Behind the smokescreen of President Donald Trump's childish argument over the size of his inauguration crowd and his allegation that widespread voter fraud caused him to lose the 2016 popular vote is an autocratic assault on America's long post-Cold War leadership.

His bold inaugural reset of U.S foreign policy from the collective Western defense of democratic principles is a throwback to the old and repudiated cry of "America First." This alone reveals the depth of the threat he poses to world peace and order.

His verbal assaults on press freedom at home, and his disparagement of NATO abroad as the U.S. bulwark of power in Europe, are aimed at the heart of American global leadership. His intention appears to be undermining the traditional U.S. resistance to Russian expansionism, despite his flimsy self-assurance that he can best handle the old KGB spymaster who has risen to unchallenged power in Russia.

The critical player in this astonishing outcome is the Rasputin of the drama, the White House adviser Stephen K. Bannon. This former CEO of the Breitbart News website is well-known as an extreme right-wing provocateur and spreader of all manner of conspiracy theories.

Mr. Bannon was an early insider in Mr. Trump's 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton, which flourished under the candidate's perceptive grasp of widespread public discontent with both major parties. The Trump-Bannon strategy fed off middle-class resentment against all manner of political elites, as personified in Democratic presidential nominee.

Now that Mr. Bannon has won Mr. Trump's ear and a critical position within Trump World, he has wormed his way into a decisive role as its philosophical swami in a makeshift political hierarchy that previously had none. Mr. Trump had already effectively jettisoned the old Republican Party establishment in the 2016 GOP primaries.

Mr. Trump himself had only a vague identification with either party, and chose to build instead on his reputation as a shrewd maker of business deals. With no experience in politics or foreign policy, Mr. Trump conned a vast segment of American voters into giving him the keys of the American kingdom, and in his first week in the White House he stood American politics on its head.

The most worrisome aspect was Mr. Trump's decision to insert Mr. Bannon as a regular member of his National Security Council, the prime security and foreign-policy body in the White House. Mr. Bannon's elevation to the NSC Principals Committee coincided with the demotion of both the chairman of the Joint Chiefs the Staff, the nation's ranking military leader, and the director of national intelligence, the top spymaster and security official; these regular designees of the Principals Committee under Mr. Obama will not routinely attend the committee's meetings.

This bizarre administrative shift has all the hallmarks of an old-fashioned palace coup, putting the shadowy and sinister Mr. Bannon on a par at the NSC with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense James Mattis, both also novices in the world of politics and diplomacy.

Mr. Bannon's old home of Breitbart News is infamous for trafficking in conspiracy theories. The growth of social media has allowed it to flourish in open contempt of truthfulness, acting as a conveyor belt of ultranationalist venom, rumor and gossip.

The Internet era has given everybody the functional equivalent of a printing press or a megaphone. Old-time professional journalism has been driven aside, obliged to defend the standards of evidence-based reporting in competition with insidious "fake news" from fabulists and partisan propagandists.

This country is now at the perilous point where a determined foe of freedom of the press is sitting in the center of presidential power. Last week Mr. Bannon phoned a New York Times reporter and asserted that the news media should "keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while," deriding the press as "the opposition party."

All this may seem to be a narrow concern of the print and electronic news businesses. But it's a major one for all Americans who are beginning to worry about their country and what it has stood for more than 200 years: government by the will of a truly informed public.

Jules Witcover is a syndicated columnist and former long-time writer for The Baltimore Sun. His latest book is "The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power" (Smithsonian Books). His email is juleswitcover@comcast.net.

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