After days of telling the world that Elon Musk is a “truly evil person” who should “go back to South Africa,” and that he would “have Elon Musk run out of here by Inauguration Day,” Steve Bannon has backtracked.
“Look, he’s, the bottom line, he’s not going to be totally out,” Bannon told Politico on Monday, adding later: “Look, when you write $250 million worth of checks, when you’ve got, when you’re that involved, when you have actually backed a ground game, you’re going to have a seat at the table.”
It’s a funny comedown, one that took place in the space of less than a week. Bannon the warrior quickly became Bannon the cynic: Look, let’s not be naive. Musk contributed a huge amount to the campaign. You really think he’ll just leave?
Bannon is revealing something bigger about his shtick here, though. He plays the role of a right-wing populist, reminding us repeatedly that he’s built a people’s movement with Trump at the head. He’ll occasionally make arguments for specific policies that would outrage the rich: higher taxes on the wealthy, ending the carried interest loophole.
None of those things are going to happen. What it appears Trump is setting the country up for is a massive giveaway for his billionaire backers, with agencies set to conduct dramatically less oversight of corporate crime and financial markets, and with numerous legislative pushes to cut taxes on the rich, and offset the cost of it by shredding the social safety net.
One way of looking at this: Bannon has long served the purpose, intentionally or not, of helping give Trump populist cover as he pursues an agenda that’s servile to various forms of big business. If the pitch to voters is scapegoating immigrants while letting billionaires do what they want, then Bannon can be there as a kind of branding tool — spewing anti-immigrant invective and making perfunctory economic populist comments while the guys who are really in the room get to work.
Now that Musk has spent hundreds of millions to buy his way in, he’s now a part of that team. It would explain the cynicism in Bannon’s surprise when he told Politico on Tuesday, “What’s shocking to me is [Musk] doesn’t have much power.”
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