US President Donald Trump fired his chief strategist on Friday, making him the latest casualty in a string of high-profile members leaving the White House in recent weeks, including former chief of staff Reince Priebus, former press secretary Sean Spicer and ex-communications director Anthony Scaramucci.

Bannon, who will return to head the hard right-wing media outlet Breitbart.com, wasted no time in framing his departure for the public's understanding.

He gave interviews with two different outlets - The Weekly Standard and Bloomberg - plus another, with liberal publication The American Prospect the day before his resignation.

In these interviews Bannon all but declared that if he can't shape the Trump presidency from within, he'll do so from the outside.

"The Trump presidency we fought for and won is over," Bannon told The Weekly Standard. "We still have this huge movement, and there'll be good days and bad days, but that presidency is over."

Whether Trump fired Bannon or he resigned of his own free will, we don't know.

Fired or not, he is back at Breitbart.com, not with his tail between his legs, but with a lust for blood.

"War" is the word, as Breitbart editor Joel Pollack tweeted with a hashtag on Friday. A war against the 'globalists,' the liberals, the media and those in the White House who conspired against Bannon and therefore, in Bannon's telling, conspired against Trump.

The declaration promising to shape the Trump presidency from the outside won't make the president happy, but Trump was arguably just a vehicle for Bannon who has always been more focused on his own brand than policy - "policy" being a word Bannon, the late website founder Andrew Breitbart and millennial alt-right showman Milo Yiannoplous abhor.

Breitbart's big guns like Bannon wanted a culture war, they didn't want to talk actual law or the hard stuff like legislation.

With Bannon's help, a culture war was the one thing Trump had been consistent in inflaming across the United States, and beyond.

In fact, the Breitbart site itself existed because its late founder Andrew Breitbart wanted to join the ranks of the high-dollar conservative cults of personality like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, who were making millions feeding red meat to the conservative base on talk radio.

Now Bannon will attempt to push a presidency, but first the priority is to push himself. The thoughts surrounding former writers at the site are that Bannon's motivations are mostly ego driven.

His spate of interviews suggest Bannon will raise his profile higher by appearing to be pulling the strings of the White House from the front page of Breitbart.com, all the while going to "war" with perceived enemies. Bannon will try to recreate the atmosphere of the 2016 president campaign, where memes, social media, the alt-right, nationalists, the disaffected red pill former liberals, Russia, conservative billionaire Robert Mercer, and millions of Twitter bots created an atmosphere to win the election.

This is the base Bannon says he helped Trump create and claims to be their spokesman. He will use that bully pulpit and try to sway Republican politics.

There will be threats of third parties, and the calling out of Republicans across the board (one factor in Bannon's departure, according to sources, was Breitbart.com's constant berating of White House official H.R. McMaster). Expect more extreme language, more winks and nods at the far right and more dehumanisation of their political enemies.

Don't expect Bannon or Trump to be anymore civil. And don't expect Bannon to win with the base either - they didn't vote for him, they did vote for Trump.

BJ Bethel is a journalist based in Dayton, Ohio.