Jonathan Swan: “Steve Bannon’s next moves will be all about the billionaire Mercer family. I’m told Bannon, who visited New York this week, met with Bob Mercer and together they will be a well-funded force on the outside.”

“Bannon has felt liberated since it became clear he was being pushed out, according to friends. He’s told associates he has a ‘killing machine’ in Breitbart News, and it’s possible he returns to lead their editorial operation.”

“A source familiar with Breitbart’s operations told me they would go ‘thermonuclear’ against ‘globalists’ that Bannon and his friends believe are ruining the Trump administration, and by extension, America.”

Washington Post: “The potential for Bannon to wreak havoc and mischief on the White House from the outside is among the reasons Trump had been skittish about firing his chief strategist. And Bannon himself had used wartime metaphors to signal to friends and confidants that he would continue to pursue his nationalist, populist agenda if he leaves his government perch.”

James Hohmann: “Reports of Stephen Bannon’s death might be greatly exaggerated. President Trump’s wholehearted embrace of Confederate monuments as a new wedge issue underscores how much juice the White House’s chief strategist still has. Bannon has been in the doghouse, and Trump resents how much credit he’s gotten for his victory last November. But even if he loses his government job, which is still a possibility, the former chairman of Breitbart News’s brand of populism and scorched-earth tactics will continue to heavily influence Trump’s approach to governing.”

“Trump’s sudden decision to become the leading cheerleader for preserving Confederate memorials is a strategic political maneuver designed to change the terms of the post-Charlottesville conversation. There’s vastly more public support, especially among Republicans, for preserving monuments than for the false moral equivalencies Trump espoused earlier in the week. It’s also a distraction from the failure to follow through on his biggest promises and the mounting Russia investigations.”

“This past election, the Democrats used every personal attack, including charges of racism, against President Trump. He then won a landslide victory on a straightforward platform of economic nationalism. As long as the Democrats fail to understand this, they will continue to lose. But leftist elites do not value history, so why would they learn from history?”

— White House adviser Stephen Bannon, in an email to the Washington Post.

BuzzFeed reports that White House adviser Stephen Bannon “has now made the calculus that he’s on thin ice regardless, and won’t go down quietly.”

Said one supporter: “He’s saying, ‘I’m going to force you to fire me in a public way or we’re going to follow the agenda we were elected for.'”

“Those in the orbit of Trump mega-donors Robert and Rebekah Mercer, longtime Bannon allies who invested in Breitbart, are said to be worried about Bannon and the White House his departure would leave behind. The removal of Bannon, people in that world have said this week, would signal that the White House they worked to elect as the harbinger of political revolution was instead becoming ‘another Bush administration.'”

Steve Bannon told the Daily Mail that his controversial interview with a liberal magazine writer was a positive for the White House since it slowed down the media’s momentum in covering President Trump’s remarks about the weekend’s violence in Virginia.

Ryan Lizza: “To be sure, though he enables and reinforces Trump’s ugly nativism, Bannon is hardly the deft, Rasputin-like manipulator he is seen as in American pop culture. He was adamantly opposed to the strike on Syria, and Trump ignored him. He has learned that Trump recoils from advisers who are seen to be controlling him.”

“If Trump finally pushes Bannon out of the White House, the nationalist policy project will be all but dead. The new chief of staff, John Kelly, is far more moderate on immigration and has pushed Trump to abandon the idea of a physical border wall. Economic policy will be fully under the control of Cohn, and the heretical idea of raising taxes on the wealthy will have no champion. Trump himself has always been more animated by the xenophobia of Bannonism than by its populist economic views. A Trump White House without Bannon will be no more radical in its coddling of far-right groups—today Trump showed again that he needs no encouragement—but it will be more captured by the traditional small-government agenda of the G.O.P. Bannon hoped to destroy.”

New York Times: “Rupert Murdoch has repeatedly urged President Trump to fire him. Anthony Scaramucci, the president’s former communications director, thrashed him on television as a white nationalist. Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, the national security adviser, refused to even say he could work with him.”

“For months, Mr. Trump has considered ousting Stephen Bannon, the White House chief strategist and relentless nationalist who ran the Breitbart website and called it a ‘platform for the alt-right.’ Mr. Trump has sent Mr. Bannon to a kind of internal exile, and has not met face-to-face for more than a week with a man who was once a fixture in the Oval Office, according to aides and friends of the president.”

“So far, Mr. Trump has not been able to follow through — a product of his dislike of confrontation, the bonds of a foxhole friendship forged during the 2016 presidential campaign and concerns about what mischief Mr. Bannon might do once he leaves the protective custody of the West Wing.”

CNN: “Two senior Trump advisers — one inside the White House and another who recently departed — signaled Sunday that the knives are out for Steve Bannon, President Trump’s controversial chief strategist.”

Center for Public Integrity: “In an arrangement prominent ethics experts say is without precedent and potentially illegal, the White House is referring questions for senior presidential adviser Stephen Bannon to an outside public relations agent whose firm says she is working for free.”

“The unorthodox setup means Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, is potentially violating the Antideficiency Act, which provides that federal employees “may not accept voluntary services for [the] government or employ personal services exceeding that authorized by law.'”

Mike Allen: “Events in this madcap West Wing have conspired to give Bannon back much of his mojo: He’s clearly going to stay, after being long rumored to be on the outs. He’s no longer in a hot war with Jared Kushner. He played a key role in developing the Russia response. And he’s back to pushing ideas the GOP establishment hates, including a tax hike on the rich and trade wars.”

“Bannon’s insurance policy is that he’s the keeper of the base. Trump understands he’s never going to be broadly popular, so he absolutely has to preserve his 46%.”

Ryan Lizza: “Two important things changed since the ‘Bannon is dead’ narrative took hold, in April. The first is the Russia investigation. So far, Bannon has not been connected to the investigation… That’s not the case for Kushner. Just as Bannon seemed to reach a low point in his relationship with Trump, Kushner’s role in the Russia probe emerged as the most important piece of White House intrigue… The second change since Bannon’s low point was that a decision on whether to withdraw from the Paris climate accord finally needed to be made. It was the most important fight pitting Bannon against Jared and Ivanka yet. And it played to all of Bannon’s strengths.”

“Donald Trump doesn’t know anything about policy. Donald Trump doesn’t know anything about politics. Donald Trump doesn’t know anything about anything. He can get up and give a good speech. You listen to him talk about any topic and he wanders from sentence to sentence to sentence. So Steve Bannon is now the President of the United States. And that was more clear yesterday than ever before.”

— “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough, quoted by Mediaite.

President Trump dismissed widespread reports that his administration is riven by discord, saying he is sticking by his polarizing chief strategist, Steve Bannon, calling him a “very decent guy” who is getting a “bad rap,” Bloomberg reports.

Politico: “Stephen Miller has managed to endear himself to the man emerging as the president’s most indispensable adviser: son-in-law Jared Kushner. As the relationship between Kushner and Bannon has deteriorated, Miller has made sure his colleagues know he’s not on Bannon’s team. … And unlike Bannon, a wealthy man in his own right, the president doesn’t see Miller as a peer or someone trying to take the spotlight, unless he’s been allowed to take it.”