Great White Hype

THE LATE-CAREER ARC OF STEVE BANNON, Washington insider, was by any measure a supreme anticlimax. Bannon, you may recall, was unceremoniously nudged out of the White House back in the late summer, and in lieu of easing into a lucrative lobbying job or academic sinecure he resumed his prior office as head of the right-wing nationalist website Breitbart News. Given the speed of his ouster, and that the fallback gig for a once-trusted presidential adviser was editing his old crypto-fascist blog, it would be easy to forget that the press only recently stopped treating him like an evil supergenius. It wasn't so long ago, after all, that Time magazine described him as “the great manipulator” and asked in a long cover story whether he was “the second most powerful man in the world.”