by Joshua Green
Although Manafort averted a delegate revolt, the GOP Convention was not much sunnier. Instead of the patriotic pageantry Republicans typically produce, the four-day event was a strange, dark, almost dystopian affair whose attempt to unify the party was marred by Ted Cruz’s public refusal to endorse Trump, prompting the crowd to boo him off the stage during prime time.
On Thursday night, in his acceptance speech, Trump declared that it was “a moment of crisis in our nation.” He laid out a portrait of carnage, citing homicide rates and describing individual murders. “The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life,” he warned. “Any politician who does not grasp this danger is not fit to lead our country.”
Trump’s speech was widely panned and seemed to foredoom his campaign. In the weeks that followed, his poll numbers slid further after he engaged in extended attacks on the parents of a slain Muslim American war hero, Khizr and Ghazala Khan, who had spoken at the Democratic convention. Trump also suggested that Cruz’s father might have been involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. And he invited Russia to interfere in the U.S. election, stating at a news conference: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand e-mails [from Hillary Clinton’s private server] that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
By mid-August, Clinton’s lead over Trump was nearing double digits in many national polls, as pressure built in the Republican ranks for the RNC to cut off money to Trump’s campaign to try to save its House and Senate majorities. Many of Trump’s largest donors were desperate for him to shake up his campaign. One of them, Rebekah Mercer, boarded a helicopter and flew to meet Trump at the East Hampton estate of New York Jets owner Woody Johnson. She had insisted on a face-to-face meeting to deliver a message to Trump: it was time to make a change and let someone more aggressive run his campaign. She knew just the man.
TEN
BURN EVERYTHING DOWN
Rebekah Mercer was never one to hold back her thoughts. “This thing is over,” she told Trump, “if you don’t make a change fast.” She’d spent hours fielding calls from anguished donors. Her own family was into Trump for $3.4 million, more if you counted ancillary support such as Breitbart. The RNC, she told him, was days away from cutting him loose and turning its focus to saving the Republican majorities in the House and Senate.
“It’s bad,” Trump admitted.
“No, it’s not bad—it’s over,” she shot back. “Unless you make a change.”
Earlier that day, The New York Times had published an unsparing account of the campaign’s dysfunction (“Inside the Failing Mission to Tame Donald Trump’s Tongue”) that described how aides were so desperate to contain Trump’s outbursts that they were sending old friends like Rudy Giuliani and Mike Huckabee to babysit him on the campaign trail. Mercer told Trump that he needed to get rid of Paul Manafort, whose ill-conceived attempt to moderate him into someone acceptable to swing voters had plainly failed. Furthermore, growing attention to Manafort’s ties to pro-Kremlin autocrats was hurting Trump’s campaign.
“Bring in Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway,” Mercer told him. “I’ve talked to them; they’ll do it.”
Trump agreed.
It didn’t hurt that Bannon, Conway, and David Bossie were already involved in a Super PAC that was aiding Trump. Informally called the “Defeat Crooked Hillary PAC,” the Mercer-backed effort had been set up three months earlier, with a novel twist: it would only attack Clinton, not boost Trump. That way conservatives reluctant to support Trump could still donate in good conscience. (The give-to-stop-Clinton gambit didn’t work. According to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, the only substantial donations after the Super PAC shifted its focus to defeating “Crooked Hillary” came from Robert Mercer [$2 million] and Peter Thiel [$1 million].) After Cruz dropped out in May, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner had approached Mercer to ask if she would organize an effort to support Trump. She agreed. But the awkward truth was that most wealthy conservatives didn’t support Trump. The Clinton angle was a move born of desperation, and one that risked skirting federal election law. “Some donors don’t want to associate with something overtly pro-Trump,” Bossie admitted. “Technically, the name of the Super PAC is going to be ‘Make America Number 1.’ If we call it ‘Defeat Crooked Hillary,’ it’s an FEC violation.”
That night, August 13, Trump and Bannon spoke by phone and agreed to a deal: Bannon would take over the campaign (forgoing a salary, as Manafort had) and Conway would be named campaign manager. Bossie would later join as her deputy. Trump told Bannon to meet him the next morning at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.
The next day, a Sunday, Trump’s top advisers gathered at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, unaware of the leadership change that had been instituted the night before—or of their boss’s foul mood. At the table were Chris Christie, Giuliani, Ailes, who was now advising Trump, Manafort, and his deputy, Rick Gates. (Jared and Ivanka were yachting in Croatia with David Geffen and not present.)
Trump, who had been stewing over the Times article, exploded at Manafort.
“How can anybody allow an article that says your campaign is all fucked up?” Trump demanded to know, furious at his portrayal and at reports his aides were going on television in an effort to reach him.
“You think you’ve gotta go on TV to talk to me?” he shouted. “You treat me like a baby! Am I like a baby to you? I sit there like a little baby and watch TV and you talk to me? Am I a fucking baby, Paul?”
The room fell silent.
Manafort took the hazing in stride. It was hardly the first time Trump had lost his temper. And while he’d been demoted, he hadn’t been fired. Besides, he had a bigger problem to worry about. After the meeting, Manafort headed home to his Trump Tower condominium. On his desk was a printout of an article, set to run in the next morning’s New York Times. It explained how a Ukrainian government anticorruption team had discovered a secret handwritten ledger listing Manafort as the designated recipient of $12.7 million in previously undisclosed cash payments from a pro-Russian political party aligned with former president Viktor F. Yanukovych, Manafort’s client.
Although Times reporters had been pressing him for weeks to comment, Manafort’s attorney had advised him against it. Now Manafort was having doubts. He’d kept the news of the impending story from the Trump campaign. He’d even hidden it from his wife, who leaped up from the couch in fury when she found out that night.
On Monday morning, the Manafort story was splashed across the front page of The New York Times (“Secret Ledger in Ukraine Lists Cash for Donald Trump’s Campaign Chief”) and dominated the day’s news, overshadowing a high-profile national-security speech Trump was delivering in Ohio that afternoon. (Twisting the knife in his old rival, Lewandowski tweeted out the Times story.) Manafort fed the story, and ensured it would continue for at least another day, by finally issuing an on-the-record denial. “The suggestion that I accepted cash payments is unfounded, silly, and nonsensical,” he said, claiming that any payments were for staff, polling, and political research.
Manafort’s story was, a top Trump adviser later conceded, “a kill shot” that infuriated everyone in the campaign, no one more than the candidate himself. Having held back the news of Bannon and Conway’s takeover, the campaign announced it on Wednesday morning, hoping to snuff out the Manafort distraction. Initially, Trump’s team billed the move as an “expansion” rather than what it obviously was: a demotion. But by late Thursday, Trump had had enough and demanded Manafort’s scalp. “It’s like the French Revolution,” said Roger Stone. “The guys who are cutting people’s heads off at the beginning wind up getting their own heads cut off at the end.”
Kushner, now back from vacationing in Croatia, delivered the news at a Friday morning breakfast as diplomatically as he could. “We’ve really got a probl
em here, Paul,” Kushner told him. “You’re going to have to step down.”
But Manafort objected. “Well, I don’t want to do that, because it’ll look like I’m guilty,” he said.
Kushner pressed harder. “It would be helpful if you stepped down.”
“Yes,” Manafort replied, “but I can’t do that.”
At this, Kushner’s demeanor hardened and he glanced at his watch. “We’re putting out a press release at nine a.m. that says you’ve resigned,” he said. “That’s in thirty seconds.”
Manafort’s ouster extinguished the last vestige of hope for Republicans praying that Trump would at last pivot to a more statesmanlike approach. No one believed he had any chance of winning in November; their desperation, at this point, was driven purely by the desire to limit the scope of the expected GOP losses down the ticket. Bannon’s elevation was simply unimaginable, the Republican establishment’s worst nightmare come to life.
“This is the bunker scene in Downfall, only the Trump crowd won’t tell Hitler the truth. It’s utter madness,” said Stuart Stevens, who ran Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. “Trump is a nut, and he likes to surround himself with nuts. It’s a disaster for the Republican Party.”
Although few Republicans knew Bannon personally, many were acquainted with Breitbart’s aggressive, hard-edged populism, often because they had been on the receiving end of one of its journalistic assaults. Bannon, they understood, would pay no heed at all to the sensitivities of down-ballot Republicans, and indeed would gladly indulge Trump’s impulse to burn everything down.
“If you were looking for a tone or pivot, Bannon will pivot you in a dark, racist, and divisive direction,” said the GOP consultant Rick Wilson. “It’ll be a nationalist, hateful campaign. Republicans should run away.”
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By now, Bannon’s term for his politics, and Trump’s—“nationalism”—was already in wide circulation in the political press. But the term’s meaning was (and remains) confusing and has never been fully explicated. While Trump’s embrace of “America first” nationalism was chiefly due to its resonance as a campaign slogan, Bannon’s attraction to it had a far deeper and more complicated lineage.
From an early age, Bannon was influenced by his family’s distinctly traditionalist Catholicism and tended to view current events against the broad sweep of history. Though hardly a moralizing social conservative, he objected bitterly to the secular liberalism encroaching upon the culture. “We shouldn’t be running a victory lap every time some sort of traditional value gets undercut,” he said in 2015. While he was still in the Navy, Bannon, a voracious autodidact, embarked upon what he described as “a systematic study of the world’s religions” that he carried on for more than a decade. Taking up the Roman Catholic history first instilled in him at Benedictine, his Catholic military high school, he moved on to Christian mysticism and from there to Eastern metaphysics. (In the Navy, he briefly practiced Zen Buddhism before wending his way back to Tridentine Catholicism).
Bannon’s reading eventually led him to the work of René Guénon, an early-twentieth-century French occultist and metaphysician who was raised a Roman Catholic, practiced Freemasonry, and later became a Sufi Muslim. There are many forms of traditionalism in religion and philosophy. Guénon developed a philosophy often referred to as “Traditionalism” (capital “T”), a form of antimodernism with precise connotations. Guénon was a “primordial” Traditionalist, a believer in the idea that certain ancient religions, including the Hindu Vedanta, Sufism, and medieval Catholicism, were repositories of common spiritual truths, revealed in the earliest age of the world, that were being wiped out by the rise of secular modernity in the West. What Guénon hoped for, he wrote in 1924, was to “restore to the West an appropriate traditional civilization.”
Guénon, like Bannon, was drawn to a sweeping, apocalyptic view of history that identified two events as marking the beginning of the spiritual decline of the West: the destruction of the Order of the Knights Templar in 1314 and the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Also like Bannon, Guénon was fascinated by the Hindu concept of cyclical time and believed that the West was passing through the fourth and final era, known as the Kali Yuga, a six-thousand-year “dark age” when tradition is wholly forgotten.
The antimodernist tenor of Guénon’s philosophy drew several notable followers who made attempts during the twentieth century to re-enchant the world by bringing about this restoration. The most notorious of these was Julius Evola, an Italian intellectual and the black sheep of the Traditionalist family. A monarchist and racial theorist who traced the descent of the Kali Yuga to interwar European politics, Evola, unlike Guénon (a pious Muslim chiefly interested in spiritual transformation), took concrete steps to incite societal transformation. By 1938, he had struck an alliance with Benito Mussolini, and his ideas became the basis of Fascist racial theory; later, after he soured on Mussolini, Evola’s ideas gained currency in Nazi Germany.
The common themes of the collapse of Western civilization and the loss of the transcendent in books such as Guénon’s The Crisis of the Modern World (1927) and Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World (1934) are what drew Bannon’s interest to Traditionalism (although he was also very much taken with its spiritual aspects, citing Guénon’s 1925 book, Man and His Becoming According to the Vedanta, as “a life-changing discovery”).*
Bannon, more synthesist than adherent, brought to Guénon’s Traditionalism a strong dose of Catholic social thought, in particular the concept of “subsidiarity”: the principle expressed in Pope Pius XI’s 1931 encyclical, Quadragesimo anno, that political matters should devolve to the lowest, least centralized authority that can responsibly handle them—a concept that, in a U.S. political context, mirrors small-government conservatism.
Everywhere Bannon looked in the modern world, he saw signs of collapse and an encroaching globalist order stamping out the last vestiges of the traditional. He saw it in governmental organizations such as the European Union and political leaders such as German chancellor Angela Merkel, who insisted that countries forfeit their sovereignty, and thus their ability to maintain their national character, to distant secular bureaucrats bent on erasing national borders. He saw it in the Roman Catholic Church, whose elevation of Pope Francis, “a liberal-theology Jesuit” and “pro-immigration globalist,” to replace Pope Benedict XVI so alarmed him that, in 2013, he established Breitbart Rome and took a Vatican meeting with Cardinal Raymond Burke in an effort to prop up Catholic traditionalists marginalized by the new Pope.
More than anywhere else, Bannon saw evidence of Western collapse in the influx of Muslim refugees and migrants across Europe and the United States—what he pungently termed “civilizational jihad personified by this migrant crisis.” Expounding on this view at a 2014 conference at the Vatican, Bannon knit together Guénon, Evola, and his own racial-religious panic to cast his beliefs in historical context. Citing the tens of millions of people killed in twentieth-century wars, he called mankind “children of that barbarity” whose present condition would one day be judged “a new Dark Age.” He added, “We are in an outright war against jihadist Islamic fascism. And this war is, I think, metastasizing far quicker than governments can handle it.”
Bannon’s response to the rise of modernity was to set populist, right-wing nationalism against it. Wherever he could, he aligned himself with politicians and causes committed to tearing down its globalist edifice: archconservative Catholics such as Burke, Nigel Farage and UKIP, Marine Le Pen’s National Front, Geert Wilders and the Party for Freedom, and Sarah Palin and the Tea Party. (When he got to the White House, he would also leverage U.S. trade policy to strengthen opponents of the EU.) This had a meaningful effect, even before Trump. “Bannon’s a political entrepreneur and a remarkable bloke,” Farage said. “Without the supportive voice of Breitbart London, I’m not sure we would have had a Brexit.”
For all his paranoid alarm,
Bannon believes that the rise of nationalist movements across the world, from Europe to Japan to the United States, heralds a return to tradition. “You have to control three things,” he explained, “borders, currency, and military and national identity. People are finally coming to realize that, and politicians will have to follow.” The clearest example of Traditionalist political influence today is in Russia. Vladimir Putin’s chief ideologist, Alexander Dugin—whom Bannon has cited—translated Evola’s work into Russian and later developed a Russian-nationalist variant of Traditionalism known as Eurasianism.
Bannon initially thought restoration lay in a rising political generation still some years off: figures such as Frauke Petry, of Germany’s right-wing Alternative für Deutschland, and Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, niece of Marine, whose politics he approvingly described as “practically French medieval,” adding: “She’s the future of France.” It took some time for him to realize that in Trump (whose familiarity with French metaphysics, we can be certain, is no more than glancing) he had found a leader who could rapidly advance the nationalist cause.
In the summer of 2016, Bannon described Trump as a “blunt instrument for us.” But by the following April, Trump was in the White House and Bannon had raised his estimation of him to pathbreaking leader. “He’s taken this nationalist movement and moved it up twenty years,” Bannon said. “If France, Germany, England, or any of these places had the equivalent of a Donald Trump, they would be in power. They don’t.”
When he took over Trump’s campaign in August, Bannon did indeed run a nationalist, divisive campaign in which issues of race, immigration, culture, and identity were put front and center. This wasn’t by accident or lacking in purpose, even if the candidate himself didn’t care to understand its broader historical context. By exhuming the nationalist thinkers of an earlier age, Bannon was trying to build an intellectual basis for Trumpism, or what might more accurately be described as an American nationalist-Traditionalism. Whatever the label, Trump proved to be an able messenger.
