Donald Trump on Thursday railed against a conspiratorial plot by the Democrats, corporations and the mainstream media; renewed calls for the imprisonment of his political opponent; and portrayed himself as a populist hero battling a globalist elite.
To casual observers, such rhetoric might be seen as a sign that he is lashing out amid falling polls and reports of women accusing him of inappropriate physical advances. But to people watching closely, the worldview he espoused bore the clear mark of Steve Bannon, his campaign's CEO, and Breitbart News, the right-wing outlet of which Bannon was the chairman before taking leave to work for Trump.
Two years ago, just 15% of Americans had ever heard of Breitbart -- a populist, right-wing website that makes no apologies for its agenda-driven reporting -- and a mere 4% said they trusted it, according to a Pew Research Center survey. Today, Breitbart claims a bigger digital audience than every other conservative outlet with the exception of Fox News and Drudge Report. It is the favored outlet for Donald Trump's core supporters, and Bannon, as Trump campaign CEO, has become a key driving force in this election.
"The core principles that drive Breitbart seem to be gaining popularity," Alex Marlow, the editor-in-chief of the Breitbart News Network, told CNNMoney. "There is a movement."
"Regardless of what happens to Trump on November 8, this movement is not going away," a source close to Breitbart said. "This is the first inning."
As Thursday's speech showed, Trump has fully embraced the Breitbart worldview, which means nationalist talking points and anti-liberal narratives once reserved for the far-right echo-chamber have now found a hearing in the national discourse, and even at the presidential debates watched by tens of millions Americans.
Those narratives will almost certainly not be going anywhere after the election, even if Trump loses, and Breitbart -- or at the very least its spirit -- will be the primary voice behind them.
"There are thousands of ways in which this campaign is a merger between Donald Trump and Breitbart," Ben Shapiro, a former editor-at-large at Breitbart who has become a vociferous critic of the site, told CNNMoney. "Breitbart's whole goal was to burn everything down... and Trump has gone full Breitbart."
What can be mystifying to Americans who do not identify with or trust Breitbart is why so many people willingly believe news sources that have a stated partisan agenda, ignore critical stories about Trump and, in some cases, advance falsehoods, unfounded narratives and conspiracy theories -- and at the same time willingly disregard so much of what comes out of mainstream media as categorically false or biased.
For decades, conservatives have fueled the perception that the mainstream media is squarely on the side of the liberal elite. This perception grew stronger with the rise of talk radio in the 1990s, the launch of Fox News in 1996 and the proliferation of conservative websites over the last decade. Today, just 14% of Republicans express trust in the media, according to Gallup.
http://money.cnn.com/2016/10/13/media/breitbart-stephen-bannon-donald-trump/
