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

by Joshua Green

  “Steve, this isn’t fair, and it’s killing us,” Ailes said. “You have to stop it.”

  “Fuck that, that was outrageous what she did!” Bannon retorted. “She pulled every trick out of the leftist playbook.”

  “You’ve gotta knock this crap off, Steve.”

  “Not until she backs off Trump—she’s still going after him on her show.”

  “She’s the star of this network! Cut it out!”

  The call ended without resolution. Bannon and Ailes would not speak again for almost a year.

  Kelly indeed refused to back down, and mocked Trump during a weekend Fox News appearance by posing a rhetorical question: “If you can’t get past me, how are you going to handle Vladimir Putin?” On Monday’s Kelly File, she addressed the controversy in a direct-to-camera statement. “Mr. Trump is an interesting man who has captured the attention of the electorate—that’s why he’s leading in the polls,” she said. “Trump, who is the front-runner, will not apologize. And I certainly will not apologize for doing good journalism.”

  But what irritated Bannon even more was the sudden outpouring of support Kelly was receiving from people whom he considered sworn enemies of the conservative cause: Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, the “whole fucking cast” of CNN, and—most gallingly—Hillary Clinton, who he felt never met a gender controversy she wouldn’t exploit for political gain.

  The next day, in a fit of pique, Bannon and Marlow composed a point-by-point indictment of Kelly’s alleged transgressions and published it on Breitbart: “The Arrogance of Power: Megyn Kelly’s ‘Good Journalism.’” While it was an unvarnished depiction of Breitbart editorial sentiment, the piece served a double purpose: it kept the fight going. As Bannon confessed to an associate, “The [Web] traffic is absolutely filthy!”

  The blowback against Kelly and Fox News kept mounting. Trump was livid. Over the weekend, he had called Hannity and told him he was boycotting Fox. Fearful of the damage Trump could do to the Fox brand, Ailes relented and called him to apologize—a concession Trump tweeted out: “Roger Ailes just called. He is a great guy & assures me that ‘Trump’ will be treated fairly on @FoxNews. His word is always good!”

  Bannon, however, remained a problem. Breitbart wasn’t relenting. In fact, its attacks on Kelly were growing more personal. “Flashback: Megyn Kelly Discusses Her Husband’s Penis and Her Breasts on Howard Stern,” read a Breitbart headline on the one-week anniversary of the debate. Not knowing what else to do, Ailes dispatched his personal lawyer, Peter Johnson, Jr., to the Breitbart Embassy in Washington, D.C., to deliver a personal message to Bannon to end the war on Kelly.

  Bannon loathed Johnson, whom he referred to privately as “that nebbishy, goofball lawyer on Fox & Friends”—Johnson had leveraged his proximity to Ailes to become a Fox News pundit. When he arrived at the Embassy, Johnson got straight to the point: if Bannon didn’t stop immediately, he would never again appear on Fox News.

  “You’ve got a very strong relationship with Roger,” Johnson warned. “You’ve gotta stop these attacks on Megyn. She’s the star. And if you don’t stop, there are going to be consequences.”

  Bannon was incensed at the threat.

  “She’s pure evil,” he told Johnson. “And she will turn on him one day. We’re going full-bore. We’re not going to stop. I’m gonna unchain the dogs.”

  The conversation was brief and unpleasant, and it ended with a cinematic flourish.

  “I want you to go back to New York and quote me to Roger,” Bannon said. “‘Go fuck yourself.’”

  —

  Even as it captivated the public’s attention, Trump’s presidential campaign often seemed to exist as a thing apart from the real world of politics that only perpetuated itself through a willful collective suspension of disbelief. For all Trump’s success in the polls and debates, the prevailing assumption in Washington was that voters would come to their senses before the first ballots were cast, and this strange moment in American politics would pass. Perhaps because Trump’s insurgency had all the elements of a gripping reality-TV show, and he himself was sui generis, political analysts tended not to connect the Trump phenomenon to other developments occurring at the same time.

  But signs were emerging everywhere that they should. In September, the rising populist tide that was about to wash away the GOP presidential field first swept another major Republican figure out of his job. For the better part of three years, House Speaker John Boehner had struggled to contain a growing mutiny among his hard-right flank. Twice before, its members had launched rebellions to topple Boehner and failed. But by the fall of 2015, driven by the same metastasizing energy fueling Trump’s campaign, their influence had grown more substantial.

  For House Republicans, building an anti-establishment identity was becoming so important that membership in the conservative Republican Study Committee, which denoted one’s independence from party leadership, grew to encompass a majority of the caucus. This irked the most conservative members because it muddied the distinction they prized. So in early 2015, a few dozen broke off to form a new group, the House Freedom Caucus, that situated itself even further to the right. The group’s chairman, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, said the Freedom Caucus would be a “smaller, more cohesive, more agile, and more active” conservative group—“active” meaning “oppositional.” Other Republicans resented the HFC’s challenge. “They’re not legislators, they’re just assholes,” complained one GOP aide. “The craziest of the crazy.” Yet the HFC’s strident refusal to accept anything less than total victory—even under a Democratic president—set a standard that was amplified across the conservative universe by Breitbart News and talk radio.

  Over the summer, Mark Meadows, a North Carolina representative and founding member of the HFC, filed a motion that would trigger what amounted to a vote of no confidence in Boehner. It was a move that expressed the profound anger and frustration that had been building up in the party since at least the Tea Party wave of 2009. Republican leaders had repeatedly promised voters that if handed power they would unwind the major Obama achievements, from the Affordable Care Act to the Dodd-Frank financial reforms. And although they had gone so far as to shut down the government in 2013 in a failed bid to defund Obamacare, Republicans had controlled the House for almost five years and Obama’s programs remained intact. Republican voters had cynically been promised fast, easy solutions—so when Boehner couldn’t deliver, they were primed to chalk it up to betrayal.

  As the Summer of Trump carried into the fall, and Republican fascination with the norm-smashing front-runner kept growing, taking down a major party leader came to seem like a measure of the new populist strength. On September 5, Breitbart took aim with a story titled “Behind the Scenes with John Boehner’s Worst Nightmare: Mark Meadows Launches Mission to Fix Broken Congress.” At the same time, Trump was telling the country how easy it would be to strike deals, if only voters would choose the right leaders. “We are led by very, very stupid people,” Trump declared at a September 9 rally on Capitol Hill. But it didn’t have to be that way. “We will have so much winning if I get elected,” he vowed, “that you may get bored with the winning.”

  Caught between the pincers of Breitbart and Trump, Boehner had nowhere to go. On September 23, a Fox News poll showed that 60 percent of Republicans felt “betrayed” by their own party’s leaders. Small wonder. The next day, Boehner announced his retirement.

  The seismic news from Congress was enough to break through the wall-to-wall coverage of Trump and the presidential campaign. And the lesson it reinforced was the same one Trump was shouting from the campaign trail: if you don’t like your party’s leaders, you can get rid of them and install someone else.

  NINE

  “HONEST POPULISM”

  Trump’s fixation with Fox News was a powerful force throughout the campaign and the psychology of his relationship w
ith Rupert Murdoch almost filial. He often told intimates of how Murdoch, whose approval he craved, had once humiliated him. As Trump was preparing to launch his campaign, recalled one person to whom Trump told the story, his daughter Ivanka arranged a lunch with Murdoch to share the news. “Rupert had never had any interest in me at all,” Trump told this person. “He thinks real estate guys who made a bunch of money are a dime a dozen.”

  Soon after the three of them were seated and the waiter brought their soup, Ivanka spoke up: “My father has something big to tell you.”

  “What’s that?” Murdoch said.

  “He’s going to run for president.”

  “He’s not running for president,” Murdoch replied, without looking up from his soup.

  “No, he is!” she insisted.

  Murdoch changed the subject.

  Trump nursed the slight for months, seething at the indignity. “He didn’t even look up from his soup!” he’d complain. The insult weighed heavily on him, and it made Fox News a perennially fraught subject.

  —

  Trump’s willingness to flout any norm was a powerful source of his appeal. But sometimes it worked against him. Just before the Iowa caucuses, where Trump would at last subject himself to actual voters, he reared up and pulled a stunt that backfired.

  Soon after the August détente between Trump and Ailes, Trump’s feud with Fox News flared up again, driven by the issue he was most passionate about: his poll numbers. Throughout the fall, Trump took to Twitter to lambaste his nemesis, Megyn Kelly, for the alleged sin of highlighting polls that disfavored him while ignoring those in which he fared well. “Isn’t it terrible that @megynkelly used a poll not used before (I.B.D.) when I was down, but refuses to use it now when I am up?” Trump tweeted in November. He kept after her, calling her “dopey @megynkelly” and “highly overrated and crazy” and twice retweeting others who called her a “bimbo.”

  Whether Trump’s animus toward Kelly was emotional or strategic wasn’t clear. Either way, she loomed as a problem. Fox News was hosting a debate in Des Moines, four days before the February 1 Iowa caucuses, and Kelly was set to reprise her role as moderator. Trump was determined to assert his primacy and force her off the stage. A week beforehand, he tweeted: “Based on @MegynKelly’s conflict of interest and bias she should not be allowed to be a moderator of the next debate.” But Ailes knew a showdown would be ratings gold and stood firm. Trump, unwilling to submit, announced he would boycott the debate and hold a competing event to raise money for veterans. “Let’s see how much money Fox is going to make on the debate without me, okay?” he said.

  Trump’s confidence was aided by polls such as the Bloomberg Politics–Des Moines Register Iowa Poll, a legendary survey of support conducted by J. Ann Selzer, a longtime Iowa pollster widely regarded as the state’s finest. By tradition, the political world awaited Selzer’s final poll with bated breath, and when it arrived on January 30, it showed that Trump had overtaken Ted Cruz to seize a commanding 5-point lead, 28 percent to 23 percent. “Trump is leading with both the inner core of the caucus universe and the fringe—that’s what any candidate would want,” Selzer said.

  Yet on caucus night, amid a record turnout, Cruz won in a huge upset. Powered by Iowa’s large community of evangelical Christians, Cruz won 28 percent of the vote, Trump 24 percent, and Marco Rubio 23 percent. Trump, who had predicted “a tremendous victory,” looked shattered. “I love you people,” he told a crowd of supporters in West Des Moines that evening. “We will go on to get the Republican nomination, and we will go on to easily beat Hillary or Bernie or whoever the hell they throw out there.”

  No one believed him. What’s more, the outcome seemed to ratify every doubt political experts held about him: he hadn’t bothered to raise money or do the hard work of traditional campaigning, had little campaign infrastructure, no polling, a weak ground game, a volatile temperament, and what appeared to be a fatal inability to translate media attention into hard votes. It had taken quite a while, but in the end, just as those experts had predicted, voters had listened to Republican leaders and come to their senses. Even Trump admitted error: “I think some people were disappointed that I didn’t go into the debate.” To all appearances, the voters had forsaken him.

  But they hadn’t. Eight days later, on February 9, Trump stormed to a blowout win in the New Hampshire primary, more than doubling the support of the second-place finisher, John Kasich. “Wow, wow, wow,” a jubilant Trump declared afterward. “We are going to make America great again!” By any measure, Trump’s victory was a historic event—had anyone proposed a year earlier that Donald J. Trump, tabloid fixture and star of The Apprentice, would overwhelmingly carry any GOP primary, they’d have been laughed out of the room.

  All along, many of those closest to Trump believed that his true test would come in the Southern states that followed in the weeks after New Hampshire. During the fall, while other Republicans were blitzing states with early primaries such as Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, Trump was holding massive rallies in places like Alabama, which was bizarre according to conventional wisdom. Most reporters considered them an exercise in self-aggrandizement. In late August, Trump held a stadium event in Mobile, Alabama, which was so baffling to the local political cognoscenti that on the day he arrived, the front-page headline of the Mobile Press-Register read “Trump’s stumping in Mobile, but why?”

  There were two reasons for the perplexing strategy. The first was the Trump team’s belief that it could quickly lock down the nomination by winning the “SEC primary”—a nickname derived from the Southeastern Conference, the college-athletics powerhouse whose member universities included many of the states holding primaries immediately after New Hampshire’s. They included South Carolina (February 20); Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas (March 1), Kentucky (March 5), and Mississippi (March 8). Although there weren’t many reliable public polls of these states during the fall, the few that were published showed Trump performing well. As a Trump adviser explained on the eve of the August stadium rally in Mobile, “With the lead he’s got now in Texas, he feels that he can win the nomination on March 1 with a sweep of the populist, anti-establishment South.” Trump was also relying on data beyond poll numbers. “His brand and sales are strongest in the South,” the adviser added. “His TV ratings, his Trump resort guests—he thinks it’ll pay off.”

  The other reason Trump was focused on the Deep South was that he was trying to win the support of the man who introduced him in Mobile (and, in fact, resided there): Alabama senator Jeff Sessions. Well into the primary season, Trump lacked any endorsements from elected Republicans. No politician was as closely aligned with his positions as was Sessions, whose views on immigration and the GOP leadership—he was mainly against both—had made him an outcast in the Senate. Sessions could see that he and Trump appealed to the same type of voters: “a lot of middle-class working people, who don’t trust establishment messaging. I call it ‘honest populism,’” Sessions said in October. But he had withheld his formal support.

  Throughout the spring, Bannon was whipping the Breitbart staff like a jockey in the homestretch to champion Trump and scourge his opponents. Yet he rarely spoke directly with Trump, who didn’t seem to need much help and was not even particularly aware of what Bannon was doing. Trump’s singular media fixation was cable television—he didn’t listen to talk radio or go online to read Breitbart. Instead, Bannon’s major contribution during this period was brokering an alliance between Trump’s world and Sessions’s. In January, Bannon prevailed on Lewandowski to hire Sessions’s top aide, Stephen Miller, who had been smitten with Trump since his emergence as an immigration critic in 2014. Miller, too, shared Trump’s broader discontent. Just before joining the campaign as Trump’s senior speechwriter, Miller groused, “The Republican leadership is so out of touch with the conservative grass roots that I don’t have an adjective strong enough to describe it.”
(Luckily, Trump had plenty.)

  The urgency Bannon felt about Sessions and the South was alien to most Republican strategists and thinkers. For the better part of twenty years, the prevailing worry among the GOP’s intellectual class was that the party was too Southern—that its rootedness in Southern folkways and values would inhibit its ability to appeal to a rapidly diversifying national electorate, an idea whose clearest expression was Christopher Caldwell’s 1998 essay “The Southern Captivity of the GOP” in The Atlantic. Bannon believed exactly the opposite. He thought that the South—populist, patriotic, pro-military, and skeptical of immigration—was in fact the party’s salvation. Having drifted too far toward secular globalism, it needed to return to its roots.

  The same week in 2013 that Marco Rubio pitched Ailes and Murdoch on immigration reform over a secret dinner at News Corp., Bannon held a five-hour dinner of his own at the Breitbart Embassy to try to talk Sessions into running for president. “You’re not going to be president, and you’re not going to win the Republican nomination,” Bannon told him, as Miller looked on. “However, we can bill you as the agrarian populist and take trade and immigration and pull them toward the top of the party’s issue list.”

  In the end, Sessions wasn’t convinced. “I can’t do it,” he said. “But we’ll find a candidate who will carry that message.”

  Three years later, that candidate had revealed himself, and Sessions was sitting in a car at the Millington Regional Jetport in suburban Memphis waiting for him to arrive. But he was fretting over what he was about to do. It was February 27, 2016, and Trump had just upset Cruz to win the South Carolina primary. But Sessions was on the phone with Bannon—and had been for over an hour—anxious about the risk of becoming the first U.S. senator to endorse Trump. Fourteen months earlier, when Republicans took control of the Senate in the 2014 midterm elections, Sessions, the ranking member of the powerful Budget Committee, had been denied the chairmanship—punishment, he believed, for his aberrant ways. Now he wanted reassurance that giving his imprimatur to Trump wouldn’t cost him his political career.