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

by Joshua Green

  Many of these signals were modest at best, difficult to detect and even harder for most people to profit from. But for Renaissance they held two great advantages. Stronger signals meant that other quantitative traders would be more likely to pick up on them, too, causing the market inefficiency to correct. The subtler and stranger the correlation—like the relationship between sunny weather and rising markets—the less likely that others would spot it and cause it to go away. “The signals that we have been trading without interruption for fifteen years make no sense,” Mercer explained to Mallaby in a rare interview in 2008. “Otherwise someone else would have found it.”

  The other advantage Renaissance held was its ability to exploit these faint patterns, even if they were individually modest. Because trades were made algorithmically by computers, it didn’t require much human effort to make hundreds or thousands of quick trades to capture small profits. Collectively, those profits added up. Where human ingenuity came into play was in building the infrastructure that tied all these programs together into a seamless, humming machine. The system’s architecture and scope were Mercer’s constant, preoccupying concern. “I spent all my time thinking about the problem of coordinating everything,” he said in 2014.

  This openness to odd correlations and skepticism toward received wisdom paid enormous dividends for Renaissance and its employees. In 2016, Bloomberg dubbed the firm’s Medallion Fund “perhaps the world’s greatest moneymaking machine,” having by that point produced about $55 billion in profits during the twenty-eight years of its existence. Much of the firm’s success was driven by Mercer and Brown, who took over as co-CEOs when Simons retired in 2009.

  When Mercer’s interest in right-wing politics began to blossom two years later, his instincts didn’t lead him to seek out the wisdom of the GOP establishment—wisdom that had, not incidentally, produced the disastrous loss of the White House and both houses of Congress by 2008. They led him instead to charismatic, peripheral figures with dramatic, world-changing ideas—people such as Andrew Breitbart, whom Mercer met in 2011 at a conference held by the conservative group Club for Growth. And they led him to Steve Bannon, whom he met shortly afterward. As a glance across Mercer’s lawn at Christmastime would confirm, his interests, and his generous sponsorships, were broad-based and varied. But by every account, both he and Rebekah were thoroughly captivated by Breitbart’s zany, outsider approach to upending politics. The fact that most members of the Republican power structure viewed Breitbart as a loudmouth and a jester (and would come to view Bannon the same way) did not, in Mercer’s eyes, detract in any way from his appeal, and probably counted as a mark in his favor. What good was the collective opinion of the establishment, anyway?

  Through Bannon, the Mercers agreed to invest $10 million to help finance Breitbart News’ long-planned relaunch. The rollout was scheduled for the spring of 2012, but Breitbart didn’t live to see the result. After his sudden death a few days before the relaunch, the Mercers gave their blessing for Bannon to step in and take over the site. But Breitbart News was only a piece of a much larger system that Bannon wanted to build. There were other parts, too, and they would all work in harmony. Bob Mercer and his family became their eager benefactor, because to him such an approach made intuitive sense.

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  The Mercer family was not Trump’s largest donor, but they were without a doubt the most important in helping Trump to win the presidency. There is no small irony in this fact, because Trump was not the candidate whom the Mercers initially backed in the 2016 Republican presidential primary. Ted Cruz was their first choice. The Mercers admired how Cruz had taken on the Republican establishment, going so far as to drive the shutdown of the federal government in October 2013 in an effort to slash government spending on health care. Republican leaders loathed Cruz, and yet he persevered in his criticism of them and in his strident right-wing politics. The Mercers gave $11 million to a Super PAC they established to support Cruz’s candidacy, hiring Kellyanne Conway to run it, and they organized other wealthy donors to do the same.

  Although the Mercers later switched their allegiance to Trump after Cruz dropped out, and gave millions more in support of his candidacy, their greatest impact on his behalf was indirect and aimed at helping Cruz. Through Bannon and his interlocking groups, the Mercers bankrolled the effort to discredit Trump’s eventual opponent, Hillary Clinton, who everyone in politics had long assumed would wind up the Democratic presidential nominee. (The Mercers had simply expected that Cruz would be her opponent.)

  To Bob Mercer, the plot to tear down Clinton may have held greater appeal than his support for a Republican alternative because, according to former Renaissance employees, he had long been convinced of the Clintons’ treachery. Nick Patterson, a computational biologist who worked with Mercer in the 1990s, claims that at a Renaissance staff luncheon during Bill Clinton’s presidency, Mercer declared that Clinton, while governor of Arkansas, had been involved in a CIA-backed drug-running scheme based out of the Mena, Arkansas, airport—a conspiracy theory that circulated in extreme right-wing circles at the time. “Bob told me he believed that the Clintons were involved in murders connected to it,” Patterson said.

  Bannon’s plan to stop Hillary Clinton was multifaceted and years in the making. It was built primarily on four organizations, each of which the Mercers funded or had a stake in (they also compensated Bannon directly). The first was Breitbart News, whose staff and audience grew rapidly after the Mercers’ $10 million investment in 2012. Although much of the site’s energy was devoted to attacking establishment Republicans, such as former House Speaker John Boehner and his successor, Paul Ryan, Breitbart’s constant stream of outrageously critical stories about the Clintons made it a natural rallying point for conservative readers and a steady source of material for high-profile Clinton-hating sites like the Drudge Report.

  The second organization was the Government Accountability Institute, a nonprofit research group based in Tallahassee, Florida, that was established in 2012 to serve as a home for Peter Schweizer, the conservative researcher whose book on Ronald Reagan had been the basis of Bannon’s filmmaking debut in 2004. In the years after his book was published, Schweizer had become increasingly consumed with the issue of Washington cronyism, and his interests turned toward exposing this culture. In 2011 he published an investigative book, Throw Them All Out: How Politicians and Their Friends Get Rich Off Insider Stock Tips, Land Deals, and Cronyism That Would Send the Rest of Us to Prison. The book had a real effect, catching the attention of 60 Minutes and leading Congress to pass a law, the STOCK (Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge) Act, which aimed to curb the abuses Schweizer documented. Bannon told him that he ought to focus next on the cronyism endemic to the Clintons, and that financial help would be forthcoming if he was to agree. “He told me, ‘I know people who will support this kind of work,’” Schweizer said. In 2013, the Mercer Family Foundation contributed a million dollars to GAI, which hired Schweizer as its president. Rebekah Mercer took a seat on the board. The following year, the foundation contributed another million dollars, and in 2015, it upped that amount to $1.7 million, which constituted the overwhelming majority of GAI’s budget. The investment paid off. That year, Schweizer’s book Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, was published by HarperCollins, just as Clinton was preparing to launch her candidacy. The book dominated the national political conversation for weeks on end, doing more to shape Clinton’s image in a negative way than any of her Republican detractors could.

  The third Mercer-backed group was a film production company called Glittering Steel, which Bannon and Rebekah Mercer established to make movies and political advertisements. According to Bannon, Glittering Steel had ambitions not only to influence politics but also to become a commercially successful producer of Christian-themed movies, an endeavor that greatly excited Rebekah, who home-schooled her four children.
It held allure for Bannon as well. During his Hollywood years, he was part of a discreet network of religious conservatives in the film industry that was loosely organized by the Wilberforce Forum—an evangelical group chaired by the reformed Watergate felon Chuck Colson—whose mission was to “shape culture from a biblical perspective.” This network included the actor and director Mel Gibson, whose 2004 film The Passion of the Christ had been an unexpected hit, as well as a producer of that film with whom Bannon briefly teamed up to make a documentary on Pope Benedict XVI. Although Glittering Steel didn’t turn out any commercially successful films, it did produce a movie version of Clinton Cash that appeared in 2016, just as the general election race was kicking off. The film debuted during the Cannes Film Festival,* on the French Riviera, where Rebekah Mercer entertained guests, including Bannon, aboard the family’s 203-foot luxury super yacht, Sea Owl.

  The fourth Mercer-funded outfit was a business after Robert Mercer’s own heart, the U.S. offshoot of a British data analytics company, Strategic Communication Laboratories, that advised foreign governments and militaries on influencing elections and public opinion using the tools of psychological warfare. The American affiliate of SCL, of which Robert Mercer became principal owner, was christened Cambridge Analytica. (Bannon, too, took an ownership stake and a seat on the company’s board.) The purpose of acquiring a major stake in a data company was to equip the Mercer network with the kind of state-of-the-art technology that had been glaringly absent from Mitt Romney’s campaign. It also allowed the Mercers to build out an infrastructure for sophisticated messaging and strategy that would be independent of the institutional Republican Party (an impulse shared by their fellow billionaires, David and Charles Koch, who also spent tens of millions of dollars building an alternative party structure, so disillusioned were they by the ineptitude of the GOP). Rebekah Mercer, who gained a fast reputation for aggressively involving herself in the campaigns of politicians she backed, made clear that as a condition of her financial support, she expected that campaigns would hire Cambridge Analytica to do their data work. Whenever necessary, Bannon played the role of heavy.

  By the time Clinton launched her presidential campaign in April 2015, all four of these groups were up and running like the machine they were envisioned to be. But the collective power of the Bannon-Mercer project wasn’t obvious to many people at the time. Trump was still considered a carnival sideshow, Breitbart News a site for trolls and crazies, and Bannon a fringe figure who wouldn’t possibly factor into something as large and important as a presidential race. These were all assumptions the Clinton brain trust would come to bitterly regret. “One of the realities that I don’t think was truly appreciated by our campaign,” Brian Fallon, Clinton’s communications director, admitted after the election, “was just how profound the Breitbart effect was in cultivating a standalone ecosystem in conservative media that very aggressively and successfully promoted certain stories and narratives we had a blind spot for during the campaign.”

  The Mercers cut a higher profile, as is typically the case when billionaires—especially eccentric ones—decide to direct part of their fortune toward influencing electoral politics. The family’s public image as sinister masterminds of Republican politics has only mushroomed since Trump’s victory. What’s most interesting about the Mercers, however, is that their true role in the election belies this breathless coverage. After all, their preferred candidate didn’t win. And yet their virtually limitless resources wound up working on behalf of the man who did win: the candidate preferred by Steve Bannon. It’s standard practice for ultrarich people with an interest in politics to hire an adviser to counsel them on where to direct their money. What’s so unusual about the relationship between Bannon and the Mercers is that it reversed the normal power dynamic. Typically, the adviser is a well-paid employee, a kind of political maître d’ who oversees campaign donations and arranges meetings with Washington heavyweights. That person functions as a clear subordinate to his wealthy benefactor. In Bannon’s case, the relationship was inverted. Instead of the help, he became the Svengali. And the Mercers, whether or not they fully appreciated it, became the merchant bankers funding Bannon’s broad-ranging ambitions.

  SEVEN

  A ROLLING TUMBLEWEED OF WOUNDED MALE ID AND AGGRESSION

  It was nearing midnight as Bannon pushed past the bluegrass band in his living room and through a crowd of Republican congressmen, political operatives, and a few stray Duck Dynasty cast members. He was trying to make his way back to the SiriusXM Patriot radio show, broadcasting live from a cramped corner of the fourteen-room town house a stone’s throw from the Supreme Court that served as the Washington headquarters for Breitbart News. It was late February 2015, the annual Conservative Political Action Conference was in full swing, and Bannon, as usual, was the whirlwind at the center of the action.

  Earlier that day, Trump had made his annual CPAC speech to only middling applause, going on for so long that many people in the audience drifted away. When he finished, Sean Hannity of Fox News, wearing a bright red Trump-branded necktie, strode out to the lectern where Trump stood and awkwardly interviewed him about the likelihood that he would run for president. “One to a hundred, I would say 75 and 80 [percent],” Trump replied. “I want to do it so badly. You know, I have the theme. It’s my theme. It’s ‘Make America Great Again.’ That’s what I want to do.”

  But Trump didn’t even rate as the day’s most popular reality-TV star—Bannon outdid him. He’d spent the day at CPAC squiring around an unlikely pair of guests: Nigel Farage, the leader of the right-wing UK Independence Party, and Phil Robertson, the bandanna’d, ayatollah-bearded Duck Dynasty patriarch who was accepting a free-speech award. CPAC is a beauty contest for Republican presidential hopefuls. But Robertson, a novelty adornment invited after A&E suspended him for denouncing gays, delivered a wild rant about beatniks and sexually transmitted diseases that had upstaged them all, to Bannon’s evident delight. Afterward, everyone piled into party buses and headed for the Breitbart town house.

  Ordinarily, the town house was crypt-quiet and felt like a museum, as it was faithfully decorated down to its embroidered yellow silk curtains and painted murals in authentic Lincoln-era detail. Bannon slept in an upstairs bedroom when he was in town, while down below, the Breitbart newsroom operated out of the chilly basement. On this February night, however, the furniture was gone, a makeshift bar had been installed to serve “moonshine”—his wink at the Dynasty guests—and the party was jam-packed and roaring. Bannon was in high spirits. Along with his CPAC triumph, the Clinton book he had secretly conceived with Peter Schweizer, a full two years in the making, was almost finished being vetted by his lawyers. Bannon was certain it would upend the presidential race. “Dude, it’s going to be epic,” he insisted to a guest.

  Somewhere, Hillary Clinton was carefully charting her path to the White House. Six weeks hence, on April 12, she would formally announce her presidential run and then steel herself, as she always did, for a barrage of attacks from the right. Clinton had long ago identified a “vast right-wing conspiracy” bent on tearing down her and her husband. Still, she could not possibly have imagined quite what she was about to encounter—or that the person at the nexus of the vast new conspiracy against her was, just then, surrounded by drunken, sweaty members of a reality-TV dynasty who were hooting and making duck calls.

  Bannon thrived on the chaos he created and did everything he could to make it spread. When he finally made his way through the crowd to the back of the town house, he put on a headset to join the broadcast of the Breitbart radio show already in progress. It was his way of bringing tens of thousands of listeners into the inner sanctum of the “Breitbart Embassy,” as the town house was ironically known, and thereby conscripting them into a larger project. Bannon was inordinately proud of the movement he saw growing around him, boasting constantly of its egalitarian nature. What to an outsider could look like a cast of extras from the Island
of Misfit Toys was, in Bannon’s eyes, a proudly populist and “unclubbable” plebiscite rising up in defiant protest against the “globalists” and “gatekeepers” who had taken control of both parties.

  Just how Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty figured into a plan to overthrow the global power structure wasn’t clear, even to many of Bannon’s friends. But, then, Bannon derived a visceral thrill anytime he could deliver a fuck-you to the establishment. The thousands of frustrated listeners calling in to his radio show, and the millions more who flocked to Breitbart News, had left him no doubt that an army of the angry and dispossessed was eager to join him in lobbing a bomb at the country’s leaders. As guests left the party, a doorman handed out a gift that Bannon had chosen for the occasion: a silver hip flask with “Breitbart” imprinted above an image of a honey badger, the Breitbart mascot.

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  Bannon’s cult-leader magnetism was a powerful draw for oddballs and freaks, and the attraction ran both ways. As he moved further from the cosmopolitan orbits of Goldman Sachs and Hollywood, there was no longer any need for him to suppress his right-wing impulses. Giving full vent to his views on subjects like immigration and Islam isolated him among a radical fringe that most of political Washington regarded as teeming with racist conspiracy theorists. But far from being bothered, Bannon welcomed their disdain, taking it as proof of his authentic conviction. It fed his grandiose sense of purpose to imagine that he was amassing an army of ragged, pitchfork-wielding outsiders to storm the barricades and, in Andrew Breitbart’s favorite formulation, “take back the country.” If Bannon was bothered by the incendiary views held by some of those lining up with him, he didn’t show it. His habit always was to welcome all comers.