Steve Bannon’s Big Mistake: Taking President Trump Literally (Op-Ed)

Andrew Ricci, Vice President, LEVICKOn the day after last year’s presidential election, when the world was still stunned at Donald Trump’s shocking upset, many stars were on the rise. But perhaps no star in the media world was rising as fast as that of Salena Zito, a journalist who had spent 11 years at the Pittsburgh Tribune review before moving on to cover the campaign for a variety of outlets from the New York Post to the Atlantic.As the results started to come in on Election night and the media cognoscenti started to realize the turning tide, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews referenced a now well-spread and oft-quoted column that Ms. Zito wrote for the Atlantic about a speech that Mr. Trump gave in Pittsburgh. In that column, she summed up one of the biggest misconceptions that seemingly everybody got wrong about the Trump campaign. Throughout the campaign, then-candidate Trump would make claims and use statistics that were quickly set upon by fact checkers and journalists eager to show another example of an inaccuracy from the candidate’s mouth.When he makes claims like this,” Zito wrote, “the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”As noted in a post-election profile in Politico, “Zito was mocked – by fellow reporters and social media trolls alike – for extrapolating anecdotes onto the electorate.” Two months later, Zito was a household name in the media world, widely credited for seeing the canary in the coal mine while everyone else was preparing the champagne for the certain coming of a Clinton Administration.Her analogy was later parsed and used as an example far and wide of the thinking of Trump voters across the country. Many Trump supporters weren’t so much concerned about a physical wall on the border, other reporters (and even Republican Senator Ron Johnson) claimed, but they saw the wall as a metaphor for the need to secure the border and address the problems that Middle America blamed on illegal immigration.The early stages of Mr. Trump’s transition and presidency were replete with speculation about whether the world should take him literally, i.e. holding him to his campaign promises, or seriously, giving him some leeway.As the Trump transition progressed, one of his first moves was to name Steve Bannon – the former Breitbart executive chairman who had served as chief executive officer on the Trump campaign – as a senior advisor, a position that officially installed Mr. Bannon’s nationalist ideology in a West Wing office steps from the Resolute desk. And as The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza and others have noted, Mr. Bannon’s office included “an enormous whiteboard on which he has scrawled every promise that Donald Trump made during the campaign.”A better symbol of taking the president literally can hardly be found.We’re now almost at the 100-day marker of the Trump presidency, and Bannon’s focus on making good on the literal promises is clear through multiple actions that have widely been regarded as executive missteps. President Trump’s approval ratings are a full 15 points below where they were on Inauguration Day. It seems that the “seriously but not literally” analogy may still be telling, nearly seven months after Zito first pinpointed the trend.Bannon’s tenure in the West Wing has been fraught with controversy from day one, and it hasn’t helped that he’s found himself at odds with other senior staffers and advisors who have the President’s ear. But the past two weeks have seen a dramatic shift in President Trump’s governance – what, for now, seems to be a marked sea change from governing literally to governing seriously.The launch of missiles against a Syrian government airbase a week ago was the first big break from his campaign rhetoric, and, to be sure, it riled the far right nationalist elements that supported him from the outset of his White House bid. But it also brought a number of stories about Bannon’s waning influence and his attempts to talk the President out of the attack in favor of remaining focused on Bannon’s nationalist worldview.Since then, the hits have continued to pile up, with the President seeming to go out of his way to neuter his Chief Strategist, saying Bannon was just “a guy who works for me” and “I’m my own strategist.” In the last few days, he turned several other nationalist pillars of his campaign rhetoric upside-down with his claim that NATO is “no longer obsolete” and that China isn’t manipulating his currency.The missile strike in Syria was widely praised by many across the political spectrum, and the coverage of it was overwhelmingly favorable. After nearly 100 days of missteps, President Trump seems to be finding that those who took him seriously may not have necessarily wanted to take him literally. And that has left Bannon – and his promise board – on the outs. Whether he remains in his West Wing war room office remains to be seen, but at least one piece of writing is on the wall: the old saw about campaigning in poetry and governing in prose, first said by Mario Cuomo in 1985, has never been truer.Only now, we might want to update it for 2017: you campaign literally and you govern seriously. With all due credit to Salena Zito, of course.  [author]About the Author: Andrew Ricci, Vice President at D.C. communications firm LEVICK.  Andrew, an experienced media relations expert, content-creation specialist, and public affairs strategist, started his career working on political campaigns and on Capitol Hill, serving as a senior communications aide to Rep. Zack Space (D-Ohio) and as the Congressman’s official spokesman during his reelection campaign. At LEVICK, Andrew now counsels a wide range of clients navigating reputational challenges in the public eye. [/author]