Flailing Breitbart Launches First Attack on Trump Administration

After flaming out as Donald Trump's chief strategist, Steve Bannon returned to helm the alt-right website Breitbart, and it only took two days for a negative story to emerge there about the Trump White House.

Breitbart took aim at H.R. McMaster, the national security adviser who Bannon frequently clashed with, claiming he wasn't Islamophobic enough for his job. The article specifically took umbrage at a book -- Militant Islamist Ideology: Understanding the Global Threat by U.S. military officer Youssef H. Aboul-Enein -- that McMaster endorsed and wrote a positive blurb for. The book's cardinal sin, according to Breitbart, was that it pushed respect for the Koran and advocated that Westerners apologize if they desecrate the holy Muslim text.

Connecting all the book's points to McMaster, who didn't actually write it, is obviously very specious; it's also telling. After getting fired, Bannon warned, "The Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over." Is the McMaster article the first salvo in a media war aimed at getting back at Trump? Or does Bannon want to just rid the Trump administration of the "globalists" he so detests?

Another question is how much influence Breitbart actually still has. Traffic for the site, while still impressive, dropped precipitously in the spring. "ComScore estimated that Breitbart had nearly 23 million unique visitors during the month of November 2016, but only drew 10.7 million in April 2017, a 53 percent drop," according to Vanity Fair. Breitbart denies its traffic is "cratering," as Vanity Fair put it, but the numbers speak for themselves.

Advertisers have also left Breitbart en masse, partly thanks to activists pressuring companies to sever business ties with the website and its inflammatory, vaguely racist stories.