Steve Bannon's departure from the White House was heralded as an apocalypse for the Trump presidency.  The news itself was billed as so momentous that it knocked the Charlottesville violence off the front page, in order to focus on the president's éminence grise, the man depicted on Saturday Night Live as "the grim reaper."

Supposedly, the president was risking his entire legacy in getting rid of this man the media hyped as "Trump's Brain."

They claimed that it was a highly risky move, because surely, Trump's political base would rebel and turn on him, those nasty deplorables.  Get a load of The Hill's headline just two days ago: "THE MEMO: Trump's base frets about post-Bannon era."

The base would rebel!  The swamp would win!  Bannon's exit "a monumental change"!  (No kidding – one of them said that.)  The Trump presidency is over!

Turns out a new poll shows that that is not what happened.  Wiping the egg off its face, the Daily Beast reported:

Beyond the anecdotal evidence, some early polling from the Trump campaign's top pollster, Tony Fabrizio, also underscores that Trump voters seem not to care that Bannon is out of the White House.

According to polling conducted by his firm, some 29 percent of people in an August survey of 1,500 self-described GOP or GOP leaning voters nationally, viewed Trump more favorably after Bannon was axed and only 6 percent viewed him less favorably. Some 48 percent indicated that it didn't change their opinion at all.

"Voters in Presidential elections are barely influenced by who the VP candidates are. Why should a campaign or administration staffer matter more?" Fabrizio told The Daily Beast. "Only in the bubble of the DC Beltway do players, events and issues often take on outsized importance as compared to how the rest of the country views them."

In other words, nobody cares that Bannon left office.  Aides really aren't the reason anyone votes for a president.  We in the Trump base can have our favorites, but they'll be our favorites whether they are in a particular job slot or not.  The media would have us think politics is reality TV or Game of Thrones, and for them, it is, but for the rest of us, the person we voted for is Donald Trump, and the person we would demand results of is named Donald Trump as well.  How he conducts his affairs and whom he surrounds himself with is largely irrelevant to the rest of us, because what matters is whether he fixes the economy, restores rule of law, and re-establishes American exceptionalism.  Only the Beltway really gets excited about that other stuff.  They needed Steve Bannon.  Trump didn't.  And the base didn't.

It calls to mind that the media have been pushing this Steve Bannon Omnipotent line for about eight months, claiming that we, the voters, just can't get along without Steve Bannon locked up in some sinecure in the White House.  By extension, they impute those Bannon powers to Trump, too, despite the fact that the man constantly writes his own script, as he did in Arizona.  They just don't get it.  They saw mystique in Bannon and ran with it because they were the ones who needed Bannon.  Trump's voters were just a bit too smart to fall for it.