fire and fury chapter 3&4
3
DAY ONE
Jared Kushner at thirty-six prided himself on his ability to get along with older men. By the time of
Donald Trump’s inauguration he had become the designated intermediary between his father-inlaw
and the establishment, such as it was—more moderate Republicans, corporate interests, the New
York rich. Having a line to Kushner seemed to offer an alarmed elite a handle on a volatile situation.
Several of his father-in-law’s circle of confidants also confided in Kushner—often confiding their
worries about their friend, the presidentelect.
“I give him good advice about what he needs to do and for three hours the next day he does it, and
then goes hopelessly off script,” complained one of them to Trump’s son-in-law. Kushner, whose pose
was to take things in and not give much back, said he understood the frustration.
These powerful figures tried to convey a sense of real-world politics, which they all claimed to
comprehend at some significantly higher threshold than the soon-to-be president. They were all
concerned that Trump did not understand what he was up against. That there was simply not enough
method to his madness.
Each of these interlocutors provided Kushner with something of a tutorial on the limitations of
presidential power—that Washington was as much designed to frustrate and undermine presidential
power as to accommodate it.
“Don’t let him piss off the press, don’t let him piss off the Republican Party, don’t threaten
congressmen because they will fuck you if you do, and most of all don’t let him piss off the intel
community,” said one national Republican figure to Kushner. “If you fuck with the intel community
they will figure out a way to get back at you and you’ll have two or three years of a Russian
investigation, and every day something else will leak out.”
A vivid picture was painted for the preternaturally composed Kushner of spies and their power, of
how secrets were passed out of the intelligence community to former members of the community or to
other allies in Congress or even to persons in the executive branch and then to the press.
One of Kushner’s now-frequent wise-men callers was Henry Kissinger. Kissinger, who had been a
front-row witness when the bureaucracy and intelligence community revolted against Richard Nixon,
outlined the kinds of mischief, and worse, that the new administration could face.
“Deep state,” the left-wing and right-wing notion of an intelligence-network permanentgovernment
conspiracy, part of the Breitbart lexicon, became the Trump team term of art: he’s poked
the deep state bear.
Names were put to this: John Brennan, the CIA director; James Clapper, the director of national
intelligence; Susan Rice, the outgoing National Security Advisor; and Ben Rhodes, Rice’s deputy and
an Obama favorite.
Movie scenarios were painted: a cabal of intelligence community myrmidons, privy to all sorts of
damning evidence of Trump’s recklessness and dubious dealings, would, with a strategic schedule of
wounding, embarrassing, and distracting leaks, make it impossible for the Trump White House to
govern.
What Kushner was told, again and again, is that the president had to make amends. He had to reach
out. He had to mollify. These were forces not to be trifled with was said with utmost gravity.
Throughout the campaign and even more forcefully after the election, Trump had targeted the
American intelligence community—the CIA, FBI, NSC, and, altogether, seventeen separate
intelligence agencies—as incompetent and mendacious. (His message was “on auto pilot,” said one
aide.) Among the various and plentiful Trump mixed messages at odds with conservative orthodoxy,
this was a particularly juicy one. His case against American intelligence included its faulty
information about weapons of mass destruction that preceded the Iraq war, a litany of Obama
Afghanistan-Iraq-Syria-Libya and other war-related intelligence failures, and, more recently, but by
no means least of all, intelligence leaks regarding his purported Russian relationships and
subterfuges.
Trump’s criticism seemed to align him with the left in its half century of making a bogeyman of
American intelligence agencies. But, in quite some reversal, the liberals and the intelligence
community were now aligned in their horror of Donald Trump. Much of the left—which had
resoundingly and scathingly rejected the intelligence community’s unambiguous assessment of
Edward Snowden as a betrayer of national secrets rather than a well-intentioned whistle-blower—
now suddenly embraced the intelligence community’s authority in its suggestion of Trump’s nefarious
relationships with the Russians.
Trump was dangerously out in the cold.
Hence, Kushner thought it was sensible to make a reach-out to the CIA among the first orders of
the new administration’s business.
* * *
Trump did not enjoy his own inauguration. He had hoped for a big blowout. Tom Barrack, the wouldbe
showman—in addition to Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch, he had bought Miramax Pictures
from Disney with the actor Rob Lowe—may have declined the chief of staff job, but, as part of his
shadow involvement with his friend’s White House, he stepped up to raise the money for the
inaugural and to create an event that—seemingly quite at odds with the new president’s character, and
with Steve Bannon’s wish for a no-frills populist inauguration—he promised would have a “soft
sensuality” and “poetic cadence.” But Trump, imploring friends to use their influence to nail some of
the A-level stars who were snubbing the event, started to get angry and hurt that stars were
determined to embarrass him. Bannon, a soothing voice as well as a professional agitator, tried to
argue the dialectical nature of what they had achieved (without using the word “dialectical”).
Because Trump’s success was beyond measure, or certainly beyond all expectations, the media and
the liberals had to justify their own failure, he explained to the new president.
In the hours before the inauguration, the whole of Washington seemed to be holding its breath. On
the evening before Trump was sworn in, Bob Corker, the Republican senator from Tennessee and the
chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, opened his remarks as the featured speaker at a
gathering at the Jefferson Hotel with the existential question, “Where are things going?” He paused
for a moment and then answered, as though from some deep well of bewilderment, “I have no idea.”
Later that evening, a concert at the Lincoln Memorial, part of an always awkward effort to import
pop culture to Washington, ended up, absent any star power, with Trump himself taking the stage as
the featured act, angrily insisting to aides that he could outdraw any star.
Dissuaded by his staff from staying at the Trump International Hotel in Washington and regretting
his decision, the president-elect woke up on inaugural morning complaining about the
accommodations at Blair House, the official guest residence across the street from the White House.
Too hot, bad water pressure, bad bed.
His temper did not improve. Throughout the morning, he was visibly fighting with his wife, who
seemed on the verge of tears and would return to New York the next day; almost every word he
addressed to her was sharp and peremptory. Kellyanne Conway had taken up Melania Trump as a
personal PR mission, promoting the new First Lady as a vital pillar of support for the president and a
helpful voice in her own right, and was trying to convince Trump that she could have an important
role in the White House. But, in general, the Trumps’ relationship was one of those things nobody
asked too many questions about—another mysterious variable in the presidential mood.
At the ceremonial meeting of the soon-to-be-new president and the soon-to-be-old president at the
White House, which took place just before they set off for the swearing-in ceremony, Trump believed
the Obamas acted disdainfully—“very arrogant”—toward him and Melania. Instead of wearing a
game face, going into the inaugural events, the president-elect wore what some around him had taken
to calling his golf face: angry and pissed off, shoulders hunched, arms swinging, brow furled, lips
pursed. This had become the public Trump—truculent Trump.
An inauguration is supposed to be a love-in. The media gets a new and upbeat story. For the party
faithful, happy times are here again. For the permanent government—the swamp—it’s a chance to
curry favor and seek new advantage. For the country, it’s a coronation. But Bannon had three
messages or themes he kept trying to reinforce with his boss: his presidency was going to be different
—as different as any since Andrew Jackson’s (he was supplying the less-than-well-read presidentelect
with Jackson-related books and quotes); they knew who their enemies were and shouldn’t fall
into the trap of trying to make them their friends, because they wouldn’t be; and so, from day one, they
should consider themselves on a war footing. While this spoke to Trump’s combative
“counterpuncher” side, it was hard on his eager-to-be-liked side. Bannon saw himself as managing
these two impulses, emphasizing the former and explaining to his boss why having enemies here
created friends somewhere else.
In fact, Trump’s aggrieved mood became a perfect match for the Bannon-written aggrieved
inaugural address. Much of the sixteen-minute speech was part of Bannon’s daily joie de guerre
patter—his take-back-the-country America-first, carnage-everywhere vision for the country. But it
actually became darker and more forceful when filtered through Trump’s disappointment and
delivered with his golf face. The administration purposely began on a tone of menace—a Bannondriven
message to the other side that the country was about to undergo profound change. Trump’s
wounded feelings—his sense of being shunned and unloved on the very day he became president—
helped send that message. When he came off the podium after delivering his address, he kept
repeating, “Nobody will forget this speech.”
George W. Bush, on the dais, supplied what seemed likely to become the historic footnote to the
Trump address: “That’s some weird shit.”
* * *
Trump, despite his disappointment at Washington’s failure to properly greet and celebrate him, was,
like a good salesman, an optimist. Salesmen, whose primary characteristic and main asset is their
ability to keep selling, constantly recast the world in positive terms. Discouragement for everyone
else is merely the need to improve reality for them.
By the next morning, Trump was soliciting affirmation of his view that the inauguration had been a
great success. “That crowd went all the way back. That were more than a million people at least,
right?” He made a series of phone calls to friends who largely yes’d him on this. Kushner confirmed a
big crowd. Conway did nothing to dissuade him. Priebus agreed. Bannon made a joke.
Among Trump’s first moves as president was to have a series of inspirational photographs in the
West Wing replaced with images of big crowd scenes at his inaugural ceremony.
Bannon had come to rationalize Trump’s reality distortions. Trump’s hyperbole, exaggerations,
flights of fancy, improvisations, and general freedom toward and mangling of the facts, were products
of the basic lack of guile, pretense, and impulse control that helped create the immediacy and
spontaneity that was so successful with so many on the stump—while so horrifying to so many others.
For Bannon, Obama was the north star of aloofness. “Politics,” said Bannon with an authority that
belayed the fact that until the previous August he had never worked in politics, “is a more immediate
game than he ever played it.” Trump was, for Bannon, a modern-day William Jennings Bryan.
(Bannon had long talked about the need for a new Williams Jennings Bryan in right-wing politics,
with friends assuming Bannon meant himself.) At the turn of the twentieth century, Bryan had
enthralled rural audiences with his ability to speak passionately and extemporaneously for apparently
unlimited periods of time. Trump compensated—in the theory of some intimates, including Bannon—
for his difficulties with reading, writing, and close focus with an improvisational style that produced,
if not exactly a William Jennings Bryan effect, certainly close to the exact opposite of the Obama
effect.
It was part hortatory, part personal testimony, part barstool blow-hard, a rambling, disjointed,
digressive, what-me-worry approach that combined aspects of cable television rage, big-tent
religious revivalism, Borscht Belt tummler, motivational speaking, and YouTube vlogging. Charisma
in American politics had come to define an order of charm, wit, and style—a coolness. But another
sort of American charisma was more in the Christian evangelical vein, an emotional, experiential
spectacle.
The Trump campaign had built its central strategy around great rallies regularly attracting tens of
thousands, a political phenomenon that the Democrats both failed to heed and saw as a sign of
Trump’s limited appeal. For the Trump team, this style, this unmediated connection—his speeches, his
tweets, his spontaneous phone calls to radio and television shows, and, often, to anyone who would
listen—was revelatory, a new, personal, and inspirational politics. For the other side, it was
clownishness that, at best, aspired to the kind of raw, authoritarian demagoguery that had long been
discredited by and assigned to history and that, when it appeared in American politics, reliably
failed.
While the advantages of this style for the Trump team were now very clear, the problem was that it
often—in fact regularly—produced assertions that were not remotely true.
This had led increasingly to the two-different-realities theory of Trump politics. In the one reality,
which encompassed most of Trump’s supporters, his nature was understood and appreciated. He was
the anti-wonk. He was the counterexpert. His was the gut call. He was the everyman. He was jazz
(some, in the telling, made it rap), everybody else an earnest folk music. In the other reality, in which
resided most of his antagonists, his virtues were grievous if not mental and criminal flaws. In this
reality lived the media, which, with its conclusion of a misbegotten and bastard presidency, believed
it could diminish him and wound him (and wind him up) and rob him of all credibility by relentlessly
pointing out how literally wrong he was.
The media, adopting a “shocked, shocked” morality, could not fathom how being factually wrong
was not an absolute ending in itself. How could this not utterly shame him? How could his staff
defend him? The facts were the facts! Defying them, or ignoring them, or subverting them, made you a
liar—intending to deceive, bearing false witness. (A minor journalism controversy broke out about
whether these untruths should be called inaccuracies or lies.)
In Bannon’s view: (1) Trump was never going to change; (2) trying to get him to change would
surely cramp his style; (3) it didn’t matter to Trump supporters; (4) the media wasn’t going to like him
anyway; (5) it was better to play against the media than to the media; (6) the media’s claim to be the
protector of factual probity and accuracy was itself a sham; (7) the Trump revolution was an attack on
conventional assumptions and expertise, so better to embrace Trump’s behavior than try to curb it or
cure it.
The problem was that, for all he was never going to stick to a script (“his mind just doesn’t work
that way” was one of the internal rationalizations), Trump craved media approval. But, as Bannon
emphasized, he was never going to get the facts right, nor was he ever going to acknowledge that he
got them wrong, so therefore he was not going to get that approval. This meant, next best thing, that he
had to be aggressively defended against the media’s disapproval.
The problem here was that the more vociferous the defense—mostly of assertions that could easily
be proved wrong—the more the media redoubled its attacks and censure. What’s more, Trump was
receiving the censure of his friends, too. And it was not only calls from friends worried about him,
but staffers calling people to call him and say Simmer down. “Who do you have in there?” said Joe
Scarborough in a frantic call. “Who’s the person you trust? Jared? Who can talk you through this stuff
before you decided to act on it?”
“Well,” said the president, “you won’t like the answer, but the answer is me. Me. I talk to myself.”
Hence, within twenty-four hours of the inauguration, the president had invented a million or so
people who did not exist. He sent his new press secretary, Sean Spicer—whose personal mantra
would shortly become “You can’t make this shit up”—to argue his case in a media moment that turned
Spicer, quite a buttoned-down political professional, into a national joke, which he seemed destined
to never recover from. To boot, the president blamed Spicer for not making the million phantom souls
seem real.
It was the first presidential instance of what the campaign regulars had learned over many months:
on the most basic level, Trump just did not, as Spicer later put it, give a fuck. You could tell him
whatever you wanted, but he knew what he knew, and if what you said contradicted what he knew, he
simply didn’t believe you.
The next day Kellyanne Conway, her aggressive posture during the campaign turning more and
more to petulance and self-pity, asserted the new president’s right to claim “alternative facts.” As it
happened, Conway meant to say “alternative information,” which at least would imply there might be
additional data. But as uttered, it certainly sounded like the new administration was claiming the right
to recast reality. Which, in a sense, it was. Although, in Conway’s view, it was the media doing the
recasting, making a mountain (hence “fake news”) out of a molehill (an honest minor exaggeration,
albeit of vast proportions).
Anyway, the frequently asked question about whether Trump would continue his unsupervised and
often inexplicable tweets now that he was officially in the White House and the president of the
United States—a question as hotly asked inside the White House as out—was answered: he would.
This was his fundamental innovation in governing: regular, uncontrolled bursts of anger and
spleen.
* * *
The president’s immediate official business, however, was to make nice with the CIA.
On Saturday, January 21, in an event organized by Kushner, the president, in his first presidential
act, paid a call on Langley to, in Bannon’s hopeful description, “play some politics.” In carefully
prepared remarks in his first act as president, he would lay some of the famous Trump flattery on the
CIA and the rest of the sprawling, and leaking, U.S. intelligence world.
Not taking off his dark overcoat, lending him quite a hulking gangster look, pacing in front of the
CIA’s wall of stars for its fallen agents, in front of a crowd of about three hundred agency personnel
and a group of White House staffers, and, suddenly, in a mood of sleepless cockiness and pleasure at
having a captive crowd, the new president, disregarding his text, launched into what we could
confidently call some of the most peculiar remarks ever delivered by an American president.
“I know a lot about West Point, I’m a person who very strongly believes in academics. Every time
I say I had an uncle who was a great professor at MIT for 35 years, who did a fantastic job in so
many ways academically—he was an academic genius—and then they say, Is Donald Trump an
intellectual? Trust me, I’m like a smart person.”
Which was all somehow by way of praise for the new, soon-to-be-confirmed CIA director, Mike
Pompeo, who had attended West Point and who Trump had brought with him to stand in the crowd—
and who now found himself as bewildered as everyone else.
“You know when I was young. Of course I feel young—I feel like I was 30 . . . 35 . . . 39 . . . .
Somebody said, Are you young? I said, I think I’m young. I was stopping in the final months of the
campaign, four stops, five stops, seven stops—speeches, speeches in front of twenty-five, thirty
thousand people . . . fifteen, nineteen thousand. I feel young—I think we’re all so young. When I was
young we were always winning things in this country. We’d win with trade, we’d win with wars—at
a certain age I remembering hearing from one of my instructors, the United States has never lost a
war. And then, after that, it’s like we haven’t won anything. You know the old expression, to the victor
belongs the spoils? You remember I always say, keep the oil.”
“Who should keep the oil?” asked a bewildered CIA employee, leaning over to a colleague in the
back of the room.
“I wasn’t a fan of Iraq, I didn’t want to go into Iraq. But I will tell you when we were in we got
out wrong and I always said in addition to that keep the oil. Now I said it for economic reasons, but if
you think about it, Mike”—he called out across the room, addressing the soon-to-be director—“if we
kept the oil we wouldn’t have ISIS because that’s where they made their money in the first place, so
that’s why we should have kept the oil. But okay—maybe you’ll have another chance—but the fact is
we should have kept the oil.”
The president paused and smiled with evident satisfaction.
“The reason you are my first stop, as you know I have a running war with the media, they are
among the most dishonest human beings on earth, and they sort of made it sound like I had a feud with
the intelligence community and I just want to let you know the reason you’re the number one stop is
exactly the opposite, exactly, and they understand that. I was explaining about the numbers. We did,
we did a thing yesterday at the speech. Did everybody like the speech? You had to like it. But we had
a massive field of people. You saw them. Packed. I get up this morning, I turn on one of the networks,
and they show an empty field and I say, Wait a minute, I made a speech. I looked out—the field was—
it looked like a million, million and half people. They showed a field where there were practically
nobody standing there. And they said Donald Trump did not draw well and I said it was almost
raining, the rain should have scared them away, but God looked down and said we’re not going to let
it rain on your speech and in fact when I first started I said, Oooh no, first line I got hit by a couple of
drops, and I said, Oh this is too bad, but we’ll go right through it, the truth is it stopped immediately. .
. .”
“No, it didn’t,” one of the staffers traveling with him said reflexively, then catching herself and,
with a worried look, glancing around to see if she had been overheard.
“. . . and then it became really sunny and I walked off and it poured right after I left. It poured but
we have something amazing because—honestly it looked like a million, million and a half people,
whatever it was it was, but it went all the way back to the Washington Monument and by mistake I get
this network and it showed an empty field and it said we drew two hundred fifty thousand people.
Now that’s not bad, but it’s a lie. . . . And we had another one yesterday which was interesting. In the
Oval Office there’s a beautiful statue of Dr. Martin Luther King and I also happen to like Churchill—
Winston Churchill—I think most of us like Churchill, doesn’t come from our country but had a lot to
do with it, helped us, real ally, and as you know the Churchill statue was taken out. . . . So a reporter
for Time magazine and I have been on the cover like fourteen or fifteen times. I think I have the alltime
record in the history of Time magazine. Like if Tom Brady is on the cover it’s one time because
he won the Super Bowl or something. I’ve been on fifteen times this year. I don’t think, Mike, that’s a
record that can ever be broken, do you agree with that . . . . What do you think?”
“No,” said Pompeo in a stricken voice.
“But I will say that they said it was very interesting that ‘Donald Trump took down the bust, the
statue, of Dr. Martin Luther King,’ and it was right there, there was a cameraman that was in front of
it. So Zeke . . . Zeke . . . from Time magazine . . . writes a story that I took it down. I would never do
that. I have great respect for Dr. Martin Luther King. But this is how dishonest the media is. Now big
story, but the retraction was like this”—he indicated ever-so-small with his fingers. “Is it a line or do
they even bother putting it in? I only like to say I love honesty, I like honest reporting. I will tell you,
final time, although I will say it when you let in your thousands of other people who have been trying
to come in, because I am coming back, we may have to get you a larger room, we may have to get you
a larger room and maybe, maybe, it will be built by somebody that knows how to build and we won’t
have columns. You understand that? We get rid of the columns, but you know I just wanted to say that I
love you, I respect you, there’s nobody I respect more. You do a fantastic job and we’re going to start
winning again, and you’re going to be leading the charge, so thank you all very much.”
In a continuing sign of Trump’s Rashomon effect—his speeches inspiring joy or horror—
witnesses would describe his reception at the CIA as either a Beatles-like emotional outpouring or a
response so confounded and appalled that, in the seconds after he finished, you could hear a pin drop.
S
4
BANNON
teve Bannon was the first Trump senior staffer in the White House after Trump was sworn in. On
the inauguration march, he had grabbed the newly appointed deputy chief of staff, Katie Walsh,
Reince Priebus’s deputy at the RNC, and together they had peeled off to inspect the now vacant West
Wing. The carpet had been shampooed, but little else had changed. It was a warren of tiny offices in
need of paint, not rigorously cleaned on a regular basis, the décor something like an admissions office
at a public university. Bannon claimed the nondescript office across from the much grander chief of
staff’s suite, and he immediately requisitioned the white boards on which he intended to chart the first
hundred days of the Trump administration. And right away he began moving furniture out. The point
was to leave no room for anyone to sit. There were to be no meetings, at least no meetings where
people could get comfortable. Limit discussion. Limit debate. This was war. This was a war room.
Many who had worked with Bannon on the campaign and through the transition shortly noticed a
certain change. Having achieved one goal, he was clearly on to another. An intense man, he was
suddenly at an even higher level of focus and determination.
“What’s up with Steve?” Kushner began to ask. And then, “Is something wrong with Steve?” And
then finally, “I don’t understand. We were so close.”
Within the first week, Bannon seemed to have put away the camaraderie of Trump Tower—
including a willingness to talk at length at any hour—and become far more remote, if not unreachable.
He was “focused on my shit.” He was just getting things done. But many felt that getting things done
was was more about him hatching plots against them. And certainly, among his basic character notes,
Steve Bannon was a plotter. Strike before being struck. Anticipate the moves of others—counter them
before they can make their moves. To him this was seeing things ahead, focusing on a set of goals. The
first goal was the election of Donald Trump, the second the staffing of the Trump government. Now it
was capturing the soul of the Trump White House, and he understood what others did not yet: this
would be a mortal competition.
* * *
In the early days of the transition, Bannon had encouraged the Trump team to read David
Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest. (One of the few people who seem actually to have taken
him up on this reading assignment was Jared Kushner.) “A very moving experience reading this book.
It makes the world clear, amazing characters and all true,” Bannon enthused.
This was a personal bit of branding—Bannon made sure to exhibit the book to many of the liberal
reporters he was courting. But he was also trying to make a point, an important one considering the
slapdash nature of the transition team’s staffing protocols: be careful who you hire.
Halberstam’s book, published in 1972, is a Tolstoyan effort to understand how great figures of the
academic, intellectual, and military world who had served during the Kennedy and Johnson years had
so grievously misapprehended the nature of the Vietnam War and mishandled its prosecution. The
Best and the Brightest was a cautionary tale about the 1960s establishment—the precursor of the
establishment that Trump and Bannon were now so aggressively challenging.
But the book also served as a reverential guide to the establishment. For the 1970s generation of
future policy experts, would-be world leaders, and Ivy League journalists aiming for big-time careers
—though it was Bannon’s generation, he was far outside this self-selected elite circle—The Best and
the Brightest was a handbook about the characteristics of American power and the routes to it. Not
just the right schools and right backgrounds, although that, too, but the attitudes, conceits, affect, and
language that would be most conducive to finding your way into the American power structure. Many
saw the book as a set of prescriptions about how to get ahead, rather than, as intended, what not to do
when you are ahead. The Best and the Brightest described the people who should be in power. A
college-age Barack Obama was smitten with the book, as was Rhodes Scholar Bill Clinton.
Halberstam’s book defined the look and feel of White House power. His language, resonant and
imposing and, often, boffo pompous, had set the tone for the next half century of official presidential
journalism. Even scandalous or unsuccessful tenants of the White House were treated as unique
figures who had risen to the greatest heights after mastering a Darwinian political process. Bob
Woodward, who helped bring Nixon down—and who himself became a figure of unchallengeable
presidential mythmaking—wrote a long shelf of books in which even the most misguided presidential
actions seemed part of an epochal march of ultimate responsibility and life-and-death decision
making. Only the most hardhearted reader would not entertain a daydream in which he or she was not
part of this awesome pageant.
Steve Bannon was such a daydreamer.
* * *
But if Halberstam defined the presidential mien, Trump defied it—and defiled it. Not a single
attribute would place him credibly in the revered circle of American presidential character and
power. Which was, in a curious reversal of the book’s premise, just what created Steve Bannon’s
opportunity.
The less likely a presidential candidate is, the more unlikely, and, often, inexperienced, his aides
are—that is, an unlikely candidate can attract only unlikely aides, as the likely ones go to the more
likely candidates. When an unlikely candidate wins—and as outsiders become ever more the
quadrennial flavor of the month, the more likely an unlikely candidate is to get elected—ever more
peculiar people fill the White House. Of course, a point about the Halberstam book and about the
Trump campaign was that the most obvious players make grievous mistakes, too. Hence, in the Trump
narrative, unlikely players far outside the establishment hold the true genius.
Still, few have been more unlikely than Steve Bannon.
At sixty-three, Bannon took his first formal job in politics when he joined the Trump campaign.
Chief Strategist—his title in the new administration—was his first job not just in the federal
government but in the public sector. (“Strategist!” scoffed Roger Stone, who, before Bannon, had
been one of Trump’s chief strategists.) Other than Trump himself, Bannon was certainly the oldest
inexperienced person ever to work in the White House.
It was a flaky career that got him here.
Catholic school in Richmond, Virginia. Then a local college, Virginia Tech. Then seven years in
the Navy, a lieutenant on ship duty and then in the Pentagon. While on active duty, he got a master’s
degree at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, but then he washed out of his naval career. Then
an MBA from Harvard Business School. Then four years as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs
—his final two years focusing on the media industry in Los Angeles—but not rising above a midlevel
position.
In 1990, at the age of thirty-seven, Bannon entered peripatetic entre-preneurhood under the
auspices of Bannon & Co., a financial advisory firm to the entertainment industry. This was something
of a hustler’s shell company, hanging out a shingle in an industry with a small center of success and
concentric rings radiating out of rising, aspiring, falling, and failing strivers. Bannon & Co., skirting
falling and failing, made it to aspiring by raising small amounts of money for independent film
projects—none a hit.
Bannon was rather a movie figure himself. A type. Alcohol. Bad marriages. Cash-strapped in a
business where the measure of success is excesses of riches. Ever scheming. Ever disappointed.
For a man with a strong sense of his own destiny, he tended to be hardly noticed. Jon Corzine, the
former Goldman chief and future United States senator and governor of New Jersey, climbing the
Goldman ranks when Bannon was at the firm, was unaware of Bannon. When Bannon was appointed
head of the Trump campaign and became an overnight press sensation—or question mark—his
credentials suddenly included a convoluted story about how Bannon & Co. had acquired a stake in the
megahit show Seinfeld and hence its twenty-year run of residual profits. But none of the Seinfeld
principals, creators, or producers seem ever to have heard of him.
Mike Murphy, the Republican media consultant who ran Jeb Bush’s PAC and became a leading
anti-Trump movement figure, has the vaguest recollection of Bannon’s seeking PR services from
Murphy’s firm for a film Bannon was producing a decade or so ago. “I’m told he was in the meeting,
but I honestly can’t get a picture of him.”
The New Yorker magazine, dwelling on the Bannon enigma—one that basically translated to: How
is it that the media has been almost wholly unaware of someone who is suddenly among the most
powerful people in government?—tried to trace his steps in Hollywood and largely failed to find
him. The Washington Post traced his many addresses to no clear conclusion, except a suggestion of
possible misdemeanor voter fraud.
In the midnineties, he inserted himself in a significant role into Biosphere 2, a project copiously
funded by Edward Bass, one of the Bass family oil heirs, about sustaining life in space, and dubbed
by Time one of the hundred worst ideas of the century—a rich man’s folly. Bannon, having to find his
opportunities in distress situations, stepped into the project amid its collapse only to provoke further
breakdown and litigation, including harassment and vandalism charges.
After the Biosphere 2 disaster, he participated in raising financing for a virtual currency scheme
(MMORPGs, or MMOs) called Internet Gaming Entertainment (IGE). This was a successor company
to Digital Entertainment Network (DEN), a dot-com burnout, whose principals included the former
child star Brock Pierce (The Mighty Ducks) who went on to be the founder of IGE, but was then
pushed out. Bannon was put in as CEO, and the company was subsumed by endless litigation.
Distress is an opportunistic business play. But some distress is better than others. The kinds of
situations available to Bannon involved managing conflict, nastiness, and relative hopelessness—in
essence managing and taking a small profit on dwindling cash. It’s a living at the margins of people
who are making a much better living. Bannon kept trying to make a killing but never found the killing
sweet spot.
Distress is also a contrarian’s game. And the contrarian’s impulse—equal parts personal
dissatisfaction, general resentment, and gambler’s instinct—started to ever more strongly fuel
Bannon. Part of the background for his contrarian impulse lay in an Irish Catholic union family,
Catholic schools, and three unhappy marriages and bad divorces (journalists would make much of the
recriminations in his second wife’s divorce filings).
Not so long ago, Bannon might have been a recognizably modern figure, something of a romantic
antihero, an ex-military and up-from-the-working-class guy, striving, through multiple marriages and
various careers, to make it, but never finding much comfort in the establishment world, wanting to be
part of it and wanting to blow it up at the same time—a character for Richard Ford, or John Updike,
or Harry Crews. An American man’s story. But now such stories have crossed a political line. The
American man story is a right-wing story. Bannon found his models in political infighters like Lee
Atwater, Roger Ailes, Karl Rove. All were larger-than-life American characters doing battle with
conformity and modernity, relishing ways to violate liberal sensibilities.
The other point is that Bannon, however smart and even charismatic, however much he extolled
the virtue of being a “stand-up guy,” was not necessarily a nice guy. Several decades as a grasping
entrepreneur without a satisfying success story doesn’t smooth the hustle in hustler. One competitor in
the conservative media business, while acknowledging his intelligence and the ambitiousness of his
ideas, also noted, “He’s mean, dishonest, and incapable of caring about other people. His eyes dart
around like he’s always looking for a weapon with which to bludgeon or gouge you.”
Conservative media fit not only his angry, contrarian, and Roman Catholic side, but it had low
barriers to entry—liberal media, by contrast, with its corporate hierarchies, was much harder to
break into. What’s more, conservative media is a highly lucrative target market category, with books
(often dominating the bestseller lists), videos, and other products available through direct sales
avenues that can circumvent more expensive distribution channels.
In the early 2000s, Bannon became a purveyor of conservative books products and media. His
partner in this enterprise was David Bossie, the far-right pamphleteer and congressional committee
investigator into the Clintons’ Whitewater affair, who would join him as deputy campaign manager on
the Trump campaign. Bannon met Breitbart News founder Andrew Breitbart at a screening of one of
the Bannon-Bossie documentaries In the Face of Evil (billed as “Ronald Reagan’s crusade to destroy
the most tyrannical and depraved political systems the world has ever known”), which in turn led to a
relationship with the man who offered Bannon the ultimate opportunity: Robert Mercer.
* * *
In this regard, Bannon was not so much an entrepreneur of vision or even business discipline, he was
more simply following the money—or trying to separate a fool from his money. He could not have
done better than Bob and Rebekah Mercer. Bannon focused his entrepreneurial talents on becoming
courtier, Svengali, and political investment adviser to father and daughter.
Theirs was a consciously quixotic mission. They would devote vast sums—albeit still just a small
part of Bob Mercer’s many billions—to trying to build a radical free-market, small-government,
home-schooling, antiliberal, gold-standard, pro-death-penalty, anti-Muslim, pro-Christian,
monetarist, anti-civil-rights political movement in the United States.
Bob Mercer is an ultimate quant, an engineer who designs investment algorithms and became a co-
CEO of one of the most successful hedge funds, Renaissance Technologies. With his daughter,
Rebekah, Mercer set up what is in effect a private Tea Party movement, self-funding whatever Tea
Party or alt-right project took their fancy. Bob Mercer is almost nonverbal, looking at you with a dead
stare and either not talking or offering only minimal response. He had a Steinway baby grand on his
yacht; after inviting friends and colleagues on the boat, he would spend the time playing the piano,
wholly disengaged from his guests. And yet his political beliefs, to the extent they could be discerned,
were generally Bush-like, and his political discussions, to the extent that you could get him to be
responsive, were about issues involving ground game and data gathering. It was Rebekah Mercer—
who had bonded with Bannon, and whose politics were grim, unyielding, and doctrinaire—who
defined the family. “She’s . . . like whoa, ideologically there is no conversation with her,” said one
senior Trump White House staffer.
With the death of Andrew Breitbart in 2012, Bannon, in essence holding the proxy of the Mercers’
investment in the site, took over the Breitbart business. He leveraged his gaming experience into using
Gamergate—a precursor alt-right movement that coalesced around an antipathy toward, and
harassment of, women working in the online gaming industry—to build vast amounts of traffic through
the virality of political memes. (After hours one night in the White House, Bannon would argue that he
knew exactly how to build a Breitbart for the left. And he would have the key advantage because
“people on the left want to win Pulitzers, whereas I want to be Pulitzer!”)
Working out of—and living in—the town house Breitbart rented on Capitol Hill, Bannon became
one of the growing number of notable Tea Party figures in Washington, the Mercers’ consigliere. But a
seeming measure of his marginality was that his big project was the career of Jeff Sessions
—“Beauregard,” Sessions’s middle name, in Bannon’s affectionate moniker and evocation of the
Confederate general—among the least mainstream and most peculiar people in the Senate, whom
Bannon tried to promote to run for president in 2012.
Donald Trump was a step up—and early in the 2016 race, Trump became the Breitbart totem.
(Many of Trump’s positions in the campaign were taken from the Breitbart articles he had printed out
for him.) Indeed, Bannon began to suggest to people that he, like Ailes had been at Fox, was the true
force behind his chosen candidate.
Bannon didn’t much question Donald Trump’s bona fides, or behavior, or electability, because, in
part, Trump was just his latest rich man. The rich man is a fixed fact, which you have to accept and
deal with in an entrepreneurial world—at least a lower-level entrepreneurial world. And, of course,
if Trump had had firmer bona fides, better behavior, and clear electability, Bannon would not have
had his chance.
However much a marginal, invisible, small-time hustler Bannon had been—something of an
Elmore Leonard character—he was suddenly transformed inside Trump Tower, an office he entered
on August 15, and for practical purposes, did not exit, save for a few hours a night (and not every
night) in his temporary midtown Manhattan accommodations, until January 17, when the transition
team moved to Washington. There was no competition in Trump Tower for being the brains of the
operation. Of the dominant figures in the transition, neither Kushner, Priebus, nor Conway, and
certainly not the president-elect, had the ability to express any kind of coherent perception or
narrative. By default, everybody had to look to the voluble, aphoristic, shambolic, witty, off-the-cuff
figure who was both ever present on the premises and who had, in an unlikely attribute, read a book
or two.
And indeed who, during the campaign, turned out to be able to harness the Trump operation, not to
mention its philosophic disarray, to a single political view: that the path to victory was an economic
and cultural message to the white working class in Florida, Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
* * *
Bannon collected enemies. Few fueled his savagery and rancor toward the standard-issue Republican
world as much as Rupert Murdoch—not least because Murdoch had Donald Trump’s ear. It was one
of the key elements of Bannon’s understanding of Trump: the last person Trump spoke to ended up
with enormous influence. Trump would brag that Murdoch was always calling him; Murdoch, for his
part, would complain that he couldn’t get Trump off the phone.
“He doesn’t know anything about American politics, and has no feel for the American people,”
said Bannon to Trump, always eager to point out that Murdoch wasn’t an American. But Trump
couldn’t get enough of him. With his love of “winners”—and he saw Murdoch as the ultimate winner
—Trump was suddenly bad-mouthing his friend Ailes as a “loser.”
And yet in one regard Murdoch’s message was useful to Bannon. Having known every president
since Harry Truman—as Murdoch took frequent opportunities to point out—and, he conjectured, as
many heads of state as anyone living, Murdoch believed he understood better than younger men, even
seventy-year-old Trump, that political power was fleeting. (This was in fact the same message he had
imparted to Barack Obama.) A president really had only, max, six months to make an impact on the
public and set his agenda, and he’d be lucky to get six months. After that it was just putting out fires
and battling the opposition.
This was the message whose urgency Bannon himself had been trying to impress on an often
distracted Trump. Indeed, in his first weeks in the White House, an inattentive Trump was already
trying to curtail his schedule of meetings, limit his hours in the office, and keep his normal golf habits.
Bannon’s strategic view of government was shock and awe. Dominate rather than negotiate.
Having daydreamed his way into ultimate bureaucratic power, he did not want to see himself as a
bureaucrat. He was of a higher purpose and moral order. He was an avenger. He was also, he
believed, a straight shooter. There was a moral order in aligning language and action—if you said you
were going to do something, you do it.
In his head, Bannon carried a set of decisive actions that would not just mark the new
administration’s opening days, but make it clear that nothing ever again would be the same. At the age
of sixty-three, he was in a hurry.
* * *
Bannon had delved deeply into the nature of executive orders—EOs. You can’t rule by decree in the
United States, except you really can. The irony here was that it was the Obama administration, with a
recalcitrant Republican Congress, that had pushed the EO envelope. Now, in something of a zero-sum
game, Trump’s EOs would undo Obama’s EOs.
During the transition, Bannon and Stephen Miller, a former Sessions aide who had earlier joined
the Trump campaign and then become Bannon’s effective assistant and researcher, assembled a list of
more than two hundred EOs to issue in the first hundred days.
But the first step in the new Trump administration had to be immigration, in Bannon’s certain view.
Foreigners were the ne plus ultra mania of Trumpism. An issue often dismissed as living on the onetrack-
mind fringe—Jeff Sessions was one of its cranky exponents—it was Trump’s firm belief that a
lot of people had had it up to here with foreigners. Before Trump, Bannon had bonded with Sessions
on the issue. The Trump campaign became a sudden opportunity to see if nativism really had legs.
And then when they won, Bannon understood there could be no hesitation about declaring their
ethnocentric heart and soul.
To boot, it was an issue that made liberals bat-shit mad.
Laxly enforced immigration laws reached to the center of the new liberal philosophy and, for
Bannon, exposed its hypocrisy. In the liberal worldview, diversity was an absolute good, whereas
Bannon believed any reasonable person who was not wholly blinded by the liberal light could see
that waves of immigrants came with a load of problems—just look at Europe. And these were
problems borne not by cosseted liberals but by the more exposed citizens at the other end of the
economic scale.
It was out of some instinctive or idiot-savant-like political understanding that Trump had made this
issue his own, frequently observing, Wasn’t anybody an American anymore? In some of his earliest
political outings, even before Obama’s election in 2008, Trump talked with bewilderment and
resentment about strict quotas on European immigration and the deluge from “Asia and other places.”
(This deluge, as liberals would be quick to fact-check, was, even as it had grown, still quite a modest
stream.) His obsessive focus on Obama’s birth certificate was in part about the scourge of non-
European foreignness—a certain race-baiting. Who were these people? Why were they here?
The campaign sometimes shared a striking graphic. It showed a map of the country reflecting
dominant immigration trends in each state from fifty years ago—here was a multitude of countries,
many European. Today, the equivalent map showed that every state in the United States was now
dominated by Mexican immigration. This was the daily reality of the American workingman, in
Bannon’s view, the ever growing presence of an alternative, discount workforce.
Bannon’s entire political career, such as it was, had been in political media. It was also in Internet
media—that is, media ruled by immediate response. The Breitbart formula was to so appall the
liberals that the base was doubly satisfied, generating clicks in a ricochet of disgust and delight. You
defined yourself by your enemy’s reaction. Conflict was the media bait—hence, now, the political
chum. The new politics was not the art of the compromise but the art of conflict.
The real goal was to expose the hypocrisy of the liberal view. Somehow, despite laws, rules, and
customs, liberal globalists had pushed a myth of more or less open immigration. It was a double
liberal hypocrisy, because, sotto voce, the Obama administration had been quite aggressive in
deporting illegal aliens—except don’t tell the liberals that.
“People want their countries back,” said Bannon. “A simple thing.”
* * *
Bannon meant his EO to strip away the liberal conceits on an already illiberal process. Rather than
seeking to accomplish his goals with the least amount of upset—keeping liberal fig leaves in place—
he sought the most.
Why would you? was the logical question of anyone who saw the higher function of government as
avoiding conflict.
This included most people in office. The new appointees in place at the affected agencies and
departments, among them Homeland Security and State—General John Kelly, then the director of
Homeland Security, would carry a grudge about the disarray caused by the immigration EO—wanted
nothing more than a moment to get their footing before they might even consider dramatic and
contentious new policies. Old appointees—Obama appointees who still occupied most executive
branch jobs—found it unfathomable that the new administration would go out of its way to take
procedures that largely already existed and to restate them in incendiary, red-flag, and ad hominem
terms, such that liberals would have to oppose them.
Bannon’s mission was to puncture the global-liberal-emperor-wears-no-clothes bubble, nowhere,
in his view, as ludicrously demonstrated as the refusal to see the colossally difficult and costly effects
of uncontrolled immigration. He wanted to force liberals to acknowledge that even liberal
governments, even the Obama government, were engaged in the real politics of slowing immigration
—ever hampered by the liberal refusal to acknowledge this effort.
The EO would be drafted to remorselessly express the administration’s (or Bannon’s) pitiless
view. The problem was, Bannon really didn’t know how to do this—change rules and laws. This
limitation, Bannon understood, might easily be used to thwart them. Process was their enemy. But just
doing it—the hell with how—and doing it immediately, could be a powerful countermeasure.
Just doing things became a Bannon principle, the sweeping antidote to bureaucratic and
establishment ennui and resistance. It was the chaos of just doing things that actually got things done.
Except, even if you assumed that not knowing how to do things didn’t much matter if you just did
them, it was still not clear who was going to do what you wanted to do. Or, a corollary, because
nobody in the Trump administration really knew how to do anything, it was therefore not clear what
anyone did.
Sean Spicer, whose job was literally to explain what people did and why, often simply could not
—because nobody really had a job, because nobody could do a job.
Priebus, as chief of staff, had to organize meetings, schedules, and the hiring of staff; he also had
to oversee the individual functions of the executive office departments. But Bannon, Kushner,
Conway, and the president’s daughter actually had no specific responsibilities—they could make it up
as they went along. They did what they wanted. They would seize the day if they could—even if they
really didn’t know how to do what they wanted to do.
Bannon, for instance, even driven by his imperative just to get things done, did not use a computer.
How did he do anything? Katie Walsh wondered. But that was the difference between big visions
and small. Process was bunk. Expertise was the last refuge of liberals, ever defeated by the big
picture. The will to get big things done was how big things got done. “Don’t sweat the small stuff”
was a pretty good gist of Donald Trump’s—and Steve Bannon’s—worldview. “Chaos was Steve’s
strategy,” said Walsh.
Bannon got Stephen Miller to write the immigration EO. Miller, a fifty-five-year-old trapped in a
thirty-two-year-old’s body, was a former Jeff Sessions staffer brought on to the Trump campaign for
his political experience. Except, other than being a dedicated far-right conservative, it was unclear
what particular abilities accompanied Miller’s political views. He was supposed to be a
speechwriter, but if so, he seemed restricted to bullet points and unable to construct sentences. He
was supposed to be a policy adviser but knew little about policy. He was supposed to be the house
intellectual but was purposely unread. He was supposed to be a communications specialist, but he
antagonized almost everyone. Bannon, during the transition, sent him to the Internet to learn about and
to try to draft the EO.
By the time he arrived in the White House, Bannon had his back-of-the-envelope executive order
on immigration and his travel ban, a sweeping, Trumpian exclusion of most Muslims from the United
States, only begrudgingly whittled down, in part at Priebus’s urging, to what would shortly be
perceived as merely draconian.
In the mania to seize the day, with an almost total lack of knowing how, the nutty inaugural crowd
numbers and the wacky CIA speech were followed, without almost anybody in the federal government
having seen it or even being aware of it, by an executive order overhauling U.S. immigration policy.
Bypassing lawyers, regulators, and the agencies and personnel responsible for enforcing it, President
Trump—with Bannon’s low, intense voice behind him, offering a rush of complex information—
signed what was put in front of him.
On Friday, January 27, the travel ban was signed and took immediate effect. The result was an
emotional outpouring of horror and indignation from liberal media, terror in immigrant communities,
tumultuous protests at major airports, confusion throughout the government, and, in the White House,
an inundation of lectures, warnings, and opprobrium from friends and family. What have you done?
Do you know what you’re doing? You have to undo this! You’re finished before you even start! Who
is in charge there?
But Steve Bannon was satisfied. He could not have hoped to draw a more vivid line between the
two Americas—Trump’s and liberals’—and between his White House and the White House inhabited
by those not yet ready to burn the place down.
Why did we do this on a Friday when it would hit the airports hardest and bring out the most
protesters? almost the entire White House staff demanded to know.
“Errr . . . that’s why,” said Bannon. “So the snowflakes would show up at the airports and riot.”
That was the way to crush the liberals: make them crazy and drag them to the
DAY ONE
Jared Kushner at thirty-six prided himself on his ability to get along with older men. By the time of
Donald Trump’s inauguration he had become the designated intermediary between his father-inlaw
and the establishment, such as it was—more moderate Republicans, corporate interests, the New
York rich. Having a line to Kushner seemed to offer an alarmed elite a handle on a volatile situation.
Several of his father-in-law’s circle of confidants also confided in Kushner—often confiding their
worries about their friend, the presidentelect.
“I give him good advice about what he needs to do and for three hours the next day he does it, and
then goes hopelessly off script,” complained one of them to Trump’s son-in-law. Kushner, whose pose
was to take things in and not give much back, said he understood the frustration.
These powerful figures tried to convey a sense of real-world politics, which they all claimed to
comprehend at some significantly higher threshold than the soon-to-be president. They were all
concerned that Trump did not understand what he was up against. That there was simply not enough
method to his madness.
Each of these interlocutors provided Kushner with something of a tutorial on the limitations of
presidential power—that Washington was as much designed to frustrate and undermine presidential
power as to accommodate it.
“Don’t let him piss off the press, don’t let him piss off the Republican Party, don’t threaten
congressmen because they will fuck you if you do, and most of all don’t let him piss off the intel
community,” said one national Republican figure to Kushner. “If you fuck with the intel community
they will figure out a way to get back at you and you’ll have two or three years of a Russian
investigation, and every day something else will leak out.”
A vivid picture was painted for the preternaturally composed Kushner of spies and their power, of
how secrets were passed out of the intelligence community to former members of the community or to
other allies in Congress or even to persons in the executive branch and then to the press.
One of Kushner’s now-frequent wise-men callers was Henry Kissinger. Kissinger, who had been a
front-row witness when the bureaucracy and intelligence community revolted against Richard Nixon,
outlined the kinds of mischief, and worse, that the new administration could face.
“Deep state,” the left-wing and right-wing notion of an intelligence-network permanentgovernment
conspiracy, part of the Breitbart lexicon, became the Trump team term of art: he’s poked
the deep state bear.
Names were put to this: John Brennan, the CIA director; James Clapper, the director of national
intelligence; Susan Rice, the outgoing National Security Advisor; and Ben Rhodes, Rice’s deputy and
an Obama favorite.
Movie scenarios were painted: a cabal of intelligence community myrmidons, privy to all sorts of
damning evidence of Trump’s recklessness and dubious dealings, would, with a strategic schedule of
wounding, embarrassing, and distracting leaks, make it impossible for the Trump White House to
govern.
What Kushner was told, again and again, is that the president had to make amends. He had to reach
out. He had to mollify. These were forces not to be trifled with was said with utmost gravity.
Throughout the campaign and even more forcefully after the election, Trump had targeted the
American intelligence community—the CIA, FBI, NSC, and, altogether, seventeen separate
intelligence agencies—as incompetent and mendacious. (His message was “on auto pilot,” said one
aide.) Among the various and plentiful Trump mixed messages at odds with conservative orthodoxy,
this was a particularly juicy one. His case against American intelligence included its faulty
information about weapons of mass destruction that preceded the Iraq war, a litany of Obama
Afghanistan-Iraq-Syria-Libya and other war-related intelligence failures, and, more recently, but by
no means least of all, intelligence leaks regarding his purported Russian relationships and
subterfuges.
Trump’s criticism seemed to align him with the left in its half century of making a bogeyman of
American intelligence agencies. But, in quite some reversal, the liberals and the intelligence
community were now aligned in their horror of Donald Trump. Much of the left—which had
resoundingly and scathingly rejected the intelligence community’s unambiguous assessment of
Edward Snowden as a betrayer of national secrets rather than a well-intentioned whistle-blower—
now suddenly embraced the intelligence community’s authority in its suggestion of Trump’s nefarious
relationships with the Russians.
Trump was dangerously out in the cold.
Hence, Kushner thought it was sensible to make a reach-out to the CIA among the first orders of
the new administration’s business.
* * *
Trump did not enjoy his own inauguration. He had hoped for a big blowout. Tom Barrack, the wouldbe
showman—in addition to Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch, he had bought Miramax Pictures
from Disney with the actor Rob Lowe—may have declined the chief of staff job, but, as part of his
shadow involvement with his friend’s White House, he stepped up to raise the money for the
inaugural and to create an event that—seemingly quite at odds with the new president’s character, and
with Steve Bannon’s wish for a no-frills populist inauguration—he promised would have a “soft
sensuality” and “poetic cadence.” But Trump, imploring friends to use their influence to nail some of
the A-level stars who were snubbing the event, started to get angry and hurt that stars were
determined to embarrass him. Bannon, a soothing voice as well as a professional agitator, tried to
argue the dialectical nature of what they had achieved (without using the word “dialectical”).
Because Trump’s success was beyond measure, or certainly beyond all expectations, the media and
the liberals had to justify their own failure, he explained to the new president.
In the hours before the inauguration, the whole of Washington seemed to be holding its breath. On
the evening before Trump was sworn in, Bob Corker, the Republican senator from Tennessee and the
chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, opened his remarks as the featured speaker at a
gathering at the Jefferson Hotel with the existential question, “Where are things going?” He paused
for a moment and then answered, as though from some deep well of bewilderment, “I have no idea.”
Later that evening, a concert at the Lincoln Memorial, part of an always awkward effort to import
pop culture to Washington, ended up, absent any star power, with Trump himself taking the stage as
the featured act, angrily insisting to aides that he could outdraw any star.
Dissuaded by his staff from staying at the Trump International Hotel in Washington and regretting
his decision, the president-elect woke up on inaugural morning complaining about the
accommodations at Blair House, the official guest residence across the street from the White House.
Too hot, bad water pressure, bad bed.
His temper did not improve. Throughout the morning, he was visibly fighting with his wife, who
seemed on the verge of tears and would return to New York the next day; almost every word he
addressed to her was sharp and peremptory. Kellyanne Conway had taken up Melania Trump as a
personal PR mission, promoting the new First Lady as a vital pillar of support for the president and a
helpful voice in her own right, and was trying to convince Trump that she could have an important
role in the White House. But, in general, the Trumps’ relationship was one of those things nobody
asked too many questions about—another mysterious variable in the presidential mood.
At the ceremonial meeting of the soon-to-be-new president and the soon-to-be-old president at the
White House, which took place just before they set off for the swearing-in ceremony, Trump believed
the Obamas acted disdainfully—“very arrogant”—toward him and Melania. Instead of wearing a
game face, going into the inaugural events, the president-elect wore what some around him had taken
to calling his golf face: angry and pissed off, shoulders hunched, arms swinging, brow furled, lips
pursed. This had become the public Trump—truculent Trump.
An inauguration is supposed to be a love-in. The media gets a new and upbeat story. For the party
faithful, happy times are here again. For the permanent government—the swamp—it’s a chance to
curry favor and seek new advantage. For the country, it’s a coronation. But Bannon had three
messages or themes he kept trying to reinforce with his boss: his presidency was going to be different
—as different as any since Andrew Jackson’s (he was supplying the less-than-well-read presidentelect
with Jackson-related books and quotes); they knew who their enemies were and shouldn’t fall
into the trap of trying to make them their friends, because they wouldn’t be; and so, from day one, they
should consider themselves on a war footing. While this spoke to Trump’s combative
“counterpuncher” side, it was hard on his eager-to-be-liked side. Bannon saw himself as managing
these two impulses, emphasizing the former and explaining to his boss why having enemies here
created friends somewhere else.
In fact, Trump’s aggrieved mood became a perfect match for the Bannon-written aggrieved
inaugural address. Much of the sixteen-minute speech was part of Bannon’s daily joie de guerre
patter—his take-back-the-country America-first, carnage-everywhere vision for the country. But it
actually became darker and more forceful when filtered through Trump’s disappointment and
delivered with his golf face. The administration purposely began on a tone of menace—a Bannondriven
message to the other side that the country was about to undergo profound change. Trump’s
wounded feelings—his sense of being shunned and unloved on the very day he became president—
helped send that message. When he came off the podium after delivering his address, he kept
repeating, “Nobody will forget this speech.”
George W. Bush, on the dais, supplied what seemed likely to become the historic footnote to the
Trump address: “That’s some weird shit.”
* * *
Trump, despite his disappointment at Washington’s failure to properly greet and celebrate him, was,
like a good salesman, an optimist. Salesmen, whose primary characteristic and main asset is their
ability to keep selling, constantly recast the world in positive terms. Discouragement for everyone
else is merely the need to improve reality for them.
By the next morning, Trump was soliciting affirmation of his view that the inauguration had been a
great success. “That crowd went all the way back. That were more than a million people at least,
right?” He made a series of phone calls to friends who largely yes’d him on this. Kushner confirmed a
big crowd. Conway did nothing to dissuade him. Priebus agreed. Bannon made a joke.
Among Trump’s first moves as president was to have a series of inspirational photographs in the
West Wing replaced with images of big crowd scenes at his inaugural ceremony.
Bannon had come to rationalize Trump’s reality distortions. Trump’s hyperbole, exaggerations,
flights of fancy, improvisations, and general freedom toward and mangling of the facts, were products
of the basic lack of guile, pretense, and impulse control that helped create the immediacy and
spontaneity that was so successful with so many on the stump—while so horrifying to so many others.
For Bannon, Obama was the north star of aloofness. “Politics,” said Bannon with an authority that
belayed the fact that until the previous August he had never worked in politics, “is a more immediate
game than he ever played it.” Trump was, for Bannon, a modern-day William Jennings Bryan.
(Bannon had long talked about the need for a new Williams Jennings Bryan in right-wing politics,
with friends assuming Bannon meant himself.) At the turn of the twentieth century, Bryan had
enthralled rural audiences with his ability to speak passionately and extemporaneously for apparently
unlimited periods of time. Trump compensated—in the theory of some intimates, including Bannon—
for his difficulties with reading, writing, and close focus with an improvisational style that produced,
if not exactly a William Jennings Bryan effect, certainly close to the exact opposite of the Obama
effect.
It was part hortatory, part personal testimony, part barstool blow-hard, a rambling, disjointed,
digressive, what-me-worry approach that combined aspects of cable television rage, big-tent
religious revivalism, Borscht Belt tummler, motivational speaking, and YouTube vlogging. Charisma
in American politics had come to define an order of charm, wit, and style—a coolness. But another
sort of American charisma was more in the Christian evangelical vein, an emotional, experiential
spectacle.
The Trump campaign had built its central strategy around great rallies regularly attracting tens of
thousands, a political phenomenon that the Democrats both failed to heed and saw as a sign of
Trump’s limited appeal. For the Trump team, this style, this unmediated connection—his speeches, his
tweets, his spontaneous phone calls to radio and television shows, and, often, to anyone who would
listen—was revelatory, a new, personal, and inspirational politics. For the other side, it was
clownishness that, at best, aspired to the kind of raw, authoritarian demagoguery that had long been
discredited by and assigned to history and that, when it appeared in American politics, reliably
failed.
While the advantages of this style for the Trump team were now very clear, the problem was that it
often—in fact regularly—produced assertions that were not remotely true.
This had led increasingly to the two-different-realities theory of Trump politics. In the one reality,
which encompassed most of Trump’s supporters, his nature was understood and appreciated. He was
the anti-wonk. He was the counterexpert. His was the gut call. He was the everyman. He was jazz
(some, in the telling, made it rap), everybody else an earnest folk music. In the other reality, in which
resided most of his antagonists, his virtues were grievous if not mental and criminal flaws. In this
reality lived the media, which, with its conclusion of a misbegotten and bastard presidency, believed
it could diminish him and wound him (and wind him up) and rob him of all credibility by relentlessly
pointing out how literally wrong he was.
The media, adopting a “shocked, shocked” morality, could not fathom how being factually wrong
was not an absolute ending in itself. How could this not utterly shame him? How could his staff
defend him? The facts were the facts! Defying them, or ignoring them, or subverting them, made you a
liar—intending to deceive, bearing false witness. (A minor journalism controversy broke out about
whether these untruths should be called inaccuracies or lies.)
In Bannon’s view: (1) Trump was never going to change; (2) trying to get him to change would
surely cramp his style; (3) it didn’t matter to Trump supporters; (4) the media wasn’t going to like him
anyway; (5) it was better to play against the media than to the media; (6) the media’s claim to be the
protector of factual probity and accuracy was itself a sham; (7) the Trump revolution was an attack on
conventional assumptions and expertise, so better to embrace Trump’s behavior than try to curb it or
cure it.
The problem was that, for all he was never going to stick to a script (“his mind just doesn’t work
that way” was one of the internal rationalizations), Trump craved media approval. But, as Bannon
emphasized, he was never going to get the facts right, nor was he ever going to acknowledge that he
got them wrong, so therefore he was not going to get that approval. This meant, next best thing, that he
had to be aggressively defended against the media’s disapproval.
The problem here was that the more vociferous the defense—mostly of assertions that could easily
be proved wrong—the more the media redoubled its attacks and censure. What’s more, Trump was
receiving the censure of his friends, too. And it was not only calls from friends worried about him,
but staffers calling people to call him and say Simmer down. “Who do you have in there?” said Joe
Scarborough in a frantic call. “Who’s the person you trust? Jared? Who can talk you through this stuff
before you decided to act on it?”
“Well,” said the president, “you won’t like the answer, but the answer is me. Me. I talk to myself.”
Hence, within twenty-four hours of the inauguration, the president had invented a million or so
people who did not exist. He sent his new press secretary, Sean Spicer—whose personal mantra
would shortly become “You can’t make this shit up”—to argue his case in a media moment that turned
Spicer, quite a buttoned-down political professional, into a national joke, which he seemed destined
to never recover from. To boot, the president blamed Spicer for not making the million phantom souls
seem real.
It was the first presidential instance of what the campaign regulars had learned over many months:
on the most basic level, Trump just did not, as Spicer later put it, give a fuck. You could tell him
whatever you wanted, but he knew what he knew, and if what you said contradicted what he knew, he
simply didn’t believe you.
The next day Kellyanne Conway, her aggressive posture during the campaign turning more and
more to petulance and self-pity, asserted the new president’s right to claim “alternative facts.” As it
happened, Conway meant to say “alternative information,” which at least would imply there might be
additional data. But as uttered, it certainly sounded like the new administration was claiming the right
to recast reality. Which, in a sense, it was. Although, in Conway’s view, it was the media doing the
recasting, making a mountain (hence “fake news”) out of a molehill (an honest minor exaggeration,
albeit of vast proportions).
Anyway, the frequently asked question about whether Trump would continue his unsupervised and
often inexplicable tweets now that he was officially in the White House and the president of the
United States—a question as hotly asked inside the White House as out—was answered: he would.
This was his fundamental innovation in governing: regular, uncontrolled bursts of anger and
spleen.
* * *
The president’s immediate official business, however, was to make nice with the CIA.
On Saturday, January 21, in an event organized by Kushner, the president, in his first presidential
act, paid a call on Langley to, in Bannon’s hopeful description, “play some politics.” In carefully
prepared remarks in his first act as president, he would lay some of the famous Trump flattery on the
CIA and the rest of the sprawling, and leaking, U.S. intelligence world.
Not taking off his dark overcoat, lending him quite a hulking gangster look, pacing in front of the
CIA’s wall of stars for its fallen agents, in front of a crowd of about three hundred agency personnel
and a group of White House staffers, and, suddenly, in a mood of sleepless cockiness and pleasure at
having a captive crowd, the new president, disregarding his text, launched into what we could
confidently call some of the most peculiar remarks ever delivered by an American president.
“I know a lot about West Point, I’m a person who very strongly believes in academics. Every time
I say I had an uncle who was a great professor at MIT for 35 years, who did a fantastic job in so
many ways academically—he was an academic genius—and then they say, Is Donald Trump an
intellectual? Trust me, I’m like a smart person.”
Which was all somehow by way of praise for the new, soon-to-be-confirmed CIA director, Mike
Pompeo, who had attended West Point and who Trump had brought with him to stand in the crowd—
and who now found himself as bewildered as everyone else.
“You know when I was young. Of course I feel young—I feel like I was 30 . . . 35 . . . 39 . . . .
Somebody said, Are you young? I said, I think I’m young. I was stopping in the final months of the
campaign, four stops, five stops, seven stops—speeches, speeches in front of twenty-five, thirty
thousand people . . . fifteen, nineteen thousand. I feel young—I think we’re all so young. When I was
young we were always winning things in this country. We’d win with trade, we’d win with wars—at
a certain age I remembering hearing from one of my instructors, the United States has never lost a
war. And then, after that, it’s like we haven’t won anything. You know the old expression, to the victor
belongs the spoils? You remember I always say, keep the oil.”
“Who should keep the oil?” asked a bewildered CIA employee, leaning over to a colleague in the
back of the room.
“I wasn’t a fan of Iraq, I didn’t want to go into Iraq. But I will tell you when we were in we got
out wrong and I always said in addition to that keep the oil. Now I said it for economic reasons, but if
you think about it, Mike”—he called out across the room, addressing the soon-to-be director—“if we
kept the oil we wouldn’t have ISIS because that’s where they made their money in the first place, so
that’s why we should have kept the oil. But okay—maybe you’ll have another chance—but the fact is
we should have kept the oil.”
The president paused and smiled with evident satisfaction.
“The reason you are my first stop, as you know I have a running war with the media, they are
among the most dishonest human beings on earth, and they sort of made it sound like I had a feud with
the intelligence community and I just want to let you know the reason you’re the number one stop is
exactly the opposite, exactly, and they understand that. I was explaining about the numbers. We did,
we did a thing yesterday at the speech. Did everybody like the speech? You had to like it. But we had
a massive field of people. You saw them. Packed. I get up this morning, I turn on one of the networks,
and they show an empty field and I say, Wait a minute, I made a speech. I looked out—the field was—
it looked like a million, million and half people. They showed a field where there were practically
nobody standing there. And they said Donald Trump did not draw well and I said it was almost
raining, the rain should have scared them away, but God looked down and said we’re not going to let
it rain on your speech and in fact when I first started I said, Oooh no, first line I got hit by a couple of
drops, and I said, Oh this is too bad, but we’ll go right through it, the truth is it stopped immediately. .
. .”
“No, it didn’t,” one of the staffers traveling with him said reflexively, then catching herself and,
with a worried look, glancing around to see if she had been overheard.
“. . . and then it became really sunny and I walked off and it poured right after I left. It poured but
we have something amazing because—honestly it looked like a million, million and a half people,
whatever it was it was, but it went all the way back to the Washington Monument and by mistake I get
this network and it showed an empty field and it said we drew two hundred fifty thousand people.
Now that’s not bad, but it’s a lie. . . . And we had another one yesterday which was interesting. In the
Oval Office there’s a beautiful statue of Dr. Martin Luther King and I also happen to like Churchill—
Winston Churchill—I think most of us like Churchill, doesn’t come from our country but had a lot to
do with it, helped us, real ally, and as you know the Churchill statue was taken out. . . . So a reporter
for Time magazine and I have been on the cover like fourteen or fifteen times. I think I have the alltime
record in the history of Time magazine. Like if Tom Brady is on the cover it’s one time because
he won the Super Bowl or something. I’ve been on fifteen times this year. I don’t think, Mike, that’s a
record that can ever be broken, do you agree with that . . . . What do you think?”
“No,” said Pompeo in a stricken voice.
“But I will say that they said it was very interesting that ‘Donald Trump took down the bust, the
statue, of Dr. Martin Luther King,’ and it was right there, there was a cameraman that was in front of
it. So Zeke . . . Zeke . . . from Time magazine . . . writes a story that I took it down. I would never do
that. I have great respect for Dr. Martin Luther King. But this is how dishonest the media is. Now big
story, but the retraction was like this”—he indicated ever-so-small with his fingers. “Is it a line or do
they even bother putting it in? I only like to say I love honesty, I like honest reporting. I will tell you,
final time, although I will say it when you let in your thousands of other people who have been trying
to come in, because I am coming back, we may have to get you a larger room, we may have to get you
a larger room and maybe, maybe, it will be built by somebody that knows how to build and we won’t
have columns. You understand that? We get rid of the columns, but you know I just wanted to say that I
love you, I respect you, there’s nobody I respect more. You do a fantastic job and we’re going to start
winning again, and you’re going to be leading the charge, so thank you all very much.”
In a continuing sign of Trump’s Rashomon effect—his speeches inspiring joy or horror—
witnesses would describe his reception at the CIA as either a Beatles-like emotional outpouring or a
response so confounded and appalled that, in the seconds after he finished, you could hear a pin drop.
S
4
BANNON
teve Bannon was the first Trump senior staffer in the White House after Trump was sworn in. On
the inauguration march, he had grabbed the newly appointed deputy chief of staff, Katie Walsh,
Reince Priebus’s deputy at the RNC, and together they had peeled off to inspect the now vacant West
Wing. The carpet had been shampooed, but little else had changed. It was a warren of tiny offices in
need of paint, not rigorously cleaned on a regular basis, the décor something like an admissions office
at a public university. Bannon claimed the nondescript office across from the much grander chief of
staff’s suite, and he immediately requisitioned the white boards on which he intended to chart the first
hundred days of the Trump administration. And right away he began moving furniture out. The point
was to leave no room for anyone to sit. There were to be no meetings, at least no meetings where
people could get comfortable. Limit discussion. Limit debate. This was war. This was a war room.
Many who had worked with Bannon on the campaign and through the transition shortly noticed a
certain change. Having achieved one goal, he was clearly on to another. An intense man, he was
suddenly at an even higher level of focus and determination.
“What’s up with Steve?” Kushner began to ask. And then, “Is something wrong with Steve?” And
then finally, “I don’t understand. We were so close.”
Within the first week, Bannon seemed to have put away the camaraderie of Trump Tower—
including a willingness to talk at length at any hour—and become far more remote, if not unreachable.
He was “focused on my shit.” He was just getting things done. But many felt that getting things done
was was more about him hatching plots against them. And certainly, among his basic character notes,
Steve Bannon was a plotter. Strike before being struck. Anticipate the moves of others—counter them
before they can make their moves. To him this was seeing things ahead, focusing on a set of goals. The
first goal was the election of Donald Trump, the second the staffing of the Trump government. Now it
was capturing the soul of the Trump White House, and he understood what others did not yet: this
would be a mortal competition.
* * *
In the early days of the transition, Bannon had encouraged the Trump team to read David
Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest. (One of the few people who seem actually to have taken
him up on this reading assignment was Jared Kushner.) “A very moving experience reading this book.
It makes the world clear, amazing characters and all true,” Bannon enthused.
This was a personal bit of branding—Bannon made sure to exhibit the book to many of the liberal
reporters he was courting. But he was also trying to make a point, an important one considering the
slapdash nature of the transition team’s staffing protocols: be careful who you hire.
Halberstam’s book, published in 1972, is a Tolstoyan effort to understand how great figures of the
academic, intellectual, and military world who had served during the Kennedy and Johnson years had
so grievously misapprehended the nature of the Vietnam War and mishandled its prosecution. The
Best and the Brightest was a cautionary tale about the 1960s establishment—the precursor of the
establishment that Trump and Bannon were now so aggressively challenging.
But the book also served as a reverential guide to the establishment. For the 1970s generation of
future policy experts, would-be world leaders, and Ivy League journalists aiming for big-time careers
—though it was Bannon’s generation, he was far outside this self-selected elite circle—The Best and
the Brightest was a handbook about the characteristics of American power and the routes to it. Not
just the right schools and right backgrounds, although that, too, but the attitudes, conceits, affect, and
language that would be most conducive to finding your way into the American power structure. Many
saw the book as a set of prescriptions about how to get ahead, rather than, as intended, what not to do
when you are ahead. The Best and the Brightest described the people who should be in power. A
college-age Barack Obama was smitten with the book, as was Rhodes Scholar Bill Clinton.
Halberstam’s book defined the look and feel of White House power. His language, resonant and
imposing and, often, boffo pompous, had set the tone for the next half century of official presidential
journalism. Even scandalous or unsuccessful tenants of the White House were treated as unique
figures who had risen to the greatest heights after mastering a Darwinian political process. Bob
Woodward, who helped bring Nixon down—and who himself became a figure of unchallengeable
presidential mythmaking—wrote a long shelf of books in which even the most misguided presidential
actions seemed part of an epochal march of ultimate responsibility and life-and-death decision
making. Only the most hardhearted reader would not entertain a daydream in which he or she was not
part of this awesome pageant.
Steve Bannon was such a daydreamer.
* * *
But if Halberstam defined the presidential mien, Trump defied it—and defiled it. Not a single
attribute would place him credibly in the revered circle of American presidential character and
power. Which was, in a curious reversal of the book’s premise, just what created Steve Bannon’s
opportunity.
The less likely a presidential candidate is, the more unlikely, and, often, inexperienced, his aides
are—that is, an unlikely candidate can attract only unlikely aides, as the likely ones go to the more
likely candidates. When an unlikely candidate wins—and as outsiders become ever more the
quadrennial flavor of the month, the more likely an unlikely candidate is to get elected—ever more
peculiar people fill the White House. Of course, a point about the Halberstam book and about the
Trump campaign was that the most obvious players make grievous mistakes, too. Hence, in the Trump
narrative, unlikely players far outside the establishment hold the true genius.
Still, few have been more unlikely than Steve Bannon.
At sixty-three, Bannon took his first formal job in politics when he joined the Trump campaign.
Chief Strategist—his title in the new administration—was his first job not just in the federal
government but in the public sector. (“Strategist!” scoffed Roger Stone, who, before Bannon, had
been one of Trump’s chief strategists.) Other than Trump himself, Bannon was certainly the oldest
inexperienced person ever to work in the White House.
It was a flaky career that got him here.
Catholic school in Richmond, Virginia. Then a local college, Virginia Tech. Then seven years in
the Navy, a lieutenant on ship duty and then in the Pentagon. While on active duty, he got a master’s
degree at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, but then he washed out of his naval career. Then
an MBA from Harvard Business School. Then four years as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs
—his final two years focusing on the media industry in Los Angeles—but not rising above a midlevel
position.
In 1990, at the age of thirty-seven, Bannon entered peripatetic entre-preneurhood under the
auspices of Bannon & Co., a financial advisory firm to the entertainment industry. This was something
of a hustler’s shell company, hanging out a shingle in an industry with a small center of success and
concentric rings radiating out of rising, aspiring, falling, and failing strivers. Bannon & Co., skirting
falling and failing, made it to aspiring by raising small amounts of money for independent film
projects—none a hit.
Bannon was rather a movie figure himself. A type. Alcohol. Bad marriages. Cash-strapped in a
business where the measure of success is excesses of riches. Ever scheming. Ever disappointed.
For a man with a strong sense of his own destiny, he tended to be hardly noticed. Jon Corzine, the
former Goldman chief and future United States senator and governor of New Jersey, climbing the
Goldman ranks when Bannon was at the firm, was unaware of Bannon. When Bannon was appointed
head of the Trump campaign and became an overnight press sensation—or question mark—his
credentials suddenly included a convoluted story about how Bannon & Co. had acquired a stake in the
megahit show Seinfeld and hence its twenty-year run of residual profits. But none of the Seinfeld
principals, creators, or producers seem ever to have heard of him.
Mike Murphy, the Republican media consultant who ran Jeb Bush’s PAC and became a leading
anti-Trump movement figure, has the vaguest recollection of Bannon’s seeking PR services from
Murphy’s firm for a film Bannon was producing a decade or so ago. “I’m told he was in the meeting,
but I honestly can’t get a picture of him.”
The New Yorker magazine, dwelling on the Bannon enigma—one that basically translated to: How
is it that the media has been almost wholly unaware of someone who is suddenly among the most
powerful people in government?—tried to trace his steps in Hollywood and largely failed to find
him. The Washington Post traced his many addresses to no clear conclusion, except a suggestion of
possible misdemeanor voter fraud.
In the midnineties, he inserted himself in a significant role into Biosphere 2, a project copiously
funded by Edward Bass, one of the Bass family oil heirs, about sustaining life in space, and dubbed
by Time one of the hundred worst ideas of the century—a rich man’s folly. Bannon, having to find his
opportunities in distress situations, stepped into the project amid its collapse only to provoke further
breakdown and litigation, including harassment and vandalism charges.
After the Biosphere 2 disaster, he participated in raising financing for a virtual currency scheme
(MMORPGs, or MMOs) called Internet Gaming Entertainment (IGE). This was a successor company
to Digital Entertainment Network (DEN), a dot-com burnout, whose principals included the former
child star Brock Pierce (The Mighty Ducks) who went on to be the founder of IGE, but was then
pushed out. Bannon was put in as CEO, and the company was subsumed by endless litigation.
Distress is an opportunistic business play. But some distress is better than others. The kinds of
situations available to Bannon involved managing conflict, nastiness, and relative hopelessness—in
essence managing and taking a small profit on dwindling cash. It’s a living at the margins of people
who are making a much better living. Bannon kept trying to make a killing but never found the killing
sweet spot.
Distress is also a contrarian’s game. And the contrarian’s impulse—equal parts personal
dissatisfaction, general resentment, and gambler’s instinct—started to ever more strongly fuel
Bannon. Part of the background for his contrarian impulse lay in an Irish Catholic union family,
Catholic schools, and three unhappy marriages and bad divorces (journalists would make much of the
recriminations in his second wife’s divorce filings).
Not so long ago, Bannon might have been a recognizably modern figure, something of a romantic
antihero, an ex-military and up-from-the-working-class guy, striving, through multiple marriages and
various careers, to make it, but never finding much comfort in the establishment world, wanting to be
part of it and wanting to blow it up at the same time—a character for Richard Ford, or John Updike,
or Harry Crews. An American man’s story. But now such stories have crossed a political line. The
American man story is a right-wing story. Bannon found his models in political infighters like Lee
Atwater, Roger Ailes, Karl Rove. All were larger-than-life American characters doing battle with
conformity and modernity, relishing ways to violate liberal sensibilities.
The other point is that Bannon, however smart and even charismatic, however much he extolled
the virtue of being a “stand-up guy,” was not necessarily a nice guy. Several decades as a grasping
entrepreneur without a satisfying success story doesn’t smooth the hustle in hustler. One competitor in
the conservative media business, while acknowledging his intelligence and the ambitiousness of his
ideas, also noted, “He’s mean, dishonest, and incapable of caring about other people. His eyes dart
around like he’s always looking for a weapon with which to bludgeon or gouge you.”
Conservative media fit not only his angry, contrarian, and Roman Catholic side, but it had low
barriers to entry—liberal media, by contrast, with its corporate hierarchies, was much harder to
break into. What’s more, conservative media is a highly lucrative target market category, with books
(often dominating the bestseller lists), videos, and other products available through direct sales
avenues that can circumvent more expensive distribution channels.
In the early 2000s, Bannon became a purveyor of conservative books products and media. His
partner in this enterprise was David Bossie, the far-right pamphleteer and congressional committee
investigator into the Clintons’ Whitewater affair, who would join him as deputy campaign manager on
the Trump campaign. Bannon met Breitbart News founder Andrew Breitbart at a screening of one of
the Bannon-Bossie documentaries In the Face of Evil (billed as “Ronald Reagan’s crusade to destroy
the most tyrannical and depraved political systems the world has ever known”), which in turn led to a
relationship with the man who offered Bannon the ultimate opportunity: Robert Mercer.
* * *
In this regard, Bannon was not so much an entrepreneur of vision or even business discipline, he was
more simply following the money—or trying to separate a fool from his money. He could not have
done better than Bob and Rebekah Mercer. Bannon focused his entrepreneurial talents on becoming
courtier, Svengali, and political investment adviser to father and daughter.
Theirs was a consciously quixotic mission. They would devote vast sums—albeit still just a small
part of Bob Mercer’s many billions—to trying to build a radical free-market, small-government,
home-schooling, antiliberal, gold-standard, pro-death-penalty, anti-Muslim, pro-Christian,
monetarist, anti-civil-rights political movement in the United States.
Bob Mercer is an ultimate quant, an engineer who designs investment algorithms and became a co-
CEO of one of the most successful hedge funds, Renaissance Technologies. With his daughter,
Rebekah, Mercer set up what is in effect a private Tea Party movement, self-funding whatever Tea
Party or alt-right project took their fancy. Bob Mercer is almost nonverbal, looking at you with a dead
stare and either not talking or offering only minimal response. He had a Steinway baby grand on his
yacht; after inviting friends and colleagues on the boat, he would spend the time playing the piano,
wholly disengaged from his guests. And yet his political beliefs, to the extent they could be discerned,
were generally Bush-like, and his political discussions, to the extent that you could get him to be
responsive, were about issues involving ground game and data gathering. It was Rebekah Mercer—
who had bonded with Bannon, and whose politics were grim, unyielding, and doctrinaire—who
defined the family. “She’s . . . like whoa, ideologically there is no conversation with her,” said one
senior Trump White House staffer.
With the death of Andrew Breitbart in 2012, Bannon, in essence holding the proxy of the Mercers’
investment in the site, took over the Breitbart business. He leveraged his gaming experience into using
Gamergate—a precursor alt-right movement that coalesced around an antipathy toward, and
harassment of, women working in the online gaming industry—to build vast amounts of traffic through
the virality of political memes. (After hours one night in the White House, Bannon would argue that he
knew exactly how to build a Breitbart for the left. And he would have the key advantage because
“people on the left want to win Pulitzers, whereas I want to be Pulitzer!”)
Working out of—and living in—the town house Breitbart rented on Capitol Hill, Bannon became
one of the growing number of notable Tea Party figures in Washington, the Mercers’ consigliere. But a
seeming measure of his marginality was that his big project was the career of Jeff Sessions
—“Beauregard,” Sessions’s middle name, in Bannon’s affectionate moniker and evocation of the
Confederate general—among the least mainstream and most peculiar people in the Senate, whom
Bannon tried to promote to run for president in 2012.
Donald Trump was a step up—and early in the 2016 race, Trump became the Breitbart totem.
(Many of Trump’s positions in the campaign were taken from the Breitbart articles he had printed out
for him.) Indeed, Bannon began to suggest to people that he, like Ailes had been at Fox, was the true
force behind his chosen candidate.
Bannon didn’t much question Donald Trump’s bona fides, or behavior, or electability, because, in
part, Trump was just his latest rich man. The rich man is a fixed fact, which you have to accept and
deal with in an entrepreneurial world—at least a lower-level entrepreneurial world. And, of course,
if Trump had had firmer bona fides, better behavior, and clear electability, Bannon would not have
had his chance.
However much a marginal, invisible, small-time hustler Bannon had been—something of an
Elmore Leonard character—he was suddenly transformed inside Trump Tower, an office he entered
on August 15, and for practical purposes, did not exit, save for a few hours a night (and not every
night) in his temporary midtown Manhattan accommodations, until January 17, when the transition
team moved to Washington. There was no competition in Trump Tower for being the brains of the
operation. Of the dominant figures in the transition, neither Kushner, Priebus, nor Conway, and
certainly not the president-elect, had the ability to express any kind of coherent perception or
narrative. By default, everybody had to look to the voluble, aphoristic, shambolic, witty, off-the-cuff
figure who was both ever present on the premises and who had, in an unlikely attribute, read a book
or two.
And indeed who, during the campaign, turned out to be able to harness the Trump operation, not to
mention its philosophic disarray, to a single political view: that the path to victory was an economic
and cultural message to the white working class in Florida, Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
* * *
Bannon collected enemies. Few fueled his savagery and rancor toward the standard-issue Republican
world as much as Rupert Murdoch—not least because Murdoch had Donald Trump’s ear. It was one
of the key elements of Bannon’s understanding of Trump: the last person Trump spoke to ended up
with enormous influence. Trump would brag that Murdoch was always calling him; Murdoch, for his
part, would complain that he couldn’t get Trump off the phone.
“He doesn’t know anything about American politics, and has no feel for the American people,”
said Bannon to Trump, always eager to point out that Murdoch wasn’t an American. But Trump
couldn’t get enough of him. With his love of “winners”—and he saw Murdoch as the ultimate winner
—Trump was suddenly bad-mouthing his friend Ailes as a “loser.”
And yet in one regard Murdoch’s message was useful to Bannon. Having known every president
since Harry Truman—as Murdoch took frequent opportunities to point out—and, he conjectured, as
many heads of state as anyone living, Murdoch believed he understood better than younger men, even
seventy-year-old Trump, that political power was fleeting. (This was in fact the same message he had
imparted to Barack Obama.) A president really had only, max, six months to make an impact on the
public and set his agenda, and he’d be lucky to get six months. After that it was just putting out fires
and battling the opposition.
This was the message whose urgency Bannon himself had been trying to impress on an often
distracted Trump. Indeed, in his first weeks in the White House, an inattentive Trump was already
trying to curtail his schedule of meetings, limit his hours in the office, and keep his normal golf habits.
Bannon’s strategic view of government was shock and awe. Dominate rather than negotiate.
Having daydreamed his way into ultimate bureaucratic power, he did not want to see himself as a
bureaucrat. He was of a higher purpose and moral order. He was an avenger. He was also, he
believed, a straight shooter. There was a moral order in aligning language and action—if you said you
were going to do something, you do it.
In his head, Bannon carried a set of decisive actions that would not just mark the new
administration’s opening days, but make it clear that nothing ever again would be the same. At the age
of sixty-three, he was in a hurry.
* * *
Bannon had delved deeply into the nature of executive orders—EOs. You can’t rule by decree in the
United States, except you really can. The irony here was that it was the Obama administration, with a
recalcitrant Republican Congress, that had pushed the EO envelope. Now, in something of a zero-sum
game, Trump’s EOs would undo Obama’s EOs.
During the transition, Bannon and Stephen Miller, a former Sessions aide who had earlier joined
the Trump campaign and then become Bannon’s effective assistant and researcher, assembled a list of
more than two hundred EOs to issue in the first hundred days.
But the first step in the new Trump administration had to be immigration, in Bannon’s certain view.
Foreigners were the ne plus ultra mania of Trumpism. An issue often dismissed as living on the onetrack-
mind fringe—Jeff Sessions was one of its cranky exponents—it was Trump’s firm belief that a
lot of people had had it up to here with foreigners. Before Trump, Bannon had bonded with Sessions
on the issue. The Trump campaign became a sudden opportunity to see if nativism really had legs.
And then when they won, Bannon understood there could be no hesitation about declaring their
ethnocentric heart and soul.
To boot, it was an issue that made liberals bat-shit mad.
Laxly enforced immigration laws reached to the center of the new liberal philosophy and, for
Bannon, exposed its hypocrisy. In the liberal worldview, diversity was an absolute good, whereas
Bannon believed any reasonable person who was not wholly blinded by the liberal light could see
that waves of immigrants came with a load of problems—just look at Europe. And these were
problems borne not by cosseted liberals but by the more exposed citizens at the other end of the
economic scale.
It was out of some instinctive or idiot-savant-like political understanding that Trump had made this
issue his own, frequently observing, Wasn’t anybody an American anymore? In some of his earliest
political outings, even before Obama’s election in 2008, Trump talked with bewilderment and
resentment about strict quotas on European immigration and the deluge from “Asia and other places.”
(This deluge, as liberals would be quick to fact-check, was, even as it had grown, still quite a modest
stream.) His obsessive focus on Obama’s birth certificate was in part about the scourge of non-
European foreignness—a certain race-baiting. Who were these people? Why were they here?
The campaign sometimes shared a striking graphic. It showed a map of the country reflecting
dominant immigration trends in each state from fifty years ago—here was a multitude of countries,
many European. Today, the equivalent map showed that every state in the United States was now
dominated by Mexican immigration. This was the daily reality of the American workingman, in
Bannon’s view, the ever growing presence of an alternative, discount workforce.
Bannon’s entire political career, such as it was, had been in political media. It was also in Internet
media—that is, media ruled by immediate response. The Breitbart formula was to so appall the
liberals that the base was doubly satisfied, generating clicks in a ricochet of disgust and delight. You
defined yourself by your enemy’s reaction. Conflict was the media bait—hence, now, the political
chum. The new politics was not the art of the compromise but the art of conflict.
The real goal was to expose the hypocrisy of the liberal view. Somehow, despite laws, rules, and
customs, liberal globalists had pushed a myth of more or less open immigration. It was a double
liberal hypocrisy, because, sotto voce, the Obama administration had been quite aggressive in
deporting illegal aliens—except don’t tell the liberals that.
“People want their countries back,” said Bannon. “A simple thing.”
* * *
Bannon meant his EO to strip away the liberal conceits on an already illiberal process. Rather than
seeking to accomplish his goals with the least amount of upset—keeping liberal fig leaves in place—
he sought the most.
Why would you? was the logical question of anyone who saw the higher function of government as
avoiding conflict.
This included most people in office. The new appointees in place at the affected agencies and
departments, among them Homeland Security and State—General John Kelly, then the director of
Homeland Security, would carry a grudge about the disarray caused by the immigration EO—wanted
nothing more than a moment to get their footing before they might even consider dramatic and
contentious new policies. Old appointees—Obama appointees who still occupied most executive
branch jobs—found it unfathomable that the new administration would go out of its way to take
procedures that largely already existed and to restate them in incendiary, red-flag, and ad hominem
terms, such that liberals would have to oppose them.
Bannon’s mission was to puncture the global-liberal-emperor-wears-no-clothes bubble, nowhere,
in his view, as ludicrously demonstrated as the refusal to see the colossally difficult and costly effects
of uncontrolled immigration. He wanted to force liberals to acknowledge that even liberal
governments, even the Obama government, were engaged in the real politics of slowing immigration
—ever hampered by the liberal refusal to acknowledge this effort.
The EO would be drafted to remorselessly express the administration’s (or Bannon’s) pitiless
view. The problem was, Bannon really didn’t know how to do this—change rules and laws. This
limitation, Bannon understood, might easily be used to thwart them. Process was their enemy. But just
doing it—the hell with how—and doing it immediately, could be a powerful countermeasure.
Just doing things became a Bannon principle, the sweeping antidote to bureaucratic and
establishment ennui and resistance. It was the chaos of just doing things that actually got things done.
Except, even if you assumed that not knowing how to do things didn’t much matter if you just did
them, it was still not clear who was going to do what you wanted to do. Or, a corollary, because
nobody in the Trump administration really knew how to do anything, it was therefore not clear what
anyone did.
Sean Spicer, whose job was literally to explain what people did and why, often simply could not
—because nobody really had a job, because nobody could do a job.
Priebus, as chief of staff, had to organize meetings, schedules, and the hiring of staff; he also had
to oversee the individual functions of the executive office departments. But Bannon, Kushner,
Conway, and the president’s daughter actually had no specific responsibilities—they could make it up
as they went along. They did what they wanted. They would seize the day if they could—even if they
really didn’t know how to do what they wanted to do.
Bannon, for instance, even driven by his imperative just to get things done, did not use a computer.
How did he do anything? Katie Walsh wondered. But that was the difference between big visions
and small. Process was bunk. Expertise was the last refuge of liberals, ever defeated by the big
picture. The will to get big things done was how big things got done. “Don’t sweat the small stuff”
was a pretty good gist of Donald Trump’s—and Steve Bannon’s—worldview. “Chaos was Steve’s
strategy,” said Walsh.
Bannon got Stephen Miller to write the immigration EO. Miller, a fifty-five-year-old trapped in a
thirty-two-year-old’s body, was a former Jeff Sessions staffer brought on to the Trump campaign for
his political experience. Except, other than being a dedicated far-right conservative, it was unclear
what particular abilities accompanied Miller’s political views. He was supposed to be a
speechwriter, but if so, he seemed restricted to bullet points and unable to construct sentences. He
was supposed to be a policy adviser but knew little about policy. He was supposed to be the house
intellectual but was purposely unread. He was supposed to be a communications specialist, but he
antagonized almost everyone. Bannon, during the transition, sent him to the Internet to learn about and
to try to draft the EO.
By the time he arrived in the White House, Bannon had his back-of-the-envelope executive order
on immigration and his travel ban, a sweeping, Trumpian exclusion of most Muslims from the United
States, only begrudgingly whittled down, in part at Priebus’s urging, to what would shortly be
perceived as merely draconian.
In the mania to seize the day, with an almost total lack of knowing how, the nutty inaugural crowd
numbers and the wacky CIA speech were followed, without almost anybody in the federal government
having seen it or even being aware of it, by an executive order overhauling U.S. immigration policy.
Bypassing lawyers, regulators, and the agencies and personnel responsible for enforcing it, President
Trump—with Bannon’s low, intense voice behind him, offering a rush of complex information—
signed what was put in front of him.
On Friday, January 27, the travel ban was signed and took immediate effect. The result was an
emotional outpouring of horror and indignation from liberal media, terror in immigrant communities,
tumultuous protests at major airports, confusion throughout the government, and, in the White House,
an inundation of lectures, warnings, and opprobrium from friends and family. What have you done?
Do you know what you’re doing? You have to undo this! You’re finished before you even start! Who
is in charge there?
But Steve Bannon was satisfied. He could not have hoped to draw a more vivid line between the
two Americas—Trump’s and liberals’—and between his White House and the White House inhabited
by those not yet ready to burn the place down.
Why did we do this on a Friday when it would hit the airports hardest and bring out the most
protesters? almost the entire White House staff demanded to know.
“Errr . . . that’s why,” said Bannon. “So the snowflakes would show up at the airports and riot.”
That was the way to crush the liberals: make them crazy and drag them to the
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