Opinión: With Bannon out, does anything really change in the Trump White House?

Macchiavelli has left the White House.

Steve Bannon, the self-described “economic nationalist” whose pandering to the far-right, anti-immigrant crowd helped propel Donald J. Trump to the White House, is out. In some ways, the news explains the interview Bannon recently gave to American Prospect in which he differed with Trump on North Korea (there is no military solution) and dismissed white supremacists as “losers.” It felt then, and seems more so now, like Bannon was trying to soften the ground for his landing. He went in perceived as a right-wing extremist and wants to emerge as something a little less extreme.

Fine. But what does that mean for policy, and the direction of the confused and rattled White House? That’s not totally clear, given that fellow nationalist Steve Miller still has his office and, presumably, the president’s ear. There have been reports for weeks that Bannon’s influence in the administration had waned, and that he often was left out of — or skipped — critical meetings. And Trump’s original, ineffectual chief of staff, Reince Priebus, has given way to John Kelly, the former general who is expected to be a far more effective gatekeeper to the Oval Office. In fact, Bannon is Kelly’s second pelt; he fired communications director Anthony Scaramucci seemingly before he even sat down in his chair.

Despite that diminished role by Bannon and the arrival of Kelly, Trump’s inane rhetoric — the same sort of tripe he spewed on the campaign trail — continued unabated. He looked at far-right demonstrators who included Nazis and racists and white supremacists – a crowd that was marching to preserve symbols of slavery and white domination – and he concluded the crowd included many “fine people.”

So what does all of this tell us? That maybe Bannon as Svengali to Trump wasn’t quite the right perception, and that the former head of online Breitbart News — which gave voice and support to far-right extremists — wound up with Trump because he echoed the president rather than led him.

Regardless, Bannon’s exit means one less extremist in the White House, and whether that will help rein in the worst impulses of Trump — a Tweet Thursday seemed to endorse extrajudicial killings and war crimes — should become clear fairly soon. The president has a rally in Phoenix next week, home to Republican Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake, whom he has publicly disparaged. Who knows what histrionics we’ll see then?

Maybe the most promising reading of this is that Kelly might be on a program of ousting the lunatics and extremists that Trump brought into the seat of power. If Kelly manages to oust Miller, Sebastian Gorka and others with extremist views and no experience, can he actually transform this train wreck into a relatively normal presidency?

Probably not, because, well, Trump.

Scott.Martelle@LATimes.com

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