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

by Joshua Green

  In a financial sense, the push to build a third-party business around selling virtual goods inside a video game was a disaster for almost everyone involved. Inevitably, game makers began selling goods directly to their players. Yet Bannon was captivated by what he had discovered while trying to build the business: an underworld he hadn’t known existed that was populated by millions of intense young men (most gamers were men) who disappeared for days or even weeks at a time in alternate realities. While perhaps not social adepts, they were smart, focused, relatively wealthy, and highly motivated about issues that mattered to them, their collective might powerful enough to wreck IGE’s business and bend companies such as Blizzard to their will. As he would later confirm, this luciferous insight gave him an early understanding of the size and strength of online communities, along with an appreciation for the powerful currents that run just below the surface of the Internet. He began to wonder if those forces could be harnessed and, if so, how he might exploit them.

  Affinity sold off its gold-farming operations to a competitor at a steep discount. But Bannon held on to a network of three large MMO gaming sites that the company had acquired (Wowhead, Allakhazam, and Thottbot) that were the hubs where these gamers congregated by the millions.

  If you trace a line backward from Trump’s election, it doesn’t take long before you encounter online networks of motivated gamers and message-board denizens such as the ones who populate Trump-crazed boards like 4chan, 8chan, and reddit. During the campaign, users of these message boards were eager purveyors of racist, alt-right invective, such as the anti-Semitic Pepe the Frog images that the Anti-Defamation League declared a hate symbol. Trace the line back a little further and it leads to Breitbart News and Bannon, whose hiring of the anti-feminist internet troll Milo Yiannopoulos as Breitbart’s tech editor in 2015 greatly exacerbated these forces.

  But Bannon’s path would never have veered from Hollywood and pointed him in that direction had it not been for a tragedy that re-inflamed his antipathy toward Islam and his conviction that Western civilization was under attack.

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  The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon functioned as a kind of echo for Bannon of the 1979 seizure of American hostages at the U.S. embassy in Tehran. The two decades in between, he realized, had done nothing to stanch the threat of radical Islam to the United States—in fact, Islamic terrorists had struck with greater force than anyone imagined they could and had chosen as a target of their attack the very Wall Street financial district where he had long toiled for Goldman Sachs.

  The Iranian hostage crisis first impelled Bannon toward Ronald Reagan, whose strength he was certain was vital to preserving America’s safety and influence in the world. Having long ago left the military, he didn’t have any obvious outlet to respond to the new attacks—a middle-aged Hollywood investment banker can’t exactly walk into a recruiter’s office and reenlist. But the following year, Bannon, an avid reader of biographies and political histories, picked up a new book, Reagan’s War: The Epic Story of His Forty-Year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism, by the conservative scholar Peter Schweizer. Drawing on newly available archives—including Reagan’s KGB file—Schweizer drew a portrait of the president as he was seen by his enemies, arguing (rather effusively) that Reagan’s steadfastness and foresight, along with his willingness to buck expert opinion, was almost single-handedly responsible for winning the Cold War.

  Working in Hollywood all these years, Bannon had plenty of up-close experience in the film business. But it was all on the financial side. He longed, like countless moneymen before him, to get involved on the creative side. Never wanting for ideas or conviction, he now had the means to indulge his passion. He optioned the film rights to Schweizer’s book and wrote and directed a movie based upon it, In the Face of Evil (2004). “It was really a metaphor,” Bannon said of his film. “It was just after 9/11, and I wanted to tell a story about how a democracy takes on a radical ideology.” He persuaded Schweizer to collaborate with him on the project. “Peter and I worked on the film to tell the story of Reagan’s sixty-year struggle with communism,” he said, “and at the end, we connect the dots about how that was like America’s struggle with radical Islam.”

  The film had a modest release and won glowing praise from conservative audiences (“A brilliant effort . . . extremely well done,” said Rush Limbaugh). It won the Best Feature Film award at the Liberty Film Festival, a new film festival meant to establish a conservative beachhead in liberal Hollywood. It was here that Bannon first encountered Andrew Breitbart, the conservative impresario, and was drawn into his orbit. “We screened the film at a festival in Beverly Hills,” Bannon recalled, “and out of the crowd comes this, like, bear who’s squeezing me like my head’s going to blow up and saying how we’ve got to take back the culture. I didn’t really know who he was.”

  Breitbart, who also lived in Los Angeles, had an immediate and profound influence on Bannon. He became the kind of guru figure that the Maharishi was to the Beatles. When they met, Breitbart was just starting his eponymous website network, after having worked with Matt Drudge to publish the Drudge Report and having helped Arianna Huffington launch the liberal Huffington Post. Breitbart was a character after Bannon’s own heart: loud, opinionated, cocksure, gleefully combative, and possessed of performative gifts that Bannon could only envy. “I’d never met a conservative who had this kind of huge persona,” he recalled. Breitbart also shared a keen appreciation for, and a deep understanding of, online audiences and how to influence them—and not just audiences but also the media outlets that catered to them. Bannon marveled at how Breitbart was able to shape media coverage through the Drudge Report, which was raptly followed by television producers and news editors, and how he seemed to have a visceral feel for the news cycle. Breitbart also heightened his awareness of culture as an important front in the battle against secular liberalism and the weakness that both men felt it instilled. “Politics is downstream from culture,” Breitbart liked to say. “I want to change the cultural narrative.” What this meant was that Breitbart was less interested in trying to influence Washington directly than he was in going after the institutions (and the methods they employed, like “political correctness”) that he believed shaped this narrative.

  Bannon, recognizing a new Pirate King, helped Breitbart build out his new endeavor, lending financial acumen and office space. He had direct experience with media-focused Internet start-ups. “I had looked over the shoulders of some of the private-equity guys who had put the money into The Huffington Post,” Bannon said. “The one thing they told me to explain the huge valuation is that it was not a content play but a technology play. They had Jonah Peretti—guy’s a genius—[who] at the time was walking me through the tech side of the business [and told me], ‘You’re really not thinking about traffic, you’re thinking about community.’ That always stuck in the back of my mind.”

  The other thing Bannon gleaned from Breitbart was the exhilarating, galvanizing power of being the bad guy, publicly despised by those whom you profess to oppose. “I realized I liked being hated more than I liked being liked—that’s when the game began,” Breitbart explained to Time in 2010. But where Breitbart’s “hatred” of his enemies often had a twinkle, Bannon took a more literal view of his role in the opposition.

  Over the next several years, as Barack Obama was elected and the Tea Party backlash arrived, Bannon continued making and producing documentaries—big, crashing, opinionated films with Wagner scores and martial imagery: Border Wars: The Battle Over Illegal Immigration (2006), on clashes at the U.S.–Mexico border; Battle for America (2010), celebrating the rise of the Tea Party; and Generation Zero (2010), examining the roots of the financial meltdown. By then he had become a full-blown populist critic of Wall Street. “Here’s what changed,” said Bannon. “What Goldman represented in the 1980s was that they were principal providers of capital formation. I
t was all about [fostering] growth. Growth is good. If you went to Goldman when I did, the elite branch of the firm was investment banking, and the most elite was M & A. The traders were guys from Queens. They were just beginning the quant age.” Bannon claimed he could no longer recognize the world he had known and the values it embraced, and he was repelled by the new one that had taken its place. He thought there was a cinematic poignancy to the transformation. “It’s like watching the movie Wall Street when Charlie Sheen first walks into the trading room,” he said, describing his younger self. “Then cut to 2008, when I come back from Asia, and investment banks had become highly leveraged hedge funds. That’s where they make all the money. And they wrecked the economy.”

  This is the standard populist critique of the financial crisis, routinely espoused by liberals and many conservatives alike. That Bannon’s father lost a good part of his retirement savings gives it an especially personal gloss. But Bannon’s diagnosis of the cause of the crisis is where he parts company with Michael Lewis and other mainstream critics of Wall Street. Generation Zero is a film suffused with Andrew Breitbart’s influence: in it, Bannon blames liberal social policies for creating the culture of Wall Street permissiveness that ultimately led to the crash. “By the late nineties,” a narrator intones, “the Left had taken over many of the institutions of power—meaning government, media, and academe. And it was from these places and positions of power that they were able to disrupt the system and implement a strategy that was designed to ultimately undermine the capitalist system.”

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  As the 2010 midterm elections neared, Sarah Palin, still riding high from her star turn in the 2008 presidential campaign, approached Bannon to see if he would be interested in shooting videos for her. This struck Bannon as a near-perfect conjunction of timing, personality, and politics: Palin was the avatar of the Tea Party movement, a global phenomenon, and someone thought to be seriously considering a run for the presidency. Instead of just shooting video, Bannon made a full documentary movie about Palin, The Undefeated (2011), on which he reportedly spent $1 million of his own money. He went all-out.

  In the Bannon repertoire, no metaphor is too direct. The Undefeated is peppered with footage of lions attacking helpless gazelles and seedlings bursting from the ground into glorious bloom. Palin ate it up, and she traveled with her family to the first-in-the-nation caucus state of Iowa, trailed by hundreds of reporters, to appear with Bannon at a June premiere in Pella that the press thought might signal her entrance into the 2012 race. Before the curtain lifted, Bannon praised Palin’s rough-hewn prairie populism: “The hard-worn bricks outside the Pella Opera House are all the red carpet she needs.” The atmosphere was charged. That same day, Palin’s daughter Bristol told a TV reporter that her mother had made up her mind about a presidential run. Andrew Breitbart, who trekked to Pella to serve as ringmaster for the occasion, was as effusive in his praise of Bannon as he was Palin, remarking afterward that he considered Bannon to be “the Leni Riefenstahl of the Tea Party movement.”

  But Palin never took the plunge. And no other candidate struck quite the same chords. Instead, the locus of right-wing populism moved to the Internet, and to Breitbart News in particular. “Most conservatives are individualists,” Breitbart said. “For years, they’ve been pummeled by the collectivists who run the American media, Hollywood and Washington. The underground conservative movement that is now awakening is the ecosystem I’ve designed my sites to tap into.”

  One big draw of Breitbart’s underground movement was his flair for showmanship along with his embrace of stunt journalism, which occasionally broke through into the mainstream. Breitbart’s signature maneuver was the elaborate trolling operation aimed at some liberal icon or institution that exposed the hypocrisy at the heart of its enterprise. His first hit came in 2009, when he posted video of an amateur sting operation run by two conservative activists, James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles, against the liberal community-activist group Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a favorite bogeyman of conservatives. In the video, O’Keefe appears to solicit and receive advice from the group on running a brothel. Subsequent investigations found that the videos had been manipulated in the editing process to make ACORN look complicit, but Congress suspended the group’s funding anyway.

  The following year, Breitbart caused an even bigger uproar by posting video excerpts (once again furnished by a conservative activist) of a speech to the NAACP by a Department of Agriculture official named Shirley Sherrod. In the excerpts, Sherrod appeared to advocate anti-white racism. Within hours, she was fired, as the story blanketed cable news. But it soon became clear that the Breitbart News video was misleadingly edited—that Sherrod’s point, as the full tape makes clear, had been the opposite of what was portrayed. Fox News, which aggressively promoted the Sherrod video, banned Andrew Breitbart as an on-air guest.

  By then, Bannon was actively involved in the site and its business. When the Sherrod story blew up, he was out raising money to expand and relaunch Breitbart News. With the negative publicity, and the taint of racism, he suddenly encountered “nuclear winter.” And yet Breitbart himself was immune to shame—or at least, to being shamed—and had no compunction about launching vicious personal attacks. Upon learning of Senator Ted Kennedy’s death, Breitbart tweeted that Kennedy was a “villain,” a “prick,” and a “duplicitous bastard,” adding: “I’m more than willing to go off decorum to ensure THIS MAN is not beatified.”

  The ostracizing of Breitbart News didn’t last long. Less than a year later, the site caught Democratic representative Anthony Weiner tweeting pictures of his genitals. According to Bannon, the site helped to orchestrate his downfall: tipped to Weiner’s proclivity for sexting with female admirers, he said, the site paid trackers to follow his Twitter account around the clock and eventually intercepted the fateful crotch shot Weiner inadvertently made public.* As if orchestrated by some higher power, the ensuing scandal culminated in the surreal scene, carried live on television, of Breitbart hijacking Weiner’s New York press conference and fielding questions from astonished reporters. He was quickly welcomed back to Fox News. The experience taught Bannon the power of real news and how it could be exploited—a lesson he would soon have cause to put into practice.

  On March 1, 2012, with the relaunch of Breitbart News just four days away, Bannon was in New York City pitching investors when he got a phone call: Andrew Breitbart had been walking in his Brentwood neighborhood that morning when he collapsed and died of heart failure. He was forty-three. Feeling shell-shocked and duty-bound, Bannon made the decision to formally join Breitbart News, stepping in to become its executive chairman.

  At the funeral, Matt Drudge asked Bannon what he planned to do. Bannon replied: “We’re going ahead with the launch.”

  FIVE

  NOBODY BUILDS WALLS LIKE TRUMP

  Trump had been thinking about running for president for more than twenty years before he encountered Steve Bannon. During most of that period, they were not ideologically aligned. Trump did have long-standing impulses on certain issues that Bannon would have approved of—both believed, for instance, that the United States was constantly being victimized in foreign trade deals. But to the extent Trump expressed opinions on national affairs, they tended to reflect the views of a New York Democrat, which was, after all, the world that he inhabited. Then he met Bannon—and his views changed. Trump took up Bannon’s populist nationalism, with its chesty blue-collar ethos and disdain for corrupt “globalist” elites. But just as important to Trump’s path to the White House was what he chose to give up.

  On January 8, 2004, viewers of NBC’s prime-time television lineup got the first glimpse of a new show soon to become a cultural sensation. As a crow’s-eye view of the Manhattan skyline floated across the screen, Donald Trump’s unmistakable voice, all steely self-confidence, laid out the premise of his new series: “New York. My city. Where the wheels of the global
economy never stop turning.” The perspective jumps to the backseat of a limousine and a familiar figure: “My name is Donald Trump, and I’m the largest real-estate developer in New York. I own buildings all over the place, model agencies, the Miss Universe pageant, jet liners, golf courses, casinos.” As he climbs out of the limousine toward a “Trump”-emblazoned helicopter that awaits him, Trump delivers the payoff: “I’ve mastered the art of the deal, and I’ve turned the name Trump into the highest-quality brand. As the master, I want to pass along my knowledge to somebody else. I’m looking for . . . the apprentice.”

  Right out of the gate, The Apprentice was a hit. During its first season, the show drew an average of more than 20 million viewers a week. It was the dawn of the reality-TV era, and Trump’s cartoonish persona lent itself perfectly to the new medium. Each week, Trump would preside from a luxe, walnut-lined boardroom high up in Trump Tower,* as sixteen contestants competed against one another by running business projects, after which they would all assemble in the boardroom and submit themselves to Trump’s glowering judgment. Each week, at the end of the show, Trump would dispatch one of the contestants with his signature phrase: “You’re fired!”

  NBC executives were thrilled by the surprise hit on their hands. Until The Apprentice, the network had not managed to develop a successful reality-TV franchise, and it was falling behind its major competitors, CBS (Survivor, Big Brother) and ABC (The Mole). Trump’s success was all the more important to NBC because the show aired in a critical time slot—Thursday prime time—that for years had boasted a powerhouse lineup, most recently anchored by the ensemble comedy Friends. But by the spring of 2004, Friends was finishing up its final season. To NBC’s great relief, The Apprentice reached out and took the baton.

  The show’s fast success produced significant economic benefits for the network. It did so for Trump, too—but it also did something more. It indelibly established his national image. Mark Burnett, the show’s creator, had originally sold the concept to NBC as one where Trump would host The Apprentice for only the first season, after which he would give way to a succession of iconic business moguls, such as Richard Branson, Mark Cuban, or Martha Stewart. That idea quickly fell by the wayside. “After the first episode,” recalled Jeff Gaspin, who ran reality programming for NBC, “we said we want more Trump.”