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From the pages of The New Yorker, this is the Weekly Comment podcast.
In After Bannon, Jelani Cobb writes about Steve Bannon's banishment.
The prerequisites for a senior advisor to the president, like those for basketball coaches, boxing trainers and stage directors, include a talent for knowing what to do with talent.
Karl Rove looked at the unvarnished folksiness and the common touch of a patrician Texas baseball team owner and former first son and saw a future commander-in-chief.
David Axelrod, recognized in a lanky biracial state senator from Illinois, a man who could be a history-making candidate for national office.
Steve Bannon, the erstwhile senior advisor to Donald Trump, cannot claim any such narrative of discovery.
He joined the campaign as its CEO after Trump had already secured the Republican nomination.
But Bannon perceived the billionaire reality show host's talents and steered him through the final phases of a general election that few people thought he could win.
It didn't matter that none of Trump's talents were beneficial to the office of the presidency or really to any public office in a democratic society.
This particular partnership has come to an early end.
Bannon clashed with the National Security Advisor H.R.
McMaster and with Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, made grandiose pronouncements about his goal of achieving the deconstruction of the administrative state and came under suspicion from various White House factions as a leaker.
In an administration where senior staffers are treated like seasonal workers, Bannon's prospects for long-term employment did not seem bright.
Then, two weeks ago, came the terrible events in Charlottesville, and with them renewed concerns about Bannon's presence.
We'll see what happens with Mr Bannon.
Trump said at a press conference which coincided with the publication of an unbridled interview that Bannon gave to Robert Kuttner of The American Prospect.
In the interview, Bannon contradicted Trump's hawkish rhetoric on North Korea.
There's no military solution.
Forget it, and described himself both as a force that inspired incontinence among his White House foes and as an embattled figure constantly fighting the globalists, those whom he has called the West Wing Democrats.
He also dismissed as clowns the right-wing contingents that descended on Charlottesville and made a broader indictment of ethno-nationalism the rationale for those groups' existence.
This was an odd display of public hand-washing, given that Breitbart News, which Bannon ran before he joined the campaign and to which he has now returned, has been so closely tied to the development of the euphemistically termed alt-right and its various belligerents.
It also made it harder to see Bannon's dismissal as a rebuke to such groups.
The aide, who called them clowns, was going, but the president, who said that their ranks included many fine people, stayed.
Whatever the reason, a few days later it was reported that Bannon and the new chief of staff, John Kelly, had agreed that it was finally time for him to go.
With Bannon's departure, those who saw his truculent blend of nationalism and racial grievance Bannonism, if you wish as the ballast in Trump's otherwise foundering ship have been left to ponder who will now lead whom and where it will all end.
In the prospect interview it appeared that Bannon's overarching worry was that China would supplant the United States as the leader of the global economy in the next decade.
He presented himself as simply fighting for protectionism, though he prefers the term economic nationalism.
No one who watched the Hitlerian cosplay in Charlottesville believes however, that the most embittered portions of the electorate that Bannon and Trump tapped into during the 2016 campaign were driven solely by economic anxiety.
Charlottesville was the logical culmination of events set in motion two years ago, when Trump's announcement of his candidacy included a declaration that the country was inundated with Mexican rapists.
American populism since the early 20th century, the era of the Georgia statesman Tom Watson, has had a habit of wasting vast amounts of energy in pursuit of paranoid conspiracy theories and racial resentments.
In the interview, Bannon notably recast his rivalries with Jared Kushner, Gary Cohn and Steve Mnuchin as mere disagreements over the virtues of globalism.
In fact, on the day that Bannon's departure was announced, a Breitbart senior editor tweeted hashtag war, an apparent reference to the site's plans to take on the globalists.
Bannon told the Weekly Standard, now I'm free.
I've got my hands back on my weapons.
Someone said, it's Bannon the barbarian.
I am definitely going to crush the opposition.
Breitbart celebrated by selling fidget spinners featuring Bannon's face and the hashtag War.
This is mostly theater.
Bannon's return has been accompanied by claims that Breitbart will increase its staff and its coverage, but the site faces significant challenges.
Following the defeat of the far right in the Austrian, Dutch and French elections, a planned expansion to France and Germany has not happened.
The cyclonic winds of global populism that Breitbart had hoped to ride have, at least for the moment, calmed.
And it remains to be seen whether Bannon can wield from the outside anywhere near the influence he commanded when his desk was a few feet from the Oval Office.
The administration's next fight is likely to be over tax reform, and Trump presumably would rather not have Bannon, who has said that he favors raising taxes on the rich, leading an attack that could, in effect, split the base.
Last Tuesday, Breitbart blasted the speech that Trump delivered at Fort Myer on the war in Afghanistan, which it said made him sound like a classic neocon and had enraged his America First followers.
Yet the same day, Trump staged a rally in Phoenix, hitting the old familiar notes.
He scorned the mainstream media as dishonest and traitorous, insisted that a border wall is necessary for national security and threatened to shut down the government if he didn't get one, and railed against establishment figures in the Republican Party, including the two senators from Arizona.
These are disgruntlements that Bannon had helped whip up during the campaign, but listening as the crowd in the arena roared, one could scarcely have noticed that he was gone.
That was After Bannon by Jelani Cobb from The New Yorker magazine September 4 2017, narrated by Todd Munt.
Also in the magazine this week Sam Knight on the reality show Eden, David Remnick on an Israeli TV series set in the West Bank, Emily Nussbaum on the showrunner Jenji Kohan, Ian Parker on Ken Burns, Dan Chason on Angie Malenko, Hua Su on LCD Sound System and more.
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