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

by Joshua Green

  To all outward appearances, Bannon, wild-eyed and scruffy, a Falstaff in flip-flops, was someone whom the political world could safely ignore. But his appearance, and the company he kept, masked an analytic capability that was undiminished and as applicable to politics as it had been to the finances of corrupt Hollywood movie studios. Somehow, Bannon, who would happily fall into league with the most agitated conservative zealot, was able to see clearly that conservatives had failed to stop Bill Clinton in the 1990s because they had indulged this very zealotry to a point where their credibility with the media and mainstream voters was shot. Trapped in their own bubble, speaking only to one another, they had believed that they were winning, when in reality they had already lost.

  To stop Hillary, Bannon believed, conservatives needed to exert influence beyond their own movement, which would require them to abstain from indulging every outlandish Clinton conspiracy theory, as they had fallen prey to doing in the 1990s, when important Republican politicians such as Dan Burton were running around shooting watermelons with a pistol. In order to gain the necessary influence, Bannon thought, conservatives needed to build a political case based on documented facts that would discredit Clinton in the eyes of the people whose support she would need to win the election—not just voters, but the media as well.

  While Breitbart News could rally conservatives against Clinton, Bannon knew that such an openly partisan organ would never be seen as a credible messenger by Democratic voters or the guardians of mainstream news. “One of the things Goldman teaches you is, don’t be the first guy through the door, because you’re going to get all the arrows,” said Bannon. “If it’s junk bonds, let Michael Milken lead the way. Goldman would never lead in any product. Find a business partner.” That’s where the Government Accountability Institute came into play. Although it was funded by Mercer family money, GAI was, under the letter of the law, a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) research organization whose work, if it had merit, could safely be taken up by reporters and producers at nonpartisan media outlets without exposing them to charges of political bias. Leading GAI required Bannon to assume an entirely different profile from the one he cultivated at Breitbart. But having been so many things already in his career, he had no trouble adding a new role.

  As befitted someone with his peripatetic background, Bannon became a kind of Jekyll-and-Hyde figure in the complicated ecosystem of the right—he was two things at once. Through Breitbart, he could influence the right, and through GAI, he could exert a subtler influence over the left. This allowed him to marry the old-style attack journalism of Breitbart News with a more sophisticated approach, conducted through GAI, that built rigorous, fact-based indictments against major politicians and then partnered with mainstream media outlets to disseminate those findings to the broadest possible audience. The key was to pique the interest of a group of people every bit as obsessive and driven as hard-core partisans like Bannon: investigative reporters at major newspapers and TV networks.

  “What Peter and I noticed is that it’s facts, not rumors, that resonate with the best investigative reporters,” Bannon said, referring to GAI’s president. If they could amass enough unflattering facts about Clinton—ideally ones that hinted at larger stories—then reporters would eagerly chase after them. This would produce an elegant symbiosis. As negative stories sprouted up in the mainstream press, they would dampen enthusiasm among potential Clinton supporters, while serving as fodder for Breitbart News to stoke anti-Clinton outrage on the right.

  The biggest product of this system was the project Bannon was so excited about at Breitbart’s CPAC party: Schweizer’s investigative book, Clinton Cash. Its publication was the culmination of everything Bannon had learned during his time in Goldman Sachs, Internet Gaming Entertainment, Hollywood, and Breitbart News. It was, he thought, the key to orchestrating Hillary Clinton’s downfall.

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  Most days, Bannon could be found in his Mr. Hyde persona, in the Washington offices of Breitbart News. That’s where he was one day in late May 2015, a few days after Clinton Cash had rocketed to number two on the New York Times bestseller list. The book was creating a media frenzy that was pleasantly familiar to many Breitbart staffers.

  Bannon’s elevation to executive chairman of what was officially the Breitbart News Network had been sudden, but his new role was eased by the fact that the site was deeply imprinted with its founder’s DNA. Breitbart had developed a visceral feel for what kinds of stories would resonate and keep readers coming back for more. “To me, that was Andrew’s greatest skill set: knowing what stories would move the masses,” said Alex Marlow, who began as Breitbart’s assistant and later became the site’s editor in chief. “He learned that from Matt Drudge, who is the greatest conversation starter in American history.”

  Breitbart’s genius was that he grasped better than anyone else what the early twentieth-century press barons understood—that most readers don’t approach the news as a clinical exercise in absorbing facts, but experience it viscerally as an ongoing drama, with distinct story lines, heroes, and villains. Breitbart excelled at creating these narratives, an editorial approach that lived on after his death. “When we do an editorial call, I don’t even bring anything I feel like is only a one-off story, even if it’d be the best story on the site,” said Marlow. “Our whole mind-set is looking for these rolling narratives.” He rattled off the most popular ones, which Breitbart covers intensively from a posture of aggrieved persecution. “The big ones won’t surprise you,” he said. “Immigration, ISIS, race riots, and what we call ‘the collapse of traditional values.’ But I’d say Hillary Clinton is tops.” Often, the site managed to inject these narratives into the broader discourse.

  Although most famous for his outré media stunts, Breitbart could spot stories that others couldn’t (or wouldn’t) see—stories downplayed or buried on the back pages of newspapers—and billboard them with screaming, transgressive headlines. A scathing press critic, he claimed that the greatest manifestation of liberal media bias was the stories that news outlets chose not to tell. “Andrew always said, ‘If you look at the mainstream media, they’re all fishing for stories in one pond,’” recalled Breitbart president Larry Solov. “‘But there’s a second pond, and nobody’s fishing there.’” Only by wresting control of the news narrative away from mainstream outlets, Breitbart believed, could this imbalance be rectified. That was what Breitbart News aimed to do. “Our vision—Andrew’s vision—was always to build a global center-right, populist, anti-establishment news site,” said Bannon.

  Yet Breitbart’s definition of “news” differed markedly from that of the wire services in that it also encompassed political activism: it was news with a purpose. Much of the site’s energy was devoted to skewering liberal hypocrisy and highlighting ostensibly outrageous instances of political correctness. Unlike reputable news outlets, Breitbart was willing to publish dubious investigative “sting” videos shot by conservative activists, such as the 2009 ACORN tape or the Shirley Sherrod tape that was misleadingly edited to portray the Obama Agriculture official as an anti-white racist. And there was no parallel anywhere to Breitbart’s orchestration of Anthony Weiner’s downfall, not in his decision to publish an unverified photo of the married congressman’s crotch supposedly tweeted at a young paramour, and certainly not in the Barnum-like scene he created by hijacking Weiner’s press conference after the story turned out to be true. Episodes such as these sent a galvanizing charge into readers that no other conservative site could match.

  When Bannon took over, he wanted to ensure that Breitbart lost none of its combative zest. The main discernible difference under his leadership was an amplification of the nativist populism already evident in the site’s coverage and an emboldened desire to attack “globalist” Republicans along with Democrats. Operating from the basement of the Breitbart Embassy, Breitbart’s pirate crew became tribunes of the rising Tea Party movement and champions of Sarah Palin, with whom Banno
n was close, bedeviling GOP leaders and helping to drive the 2013 government shutdown.

  Bannon made another decision that wasn’t immediately obvious but that would have a significant effect on the size and nature of Breitbart’s audience—and eventually on the 2016 presidential campaign. He wanted to attract the online legions of mostly young men he’d run up against several years earlier, believing that the Internet masses could be harnessed to stoke a political revolution. Back in 2007, when he’d taken over Internet Gaming Entertainment, the Hong Kong company that systemized gold farming in World of Warcraft and other massively multiplayer online games, Bannon had become fascinated by the size and agency of the audiences congregating on MMO message boards such as Wowhead, Allakhazam, and (his favorite) Thottbot. “In 2006, 2007, they were doing 1.5 billion page views a month,” he recalled. “Just insane traffic. I thought we could monetize it, but it turned out I couldn’t give the advertising away.” Instead, the gamers ended up wrecking IGE’s business model by organizing themselves on the message boards and forcing the companies behind World of Warcraft and other MMO games to curb the disruptive practice of gold farming.

  IGE’s investors lost millions of dollars. But Bannon gained a perverse appreciation for the gamers who’d done him in. “These guys, these rootless white males, had monster power,” he said. “It was the pre-reddit. It’s the same guys on Thottbot who were [later] on reddit” and 4chan—the message boards that became the birthplace of the alt-right.

  When Bannon took over Breitbart, he wanted to capture this audience. Andrew Breitbart had drawn a portion of it enchanted by his aggressive provocations on issues such as race and political correctness. Bannon took it further. He envisioned a great fusion between the masses of alienated gamers, so powerful in the online world, and the right-wing outsiders drawn to Breitbart by its radical politics and fuck-you attitude. “The reality is, Fox News’ audience was geriatric and no one was connecting with this younger group,” Bannon said. But he needed a way to connect. He found it in Milo Yiannopoulos, a gay British tech blogger and Internet troll nonpareil.

  Hoping to appeal to the gamer audience, Bannon found Yiannopoulos through a friend while scouting for someone to launch a Breitbart tech vertical. “He sent me a résumé and the title of the book he was working on: The Pathological Narcissism of the Silicon Valley Elite,” Bannon recalled. “I said, ‘Whoa.’ Then I met him. When I saw Milo, it was the first time I saw a guy who could connect culturally like an Andrew Breitbart. He had the fearlessness, the brains, the charisma—it’s something special about those guys. They just had that ‘it’ factor. The difference was, Andrew had a very strong moral universe, and Milo is an amoral nihilist. I knew right away, he’s gonna be a fucking meteor.”

  At its essence, the alt-right is a rolling tumbleweed of wounded male id and aggression.* Yiannopoulos showed a flair for manipulating it. In contrast to the gadget reviews and company news that compose tech coverage on other sites, Breitbart focused on incendiary cultural issues such as Gamergate, the controversy over sexism in the video-game industry that involved a loosely organized campaign of harassment against female programmers. Yiannopoulos’s specialty became the intentionally offensive opinion piece that invariably provoked a high-traffic response, an editorial style adopted across Breitbart. Many of the site’s most offensive headlines were his. He was also fluent in alt-right obsessions and iconography, such as the alt-right’s mascot, Pepe the Frog.

  Yiannopoulos didn’t hide behind a keyboard; he also brought performative skills to his job. Like Breitbart himself, he delighted in taking the fight over “political correctness” to enemy turf, often liberal college campuses, where his visits would reliably incite an angry counterreaction that pointed out the hypocrisy of a censorious left supposedly committed to ideals of free speech and open debate.

  The purpose of all this incitement, at least in Bannon’s mind, was to entice the online legions into the Breitbart fold. “I realized Milo could connect with these kids right away,” he said. “You can activate that army. They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump.” In this way, Breitbart became an incubator of alt-right political energy. Although Yiannopoulos was most interested in cultivating his own celebrity—Bannon thought he looked like “a gay hooker”—he was more than willing to do his part and make the political connection explicit. “How Donald Trump Can Win: With Guns, Cars, Tech Visas, Ethanol . . . And 4Chan” read the headline of an October 2015 article he wrote.

  Trump himself would help cement this alt-right alliance by retweeting images of Pepe the Frog and occasional missives—always inadvertently, his staff insisted—from white nationalist Twitter accounts. Before long, denizens of sites such as 4chan and reddit were coordinating support for Trump’s campaign. One aspect of this “support” was flooding the Twitter feeds of prominent journalists, particularly Jewish journalists, with vile anti-Semitic imagery. A study conducted by the Anti-Defamation League found that 2.6 million anti-Semitic tweets, many of them directed at journalists, were sent in the year leading up to the election and that the “aggressors are disproportionately likely to self-identify as Donald Trump supporters, conservatives, or part of the ‘alt-right.’”

  Sometimes, Bannon’s impulse to attack led to egregious errors. The site republished as news a satirical story stating that Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate and liberal New York Times columnist, had filed for bankruptcy (he hadn’t). When Obama nominated Loretta Lynch for attorney general, a Breitbart reporter assailed her for having worked on Bill Clinton’s defense team (it was a different Loretta Lynch). “Truth and veracity weren’t his top priority,” said Ben Shapiro, a writer for the site who quit in 2016 over frustrations with Bannon. “Narrative truth was his priority rather than factual truth.” Bannon basically agreed. When the embarrassed Lynch reporter asked for time off, he refused to allow it, allergic to any hint of concession. “I told him, ‘No. In fact, you’re going to write a story every day this week.’” Bannon shrugged. “We’re honey badgers,” he explained. “We don’t give a shit.”

  With backing from the Mercer family, Bannon plotted a global expansion, opening Breitbart bureaus in London and Texas. “We look at London and Texas as two fronts in our current cultural and political war,” Bannon announced in 2014. “There is a growing global anti-establishment revolt against the permanent political class at home, and the global elites that influence them, which impacts everyone from Lubbock to London.”

  The type of reporters Bannon liked to hire were hyper-aggressive activist-journalists, whom he thought of as foot soldiers in the war he was waging. To lead his Texas bureau, he chose a former anarchist turned FBI informant. He described a pair of London hires as “real hell fighters in the Breitbart tradition.” His Washington political editor, Matthew Boyle, was notorious for threatening Capitol Hill press secretaries in both parties with damning headlines about their bosses if they didn’t immediately produce whatever information he was seeking.

  Perhaps Bannon’s most unusual Breitbart News reporting team—and one that shaped his thinking about how to go after Hillary Clinton, both before and after he joined the Trump campaign—was a group of beautiful young women whom he proudly referred to as “the Valkyries,” after the war goddesses of Norse mythology who decided soldiers’ fates in battle. They included Michelle Fields, an ambitious television and print journalist who, before joining Breitbart, had won early fame as a conservative YouTube celebrity and later became a Fox News contributor. There was also Alex Swoyer, a blond attorney and former beauty queen who had won the Miss Southwest Florida crown while attending the Ave Maria School of Law in Naples, Florida.

  But Bannon’s favorite Valkyrie, and his protégé, was Julia Hahn, a whip-smart twenty-five-year-old who was raised in Beverly Hills and studied philosophy at the University of Chicago, where she’d written a thesis examining “the intersection of psychoanalysis and post-Foucauldian philosophical inqui
ry.” Hahn’s cherubic visage and impeccably sweet manners belied an intense commitment to Bannon’s brand of populist nationalism and a ferocious pen. Her favorite target was Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan, whose devotion to global free trade and open borders drew her scorching disapproval. Hahn charged Ryan with being a “third-world migration enthusiast” and “double agent” secretly pulling for Clinton. Once, while visiting his Wisconsin district to profile a challenger, someone pointed out Ryan’s home, which Hahn immediately noticed was surrounded by a sturdy fence. She leaped out of the car to snap pictures, which later accompanied her classic Breitbart article “Paul Ryan Builds Border Fence Around His Mansion, Doesn’t Fund Border Fence in Omnibus.” Bannon loved it. “When she comes into your life,” he bragged, “shit gets fucked up.”

  As he schemed about how to impugn the Clintons, Bannon kept returning to the former president’s sex scandals—a humiliating subject for Hillary Clinton but a dangerous one for Republicans, whose monomaniacal pursuit and impeachment of Bill Clinton was a leading example of the overreach Bannon was keen to avoid. The sudden downfall of Bill Cosby, whose serial predations had come roaring back into the news after the comedian Hannibal Buress brought them up in a show, led Bannon to wonder if the Clintons might not be newly vulnerable as well. Quizzing the Valkyries convinced him that they were. Bannon often used the young women as a kind of in-house focus group of millennial voter sentiment. The Clinton scandals might be old news to his generation, he admitted, “but these girls have never heard most of this stuff.” Furthermore, millennials had just eclipsed baby boomers as the largest voting-eligible demographic in America.

  By the time Trump joined the presidential race in June 2015, Bannon was fully convinced. “I’m a big believer in generational theory,” he said one day, sitting in the dining room of the Breitbart Embassy. “There’s a whole generation of people who love the news but were seven or eight years old when this happened and have no earthly idea about the Clinton sex stuff.” While it was still too soon to make hay of this issue, a time would come when it would be ripe to be deployed. “I think that has to be concentrated and brought up,” he said.