November 13, 2016 marks the day of another series of appointments in President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet. Among them, the naming of Stephen “Steve” Bannon as chief strategist and senior counselor for the Trump administration.
Bannon has an extensive career history as a filmmaker and head of nationalist media outlet Breitbart, which he stepped down from in August to assume the role of chief executive officer for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Trump’s new chief strategist holds a master’s degree from Georgetown University in National Security Studies, received in 1976. Shortly after his time at Georgetown, Bannon served in the U.S. Navy as Surface Warfare Office aboard the USS Paul F. Foster in the Pacific Fleet. Following his naval career, he pursued graduate studies in business, receiving an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1983. This led to a position in the mergers and acquisitions department of investment banking firm Goldman Sachs, which Fortune adds was at the “peak of Wall Street’s hostile takeover and junk bond boom.”
Goldman Sachs was at the precipice of going public. In 1990, nine years before the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, Bannon shifted focus, moving to Los Angeles to form a boutique investment firm Bannon & Co., which specialized in media. Bloomberg reported that his new firm leveraged the statistics of TV ratings and technologies like VHS and its sales to turn media into a tangible commodity. Bannon and his new firm had financial involvement with names like MGM and Polygram.
Curiously, Bannon has held a diverse array of positions which also infiltrated the scientific sector; put in charge of overseeing the turnaround of the ailing Arizona-based Biosphere 2 project in the early 1990s as reported in Mother Jones . Under Bannon’s leadership, the research undertaken at this simulated environment shifted focus from self-sufficiency and human response to isolated environments to planetary research involving air and water pollution. Bannon’s experience here may offer dissonance toward the climate change skepticism Donald Trump has continually exhibited throughout his campaign. However, the recent appointment of known climate change denier Myron Ebell to lead the transition of the Environmental Protection Agency (detailed in the New York Times ) may counteract this.
The Hollywood Reporter wrote that Bannon was named as Breitbart News Network’s chief executive shortly after founder Andrew Breitbart’s death in March 2012. As a co-founder of the Government Accountability Institute (GAI), an initiative formed during the same year, Bannon worked with fellow conservative contemporaries to “investigate and expose crony capitalism, misuse of taxpayer monies, and other governmental corruption or malfeasance.” (This was the Institute’s mission statement at the time of its inception; a statement that has mysteriously disappeared as early as May 2015, yet still available via the Internet Archive ).
Vanity Fair wrote in August of the “ political symbiosis between Trump , Bannon, and Breitbart Media,” with one former Breitbart employee describing Bannon as, “Donald Trump but more intelligent.” Salon writer Taylor Link reminded readers on November 11 that Bannon had been the “ mastermind behind some of Trump’s more controversial stunts, ” which included an abrupt press conference which focused on women who had made sexual allegations against former president Bill Clinton.
Link’s piece continues to single out Bannon as one of the “main proponents of the alt-right;” a position which coincides with on-the-record anti-Semitism (Bannon’s ex-wife’s courtroom remarks were reported by New York Daily News ); it was revealed in 2007 that Bannon did not want his twin daughters attending the college preparatory institution Archer School for Girls in Los Angeles due to the many Jewish students enrolled at the school.
“The biggest problem he had with Archer is the number of Jews that attend… He said that he doesn’t like the way they raise their kids to be ‘whiny brats’ and that he didn’t want the girls going to school with Jews.” ~Mary Louise Piccard, ex-wife of Steve Bannon, in a signed courtroom statement dated June 27, 2007
It is evident that Donald Trump has chosen a seasoned individual to occupy his inner circle. With naval service, extensive experience in finance and media; Steve Bannon’s appointment as Donald Trump’s chief strategist and senior counselor has been called “deeply troubling” by David Axelrod, senior advisor to President Barack Obama during his first term.
Lots of chatter. Breitibart’s Bannon in WH is deeply troubling. Bannon as COS would have been more so. Not “normalization.” Just a fact.
— David Axelrod (@davidaxelrod) November 13, 2016
As we move closer to Donald Trump’s inauguration day, only time and continued news coverage will reveal the full implications of Steve Bannon’s views and actions while in the White House.
[Featured Image by Drew Angerer/Getty Images]