Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency
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Bannon’s meeting of, 44–46, 93
disorder in administration of, 237–42
double haters and, 231–32
elected president, xi, 15–22, 235–36, 237
on Election Night, 1–3, 7–8, 11–20
fund-raising and donors of, 131, 191, 194, 197, 199, 200
gubernatorial run considered by, 111–17
immigration views of, 6, 102, 105–6, 109–11, 116, 161–63, 165–66, 186, 190, 223, 238
“Make America Great Again” slogan of, 109, 111, 138, 186, 233, 234
Mexican immigrants attacked by, 6, 161–63, 165–66
Obama’s birth certificate as issue for, 31–35, 39–40, 42, 45–46, 100–101, 103
populist-nationalist worldview of, xiii, 6, 46, 93, 110, 111, 183, 204, 208, 230, 236, 240–42
presidential campaign of, xi–xiii, 3–10, 31, 32, 35–36, 41–42, 44–46, 175–77, 179–97, 199–224, 226–35
presidential candidacy considered by, 36–41, 93, 110–13, 117, 137–38, 162
presidential candidacy formally declared by, 6, 161–64
presidential debates and, 167–72, 180–82, 192, 218–20, 223
as presidential nominee, 187–90, 196
at Republican national convention, 194, 196
sexual misconduct allegations and comments about women, 8, 168–69, 171, 214–22, 227–28
Twitter and, 46, 106, 116–17, 147–48, 169, 180, 191, 238
wall-building idea of, 111, 163, 165, 169, 170, 190, 234
at White House Correspondents’ dinner, 32–36, 41, 104
Trump, Donald, Jr., 18, 193
Trump, Eric, 4, 18, 193
Trump, Ivana, 168
Trump, Ivanka, 14, 17, 162, 179–80, 193, 200, 201
Trump, Melania, 7, 14, 18, 161, 220
Trump Tower, 1, 3, 7, 10–11, 14, 20, 44, 46, 94, 103, 112, 161, 194
Turner, Ted, 44, 75, 78–79
Turner Broadcasting, 78
Twitter, 162, 214, 228
Trump and, 46, 106, 116–17, 147–48, 169, 180, 191, 238
Weiner and, 90–91, 144
Ukraine, 4, 201–2
Undefeated, The, ix, 88–89
Uninvited conference, 124–25
UniWorld, 96
video game industry, 145–47
Bannon in, x, 81–83, 145–46
View, The, 39, 100
Virginia Tech, 53–54
Vorse, Scot, 61, 62, 76–77, 80
Wall Street Journal, 60
Washington Post, 8, 28, 32, 33, 36, 81, 166, 214, 222
Waxman, Henry, 27
Weinberg, John, 64–65
Weiner, Anthony, 90–91, 144, 228
Westinghouse Electric, 78–79
Weymouth, Lally, 33
White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, 32–36, 40, 41, 44, 104
Wilberforce Forum, 134
Wilders, Geert, 207
Willey, Kathleen, 217
Williams, Ryan, 43
Wilson, Rick, 204
Winfrey, Oprah, 37
World of Warcraft, 81–82, 145
World War II, 120, 121, 216
Wynn, Steve, 23–25, 31–32, 239
Yanukovych, Viktor F., 193–94, 202
Yellen, Janet, 9
Yiannopoulos, Milo, 83, 146–47
Zeleny, Jeff, 40
JOSHUA GREEN is a senior national correspondent for Bloomberg Businessweek, focusing on political coverage for the magazine and Bloomberg News. Previously, Green was a senior editor of the Atlantic, a weekly political columnist for the Boston Globe, and an editor at the Washington Monthly. He has also written for the New Yorker, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and other publications. Green regularly appears on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, NBC’s Meet the Press, HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, and PBS’s Washington Week.
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*Political hit jobs like the one on Burton are always disguised in order not to divert focus away from the target. The public story of Russert’s triumph, detailed afterward in New York magazine, was that Russert himself discovered the divergent transcripts. He did not. He was a fine journalist, but here he had some help.
*Conway and her husband did know Trump socially because they had lived in one of his buildings, Trump World Tower, for a period in the 2000s. She began polling for Trump in 2013.
*One of the Goldman executives in the room that evening confirmed these events as Bannon described them, but asked that his name not be used.
*As the journalist Greg Beato has documented at Soundbitten.com, there is a fierce debate about who caught Anthony Weiner and on whose behalf that person was operating. Bannon told me in a 2015 interview that the site had used paid trackers. Beato notes that the person or persons behind the Twitter account @PatriotUSA76 initially spotted and shared Weiner’s career-ending genital tweeting misfortune—that person claims his name is Dan Wolfe, but his identity has never been independently verified. Andrew Breitbart maintained that he’d never had any contact with @PatriotUSA76 before Weiner’s tweet and never learned his true identity.
*Actually, the boardroom wasn’t high up in Trump Tower—this was an illusion created by the show’s producers, who interspersed footage of the nervous contestants riding up in an elevator at the end of every episode before Trump’s judgment was meted out. The boardroom used in the show was located on the fifth floor of Trump Tower, space that, as mentioned, was later gutted to serve as Trump’s early campaign headquarters and housed the “crack den” on Election Night.
*One Trump adviser who wished to remain nameless suggested that Trump’s seeming moderation on immigration here was driven by business concerns rather than politics. Trump had bought the Doral Resort and Spa in Miami out of bankruptcy in 2012 for $150 million and was in the process of renovating the 800-acre golf resort. Aware that Miami is “an epicenter of immigrants” and that he would need zoning variances, the adviser said, Trump took special care not to offend them.
*As Zachary Mider of Bloomberg News has reported, Mercer’s largesse wasn’t limited to Robinson’s congressional campaign. When Robinson made an appeal in his newsletter for funds to buy a powerful piece of research equipment called a “mass spectrometer,” the Mercer family reached out to help defray the $2 million cost. Since then, tax filings show that the Mercers have sent Robinson’s lab, which he calls the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, at least $1.6 million, which has allowed him to buy additional freezers to store his enormous stockpile of human urine—at last count up to fourteen thousand vials. Jane Kramer of the New Yorker has reported that after Trump’s election, Rebekah Mercer pushed to have Robinson appointed to the position of national science adviser. She has not yet succeeded.
*It’s worth noting here that of the many extreme and offensive beliefs Steve Bannon and the editors of Breitbart News have been accused of harboring, they have never advocated “birtherism”—the false claim that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States. One of the oddballs who was not invited to CPAC in 2013 or to “The Uninvited” counter-conference was the most outspoken birther of all, a Moldovan-American dentist and lawyer named Orly Taitz. During this period, Taitz, an inveterate publicity seeker, was a frequent guest on low-rent TV and radio shows, and she actually crashed “The Uninvited” conference and made a big scene by getting into a heated argument with Bannon during the question-and-answer session following a panel discussion. It took some doing, but Bannon eventually shut her down, reiterating that he and the editors of Breitbart never had any doubts that Obama was born in the U
nited States.
*Although the movie Clinton Cash was screened in Cannes, France, in May 2016, it was not a part of the Cannes Film Festival. Instead, it was shown at a screening arranged for distributors.
*While a handful of speakers and writers (such as Richard Spencer, the white supremacist head of the National Policy Institute) have tried to give “alt-right” an intellectual gloss, the bulk of the energy and activism attributed to the alt-right is driven by nihilistic, meme-obsessed gamer types whose use of racist and anti-Semitic language and iconography seems driven mainly by a warped sense of irony and a desire to upset their targets—and draw media attention. Bannon rejects any association with Spencer, whom he calls a self-promoting “freak” and a “goober.”
*We agreed I wouldn’t publish his last name.
*The National Border Patrol Council, which represents 16,500 of the roughly 21,000 agents who work for the agency, later endorsed Trump—the first time the union had taken sides in a presidential race. The National Immigration and Customs Enforcement Council, which represents 7,600 ICE agents and employees, also endorsed Trump. This, too, was its first presidential endorsement.
*According to a Trump associate, Lewandowski retaliated by persuading Trump to sue Nunberg for breaching a confidentiality agreement. In an affidavit responding to the lawsuit, Nunberg accused the married Lewandowski of having a “sordid and apparently illicit affair” with “a female Trump Campaign staffer.” The parties later agreed to drop the suit.
*The best modern primer on Guénon, Evola, and the Traditionalists is Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century, by Mark Sedgwick, a scholar at Aarhus University in Denmark.