A daily roundup of the biggest stories in right-wing media.
On Wednesday, news broke that Steve Bannon had been removed from his role on the National Security Council. Though this upset came just a day after Roger Stone told Infowars’ Alex Jones that Jared Kushner was planting anti-Bannon stories, suggesting dissent within the president’s inner circle, the conspiracy site today wrote that the Bannon news “might not be as big of a deal as reported by the mainstream media, which takes shots at Bannon whenever possible.” (Ironically, that might be right.) Nevertheless, most conservative publications addressed the news, attributing varying degrees of severity to it.
Independent Journal Review acknowledged Bannon had been “a controversial addition to the council to begin with,” also pointing to his former role as head of Breitbart’s news operation. But most outlets focused instead on the White House line that, as the Blaze put it, “Bannon was only on the NSC to supervise now-ousted national security adviser Michael Flynn’s work to ‘de-operationalize’ the council from the broad purview it had under Susan Rice.”
Breitbart’s post, “Steve Bannon Leaves National Security Council After Susan Rice Takedown,” insisted that the Trump adviser had engineered his own departure: “President Donald Trump’s Senior adviser Stephen K. Bannon has exited his role on President Donald Trump’s National Security Council, claiming that his mission is complete.” The post’s final sentence indicated that a source in the administration had “confirmed to Breitbart News that Bannon will retain his security clearance.”
Not everyone bought into the official spin that Bannon’s apparent ouster had been a deliberate strategy, or the plan all along. The Daily Caller, for example, downplayed the suggestion that Bannon himself had played a role in the move, writing, “The decision to remove Bannon was made by H.R. McMaster, Trump’s new national security adviser following the resignation of Michael Flynn.”
In the National Review, Jonah Goldberg mocked the White House’s claim that Bannon had just been on the NSC to keep an eye on then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Goldberg wrote:
Well, wait a second. I thought the current story was that Flynn was a great pick who had been unfairly hounded out of the position by illegal leaks and unmasking? Now the spin seems to be that they knew there was something sketchy about Flynn all along and so they tasked Steve Bannon (!) to keep him on the straight and narrow. That’s interesting.
On his radio program, Rush Limbaugh joked that the White House might replace Bannon with Susan Rice. Suggesting that the Bannon change would be viewed as a defeat for Trump, Limbaugh went on, “And the left is gonna be claiming and acting like they just got a scalp, that they are forcing Trump to make moves.”
In other news:
Conservative outlets have written little on the sexual harassment allegations against Bill O’Reilly. The Daily Caller, however, ran a post on advertisers fleeing O’Reilly’s Fox News show, suggesting that another cable news network was to blame for the declining support with the headline, “CNN Leads Charge to Defund ‘The O’Reilly Factor.’”
On social media, a Facebook post about Melania Trump’s fashion sense proved extremely popular:
