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

by Joshua Green

  In the end, defusing the Bannon-Kushner plan made little difference, because Trump quickly took matters into his own hands. As 67 million people watched, Trump waited for the inevitable Access Hollywood question and sprung his counterattack. “If you look at Bill Clinton, far worse,” he said. “Mine are words, and his was action. His was—what he’s done to women, there’s never been anybody in the history of politics in this nation that’s been so abusive to women. . . . Hillary Clinton attacked those same women and attacked them viciously. Four of them are here tonight.”

  Afterward, Bannon marveled at Trump’s fearlessness. “It’s awe inspiring,” he said. “You have to have a certain psychological construct to do that—he’s got that. Classic honey badger. He crushed her.”

  —

  Two days later, Trump’s internal tracking polls gave some credence to Bannon’s enthusiasm. By now, Trump’s campaign was following a familiar pattern: whenever he made news for some negative event (attacking the Khans, a poor first debate performance) his support would erode . . . but then recover, like a balloon pushed underwater. In the first debate, on September 26, Trump had looked badly overmatched and he lost support. Within a week, his numbers were climbing. Then the Access Hollywood tape landed on October 7 and they dropped again. But four days later, they once again began to recover.

  Outside the campaign, Trump’s tape fiasco was regarded as a mortal blow and the Clinton-accuser gambit a transparently cynical ploy to change the subject. But on the inside, Trump’s brain trust was seeing numbers that said attacking Clinton was the way to go—besides, they couldn’t have stopped Trump if they’d wanted to. A smattering of public polls indicated the same thing, including one from October 12 taken by NBC News/SurveyMonkey, which showed more respondents improved their opinion of Trump than they did Clinton after watching the second debate.

  But that same day, a Wednesday, multiple women came forward to accuse Trump of having groped or kissed them without their consent. Two went public in a front-page New York Times story; a third told The Palm Beach Post that Trump had “grabbed my ass” ten years earlier; the fourth, a former People magazine reporter, published an essay recounting how Trump had forcibly kissed her at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida before an interview she was going to conduct with him and his pregnant wife, Melania. Twisting the knife, Michelle Obama went after Trump directly in a speech the next day. “This wasn’t just ‘locker-room banter,’” she told a crowd in Manchester, New Hampshire. “This was a powerful individual speaking freely and openly about sexually predatory behavior.”

  Trump was incensed at the ambush and delivered an angry rebuttal at a rally in West Palm Beach, charging his accusers with being part of a “global conspiracy” and attacking them individually. “The Clinton machine is at the center of this power structure,” Trump said, delivering prepared remarks that bore the mark of Bannon. “Anyone who challenges their control is deemed a sexist, a racist, a xenophobe, and morally deformed. They will attack you; they will slander you; they will seek to destroy your career and your family. . . . They will lie, lie, lie.”

  Democrats were giddy, believing that they were finally witnessing the self-destruction of a candidate who seemed impervious to so much. Paul Begala, an adviser to the Clinton-aligned Super PAC Priorities USA, watched Trump’s rally and pronounced him finished. “To quote the late, great Nelson Mandela, it’s like drinking poison and thinking it’s going to hurt your enemy,” Begala said. “He’s a billionaire tycoon in a total meltdown, and he’s going to try to take as many people down with him. It’s not a political strategy, but it will be an unlovely twenty-six days until we dispatch him to the ash heap of history.”

  —

  The wave of new accusers put Trump’s campaign on a war footing. With Trump himself appearing increasingly unhinged, Bannon’s instinctive hyper-aggressiveness met no internal resistance. The distinction they needed to draw, he told staffers, was between Trump’s “locker room” behavior and what he alleged was Hillary Clinton’s history of enabling sexual violence. “This has nothing to do with consensual sexual affairs and infidelities,” Bannon said in a strategy meeting that week. “This is Bill. We’re going to turn him into Bill Cosby. He’s a violent sexual predator who physically abuses women who he assaults. And she takes the lead on the intimidation of the victims.”

  Bossie reached out to reporters to explain how the campaign intended to drive this narrative. Clinton had tweeted in November: “Every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed and supported.” The juxtaposition of that claim and the aggressiveness with which she and her allies had attacked her husband’s accusers over the years was, Bossie claimed, a glaring hypocrisy. “It’s untenable and it’s farcical,” he said. “With rape culture being what it is, these facts are going to shock millennial women. There will not be a millennial woman who will want to vote for her when these facts come out.” Summing up the strategy for the final stretch of the race, a Trump adviser said, “We’re gonna go buck wild.”

  Trump was certainly game. At a fund-raiser that week, he declared himself “unshackled” and seemed to relish the prospect of ramping up his attacks on Clinton, who he and Bannon both believed was orchestrating the parade of accusers. “A vote for Hillary is a vote to surrender our government to public corruption, graft, and cronyism that threatens the survival of our constitutional system itself,” he told an Arizona crowd soon after. “What makes us exceptional is that we are a nation of laws and that we are all equal under those laws. Hillary’s corruption shreds the principle on which our nation was founded.”

  On television and on the front pages of the major newspapers, Trump clearly seemed to be losing the election. Each new woman who came forward with charges of misbehavior became a focal point of coverage, coupled with Trump’s furious reaction, his ever darkening speeches, and the accompanying suggestion that they were dog whistles aimed at racists and anti-Semites. “Trump’s remarks,” one Washington Post story explained, summing up the media’s outlook, “were laced with the kind of global conspiracies and invective common in the writings of the alternative-right, white-nationalist activists who see him as their champion. Some critics also heard echoes of historical anti-Semitic slurs in Trump’s allegations that Clinton ‘meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty’ and that media and financial elites were part of a soulless cabal.”

  This outlook, which Clinton’s campaign shared, gave little consideration to the possibility that voters might be angry at large banks, international organizations, and media and financial elites for reasons other than their basest prejudices. This was the axis on which Bannon’s nationalist politics hinged: the belief that, as Marine Le Pen put it, “the dividing line is [no longer] between left and right but globalists and patriots.” Even as he lashed out at his accusers and threatened to jail Clinton, Trump’s late-campaign speeches put his own stamp on this idea. As he told one rally: “There is no global anthem, no global currency, no certificate of global citizenship. From now on, it’s going to be ‘America first.’”

  Anyone steeped in Guénon’s Traditionalism would recognize the terrifying specter Trump conjured of marauding immigrants, Muslim terrorists, and the collapse of national sovereignty and identity as the descent of a Dark Age—the Kali Yuga. For the millions who were not familiar with it, Trump’s apocalyptic speeches came across as a particularly forceful expression of his conviction that he understood their deep dissatisfaction with the political status quo and could bring about a rapid renewal.

  Whether it was a result of Trump’s apocalyptic turn, disgust at the Clintons, or simply accuser fatigue—it was likely a combination of all three—the pattern of slippage in the wake of negative news was less pronounced in Trump’s internal surveys in mid-October. Overall, he still trailed. But the data were noisy. In some states (Indiana, New Hampshire, Arizona) his support eroded, but in others (Florida, Ohio, Michigan) it ac
tually improved. When Trump held his own at the third and final debate on October 19, the numbers inched up further.

  The movement was clear enough that Nate Silver and other statistical mavens began to take note of it. “Is the Presidential Race Tightening?” he asked in the title of an October 26 article. Citing Trump’s rising favorability numbers among Republicans and red-state trend lines, he cautiously concluded that probably it was. By November 1, he had no doubt. “Yes, Donald Trump Has a Path to Victory” read the headline for his column that day, in which he noted that Clinton’s lead in national polls had shrunk from seven points in mid-October down to three or four points. “Trump remains an underdog,” Silver wrote, “but no longer really a long shot.”

  By that point, Trump’s data scientists had already arrived at the same conclusion. And then, peering into their models, they’d gone a step further and convinced themselves that the electorate was going to look different from what almost anyone else was anticipating. If they were right, there was a much clearer path to 270 electoral votes than most experts were allowing, one that stretched across the industrial upper Midwest.

  To Bannon, this made intuitive sense, but one thing gave him pause: the Clinton campaign showed no sign at all that the midwestern states Trump’s scientists now considered winnable were even in play. As he had done periodically throughout the fall, he posed a question to a reporter he knew that had nagged at him for weeks. “What is Clinton doing? What’s their strategy? It’s a week from Election Day and she’s in Arizona.”

  ELEVEN

  “THE FBI HAS LEARNED OF THE EXISTENCE . . .”

  Throughout everything, Hillary Clinton was seeing a different race. From the earliest days of her campaign, when private polls suggested that some 10 million people who’d voted Democratic in 2012 now said they were supporting Trump, she and her advisers had refused to believe it. Those voters may be frustrated and disillusioned, they may be “sending a message,” but in the end they were Democrats—they would come home to Clinton. She need not waste time and resources to persuade them.

  So certain of this was Clinton’s campaign that in the final weeks of the race, confident of victory and hoping for a landslide, she traveled to red states such as Arizona that she imagined were within her grasp, and ignored the upper Midwest until it was too late. “We’re already seeing the effects of climate change, and I have a plan to increase renewable energy that will create millions of clean-energy jobs that can’t be exported—they’ve gotta be done right here in Arizona!” Clinton belted out to ten thousand rally goers in Tempe, a week before the election.

  This bid to broaden the map was no head fake. “Arizona ain’t an indulgence,” tweeted her communications director, Brian Fallon. “It’s a true battleground. Perhaps even more favorable-looking right now than some other places we’ve been on TV.” Clinton’s plan all along was to reactivate the same coalition of Democratic-leaning groups that had twice delivered Barack Obama to the White House: young people, minorities, and suburban women. That’s why she embraced the Black Lives Matter movement and vowed to protect from deportation a larger segment of the illegal immigrant community than Obama had. And if she could also carry states like Arizona that Obama hadn’t won, then her electoral mandate would be that much bigger.

  —

  The reason Clinton’s moves so puzzled the Trump campaign is that just before she traveled to Arizona, Trump’s data analysts had become convinced, based on absentee ballots and early voting, that the people who were going to show up on Election Day would be older, whiter, more rural, and more populist than almost anyone else believed—so they re-weighted their predictive models to reflect a different electorate. As much as anything, this was a leap of faith. It’s what gnawed at Bannon and other Trump advisers in the closing days of the race. But, in the end, what other choice did they have?

  “If he was going to win this election, it was going to be because of a Brexit-style mentality and a different demographic trend than other people were seeing,” said Matt Oczkowski, a senior official at Cambridge Analytica working in Trump’s campaign.

  Imagining a more Trump-friendly turnout changed the composition of the electoral map—and with it, Trump’s strategy for the closing weeks of the race. On October 18, before the numbers had been re-weighted, the campaign’s internal election simulator, dubbed the “Battleground Optimizer Path to Victory,” gave Trump a 7.8 percent chance of winning the 270 electoral votes he needed. His long odds were mainly due to the fact that he trailed (albeit narrowly) in most of the states that looked like they would decide the election, including the all-important state of Florida.

  Re-weighting the model to reflect an older, whiter electorate changed the polls by only a couple of percentage points in most of the major battleground states. But it shifted the odds of victory substantially in Trump’s direction because it either put him ahead or made him newly competitive in states such as Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, where he’d previously trailed or hadn’t looked to have a real chance. (Arizona wasn’t competitive for Clinton in either of Trump’s models.) Trump’s path to victory was now illuminated.

  —

  Something else was happening, too. On October 25, Trump’s internal polls showed his support ticking up in nearly every battleground state, a trend that continued over the next three days. Out on the trail, Trump was stepping up his angry screeds, traducing Clinton, whom he accused of plotting “the destruction of U.S. sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special interest friends, and her donors.’”

  At first, this seemed like an expression of primal rage from a man of towering ego who understood, even if only subconsciously, that he was headed for a historic comeuppance. But then Republican voters started to respond in a way that established politicians couldn’t have imagined just two weeks earlier, when the Access Hollywood tape upended the race. Against all odds, Trump’s support steadily consolidated—and forced Republican lawmakers who had piously abandoned him to make a humiliating volte-face.

  The most satisfying for several Trump advisers was that of Utah representative Jason Chaffetz, a media-hungry weathervane of popular sentiment who had been among the first to withdraw his endorsement of Trump in the wake of the tape scandal. “I’m out. I can no longer in good conscience endorse this person for president,” Chaffetz told Utah’s Fox 13 News on October 8. “My wife, Julie, and I, we have a fifteen-year-old daughter,” he said to CNN’s Don Lemon later that night. “Do you think I can look her in the eye and tell her that I endorsed Donald Trump for president when he acts like this?”

  Not three weeks later, on October 26, under pressure from angry constituents, Chaffetz flip-flopped and announced on Twitter that he would indeed be voting for Trump.

  —

  And then the bombshell landed. Early in the afternoon of Friday, October 28, James Comey, the director of the FBI, sent a letter to Congress announcing that new evidence had emerged in the case relating to Hillary Clinton’s e-mails. “In connection with an unrelated case, the F.B.I. has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation,” he wrote. The “unrelated case” involved sexually explicit text messages sent by former representative Anthony Weiner to a fifteen-year-old girl in North Carolina. Weiner was married to Huma Abedin, one of Clinton’s close aides, who had saved some of Clinton’s e-mails on Weiner’s laptop. Having declared the Clinton e-mail case closed in July, when he delivered an unprecedented public rebuke of her “extremely careless” conduct, Comey now told Congress that he was reopening the Clinton investigation.

  Ever since The New York Times broke the news on March 2, 2015, that Clinton used a personal e-mail account and private server as secretary of state, risking exposure of classified documents to hostile foreign powers, the subject of her e-mails had stalked her campaign, fusing with the damaging Clinton Cash narrative to undermine the public’s trust in her. Clinton ha
d persevered through a criminal referral from the Justice Department, through countless congressional hearings, and through a nonstop barrage of attacks from hostile Republicans. Now a controversy she thought was behind her came roaring back into the white-hot crucible of the presidential race.

  Clinton and her staff were incredulous. “We are eleven days out from perhaps the most important national election of our lifetimes,” she said at a hastily arranged evening news conference. “Voting is already under way in our country. So the American people deserve to get the full and complete facts immediately. The director himself has said he doesn’t know whether the e-mails referenced in his letter are significant or not. . . . Therefore it’s imperative that the bureau explain this issue in question, whatever it is, without any delay.”

  Inside Trump’s campaign, the mood was ecstatic. Bannon’s phone lit up with frantic text messages from reporters racing to get a comment on the shocking revelations. Bannon demurred. “Don’t want to step on Comey’s lines,” he texted back. As the cable news networks hit DEFCON 1, he understood that the worst thing the Trump campaign could do was to distract in any way from this damaging story.

  When the news broke, Trump was just about to take the stage at a rally in Manchester, New Hampshire. As soon as he reached the lectern, he delivered the clip he knew the networks were waiting for. “I need to open with a very critical breaking news announcement,” Trump said. “The FBI”—he paused as the crowd cheered—“has just sent a letter to Congress informing them that they have discovered new e-mails pertaining to the former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s investigation.” He paused once more, as chants of Lock her up! swept through the hall. “They are reopening the case into her criminal and illegal conduct that threatens the security of the United States of America. Hillary Clinton’s corruption is on a scale we have never seen before. We must not let her take her criminal scheme into the Oval Office.”