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

by Joshua Green

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  Bannon’s ties to Breitbart’s inflammatory journalism, and the anguish he caused Republicans, became the dominant focus of the political world in the wake of his elevation to run Trump’s floundering campaign. This overshadowed a different, more salient point about the shake-up: by installing Bannon, Conway, and later Bossie, Trump was handing the reins of a half-billion-dollar political enterprise to a seasoned team of professional anti-Clinton operatives. These three figures from the Republican fringe, and the menagerie of characters they brought with them, were suddenly in charge of running a major-party presidential campaign—against an opponent, Hillary Clinton, whom they’d been plotting to tear apart for the better part of twenty-five years.

  One weakness of Trump’s campaign was that it was guided almost entirely by the candidate’s impulses. Trump’s focus, especially when things were going badly, thrashed around like a loose firehose. He would attack Megyn Kelly one day, then go after the parents of a slain Muslim soldier the next. Another weakness was the lack of opposition research that a campaign would typically draw upon to frame its opponent—Trump’s only input appeared to be cable news.

  Bannon’s arrival neatly solved both these problems. He kept Trump focused on a clear target at which to direct his ample talent for attacking and belittling people: “Crooked Hillary.” And he brought an encyclopedic knowledge of damaging material with which to attack her, gleaned from having masterminded Peter Schweizer’s book Clinton Cash while he was at GAI. The book also gave Trump an overarching theme in which to fit his attacks, one that the media, thanks partly to Schweizer’s and Bannon’s own efforts, was already predisposed to accept: that Clinton was thoroughly corrupt.

  And because Bannon’s convulsive extremism was now going to set the tone, there would be no holding back. “The campaign has been too lethargic, too reactive,” he said, shortly after his hiring. “It’s not going to be a traditional campaign.”

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  On the first business day after Manafort’s firing, Trump put out a statement intended to reframe the race: “Hillary Clinton is the defender of the corrupt and rigged status quo. The Clintons have spent decades as insiders lining their own pockets and taking care of donors instead of the American people. It is now clear that the Clinton Foundation is the most corrupt enterprise in political history. What they were doing during Crooked Hillary’s time as Secretary of State was wrong then, and it is wrong now. It must be shut down immediately.”

  In the days that followed, the campaign flooded reporters and followers with dozens of press releases focused on the Clinton Foundation and the charge that Hillary was corrupt:

  “Clinton’s Corruption Exposed—Again” . . . “Hillary Clinton Short Circuits Trying to Defend the Clinton Foundation” . . . “ABC News Reports on New Clinton Foundation Corruption” . . . “Florida’s Largest Newspaper Calls on Clinton to Make ‘Clean Break’ from Corrupt Foundation” . . .Clinton Campaign: If You Don’t Like the Clinton Foundation, Don’t Vote for Clinton” . . . “More Editorial Boards Attack ‘Shady’ Clinton Corruption” . . . “Clinton ‘Used a Special Tool to Delete Emails so That ‘Even God Can’t Read Them’”

  Out on the stump, Trump wholeheartedly embraced the theme, ratcheting up and extending his extravagant denunciations of Clinton’s countless alleged perfidies. The crowd chant that had erupted during the Republican National Convention—“Lock her up! Lock her up!”—now became a mainstay of Trump’s rallies, as popular with audiences as his greatest hit, “Build the Wall!” Trump’s supporters, many wearing “Hillary for Prison” T-shirts, came to anticipate it, shaking their fists and shouting the refrain at the top of their lungs.

  None of this seemed to matter a whit, at least not in August or September. Trump still trailed in nearly every national poll, as well as in those of most critical swing states. What it seemed like instead was the parochial obsession of a bunch of right-wing cranks who, having found themselves in charge of a presidential campaign, were feeling their oats in a way they never imagined could be possible. And yet the consistent theme of Clinton’s corruption, hammered on day in and day out, was seeping into the consciousness of millions of Americans who, despite what the polls were saying, had not yet made up their minds.

  Many Democrats privately exulted over Trump’s choice of Bannon, believing that the pair would blow up the GOP. Clinton and her staff sensed an opportunity. After Trump’s string of early August setbacks, Clinton had granted herself license to take two weeks off from the campaign trail, disappearing from the public eye as she swept through wealthy enclaves such as the Hamptons, Nantucket, and Beverly Hills, vacationing and fund-raising with the likes of Justin Timberlake, Cher, and Jimmy Buffett. But the chance to damage Trump by highlighting Bannon’s extremism was enough to lure her away, briefly, from the billionaires and celebrities.

  The idea was hatched by two of her senior aides, Jennifer Palmieri and Jake Sullivan: Clinton would deliver a major speech in Reno, Nevada, highlighting Bannon’s ties to the alt-right. The term “alt-right” itself had no fixed meaning. In its broadest sense, it encompassed the spectrum of groups left over if you took everyone to the right of center and subtracted mainstream Republicans and neoconservative foreign-policy hawks: populists, libertarians, immigration restrictionists, reactionaries, paleoconservatives, white supremacists, and full-on neo-Nazis. This catchall definition is what Bannon had had in mind when, in July, he told a journalist at Mother Jones that he considered Breitbart a “platform for the alt-right.”

  But Clinton, in her August 25 speech, cleverly defined “alt-right” to mean only white supremacists and Nazis, taking the sins of the racist fringe and stretching them to cover the whole group. Clinton’s staff debated whether to put “alt-right” in the headline of the press release, and finally decided that they should. “The term was just beginning to enter the political lexicon,” a Clinton adviser explained, “and we thought it would be catnip that would fuel people’s curiosity [about the alt-right] and what Bannon’s place was in that world. Trump’s campaign was built on stoking xenophobic impulses, so you could take a process story on Bannon’s hire and turn it into a bigger critique of how Trump was uniquely unacceptable.”

  Clinton rose to the task. “Trump,” she declared, to a multicultural audience at a community college, “is reinforcing harmful stereotypes and offering a dog whistle to his most hateful supporters. It’s a disturbing preview of what kind of president he’d be. And that’s what I want to make clear today: a man with a long history of racial discrimination, who traffics in dark conspiracy theories drawn from the pages of supermarket tabloids and the far, dark reaches of the Internet, should never run our government or command our military.”

  Having established her premise, Clinton turned her attention to Bannon and Breitbart: “The latest shake-up was designed to ‘Let Trump be Trump.’ To do that, he hired Stephen Bannon, the head of a right-wing website called Breitbart.com, as campaign CEO. To give you a flavor of his work, here are a few headlines they’ve published:

  Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy.

  Would You Rather Your Child Had Feminism or Cancer?

  Gabby Giffords: The Gun Control Movement’s Human Shield.

  Hoist It High and Proud: The Confederate Flag Proclaims a Glorious Heritage.

  She continued: “According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, Breitbart embraces ‘ideas on the extremist fringe of the conservative right.’ This is not conservatism as we have known it. This is not Republicanism as we have known it. These are race-baiting ideas, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant ideas, anti-woman—all key tenets making up an emerging racist ideology known as the ‘alt-right.’ . . . The de facto merger between Breitbart and the Trump campaign represents a landmark achievement for the alt-right. A fringe element has effectively taken over the Republican Party.”

  Most voters (and many journalists) were unfamiliar with
the term and accepted Clinton’s definition of it, which set off a clamor to explain and explore the murky underworld she had described. In fact, Clinton’s speech wasn’t far off the mark—certainly not her line about “the far, dark reaches of the Internet,” nor her contention that a fringe element was taking over the GOP.

  And if Bannon didn’t embrace anti-Semitism and white supremacy—as he repeatedly insisted he did not, noting that both Andrew Breitbart and Larry Solov were Jewish—neither did he appear to be especially troubled by it. Asked at the 2014 Vatican conference about the racist element found in many far-right parties, Bannon replied that “over time it all gets kind of washed out.” He seemed to regard it as an unavoidable evil, a kind of way station on the path to populist triumph. “When you look at any kind of revolution—and this is a revolution—you always have some groups that are disparate,” he’d said. “I think that will all burn away over time and you’ll see more of a mainstream center-right populist movement.”

  Clinton’s speech struck a chord with many members of the media because it helped to explain the torrent of abuse they were experiencing, especially on social-media platforms such as Twitter. The story line that Clinton’s staff hoped her speech would produce did indeed emerge, and the negative coverage of Bannon and Trump and their relationship to the alt-right carried on for weeks.

  It was a subject any ordinary campaign would be toxically afraid of. But it didn’t produce the political dynamic Clinton expected: her lead actually narrowed in the month after her speech, from six points to two points in the RealClearPolitics average of polls. Bannon thought he knew why. “We polled the race stuff and it doesn’t matter,” he said in late September. “It doesn’t move anyone who isn’t already in her camp.”

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  What became much more worrisome for the Trump campaign was sex—and sexual assault. On October 7, David Fahrenthold, a reporter at The Washington Post, was leaked outtake footage from a 2005 Trump appearance on the NBC show Access Hollywood. In the tape, the recently married Trump is heard bragging in lewd and graphic detail to the show’s host, Billy Bush, about kissing, groping, and trying to bed women. “When you’re a star, they let you do it,” Trump says. “You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy.”

  From the moment it posted at four p.m. on Friday, Fahrenthold’s story drew such heavy traffic that it briefly crashed the Post’s internal servers. Republican politicians seized up in panic. Many believed it was the death knell of Trump’s campaign (a prospect they secretly welcomed, given the reliably orthodox conservatism and resolute dullness of Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence). South Dakota senator John Thune, the third-ranking member of the GOP leadership, echoed many of his colleagues by calling on Trump to quit the race: “Donald Trump should withdraw and Mike Pence should be our nominee effective immediately.” House Speaker Paul Ryan announced he would no longer support or defend Trump’s campaign, though he didn’t withdraw his endorsement. “I am not going to defend Donald Trump—not now, not in the future,” Ryan told his House colleagues in a private conference call. RNC chairman Reince Priebus, scheduled to appear on the Sunday morning shows, promptly withdrew, and New York later reported that he went to see Trump at his penthouse and advised him to quit or “go down with a worse election loss than Barry Goldwater’s.”

  Trump, who made it a point never to apologize for any offense, took the unprecedented step of expressing remorse in a hastily produced ninety-second Web video. “I said it, I was wrong, and I apologize,” Trump said to the camera. But his apology quickly morphed into an attack on the Clintons that made clear he would not be dropping out. “I’ve said some foolish things,” he said, but “Bill Clinton has actually abused women, and Hillary has bullied, attacked, shamed, and intimidated his victims. We will discuss this more in the coming days. See you at the debate on Sunday.”

  Inside Trump’s campaign there was a frantic rush to stanch the damage. Trump was stung by the string of Republican defections, and he raged against Ryan and took note of who loyally stood by him: a small circle of family members, Bannon, Bossie, and Giuliani—but not Priebus, Ryan, or Christie. Kushner, too, was bitterly disposed toward Ryan, a dynamic Bannon worried about, despite his own history of antagonism, because he feared it would divide the GOP. “It takes coalitions to win wars,” he said, drawing a characteristically dramatic analogy. “It’s just like Americans working with the Russians in World War II. Defeat the Fascists, then we’ll fight amongst ourselves. We can have the long, cold war after that.” He tried, and mostly failed, to stop Trump from criticizing Ryan.

  The loyal circle also included the Mercers. The next morning, Robert and Rebekah Mercer issued a rare public statement reaffirming their support for Trump (while signaling to Republicans who wanted their money that they should tread carefully): “Donald Trump’s uncensored comments, both old and new, have been echoed and dissected in the media repeatedly in an effort to kindle among his supporters a conflagration of outrage commensurate with the media’s own faux outrage. Can anyone really be surprised that Mr. Trump could have said to Mr. Bush such things as he has already admitted saying? No. We are completely indifferent to Mr. Trump’s locker room braggadocio. . . . We have a country to save and there is only one person who can save it. We, and Americans across the country and around the world, stand steadfastly behind Donald J. Trump.”

  Still, by Saturday afternoon, Bannon could feel the crisis spiraling out of control. When a reporter reached him to ask what the campaign was planning for the next evening’s debate against Clinton, and whether a show of contrition might be warranted, Bannon didn’t miss a beat: “Attack, attack, attack, attack, attack.”

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  Trump didn’t wait for Sunday night’s debate to deliver. Bannon had long been convinced from his conversations with the Valkyries, his young female Breitbart reporters, that Bill Clinton’s womanizing and Hillary’s complicity in covering it up had more political salience than conventional wisdom allowed and was something that “has to be concentrated and brought up” (as he’d put it a year earlier). His original thought was that re-litigating the scandals would demoralize a younger generation of feminist women, unfamiliar with the details, whom Clinton was counting on for support. But with the Access Hollywood tape, Bannon saw that injecting Clinton’s accusers into the heat of the presidential race would muddy the waters and force the media to devote attention to more than just Trump’s damaging tape. The trick was to do it in a way that couldn’t be ignored.

  On Sunday afternoon, ninety minutes before the start of the debate at Washington University in St. Louis, word spread among the press corps that Trump was about to hold an event. As reporters squeezed into a conference room, Trump was seated at the center of a makeshift dais draped with black cloth and flanked by four elderly women well known to veteran political reporters: Kathleen Willey, Juanita Broaddrick, Kathy Shelton, and Paula Jones. Willey, Broaddrick, and Jones had all accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault; in 1975, a judge had appointed Hillary Clinton, then a young lawyer, to defend a man accused of raping Shelton, who was then twelve years old.

  After brief prefatory remarks from Trump, the women took turns defending him and attacking the Clintons. “Mr. Trump may have said some bad words, but Bill Clinton raped me,” Broaddrick alleged. “And Hillary Clinton threatened me. I don’t think there’s any comparison.” The shock of what was unfolding prompted frenzied live coverage on cable news, while the Trump campaign streamed the event on Facebook. As cameras panned the room, they captured Bannon standing in the back, grinning wickedly.

  Even though reporters shouted questions at Trump about the Access Hollywood tape, the brazen theatrics of Bannon’s gambit, and the visual of Trump seated among Clinton’s accusers, guaranteed that the primary imagery on television would cease to be the Access Hollywood footage, which had run in a nonstop loop for two days, and would be replaced by Trump’s latest outrageous stunt. Watching Bill Cosby succumb to his acc
users the year before, Bannon had noticed that their on-camera testimony was especially powerful because most of the victims had been attacked decades earlier and were now elderly women and thus inherently sympathetic. Bannon thought a similar dynamic would apply to the Clinton accusers, and he worked to get them as much camera time as he could.

  One method he planned to use was to put the women at the front of the debate audience in seats reserved for Trump’s family, to unnerve Hillary Clinton and assure them a steady presence in the camera shot. He and Kushner had hit upon the plan after seeing Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks and an outspoken Clinton partisan, seated in the front row during the first debate on September 26. Trump personally approved the idea, understanding that it would create an indelible moment of TV drama: the candidates’ family members were to enter the debate hall at the same time and shake hands, which would put Bill Clinton face-to-face with his accusers.

  “We were going to put the four women in the VIP box,” Giuliani explained. “We had it all set. We wanted to have them shake hands with Bill, to see if Bill would shake hands with them.” But minutes before the proceedings were to begin, Frank Fahrenkopf, cochairman of the debate commission, learned of the plan and forbade Trump’s staff from following through. Bannon urged them to go ahead anyway, to no avail. “Fahrenkopf said no—verbally said ‘no,’ that security would throw them out,” Giuliani said. “We pulled it because we were going to have a big incident on national TV.” When Clinton was introduced, she refused the traditional pre-debate handshake with Trump.