The Ideas and the Vessel: Why Breitbart Chose Trump Over Bannon

I always kind of liked Steve Bannon.

Not liked him liked him. I've never met the man. But I liked the idea of Bannon. Or rather, I liked that he had ideas.

Say what you will about Steve Bannon, but he reads books, and knows James Burnham, and rejects the mainstream, country-club-and-Chamber-of-Commerce view of the conservatism. If you squint at him a certain way—and ignore Pepe and Milo and his enthusiastic embrace of an ugly crew—Bannon was almost a reformicon. Or at least what happens when reform conservatism goes on a date with populism, has five drinks too many, and makes some bad life choices.

And for a while, lots of people talked themselves into believing that Bannon's combination of nationalism and reform conservatism was, more or less, what defined "Trumpism."

Not that Trump actually believed in Trumpism, mind you. As a political commodity Trump has always been, like Obama before him, a vessel. People poured their hopes into him. If you were an immigration hawk, you thought Trump was the only one who would secure the border. If you were concerned about the economy, you thought Trump's business background would make him a good president. If you read Breitbart, you thought that Trump believed in what Steve Bannon believed.