Steve Bannon is out as the White House chief strategist

Former chief strategist and campaign manager Steve Bannon’s departure from the Trump White House surely does not mean an end to the demagogic racial politics in which Donald Trump has trafficked for decades.

It does, however, seem to mark the final eclipse of the notion that Trump would move beyond demagoguery and construct a vision of “nationalist” economic policy that would differ in a meaningful way from standard-issue pro-business Republicanism. Bannon, on his way out the door, appeared serious about this idea — phoning up progressive magazine editor Robert Kuttner to try to find common ground on trade policy and explain that “to me, the economic war with China is everything.”

Steve Bannon’s hatred for “globalists” has done him in.

The controversial senior strategist was pushed out of the White House late on Friday, according to multiple reports, chiefly due to his constant feuding with his rivals inside the administration — people like National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster and National Economic Council Chair Gary Cohn.

Eight days after being sworn in as president, Donald Trump spoke on the phone with Russian President Vladimir Putin while surrounded by five of his top advisers, as you can see in the above photo.

And now four of those five advisers are gone from the White House.

Stephen K. Bannon, the president’s chief strategist and one of his most controversial advisers, is exiting the Trump administration after a tumultuous seven-month stint. The White House released a statement Friday saying that Bannon and White House chief of staff John Kelly had “mutually agreed” that this would be Bannon’s last day in his job.

Bannon’s departure has been long in the making. Trump signaled his public displeasure with Bannon’s high media profile back in April, and the chief strategist’s clashes with other administration officials have only worsened since. A new round of rumors about Bannon’s potentially imminent departure began swirling after Kelly was named chief of staff in late July and began exploring how to restructure the dysfunctional West Wing.

There was really only one political story this week — Donald Trump’s erratic behavior in the wake of a white supremacist murder in Charlottesville, Virginia, and its fallout. But the sheer volume of events and kaleidoscopic array of consequences — ranging from the removal of a statue in Annapolis, Maryland, to the imperiling of the president’s relationship with key congressional Republicans, to the departure of chief strategist Steve Bannon — can be difficult to keep up with.

Here’s what you need to know.

With Steve Bannon’s departure from the White House, there are some signals that Breitbart News — the website Bannon ran that has relentlessly boosted Trump — might be about to turn on the administration.

Without Bannon, “it’s now a Democrat White House,” one anonymous source close to the former chief strategist reportedly told New York magazine’s Gabriel Sherman. Sherman reported that Bannon is expected to return to Breitbart — the far-right media network he raised to a national platform under President Donald Trump.

Just over three weeks ago — on July 27 — the New York Post made its cover “Survivor: White House” amid reports of chaos and uncertainty in the administration. With Steve Bannon’s departure Friday, three of the seven officials pictured are now gone.

Bannon joins Reince Priebus (who was ousted July 28) and Anthony Scaramucci (who was removed from his new job as communications director before he could even formally start on July 31).

When Steve Bannon was hired as President Trump’s chief strategist — one of the first two hires the president-elect announced after winning the election — it was correctly regarded as a symbol that Trump would govern as the same sort of populist he’d been during the campaign: loose-cannon attention seeking in style, “law and order” hawkishness about immigration, Islam, and crime in policy.

But the opposite isn’t true. Bannon’s departure from the White House, announced on Friday after weeks of speculation, doesn’t mean the Trump administration is pivoting away from “Trumpism” — the racialized populism Bannon represented. If anything, it means that Bannonian strategy has been so deeply embedded in the DNA of the Trump administration that Bannon’s own presence is no longer needed.

As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump praised autocrats and exhibited strongman tendencies. But as president of the United States, Trump is proving to be one of the weakest, most disinterested executives in memory. He seems happy — even eager — to be both operationally and ideologically marginalized inside his own administration.

This is, I think, the best way to understand the ouster of chief strategist Steve Bannon.

Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s chief strategist, believes everything is going according to plan.

“The Democrats,” he told the American Prospect’s Bob Kuttner, “the longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”