indeed, more Spartans are joining us every day.”
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But what if Trump and Breitbart could team up, raise some money from outside investors, and bring aboard some of the television executives who built Fox News? As part of his lucrative severance package from Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox, Ailes almost certainly signed a noncompete agreement. But how long does it last? And does it preclude him from providing some informal advice to an old friend?
Bannon already has some ideas of his own. He believes that Fox News is drifting away from its core conservative viewers, and that, with Murdoch’s sons, James and Lachlan, increasingly calling some of the shots at Fox’s parent company, this process is likely to continue. “The Murdoch sons, aka the Minor Murdochs, think Fox is too conservative, too Roger Ailes-like, too Middle American,” Bannon wrote in his column. “And they have a plan to fix that.”
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read:http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/what-are-donald-trump-roger-ailes-and-steve-bannon-really-up-to
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