Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

by Joshua Green

  Each of these episodes coincided so obviously with some other angle Trump was pursuing at the time—either hawking a book or promoting The Apprentice, which began airing on NBC in 2004—that people in politics grew inured to them, rolling their eyes as each new self-promotional campaign got underway. So nobody paid much attention when, after Obama’s election, Trump became more active in politics.

  In February 2011, he was a late addition to the roster of speakers at the Conservative Political Action Conference, his first ever appearance at the annual cattle call for Republican presidential hopefuls held every year in Washington, D.C. To fan interest in this latest feint at the White House, one of his lawyers had created a website, ShouldTrumpRun.com. “While I’m not at this time a candidate for the presidency,” Trump announced grandly at CPAC, “I will decide by June whether or not I will become one.” Reporters soon realized that his announcement timeline just happened to coincide with sweeps week and dismissed it as a ratings stunt, the usual Trump-presidential-hype cycle cranking up again.

  That’s why it didn’t register as particularly significant when Trump, in the same speech, deployed a curious line of attack against Obama, one previously confined mostly to the fever swamps of far-right websites. “Our current president came out of nowhere. Came out of nowhere,” Trump said, shaking his head. “In fact, I’ll go a step further: the people that went to school with him, they never saw him; they don’t know who he is. It’s crazy!”

  In the weeks that followed, Trump traveled the talk-show circuit making explicit what he’d merely hinted at in his CPAC speech: his contention that Obama hadn’t been born in the United States, had somehow forged his birth certificate, and therefore was an illegitimate president. “I want him to show his birth certificate,” Trump said, in March, on ABC’s The View. “There’s something on that birth certificate that he doesn’t like.” A week later on Fox News he went further: “People have birth certificates. He doesn’t have a birth certificate. He may have one, but there’s something on that—maybe religion, maybe it says he is a Muslim. I don’t know. Maybe he doesn’t want that. Or he may not have one. But I will tell you this: if he wasn’t born in this country, it’s one of the great scams of all time.”

  Trump was plumbing the depths of latent racist hostility toward the president and discovering that there was a lot of it there. Everybody in politics knew this sentiment existed, but the long-standing consensus had been that it should be kept out of the public arena. In the 2008 presidential campaign, John McCain had quickly upbraided a woman at his rally who prefaced a question to him about Obama by stating, “He’s an Arab.” The crowd booed McCain for correcting her.

  Trump, who has an uncanny ability to read an audience, intuited in the spring of 2011 that the birther calumny could help him forge a powerful connection with party activists. He also figured out that the norms forbidding such behavior were not inviolable rules that carried a harsh penalty but rather sentiments of a nobler, bygone era, gossamer-thin and needlessly adhered to by politicians who lacked his willingness to defy them. He could violate them with impunity and pay no price for it—in fact, he discovered, Republican voters thrilled to his provocations and rewarded him. National polls taken in mid-April, two weeks before the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, showed Trump leading the field of 2012 GOP presidential candidates.

  Privately, what amused him the most, he later told a friend, was that no party official in a position of power dared to stand up to him. In his first nationally televised interview, on C-SPAN, the new chairman of the Republican National Committee, Reince Priebus, was confronted about Trump’s possible candidacy and his birther attacks on Obama. “Is the birther debate good for the party?” Jeff Zeleny, a reporter for The New York Times, asked him. “I think all these guys are credible,” Priebus replied, looking slightly nauseated. “I mean, I think it’s up to the primary voters to decide that. I mean, obviously, people are going to have different opinions. And, you know, you’re going to have a lot of different candidates that are running, they’re gonna talk about different things at different times. . . . I think having a diversity of opinion is fine.”

  The lesson Trump took away was that the party gatekeepers, who were privately appalled at his behavior and did not want him in the race, would pose no threat to him at all if he decided to run.

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  Obama’s humiliation of Trump at the Correspondents’ Dinner appeared to smother the hype that had been building around Trump for months. Years later, when Trump won the Republican nomination, analysts seeking to understand his rise and how they had missed it would look back at the evening as the catalyst that launched his subsequent climb to the pinnacle of American politics. Essentially, they understood Trump’s pursuit of the presidency to be a revenge fantasy exacted upon his tormentors to establish, with sweeping certainty, his dominance over all who had mocked him.

  Trump himself has rejected this view (in no small part, one suspects, because accepting it would involve an un-Trumpian admission that he had indeed been humiliated). “It’s such a false narrative,” he complained in 2016. He added, less convincingly, “I had a phenomenal time. I had a great evening.” Trump also could have pointed out that he had long ago developed many of the themes that became hallmarks of his eventual campaign—everything from the evils of Chinese currency manipulation to the economic damage that NAFTA inflicted on a broad swath of U.S. workers.

  What is clear in hindsight, however, is that Trump’s interest in politics intensified right after the dinner, instead of quickly melting away, as it had after each of his presidential flirtations in the past. “I realized,” he said, “that unless I actually ran, I wouldn’t be taken seriously.” For years, Trump had sought political advice from Roger Stone, a junior Richard Nixon henchman turned lobbyist and a notorious self-promoter, whose carefully cultivated image as a master of the political dark arts often seduced wealthy naïfs like Trump (The New Republic once dubbed Stone a “state-of-the-art Washington sleaze ball” for his ability to fleece credulous newcomers). Now Trump decided to broaden his circle of advisers. He turned to Bossie to school him in the rudiments of preparing for a presidential campaign.

  Trump’s decision to reach out to Bossie was consequential in ways that he probably couldn’t appreciate because it immediately plunged him deep into the anti-Clinton milieu in which Bossie was a chieftain. The match might have been more or less inevitable. Trump also sought meetings with more mainstream Republican consultants, some of whom had experience in presidential campaigns. But none took him seriously or envisioned any future for him in high-level politics, particularly not after his public comedown from the birther attacks. As he had with Obama and Meyers, Trump registered with them mainly as a punch line.

  The connection to Bossie, however, brought entrée to a whole menagerie of characters who were eager to advise Trump and would figure prominently in his future. Most of them belonged to a distinct subcategory within Republican politics: professional anti-Clinton operatives. As Bossie’s own résumé testified, Bill and Hillary Clinton had been prominent Democratic fixtures on the national political scene for so long—two decades, at this point—that it was possible for a conservative to build an entire career out of specializing in devising ways to oppose and attack them. No equivalent job category exists on the left. A liberal simply couldn’t sustain himself professionally by developing a specialized capacity for attacking, say, Romneys or Bushes. Either there wasn’t sufficient continuity across election cycles or, as in the case of the dynastic Bushes, they didn’t inspire the kind of visceral loathing among the opposition that is necessary to maintain a permanent counter-operation. The Clintons, on the other hand, registered to most conservatives as the primary and ever-present enemy.

  Through Bossie, Trump forged a connection with people such as Kellyanne Conway, who first rose to cable news fame in the late nineties as part of a trio of blond conservative “pundettes” (along with An
n Coulter and Laura Ingraham) who became anti–Bill Clinton fixtures during the Monica Lewinsky scandal and Clinton’s subsequent impeachment.* Conway’s husband, George T. Conway III, helped to impeach Clinton by drafting the Supreme Court brief when Paula Jones sued the president. The court agreed with Conway’s argument that a sitting president could be subjected to a civil lawsuit. (Clinton’s denial under oath that he’d had sexual relations with Lewinsky eventually led to his impeachment.) George Conway earned a special place in conservative lore by reportedly e-mailing Matt Drudge an infamous tip, which Drudge quickly published, about the shape of the president’s penis. Even Roger Stone, sensing opportunity, had begun fashioning himself into an author of heated anti-Clinton polemical books.

  All of these influences helped shape Trump’s view of politics and steer it in a sharply anti-Clinton direction just as Trump was starting to think seriously about running for president. In 2012, he surprised Mitt Romney’s campaign by repeatedly and forcefully offering his endorsement. Somewhat reluctantly, Romney’s team agreed to accept it at a Trump hotel in Las Vegas two days before Nevada’s GOP caucus, though not before taking steps to minimize the association by hanging blue curtains around the ballroom where the endorsement would take place, so that Romney wouldn’t appear to be standing “in a burlesque house or one of Saddam’s palaces,” a Romney aide, Ryan Williams, later recalled. (They missed the gold-emblazoned “Trump” lectern at which both men spoke.) Another adviser was surprised by Trump’s expectation that the campaign would want him to barnstorm the country on Romney’s plane. “We finally had to tell him: it’s not gonna happen,” the adviser said. “He couldn’t believe that we were saying no.” Trump seemed to imagine a role for himself that would have amounted to a kind of dry run for his own campaign four years later.

  No one whom Bossie brought into Trump’s orbit would exert a greater influence than Bannon would. Not long after the fateful Correspondents’ Dinner, Bossie, who knew Bannon from fringe conservative circles, brought him along on a trip to Trump Tower to offer advice about how Trump might prepare for a run. By all accounts, the two men clicked right away. Like Trump, Bannon had cycled through multiple marriages and was rich, brash, charismatic, volcanic, opinionated, and never ruffled by doubt. He, too, was a businessman and a deal maker, and he had faced down moguls ranging from Ted Turner to Michael Ovitz. Fluent in the argot of Wall Street and Hollywood, Bannon specialized in media, having moved from financing television shows and films to making movies himself. He had plenty of experience maneuvering among the outsize egos of aggressive billionaires such as Trump and seemed to possess a sixth sense about how to connect with them.

  Perhaps owing to this background, Trump, whose habit was to surround himself with obsequious lackeys, took Bannon’s counsel more seriously than he did that of other advisers. “[Steve] was the only alpha male in his universe,” said a Trump associate. When Trump began visiting conservative conferences, such as the South Carolina Freedom Summit, which Bossie hosts each year, he would make a point of seeking out Bannon. “I remember Trump at the Freedom Summit going, ‘Where’s my Steve? Where’s my Steve?’” said Sam Nunberg, an ex–Trump aide. “He loved the guy.” It was clear the connection was genuine, said Roger Stone, “because Steve is a slob, and Trump hates slobs.”

  Initially, Bannon was no more inclined to take Trump’s presidential ambitions seriously than anyone else who wasn’t on Trump’s payroll. He also met with more plausible candidates, such as Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Ben Carson. Always on the lookout for a new adventure, Bannon viewed the meetings with Trump as a lark and a chance to possibly conscript him into one of his many enterprises.

  To prepare for one meeting, Bossie conducted some cursory opposition research, mostly combing through public records, in order to give Trump a sense of where he might be vulnerable to attack. Bannon and Bossie traveled up to New York City to present what they’d found. Trump was astonished when the pair informed him that he had bothered to vote only sporadically and had given money to Democratic politicians. “How did you get that information?” he asked them, unaware that it was readily available in public records.

  According to a former Trump adviser, Bannon was also behind a needling stunt Trump pulled two weeks before the 2012 election. Having badgered Obama into releasing his birth certificate the year before, Trump had started insinuating that his passport and college transcripts may also be forged or missing. “I’m very honored to have gotten him to release his long-form birth certificate—or whatever it may be,” Trump said in a blurry video he posted to YouTube. “I have a deal for the president, a deal that I don’t believe he can refuse, and I hope he doesn’t. If Barack Obama opens up and gives his college records and applications, and if he gives his passport applications and records, I will give, to a charity of his choice . . . a check, immediately, for $5 million.” Bannon told an associate he had lined up a donor willing to supply half the sum.

  The media, chastened by the birther episode, didn’t bite on this one. But by now, Trump and Bannon had forged a connection, and Trump’s thoughts were already shifting to 2016. “I knew Trump was running in 2013,” said Nunberg, an aide to Trump at the time. “I knew because he got a taste of it in 2012—he was surprised that he was number one [in the polls].” Nunberg called Bannon to make sure he knew they weren’t screwing around. “I remember telling Steve, ‘We’re going to rage against the machine,’” said Nunberg. “And Steve just loved it. I still remember his reply. He goes, ‘That’s amazing, brother.’”

  Although neither of them could have had any inkling of where they would end up, Bannon would provide Trump with two great services in the years ahead—services without which Trump probably wouldn’t be president. First, he supplied Trump with a fully formed, internally coherent worldview that accommodated Trump’s own feelings about trade and foreign threats, what Trump eventually dubbed “America first” nationalism. One aspect in particular that preoccupied Bannon—the menace of illegal immigration—was something Trump would use to galvanize his supporters from the moment he descended the Trump Tower escalator on June 16, 2015, to declare his candidacy. By then, Bannon had left banking and Hollywood to take over the combative right-wing populist website Breitbart News after the death of its founder, Andrew Breitbart, in 2012. Breitbart’s fixation on race, crime, immigration, radical Islam, and the excesses of political correctness—as well as the site’s dark and inflammatory style—did much to shape Trump’s populist inclinations and inform his political vocabulary. (An analysis of his Twitter feed conducted after the election showed that Breitbart is far and away Trump’s primary source of news.)

  The second service Bannon provided Trump was to conceive and create over several years an infrastructure of conservative organizations that together would work, sometimes in tandem with mainstream media outlets, to stop the woman everyone believed would become the 2016 Democratic nominee: Hillary Clinton. What Bannon built was in essence the very thing Clinton herself was mocked for invoking in 1998: a “vast right-wing conspiracy” designed to tear her down. Bannon didn’t set out to do this specifically for Trump. Rather, Trump was the fortunate beneficiary of an elaborate plot to discredit his opponent—and then, either through luck or foresight, he put the architect of that plot in charge of his campaign for the critical final stretch before the election, producing a result that shocked the world.

  How did this happen? Why did no one see it coming? And why did conservatives succeed in stopping a Clinton this time, when they had failed so badly to stop one before?

  Many of the answers trace back to the Oz figure of Bannon. Though he befriended Bossie and other veterans of the anti-Clinton movement, he was not a part of their world when Bill Clinton was president. Watching from afar, he developed a perceptive critique of why they failed. “In the 1990s,” he explained, “conservative media couldn’t take down Clinton because most of what they produced was punditry and opinion, and they always oversold the conclus
ion: ‘It’s clearly impeachable!’” Stunts like Dan Burton’s watermelon murder theory and Bossie’s doctored tapes cost conservatives the public’s trust—and they didn’t even recognize it, until voters took their power away. Bannon’s diagnosis of their chief flaw was simple and direct: “They wound up talking to themselves in an echo chamber.”

  To be effective, he believed, a conservative effort to thwart Clinton would need to be based on facts, not punditry, and reach beyond the conservative bubble to turn liberals and independents against her. The insular world of anti-Clinton conspiracists was ill equipped to mount such a campaign, of this Bannon had no doubt. So instead, he drew upon the lessons of his own strange and peripatetic career, which had equipped him with a set of skills and a grand theory about how he could pull it off.

  THREE

  BILDUNGSROMAN

  Bannon was born into a blue-collar, Irish-Catholic family of Democrats in 1953, within sight of the naval base in Norfolk, Virginia. He was the third of five children born to Martin Bannon, a telephone linesman, and his wife, Doris, a homemaker. Soon afterward, the family moved to a leafy neighborhood in North Richmond, Virginia.

  Bannon’s upbringing was steeped in traditionalism at every turn: at church, at school, and at home, in the working-class identity forged by his parents’ Democratic politics. In 1953, the South was still solidly Democratic, and Virginia was dominated by the Byrd Organization, the political machine led by former governor and U.S. senator Harry F. Byrd, Sr., a conservative Democrat bent upon stopping the advance of the civil rights movement. Although the Byrd machine was well into its decline by the time Bannon was growing up, and never had the same strength in urban centers such as Richmond that it did in rural areas, it still shaped the tenor of the local politics. Yet the Bannons, like many conservative Irish-Catholic families, were captivated by a different Democrat, John F. Kennedy. “We were Kennedy freaks,” said Chris Bannon, Steve’s younger brother. “My dad knocked on doors for Kennedy. Every Irish kid thinks he wants to be Jack Kennedy, right?”