OXON HILL, Md. — White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and chief strategist Steve Bannon want it to be known that they are on the same page.
But a joint appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday only served to further highlight the contrast between Priebus’s pragmatic establishment views with Bannon’s in-your-face nationalism. Their joint interview onstage at CPAC was notable, also, for the fact that Bannon rarely delivers public remarks.
Priebus and Bannon have been pushing back on the narrative that they helm two warring factions in the Trump White House: a pragmatic, establishment wing represented by Priebus, and an aggressively ideological wing spearheaded by Bannon. The two gave a joint interview to New York magazine recently in which they joked about giving each other back rubs, and Bannon, the former chairman of Breitbart News, pushed back heavily on a recent report in his former website that blamed Priebus for many of the administration’s problems, including the botched travel-ban rollout, telling me the story was “absurd” and reportedly yelling at the author of the story.
While a suit-clad Priebus offered standard fare about taxes and regulation, Bannon, in khakis and no tie, went in a different direction. His appearance was a reminder of how unusual it is that Bannon, whose career in politics thus far had consisted of aggressive opposition not just to the left but to establishment Republicans in Priebus’s mold, has ascended in such a short period of time to the highest levels of power in the White House.