The hard-charging and trash-talking White House exile who once called political media ‘the opposition party’ is sitting down to talk with one of its leaders.
Charlie Rose of CBS News interviewed former chief White House strategist Steve Bannon on Wednesday at the ‘Breitbart Embassy,’ a row house in Washington’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.
’60 Minutes’ will air the juiciest bits of their discussion Sunday night, with longer excerpts coming Monday on his PBS show.
CBS teased the Sunday broadcast with a photo of Rose and Bannon chatting across a kitchen island in the palatial house. In the image, television makeup and hair brushes occupy the same spot where hors d’oeuvres and crudites often serve as a social magnet during book-launch parties for conservative authors who typically see the back of CBS’s hand.
The ’60 Minutes’ film crew set up in the house’s front parlor, shooting Bannon against a backdrop of blue carpet, white stars and gold curtains.
It’s a long way from Bannon’s pronouncements in January when, as a newly minted senior West Wing aide, he drew battle lines against television and print journalists as an intractable enemy.
Steve Bannon (right) posed Wednesday with ’60 Minutes’ co-host Charlie Rose (left) at the Washington, D.C. house that serves as headquarters for Breitbart News
’60 Minutes’ published this photo of Bannon during his interview, shot in the front parlor of the ‘Breitbart embassy’ – a place conservatives would normally be loath to see CBS’s cameras
Bannon was once a Trump inner-circle-dweller but left the White House in mid-August, leaving some in the West Wing to reflect on how much his own agenda, not the president’s, motivated him
‘The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while,’ he told The New York Times in one feisty interview during Donald Trump’s first week as president.
‘I want you to quote this,’ he added then. ‘The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.’
Seven months later there are some inside the White House who wish he hadn’t crossed enemy lines.
‘Steve should take his own advice and shut up for awhile,’ one White House official told DailyMail.com as news of the ’60 Minute’ interview broke on Wednesday.
‘Now that he’s gone he can showboat all he wants, I guess, but it’s just going to underscore what a lousy, lousy team player he always was.’
Another official added: ‘For someone who liked to trash talk the media, Bannon sure is kissing up to them a lot, no?’
Bannon did not respond to multiple requests for comment on Wednesday.
A Breitbart News publicist who also worked for Bannon in the White House posted this photo on Wednesday showing Bannon and Rose (standing) along with Breitbart London editor Raheem Kassam (far left), Breitbart Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow (seated, in checkered shirt), and Breitbart Washington editor Matthew Boyle (foregroud, facing away)
Bannon (right), shown in the Oval Office a week after Trump became president, once called the news media ‘the opposition party’ but is now granting profile interviews
The 63-year-old now finds himself on the outside looking in, forced out of the Trump administration by a new guard that is squeezing out chaos in favor of regular order.
Yet his relevance as the father of Trump’s brand of ‘economic nationalism’ has him clinging to Trump’s legacy and has the news media unable to look away.
Politico ranked him #1 this week in its annual survey of the most relevant political voices in America.
And granular details of his meetings, including a marathon on Tuesday with House Freedom Caucus chairman Mark Meadows, seem to leak to media tip-sheets as readily as anything ever dripped out of the West Wing.
The third wheel at that meeting, according to the Axios short-form news website, was Breitbart News editor Matthew Boyle.
‘The three men plotted for nearly two hours on the agenda for the month ahead,’ the website reported, ‘with an emphasis on the Breitbart-Freedom Caucus war against Republican leadership on multiple fronts.’
Breitbart News, named after the late conservative raconteur Andrew Breitbart, is a far-right website that Bannon ran as executive chairman until he joined the Trump campaign barely a year ago.
He went back within an hour of leaving his West Wing perch, running an evening editorial meeting via telephone.
The Freedom Caucus, a gorup of 40 ultra-conservative members of the House of Representatives, promises to be a thorn in the side of Trump loyalists who mean to partner with congressional moderates to pass legislation.
Once an anti-media insider whose White House office wall sported a white board to keep track of campaign promises, now Bannon is working his own game – one that could cross swords with Trump’s.
‘Steve is in it for Steve’s issues, for Steve’s punch-list, for Steve’s vision,’ one Bannon associate told DailyMail.com on Tuesday.
‘When Trump’s agenda lined up with the changes he wanted to see [in government], he was all-in,’ the source said. ‘But he was always more of an ideologue than anyone’s loyal footsoldier.’
‘Like it or not, Steve helped get us here. So he always deserved his 15 minutes,’ one White House aide said, before adding: ‘It would be nice if he’d just go away, though’
Among White House aides who never worked with Bannon directly, it remains an open question whether the Harvard-educated former U.S. Navy officer’s influence on Trump was all-pervasive or entirely imagined.
One current official said Wednesday that Bannon ‘never really had a hand in much, other than the stuff that got us in trouble, like the travel ban.’
That was a reference to a botched January rollout of a policy that denied entry visas to people from a half dozen Muslim-majority nations.
But another West Wing aide was kinder.
‘Like it or not, Steve helped get us here. So he always deserved his 15 minutes,’ the aide said, before qualifying his praise: ‘It would be nice if he’d just go away, though.’