by Rick Wilson
It’s an administration that combines astounding incompetence and consistent failure with a pungent combination of arrogance, bullish stupidity, and a relentless, juvenile desire to run a government dedicated not to service but to offense. The collection of miscreants, nutcases, extremists, and dead-enders around Trump is an extended middle finger to American values, institutions, and anyone, anywhere not sufficiently awed by and obeisant to this president.
Let’s have a look at the cast of Trump’s reality-TV government, campaign hangers-on, oddball allies, creepy fans, and long-term troublemakers, shall we?
STEVE BANNON
The brightest, hottest, weirdest, shittiest star in the Trump constellation from the moment of The Donald’s unexpected electoral victory was Steve Bannon. If you’re looking for the white-hot center of Esoteric Trumpism, Bannon is its intellectual architect, once you get past the homeless-drifter-with-a-hitchhiker’s-head-in-his-backpack affect.
Bannon, a man who looks like the spokesmodel for a new line of gout medication, is known for his oddball sartorial choices; the multiple shirts, the tactical “operator” pants, and the Barbour jacket are all hallmarks of his bus-shelter-chic style. Persistently rumpled, persistently grizzled, and persistently looking like he’s been dragged over 30 miles of bad road, Bannon was no one’s idea of the White House’s dull but professional suit-and-tie culture. His rheumy-eyed stare and an odd constellation of facial moles, warts, scrofula, weeping sores, and grizzled beard patches make him look vaguely piratical.
A devotee of the alt-right’s favorite writers (“You haven’t read Julius Evola in the original Italian? You’re missing it all”) and shoddy pop-history like The Fourth Turning, Bannon is one of the two types of DC intellectuals: the first type are nerds who have read everything and can’t sell anything; the second is Bannon types who want you to think they’ve read everything and are out to sell themselves.
Bannon’s confidence he is the smartest guy in the room isn’t misplaced in Trump World, and certainly not in the presence of Trump. Famous nonreader Donald Trump, scanner of headlines, ignorer of summaries, writer of nothing longer than a tweet, has by many accounts never read much of anything and appears to have absolutely no interior intellectual life. He was a perfect mark for Bannon’s blustery, whiskey-infused showmanship. Bannon would make a yeoman’s effort to gentrify and polish Trumpism into nationalist populism. He would build not just a campaign but a national movement around the idea, using Trump as its avatar, symbol, and martyr.
Breitbart was famously scrappy, famously inflammatory, and a rising force on the right before Bannon. As head of Breitbart News, Bannon turned the site into a self-described “voice of the alt-right” and weaponized it to attack anyone he felt varied from the new, narrow confines of what he defined as conservatism.
In the 2016 cycle, Bannon’s suicide-bomber version of the House Andrew Built would be turned into a blowtorch against every other Republican candidate in the primary field. His minions were particularly hard on Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, for whom Bannon’s personal animus dripped from virtually every story.
Bannon discovered immigration was the killer app in the Breitbart news mix, and it allowed him to shape the primary battlefield to Trump’s advantage. For Trump, a man who craves favorable headlines like a meth junkie, Breitbart rewarded his impulsive behavior and extreme mood swings with better and better headlines. Trump then would then use Breitbart as a driver for more of his own messages and policies, such as they were. The cycle fed on itself.
Before Trump, it was an article of faith that Bannon and Breitbart would be all-in for Ted Cruz, as Breitbart’s sponsors Robert and Rebekah Mercer had stroked a series of eye-popping SuperPAC checks and made no secret of their love of the Texas Senator. Bannon brokered their betrayal of Cruz in favor of Trump, and Trump for a time was taken by Bannon’s shtick.
Bannon’s tenure in the Trump White House went about as well as expected; he’s a sloppy thinker, largely disorganized, and given to impulses that run him into political and ideological box canyons. He’s also a man who loves to have enemies. He needs enemies—real and imagined—to function. In the Trump White House, his enemy was everyone. Everywhere. All the time. Bannon fought with Ivanka and Jared. Bannon fought with Priebus. Bannon fought with Pence. Bannon famously fought with Gary Cohn and the other “globalists” among Trump’s plutocratic economic advisors. (“Globalist” is Bannonese for “Jew,” y’all. Just letting you know, in case you’ve been living under a rock.) Bannon fought and fought and fought himself out of a job.
Before Trump, Bannon’s political chops were, to put it mildly, marginal. He’d been a Navy officer, a Goldman Sachs guy, and had dabbled in Hollywood. His money came in large measure from owning a piece of the Seinfeld franchise.
I never much cared for Bannon; he was an uglier, seamier version of Andrew Breitbart, and nothing about his new nationalist philosophy seemed to line up with any conservative principle. In 2015, Bannon weaponized Breitbart on your author because of my opposition to Trump. My prominence as an anti-Trump conservative led to a series of breathless Breitbart stories, including stories that targeted my children.3 Bannon emailed a friend that he planned to destroy my career and said, “This is going to be fun.”
Bannon’s actions made life hell on my family. His minions stalked and harassed my kids and my clients. There was only one solution, and I knew I’d have to find the right moment.
I was going to fuck Steve Bannon so hard his rheumy eyes popped out of his grizzled skull. You come at the king, you best not miss.
In the fall of 2017, though Bannon was gone from the White House, he was still the Hand of House Trump. He’d returned to Breitbart and was rising in media prominence, threatening primaries against every Republican senator except Ted Cruz and a constant source of worry for Mitch McConnell and the National Republican Senatorial Committee. When Bannon bet the farm—every last acre of it—to play the kingmaker and install pedo-curious Roy Moore in the U.S. Senate, I realized that I was about to get a “Fuck me? No, fuck you” moment with Bannon.
While Bannon barnstormed with the wee molester Moore, giving rallies where he grunted out his nationalist populism message to friendly audiences, it looked like Moore had a better than average shot to win. It was, after all, Alabama, the ur-Trump state, the reddest of red, the craziest of cray.
When a SuperPAC contacted us, a key question came up: “Can you help a Democrat win a Senate seat? Ethically, we mean.” I’ll be honest; I would have done the work just to prevent Moore from serving as a cancer in the GOP and a lunatic in the Senate, but the thought of beating Steve Bannon was deeply compelling. I wanted Bannon’s face rubbed in his arrogance and his idiocy not simply because he’d messed with me or because I find his nationalist claptrap to be anathema to conservatism, but because I still treasure running real campaigns using art, heart, and data.
We helped craft a series of ads for a SuperPAC that carefully targeted Republican women in six Alabama counties, pouring in tightly targeted, researched, and tested messages. The strongest was released the night Bannon held his infamous rally in Fairhope, Alabama. You’re welcome, Steve.
Our closing ad was simple: a series of pretty, upset girls on screen look straight to camera while a voice-over asks, “What if she was your little girl? Your daughter? Your sister? What if she was sixteen years old? Fifteen? Or even fourteen? Would you let a thirty-two-year-old man date her? Undress her? Touch her? He called it dating. We call it unacceptable. That’s why we can’t support Roy Moore.” Beating Roy Moore was a moral obligation. Beating Steve Bannon was a pleasure. Within days of the loss in Alabama, Bannon went from the GOP’s newest kingmaker to political leper. We all piled on, savagely. That’s how politics still works, even for people who think they’ve reset all the rules and defied all the structures.
Steven Law, who runs Mitch McConnell’s Senate Leadership Fund, brought out the lead pipe and went at Bannon’s kneecaps. “This is a brutal reminder that candi
date quality matters regardless of where you are running,” he said. “Not only did Steve Bannon cost us a critical Senate seat in one of the most Republican states in the country, but he also dragged the President of the United States into his fiasco.”4 McConnell advisor Josh Holmes chimed in as well: “I’d just like to thank Steve Bannon for showing us how to lose the reddest state in the union.”5 Matt Drudge, no fan of Bannon, hung the loss around Steve’s neck with the headline “Bannon Busted!” Your author didn’t hold fire either. I tweeted at the time, “Steve Bannon is a cancer. Good people of Alabama were the first dose of chemo.”6
I was right. Gristle Icarus flew far too close to the sun. His election losses in Virginia and Alabama, his leaking Trump’s dirty laundry and stories of White House discord to Fire and Fury author Michael Wolff, and his assertion that he might run for president led to a hard break with the White House and the Mercer family. He was fired from his perch at the helm of Breitbart with little ceremony and less mercy. The populist rebellion Bannon personified depended on his having the weaponized Breitbart battle station, a perception he spoke for the president, and buckets of sweet, sweet hedge fund cash from the Mercers. Without it, Bannon crashed so hard there was nothing but a greasy, smoking hole in the desert.
From being the architect of a political movement that he promised would replace a moribund conservative Establishment and a dying Republican Party, Bannon has become a wandering, rootless political gypsy. He was last spotted cheering on the neofascist parties in European elections.7
CARTER PAGE
Watching former Trump campaign senior national security advisor Carter Page immolate himself and incriminate a half dozen of his colleagues from the Trump-Putin 2016 campaign was a strange, almost guilty pleasure. Profoundly disconnected, socially awkward, and reeking of late-stage virginity, he gives off the creepy Uncanny Valley vibe of a rogue, possibly murderous android or of a man with a too-extensive knowledge of human taxidermy and a soundproofed van.
Legal scholars watching Page’s borderline insane interviews, reviewing his bizarre public statements, and reading the wackadoodle transcripts of his testimony to congressional investigators express various levels of shock. His congressional hearing in October 2017 dismayed his friends in Trump World; it was a long, rambling, performance art piece before the House that opened up entirely new venues for investigation by confirming large parts of the Steele Dossier, which had been assembled to examine connections between the Trump campaign, his business enterprises, and his finances with Russia.
The paper trail of his forays into Russia is an amazing mosaic of comic-opera misunderstandings, grand and petty corruptions, grade-school category errors, and fundamental delusions about Putin’s kleptocracy. In short, Page is a perfect example of the ad hoc weirdness of the Trump campaign, Trumpism’s deep, misplaced love of Putin’s Russia, and the power of magical thinking among the coterie of misfit toys Trump calls his advisors. Page is weird and wrong, and in most campaigns he’d be the weirdest, wrongest dog in the pack. In Trump World, he’s in the middle quintile.
A bizarre fascination with Russia as an ally shaped the view of Trump’s foreign policy advisors Steve Bannon, Mike Flynn, Stephen Miller, Sebastian Gorka, and the rest of the Foreign Policy Center for Kids Who Can’t Read Good and Want to Read Good. Yes, a meaningful fraction of it is informed by an alt-rightish belief that the U.S. and Russia are white Christian allies in the global war on Islam and brown people in general, but some of it is just their natural inclination toward nationalist authoritarianism.
Page didn’t just talk the pro-Russia talk; he threw himself into the eager arms of SVR operatives. Like the rest of Trump World, Page brought a kind of Underpants Gnome theory to his bromance with Team Putin. Through some unknown alchemy, he expected to benefit Trump and gain influence and profit from his Russia foray.
It’s not that Page is stupid in the same way many Trump voters are mulishly immune to processing empirical facts in the world around them; it’s that Page’s odd affect and thinking reflect something profoundly off-kilter about him in the same way Trump’s entire persona consists of bluster, magical thinking, and willful self-deception.
The delta between Trump’s imagination of himself and the brand image that he desperately wants to sell is always wide; he’s the “billionaire” lout playing the Manhattan sophisticate who gorges on fast food. He’s a man with a lemur wig and a five-pound bolus of chin-wattle who thinks he’s irresistible to women. He’s the serially bankrupt master of the art of the deal, the TV talk show character who slithered into the Oval Office on a tide of Russian influence and now thinks he won on his merits.
Page was an easy mark for Russian intelligence services because he lives in the same world of willful self-deception as Trump. Carter Page, International Business Man of Mystery, jet-setting wheeler-dealer, and foreign policy savant was an image shared by only Carter Page, world-class dork and sucker. In the FBI investigation of a Russian intelligence cell that sought to suborn Page in 2013, the contempt in which the SVR agents held Page was clear: “This is intelligence method to cheat, how else to work with foreigners? You promise a favor for a favor. You get the documents from him and tell him to go f—ck himself.”8 Foreign Policy reported, “Based on the FBI complaint, it appears Page never realized his Russian contact worked on behalf of Moscow’s intelligence services.”9 It’s not simply that Page was credulous; his credulity was a hot wire inside the already Putinphilic Trump inner circle. Page is just the most obviously gullible of the Trump cadre. Mike Flynn, both venal and bitter, was also easy pickings. Sebastian Gorka would probably shine Putin’s shoes in exchange for a gimcrack medal. Steve Bannon, a man better suited to promoting bumfights than grand strategy, thinks of himself as a player on par with Putin, which is an eye-rolling hilarious thought to sane people.
The rest of the jetsam dragged behind Trump’s sewage barge of a campaign is little different, and all of them are under the hot lights of Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s intelligence program to manipulate the 2016 election, and the role Trump and his campaign team may have played in it. Something about the prospect of spending a long time in a federal prison wearing an orange jumpsuit peels away the layers of bluster and pretense. Page’s interview with the House was a situation in which he was in little legal jeopardy, but the flop sweat rolling off him came through in almost every strange exchange. Following a Breitbartian anti-Hillary screed at the beginning of his testimony, Page had all the confidence of a whipped dog, lost and desperate.
Like all Trump acolytes and supporters, Page learned a key lesson: once the delusional sales pitch of Trumpism is pulled back, you’re on your own. This strange, lost man is one of the most public examples of how ugly the world looks when the con and the crimes are exposed, but he sure as hell won’t be the last.
PAUL MANAFORT
Manafort was a Trumpian character in Washington even before Trump. Crooked and corrupting, utterly amoral, he’s the tainted wellspring of a dozen Washington and international scandals. Of course he was a perfect fit for Trump. Rumors of bad blood between Manafort and his Russian sugar daddy, Oleg Deripaska, were in the wind by the time he became chairman of Trump’s campaign, and his ties to the Kremlin’s favored strongmen in the nations surrounding Russia were clear. It tells you a lot that those were his good points in Trump’s mind.
How cutting must it have been for a man who spent years making millions as a skeezy fixer to have power and influence in Washington in his grasp, only to see it slip away. He was so close to being a respectable éminence grise instead of being a scumbag lobbyist of last resort for assorted kleptocrats, third-world shitbirds, and international criminals.
Manafort is a man who once took briefcases full of cash from Russian billionaires, reduced to wearing two GPS ankle monitors since the Department of Justice and prosecutors view him as an international flight risk. Paul Manafort went from being the campaign chairman of a successful presidential run to a man in the deepest
possible legal hole. Rat on Trump and face the wrath of a notoriously spiteful, vengeful president. Flip on Putin’s oligarch buddies, he’ll spend the rest of his life waiting to be poisoned by polonium. If he flips on neither, he gets to die in jail.
At the end of the editorial process for this book, Manafort’s life is grim. He faces decades in prison, and his hanging tough against Robert Mueller depends on faith that Donald Trump will keep his promises and cover Manafort with a swift pardon.
Good luck with that one, buddy.
MICHAEL COHEN
Thug. Loudmouth. Fixer. Michael Cohen is a deeply revolting specimen even by the low standards of the Petri dish of Trump World scuzz.10 Even the fixer found himself in exile and under investigation by Robert Mueller, a victim of the Trump curse as surely as any other fatality of The Donald’s death touch.
Far from becoming a Trump-era superlawyer, Cohen’s strip-mall law school degree, mouth-breathing behavior, and really, really terrible legal work in the Stormy Daniels affair left him in exile from Trump, even though Cohen was long reputed to not only know where the bodies were buried in Trump’s past but to have been the guy with the shovels and tarps in the back of his car. Cohen, though, should be understood as an almost perfect metaphor for the Trump era, the Trump White House, and everything else orbiting this president like the hot chunks of waste spinning around the central oscillator at a sewage-treatment plant. He truly brings it all: the shoddy, hair-trigger temperament; the indifferent education and understanding of the world outside of dalliance-cleanup duty and real-estate branding deals; the malfeasance, petty corruption, general shitheel behavior, impulsivity, tantrum-as-negotiation style, and overall sketchiness of the Trump administration.
