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

by Joshua Green

  “Trump is a great advocate for our ideas,” Sessions said. “But can he win?”

  “One hundred percent,” Bannon said, pacing back and forth in flip-flops in the front room of the Embassy. “If he can stick to your message and personify this stuff, there’s not a doubt in my mind.”

  “They already took me off Budget,” Sessions reminded him. “If I do this endorsement and it doesn’t work, it’s the end of my career in the Republican Party.”

  “It’s do or die,” Bannon replied. “This is it. This is the moment.”

  A day earlier, Chris Christie, a pillar of the GOP establishment, had stunned the political world by showing up unannounced to endorse Trump at a rally in Texas. Bannon reminded Sessions that a nod from him now, with the SEC primaries looming three days away, could be decisive. The South could rise and deliver the nomination to Trump.

  Sessions agreed.

  “Okay, I’m all-in,” he said. “But if he doesn’t win, it’s over for me.”

  —

  Just as the sun was beginning to set, Trump’s jet rolled to a stop in front of an airport hangar where an eager crowd had packed in for the rally. Afterward, Sessions climbed aboard the jet to meet with Trump and formalize their arrangement. The next day, when Trump resumed campaigning, Sessions was with him at a rally in Madison, Alabama, to deliver his endorsement and signal that the Tea Party wing of the GOP was on board with Trump.

  “I told Donald Trump this isn’t a campaign, this is a movement,” Sessions told the crowd. “Look at what’s happening. The American people are not happy with their government.”

  He left no doubt about his motivation.

  “You have asked for thirty years, and politicians have promised for thirty years, to fix illegal immigration,” Sessions said. “Have they done it?”

  “No!” the crowd roared.

  “Well, Donald Trump will do it,” Sessions said. “At this time, in my best judgment, at this time in America’s history, we need to make America great again.”

  And with that, Sessions donned a red baseball cap with Trump’s slogan emblazoned on the front.

  —

  Two days later, on March 1, Trump rolled up victories all across the South, winning the bulk of the remaining SEC primary states: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee. One major prize—Texas—eluded him by going to a native son, Ted Cruz. But Cruz’s victory was viewed as underwhelming because it fell far short of what he had once promised. “We are . . . very well positioned to do incredibly well on March 1,” Cruz had told his supporters in mid-December. “You look at the states in that SEC primary—Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and the great state of Texas—you couldn’t color a better map in terms of strong conservative, Southern Baptist, evangelical, veteran, gun-owning, God-loving states.” Over the next week, Trump racked up additional wins in Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi, and then added Florida on March 15.

  With Trump appearing all but unstoppable, the Republican establishment went into a full-blown panic and began exploring elaborate scenarios to deny him the nomination. Although most presidential hopefuls had by now dropped out of the race, Cruz, Rubio, and Kasich were still running and diluting the anti-Trump vote. One fleetingly popular scenario to stop Trump from becoming the nominee was for GOP delegates to coalesce around a white-knight alternative at the party convention in July. House Speaker Paul Ryan, who was Mitt Romney’s vice presidential pick and had no shortage of political ambition, emerged as the chattering-class favorite. “Everyone thinks he’s Republican Jesus,” a Republican Senate staffer told Politico.

  The possibility, however remote, that Ryan might steal the nomination from Trump sent Bannon into a panic of his own. He put Breitbart’s sharp-taloned Julia Hahn to the task of providing some less flattering comparisons. (An unnamed operative told her, “The Republican convention is the GOP establishment’s prom, and Paul Ryan is their Prom Queen.”) And he tried to rally his alt-right readers against the party’s mandarins. “Pepe’s gonna stomp their ass,” he said, referring to the racist frog.

  On April 11, as reporters filed in and out, Bannon sat in the Breitbart Embassy stabbing at a shrimp salad and plotting an all-out war to stop Ryan, of whom he was both fearful and dismissive—sometimes within the same sentence. Ryan, he fumed, was “a limp-dick motherfucker who was born in a petri dish at the Heritage Foundation,” a conservative think tank too close to the “globalist donor class” for Bannon’s tastes. He was also angry at the RNC, which had tried to get Breitbart to sponsor a primary debate and was now, he believed, conspiring with Ryan to box out Trump. “I wasn’t going to pay them half a million dollars to associate Breitbart with a failed brand like the RNC,” he said. “We drive the coverage.”

  The next day, the clamor over Ryan’s entirely hypothetical presidential bid reached such a pitch that Ryan felt obligated to hold a press conference and respond. He didn’t leave any wiggle room. “Count me out,” he said. “I simply believe that if you want to be the nominee for our party, to be the president, you should actually run for it. I chose not to do this. Therefore, I should not be considered. Period. End of story.”

  Bannon didn’t believe him. When a reporter who had interviewed him for a story about Ryan said he was dropping it in light of the news conference, Bannon was incredulous. “Just put the ‘file’ aside DON’T throw it away,” he emailed.

  His fears were overblown. On May 3, Trump won the Indiana primary in a rout, slamming the door shut on Cruz’s slim hopes for a comeback. “I said I would continue on as long as there was a viable path to victory,” a crestfallen Cruz said afterward. “Tonight, I’m sorry to say, it appears that path has been foreclosed.” Thirty minutes later, a tweet from the account of RNC chairman Reince Priebus, ghostwritten by his deputy, Sean Spicer, a notoriously poor speller, made the news official: “@realDonaldTrump will be presumtive [sic] @GOP nominee, we all need to unite and focus on defeating @HillaryClinton #NeverClinton.”

  The misfire seemed a portent of what was to come.

  —

  High up in his Trump Tower office, the nominee-in-waiting was greeting a steady procession of reporters, well-wishers, and shell-shocked Republican officials, sifting the elements of his upset victory. “It was a hard-fought battle,” Trump said, sitting behind a hillock of newspapers and glossy magazines piled up on his desk. “It was a nasty battle. They say the nastiest ever in politics.”

  It was May 17. The world had had two weeks to process the news that it would be Trump facing off against Hillary Clinton in the fall. And yet the surreality persisted. Trump was attempting to explain how he’d seized control of the GOP and what his vision was for the party now that he was firmly in charge. But he kept returning to the subject of his victory.

  “Let me just go here first,” he said. “So when I first decided to—I always say—take the deep breath and go down the escalator with my wife, I had watched [Fox News contributor] Charles Krauthammer, shortly before that, saying these candidates are the finest group of political talent ever assembled in the history of the Republican Party. That was maybe a week before I decided to go. And I sort of said to myself, ‘If that’s true, what am I doing this for?’ If they’re really that good. But you know, many people have said that, governors, senators—the finest group of talent.”

  A copy of Vanity Fair with a buxom, corseted Amy Schumer on the cover slid from the top of his pile onto the floor. Trump took no notice.

  Channeling a major theme on cable television, he wondered aloud how all the experts had underestimated him. What had they missed? “Maybe me,” he said, answering his own question. “Maybe they don’t understand me. Plenty of people that know me said I was going to win. And I deal at a very high level.”

  The important thing now was that Trump, having won, intended to affix the Trump brand on the GOP, as he did on all his acquisitions—an imminence he believed the party sh
ould be grateful for. “If I didn’t come along, the Republican Party had zero chance of winning the presidency,” he said. So the Republican Party was going to change.

  For all the drama he created, Trump alone had intuited that standard Republican dogma no longer appealed to large swaths of the party base. In fact, voters had grown frustrated, even disgusted, by the politicians who purveyed it. While overshadowed by his feuds and insults, Trump had conveyed and defended a clear set of ideas that drew record numbers of Republican primary voters, even though they frequently cut against right-wing orthodoxy: protect Social Security and Medicare benefits, defend Planned Parenthood, restrict free trade, avoid foreign entanglements, deport illegal immigrants, and build a wall. Trump had arrived at these heterodox views by doing exactly what politicians were supposed to do: listening to voters. “I’m not sure I got there through deep analysis,” he admitted. “My views are what everybody else’s views are. When I give speeches, sometimes I’ll sign autographs and I’ll get to talk to people and learn a lot about the party.”

  The problem, he’d concluded, was lousy marketing. Having absorbed the shortcomings of the Republican message, Trump had developed a better one: “America first.” He waved off complaints that the slogan was redolent of the anti-Semitism of Charles Lindbergh’s America First Committee during World War II. “I don’t care,” he said. “When you look at the voters, you see they want hope. There’s no hope. No hope. We’re taking care of everybody else. I’m for making America first.” Under Trump, things would be different. “Five, ten years from now—different party,” he said. “You’re going to have a worker’s party.”

  Trump thought the scale of his victory proved the strength of his proposals. “All these millions and millions of people,” he said. “It’s a movement.” That movement, and his willingness to break with party orthodoxy, he believed, endowed him with the power to win states in the general election that ordinary Republicans hadn’t carried in decades. “I think I’m going to do great in the state of Washington,” Trump predicted. “Ted Cruz wouldn’t even try. People say, ‘You’re wrong about this,’ but I think Oregon . . . New Mexico . . . Florida, that’s my second home, right? I think I’m going to do well in the three states they always talk about: Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio.”

  He went on to make a series of preposterous-sounding claims—almost all of which would be borne out in the end: he would win a larger share of African Americans and Hispanics than Romney had (they loved him on The Apprentice!); he would open up new electoral college paths for the Republican Party; he would defeat Hillary Clinton; and he would do all this without raising the $1 billion to $2 billion that modern presidential campaigns were thought to require.

  Trump didn’t have the typical qualifications of a major-party presidential nominee, this he admitted. But he insisted it didn’t matter. He had his movement, and his Twitter feed, and an instinct for devastating personal invective (“Lyin’ Ted,” “Little Marco”) that would now be directed at Hillary. He understood the media and how to manipulate it. And he had something that he thought was even more important than presidential qualifications: “I have the loudspeaker.”

  —

  Trump’s ascension was all the more incredible because of the constant, churning chaos within his campaign. Early on, when he was still regarded as a political punch line, Trump got advice from the mercurial Roger Stone and his protégé, Sam Nunberg. When Corey Lewandowski was brought into the fold, he began feuding with Stone and Nunberg. In late July 2015, Nunberg was fired from the campaign after racist Facebook posts surfaced that he’d written years earlier. Nunberg blamed Lewandowski and vowed to exact revenge. Stone quit a week later, frustrated by Trump’s attacks on Megyn Kelly at the GOP debate in Cleveland. (Trump claimed Stone was fired.)

  Lewandowski, a tightly wound loyalist who guzzled Red Bull energy drinks all day, made enemies inside and outside the Trump campaign—and also, fatally, among the Trump family. Through Lewandowski, the campaign chaos spread like typhoid through the broader Trump universe, afflicting Bannon and Breitbart. On March 8, the night Trump won the Michigan and Mississippi primaries, Lewandowski forcefully grabbed Michelle Fields, the Breitbart News reporter, as she approached Trump to ask a question after a news conference in Jupiter, Florida. Fields claimed she’d been assaulted and tweeted a picture of her bruises. This set off an incendiary debate within Breitbart. Some staffers openly doubted Fields’s account. Bannon, who was close to Lewandowski, did nothing to defend her. Aghast that Breitbart seemed to side with Trump and Lewandowski over its own employee, Fields and two other staffers quit in protest. Lewandowski, unrepentant, called Fields “delusional.” Jupiter police disagreed and charged him with battery; the charge was later dropped.

  Although Lewandowski survived, he didn’t last long. “Trump treats you like a son if he likes you,” said Nunberg. “Corey’s mistake was that he really thought he was one and that he could move against other members of the family.” In June, amid growing Republican alarm over Trump’s failure to prepare for the general election, Trump’s adult children and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, began to take a firmer hand. Sensing his authority threatened, Lewandowski quietly struck back. Nunberg found out from a reporter that his nemesis was trying to plant negative stories about Kushner in the press, and he shared this information with Trump’s children. Ivanka Trump, Kushner’s wife, was furious. Meanwhile, Stone worked to undermine Lewandowski by persuading Trump to hire Paul Manafort, Stone’s ex–business partner, to oversee his delegate operation at the Republican convention.

  On June 20, at a meeting with Trump and his two sons, Don Jr. and Eric, Lewandowski was fired. Stone and Nunberg had their revenge.* Manafort rose to replace Lewandowski and prepare Trump to run a viable general-election campaign. Once a powerful Republican operative, Manafort had helped Gerald Ford block Ronald Reagan’s insurgency at the 1976 convention, and then worked for Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bob Dole. But he had long ago shifted his focus abroad to a roster of shady clients who included Viktor Yanukovych, the Ukrainian president and Vladimir Putin ally, who fled to Russia when violent protests drove him from the country; the Angolan UNITA guerrilla leader Jonas Savimbi; and Lynden Pindling, a former Bahamian prime minister accused of having ties to drug traffickers. But Manafort also owned a condominium in Trump Tower and would work for free—both qualifications that insinuated him into Trump’s favor.

  Where Lewandowski had encouraged Trump to follow his every impulse, Manafort tried, mostly in vain, to smooth the candidate’s rough edges, curb his attacks, and prod him to do something he loathed: ask rich Republicans for money. But Trump bridled at the attempts to control him. On the eve of the Republican convention, Clinton had raised $264 million to Trump’s $89 million. “It is like an epic disaster that is going to get worse,” said Rob Jesmer, a former head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Trump was still banking on his ability to dominate news coverage, which was free. But here, too, a problem had emerged.

  Fox News, which had dutifully fallen in line after Trump’s win, was engulfed in scandal after Gretchen Carlson, a longtime anchor, filed a lawsuit on July 6 charging Roger Ailes with sexual harassment. Three days later, New York published the accounts of six more women who claimed Ailes harassed them. The TV legend, once thought invincible, suddenly looked less so. Rupert Murdoch had always protected him. But Murdoch was eighty-five years old, and his sons James and Lachlan, both top executives at Fox’s parent company, 21st Century Fox, took a dim view of Ailes.

  Desperate for allies who would aggressively defend him, Ailes reached out to Bannon through an intermediary. The two hadn’t spoken since their fight over Megyn Kelly the year before. But Bannon was sympathetic, believing that the timing of the lawsuit against Ailes was no accident—and was meant to overshadow Trump’s convention, set to begin on July 18.

  He called Ailes at his home and reached his wife, Beth. “Steve, I’m so glad you called,�
�� she said, passing the phone to her husband.

  Ailes was blunt: “I need air cover.”

  Bannon was surprised at his desperation. “He was babbling,” he later told an associate. “He was in the fucking mumble tank.”

  The two men talked for an hour. In the end, Bannon agreed to put a reporter on the story and told Ailes he would “put up as spirited a defense as possible—typical Breitbart stuff.”

  But when 21st Century Fox hired the New York law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison to conduct an investigation of the charges, Bannon decided that Ailes was finished and called to tell him so.

  “You know, it’s over now,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” Ailes asked.

  “They hired an outside firm,” Bannon said. “They’re moving it out of the building—and you watch, Megyn Kelly will turn on you.”

  Ailes scoffed. “Rupert’s got my back,” he said. “The boys want to kill me, but Rupert won’t let me go.”

  The next day, Ailes called back, less sure of himself. He had tried calling the elder Murdoch, who was vacationing with his wife in the South of France and didn’t take the call.

  “It’s too hard to get through; he’s on a boat,” Ailes ventured.

  Bannon told him to get as much money as he could in a settlement and face up to the truth. “If somebody called him about a merger, he’d take the fucking call,” Bannon told Ailes. “You’re done.”

  —

  On July 19, the news broke that Kelly had indeed told the Paul, Weiss investigators that Ailes had sexually harassed her. Breitbart dutifully published Ailes’s last-ditch defense, a claim that Fox News’ entire prime-time lineup would quit if Ailes was forced out. That evening, New York reported, Ailes was banned from the Fox building, and his company e-mail and phone were shut down. On July 21, just hours before Trump was to formally accept the Republican nomination in Cleveland, Ailes agreed to a $40 million exit package. He was finished.