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. Cashstrapped
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, antiMuslim,
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 presidentelect,
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 one-track-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 nonEuropean
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.”