Kevin Williamson of National Review Online focuses on the man who helped spark one of the latest media-driven controversies.

Who is Steve Bannon? That’s a question that is of less and less interest with each passing hour. He’s the guy who got out in front of the guy who got out in front of the parade. The right-wing populist fervor that swept Donald J. Trump into the White House predates the Trump campaign. …

… Trump is a habitual liar, but one thing about which he has told the truth is that Steve Bannon’s contribution to his rise and his success has been grossly exaggerated. Bannon has posed as many things — media magnate, shrewd political operative, and cold-eyed Svengali to Trump’s undisciplined playboy — but what he actually is is a rich dilettante with a talent for convincing other rich dilettantes that he is a deep-thinking visionary. One of those rich dilettantes was Donald Trump. It was a good scam while it lasted. …

… Bannon is not an uneducated man — he holds a master’s in defense studies from Georgetown and an MBA from that funny little business school tenuously attached to Harvard — but as a would-be political philosopher, he is a casual autodidact, with the usual attendant limitations. (His undergraduate studies, at Virginia Tech, were focused on urban planning.) He cites Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War the way other Wall Street types (Bannon made his bones at Goldman Sachs) used to cite Sun Tzu’s Art of War. He likes to talk about the broad sweep of capital-H History in quasi-Hegelian terms. …