Ryan Lizza in The New Yorker:
The man behind this new message is Steve Bannon, who became the C.E.O. of the Trump campaign in August. Bannon is on leave from Breitbart, the right-wing news site where he served as executive chairman, and where he honed a view of international politics that Trump now parrots. Bannon, who is sixty-two, is new to right-wing rabble-rousing, compared to someone like Stone. Bannon was raised in a blue-collar Democratic family around Norfolk and Richmond, Virginia. He served in the Navy, went to the Harvard Business School, and became wealthy as a mergers-and-acquisition deal-maker for Goldman Sachs, in the nineteen-eighties. He made a fortune by buying a share of the royalties for “Seinfeld” back in 1993, and receives them to this day. Bannon met Andrew Breitbart, the founder of the news Web site, when Bannon was financing conservative documentaries in Los Angeles in the aughts. Breitbart, who previously worked with the Drudge Report, started Breitbart in 2005 as a conservative news aggregator, much like his former employer. In the fall of 2009, Bannon and Breitbart worked together on a business plan to launch a more ambitious version of the site, and Bannon joined its board in 2011, once the financing deal closed. When Andrew Breitbart died, in 2012, Bannon became executive chairman and took over the site. Back then Breitbart was a pugnacious but still recognizably conservative site, but, with Bannon in charge, its politics started to change.
Bannon embraced the growing populist movement in America, including the “alt-right,” a new term for white nationalists, who care little about traditional conservative economic ideas and instead stress the need to preserve America’s European heritage and keep out non-whites and non-Christians. Under Bannon, Breitbart promoted similar movements in Europe, including the United Kingdom Independence Party, the National Front in France, Alternative for Germany, and the Freedom Party in the Netherlands. Bannon likes to say that his goal is “to build a global, center-right, populist, anti-establishment news site.” After the election is over, Breitbart, which has offices in London and Rome, plans to open up new bureaus in France and Germany.
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