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

by Joshua Green

  It was no accident that Trump’s formal declaration of his candidacy, on June 16, 2015, took the form of a bitter paean to American nationalism that quickly veered into an attack on Mexican immigrants as criminals and “rapists.” Nor was it coincidence that one of his first trips as a bona fide presidential candidate was a circus-like visit to the U.S.–Mexican border crossing in Laredo, Texas. Bannon, who established a Breitbart Texas bureau in 2013 to focus on immigration, had worked for weeks with sympathetic border agents to help arrange the trip. And while Trump’s remarks were pilloried by the press and by many of his fellow Republicans (“extraordinarily ugly,” Jeb Bush called them; House Speaker Paul Ryan said he was “sickened” by them), that wasn’t what registered most with the candidate himself. By the time he left Texas, Trump had rocketed to first place in polls of Republican primary voters.

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  But that was more than a year ago. Now, as the first returns trickled in, Trump was brooding high above Fifth Avenue in his gilded Trump Tower penthouse with his wife, Melania, all too aware that it had been months since he last led Clinton in a reputable national poll. When his campaign brass gathered down below on Election Night, plenty of them thought their boss needed a miracle to win. Trump’s team had access to three different sources of polling—its own, run by Conway and a trio of Republican pollsters; large-scale surveys conducted by the GOP firm TargetPoint that fed into the Republican National Committee’s micro-targeting model; and another set of surveys by Cambridge Analytica, a London data science outfit contracted by the campaign to build a sophisticated model of its own. None of them pointed toward victory.

  Outwardly, Trump’s team kept up appearances by mercilessly flaying Clinton and insisting that their man could win. But behind the scenes, some advisers had already begun positioning themselves for the knife fight that would immediately follow a loss. The RNC had quietly summoned a group of top political reporters for a private presentation that laid out all that the committee had done on Trump’s behalf. The purpose of this secret meeting was purely exculpatory. Reince Priebus, the RNC’s put-upon chairman, and Sean Spicer, its indefatigable chief strategist, were sending a message: “Hey, Trump’s loss won’t be our fault—it’ll all be on him and his team.” In the days leading up to the election, Spicer met with top executives at the major networks to press this same message in person.

  News of these assignations had traveled back to Trump and members of his inner circle, many of whom regarded the RNC, the cradle of establishment Republicanism, with deep suspicion and even contempt. Although Spicer and Priebus had both gone to extraordinary lengths to publicly defend and support Trump—at a steep cost to their personal reputations because many Republicans now viewed them as boot-licking enablers—word raced across the Trump war room when Priebus and Spicer were spotted packing up their personal belongings early on Election Night, apparently anticipating a swift loss.

  Privately, even Bannon had moments of doubt. In the depths of Trump’s worst scandal, after The Washington Post broke news of an Access Hollywood tape that captured his lewd comments about women and how he liked to “grab them by the pussy,” Bannon admitted to an associate that Trump might be done for. Yet he wasn’t despondent, nor did he seem to view the possibility as a fatal setback to the broader movement. “Our back-up strategy,” he said of Clinton, “is to fuck her up so bad that she can’t govern. If she gets 43 percent of the vote, she can’t claim a mandate.” Psyching himself up to the task, he added, “My goal is that by November eighth, when you hear her name, you’re gonna throw up.”

  In the weeks that followed, Trump rigorously carried out his part of the job, going so far as to call Clinton “corrupt” to her face, as she sat on the dais with him at an October 21 bipartisan charity dinner. A week later, FBI director James Comey’s decision to reopen the investigation into her private e-mail server delivered an even greater blow. Out on the stump, Trump ratcheted up his criticism of Clinton to a degree that was almost unhinged. “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 thundered at an Arizona rally on October 29. “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.”

  And Trump didn’t stop there. In speeches and in ads, he channeled Bannon’s conspiratorial worldview by implicating Clinton in a dark web of moral and intellectual corruption that encompassed the entire global power structure—the banks, the government, the media, the guardians of secular culture, as well as financial titans including the billionaire investor George Soros, Federal Reserve chairwoman Janet Yellen, and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein. “It’s a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth, and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities,” Trump warned in a controversial ad that the campaign saved for the eve of the election. “The only thing that can stop this corrupt machine is you.”

  The sinister allusions to international financial conspiracies, and the fact that Soros, Yellen, and Blankfein are all Jewish, set off alarm bells at the Anti-Defamation League, whose CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, blasted Trump for propagating “painful” anti-Semitic stereotypes and “baseless conspiracy theories.” Trump’s campaign rejected the attack and criticized the ADL for involving itself in partisan politics. “Darkness is good,” Bannon counseled Trump. “Don’t let up.”

  By this point, the campaign had curtailed most of its polling. But it wasn’t quite flying blind. A few days earlier, Trump’s team of data scientists, squirreled away in an office down in San Antonio, had delivered a report titled “Predictions: Five Days Out,” which contained stunning news that contradicted the widespread assumption that Clinton would win easily. It was suddenly clear that Comey’s FBI investigation was roiling the electorate. “The last few days have proven to be pivotal in the minds of voters with the recent revelations in reopening the investigation of Secretary Clinton,” the report read. “Early polling numbers show declining support for Clinton, shifting in favor of Mr. Trump.” It added: “This may have a fundamental impact on the results.”

  The report’s authors further detected plummeting support for the Democratic candidate among early voting African Americans (down 18 percent from 2012) and “a reduction of turnout in Urban areas relative to Rural areas,” which together were shifting the electoral demographics sharply toward Trump in the key swing states of Ohio, Virginia, and North Carolina. The deeper you dove into the data, the more it appeared that the “hidden” Trump support postulated by Trump and ridiculed by most analysts was, in fact, quite real—and heading to the polls.

  Yet these voters weren’t being accounted for in public polling or even those conducted by Trump’s pollsters and the RNC. So the scientists, in their stilted jargon, modeled what the electorate might look like if “turnout includes a simulated increase in low-propensity voters that has been apparent throughout this election cycle”—what they dubbed a “Trump Effect.” This exercise illuminated a clear electoral path for Trump—ten different paths, in fact, most of which entailed winning Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio—that now looked entirely plausible. It gave Bannon hope that no miracle would be necessary.

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  Like its namesake, Trump Tower is given to hyperbole. Its southwestern facade folds, accordion-style, so that the building magically produces dozens more corner offices and apartments than a typical glass slab. Although the top floor is labeled as the sixty-eighth, this is an illusion—a flight of stairs outside Bannon’s fourteenth-floor office leads down one level, directly to the fifth floor. Trump skipped over numbers when labeling the floors, which is how a building that the city records as having only fifty-eight floors was able to sell the more exclusive and expensive (but
fictitious) floors fifty-nine through sixty-eight.

  It was on the unfinished fifth floor, once used as production offices for Trump’s reality-TV show The Apprentice, that the campaign had set up its Election Day operations a week earlier. By late in the afternoon, lawyers, political operatives, and assorted Republican officials and hangers-on were anxiously buzzing about the rows of folding tables as they awaited the results. The most exclusive among them—a rotating cast of Bannon, Conway, Spicer, and Priebus, along with Trump’s spokeswoman Hope Hicks, his running mate Mike Pence, and assorted Trump offspring and their spouses—squeezed into a ten-by-fifteen-foot storage room built from makeshift drywall partitions. Bossie dubbed it “the crack den.” Its walls were plastered with bumper stickers and posters bearing chest-thumping declarations of purpose (“DONALD TRUMP: HE WILL GET THINGS DONE”), along with, incongruously, a painting of a teddy bear and a blue butterfly smiling at a potted sunflower.

  Bill Stepien, a hard-bitten former top aide to New Jersey governor Chris Christie who was Trump’s national field director, set up a projection TV that beamed an electoral map from his laptop onto a wall. The laptop contained an RNC dashboard that automatically populated the Associated Press’s county-level election results as they rolled in.

  There had been a sudden scare. Just after five p.m., the first exit polls splashed across the Drudge Report, showing that voters were deeply dissatisfied and longing for “change”—but they also showed that Trump was tied with or trailing Clinton in nearly every critical swing state. Bannon pulled Kushner out of the crack den so no one would register their panic.

  “What do you think?” Kushner asked.

  “Well, the numbers tell two different stories,” Bannon replied. “If you believe one set, we’re killing it, it’s a change election, and everything lines up exactly like we thought. But, man, if you believe the other one, we’re getting crushed.”

  It was a moment of truth—and a dilemma. The Cambridge Analytica model had picked up a late shift in the electorate toward Trump. But it was only a model. These exit polls were based on thousands of interviews with actual voters, and they were telling a much different story.

  Not knowing what else to do, Bannon called Matt Drudge to ask what he thought.

  “Fuck the corporate media,” Drudge told him. “They’ve been wrong on everything. They’ll be wrong on this.”

  Solace came slowly at first, and then in a great gusher. On the wall of the crack den, Stepien was clicking through swing states, rattling off numbers like an auctioneer. The campaign had prepared a list of bellwether counties that it thought would provide the earliest indication of its fate. These included not only the traditional swing counties that cable news pundits always puttered on about—places such as Loudoun County, Virginia, and Jefferson County, Colorado—but also areas brimming with older, white, working-class “Trump Republicans”: places like Okaloosa County in Florida’s panhandle and Mahoning County in eastern Ohio. The campaign’s thinking was that if counties like these broke decisively for Trump, then so, too, would the vast swaths of the upper Midwest that they were depending upon to forge a path to victory.

  On TV, the cable networks had for several days focused obsessively on the surge of early votes in Latino-heavy counties, such as Florida’s Miami-Dade and Nevada’s Clark, all but promising a Clinton victory and a humiliating comeuppance for Trump. Stepien’s projector showed a different surge. The numbers in Okaloosa County were through the roof, certain to surpass the 2012 Republican totals by a mile. “This is beyond where we need to be!” Stepien enthused. The dead heat that exit polls showed in Ohio also proved to be a mirage: it soon became clear that Clinton didn’t have a prayer of winning the Buckeye State. And while Wolf Blitzer made great drama on CNN about the large Democratic counties in Florida (Broward, Miami-Dade) that were still outstanding, Trump’s brain trust had already determined that he’d won the state based on the extraordinary turnout in the panhandle. Furthermore, they knew that if Florida fell into their column, the Cambridge model—grandly dubbed the “Battleground Optimizer Path to Victory”—put Trump’s odds of winning at around 80 percent.

  But it was the states Trump wasn’t supposed to win that told the story in the end. Bannon was fixated on Michigan, constantly urging Stepien to click back over and zoom in on bellwethers like Macomb County—and with 30 percent, 40 percent, then 50 percent of precincts reporting, Trump’s lead was holding steady. Or growing. As the night wore on, he even led in Wisconsin, a scenario none of Trump’s data scientists had ever imagined.

  Later on, several of those crammed into the room would recall a moment when Stepien’s manic patter flagged for just a second and the room fell quiet. Then somebody—no one could remember who—muttered, “Holy shit. This is happening.”

  Drudge was right. The corporate media blew it.

  And they knew it. The calls and texts came pouring in. At 9:05 p.m. a frantic reporter e-mailed Bannon: “Can’t believe what I’m seeing. You guys are gonna win, aren’t you?” His curt reply: “Yes.” In newsrooms everywhere, pre-written “Clinton Wins Presidency” stories were being frantically updated or simply trashed.

  Sensing, suddenly, that history was unfolding in their midst, a couple of Trump’s advisers whipped out their phones and began snapping pictures. As word of what was occurring spread through the building, more and more people crammed into the room. Chris Christie showed up and squeezed in next to Ivanka Trump.

  Then Ivanka got a phone call from her father. He and Melania were coming down from the penthouse. Donald and Melania Trump were not, it was instantly understood, going to wedge themselves into the filth and stink of the crack den. No, Trump was headed for the fourteenth-floor war room with its thirty-foot-long wall of televisions. All at once, the room emptied out, as operatives and family members began scrambling for the elevators or the stairs. Only Stepien paused on his way out the door, to scoop up his laptop and projector.

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  By ten p.m., Trump had stationed himself at the center of the war room, where he stood facing the five big-screen televisions bolted to the wall and taking in the full spectrum of the cable news meltdown he was presently precipitating. Mike and Karen Pence sidled over to join him, and soon dozens of staffers and family members surrounded them to watch as the networks called a steady procession of states for Trump. Stepien set up his projector around the corner, in an alcove near the desk of Trump’s senior policy adviser and speechwriter, Stephen Miller. A junior aide was dispatched to race back and forth from the projector to the war room with the latest electoral tallies, like a marathon runner carrying news to the emperor in ancient Rome. Spicer hurriedly summoned a video crew from the fifth floor to begin documenting all that was happening up above.

  Before long, the room was packed. Trump remained riveted to the television screens, and while his aides obsessed over each incoming bloc of voters added to the map—Which part of the state did they come from? Which areas were still outstanding?—Trump hit upon a simple metric that cut through the minutiae and went straight to his odds of winning. “How did Obama do there in 2012?” he would ask, each time a county’s numbers were updated. By and large, the answer was that the key counties in states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio that had produced narrow victories for Obama in 2012 were now showing narrow—and sometimes not-so-narrow—Trump leads. On TV, the cable anchors were working hard to keep up the level of drama, but the scenarios they were spinning for how Clinton could win were becoming narrower and more far-fetched with each passing minute.

  No one was quite sure of the moment when Trump realized that he was going to be the next president. Although he was surrounded by friends, aides, and family members, there seemed to be a hidden force field around him that discouraged a direct approach. So instead of approaching Trump, most well-wishers began congratulating a beaming Mike Pence, whom they high-fived and saluted as “Mr. Vice President.”

  Af
ter a while, Trump, perhaps needing to absorb the gravity of what was happening, went and sat down. A moment later, Christie burst through the force field and sat next to him.

  “Hey, Donald,” he said. “The president talked to me earlier.” Christie knew Obama from their work together in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.

  “If you win he’s going to call my phone, and I’ll pass it over to you.”

  Trump flashed a look of annoyance, clearly resenting the intrusion. He was also, his aides knew well, a fanatical germaphobe who would not want Christie’s cell phone pressed to his face—not even for the deep satisfaction of hearing Barack Obama congratulate him on having defeated Clinton.

  Still, onlookers were startled when Trump snapped, “Hey, Chris, you know my fucking number. Just give it to the president. I don’t want your fucking phone.” Christie’s move was, one witness later recalled, “the ultimate mistake.” It was one from which he wouldn’t recover.

  Finally, Trump stood up and began to circulate among the crowd. Word had gone around earlier in the day that Trump probably wouldn’t attend his victory party a few blocks away at the Hilton Hotel unless he was certain of the outcome. Now, Bannon informed the team, his decision had been made. “He’s going to the Hilton,” Bannon said. “But first he’s going to go upstairs.”

  Spicer realized that this meant they would all be going over to the Hilton. Somehow, that made Trump’s victory feel official. As Trump headed toward the elevator to return to the penthouse and collect himself, Spicer ventured forth to pay his respects to the man who would soon become the next president of the United States. “Congratulations,” Spicer said.