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

by Joshua Green

  Trump just stared at him and uttered two words: “Not yet.”

  —

  It was Bannon who finally delivered the news, although by then it could hardly have been a surprise. “Hey, look, we’re gonna win this thing,” he said. Trump nodded, sensing where his chief strategist was going, and replied, “Let’s go get this done.”

  Trump was alluding to his victory speech: he didn’t have one. Nor had he prepared a concession speech. Aware that his boss was deeply superstitious—so much so that journalists had witnessed Trump tossing salt over his shoulder before meals for good luck—Bannon had intuited that he wouldn’t respond well to the hoary political tradition of writing out two speeches ahead of time, and so had simply never raised the subject with him. Trump wouldn’t want to jinx himself, he was sure. Truth be told, Bannon loved this part of Trump—his easy willingness to say “fuck that” to any number of venerable traditions without so much as a moment’s thought. Pure honey badger. He sometimes wondered whether Trump would even bother to take the stage in the event of a loss, and half suspected that he wouldn’t.

  But that scenario no longer applied.

  When they arrived in the penthouse, Trump, Bannon, and Miller gathered in the kitchen, along with Ivanka and her husband, Jared, to decide how Trump should address himself to a shell-shocked nation—a shell-shocked world. Trump made clear that he wanted a speech that would bring the country together, something “presidential” that would salve the wounds of the bitter campaign and at least crack open a door to millions of stunned Clinton supporters struggling to get their bearings. When he got up onstage, he’d surround himself with his family, too, to give Americans a fuller, softer glimpse of the man who would be leading them. Miller roughed out some lines about how it was “time for America to bind the wounds of division” and “time for us to come together as one united people.”

  As midnight struck and Clinton’s carriage turned into a pumpkin, the penthouse started filling up with VIPs: Trump’s sons Don Jr. and Eric and their wives, Melania and ten-year-old Barron, Conway and communications adviser Jason Miller, Rudy and Judith Giuliani, the Pences. Then, loudly and boisterously—inevitably—Chris Christie emerged from the elevator, eager as ever to join the party. He made a beeline for Trump. “It’s one of the main reasons he got fired,” one attendee later insisted. “Trump hates being smothered, and Christie just got under his skin.” Trump and his writing team moved to the dining room.

  Eventually, thirty or forty people were milling around, excitedly buzzing about the upset they were witness to and waiting for the president-elect to head to his victory party. There was no longer any doubt that he would prevail or do so by a comfortable electoral margin. But Trump decided that he wasn’t going to leave for the Hilton until the Associated Press called Pennsylvania, thereby slamming the door on even the one-in-a-million shot Clinton had left.

  The AP’s call came at 1:39 a.m., and a roar went up in the penthouse. It was time to go.

  The Secret Service ushered Trump and his family toward the awaiting motorcade, with Bannon and Miller in tow. Down below, Spicer and several of his RNC colleagues threw on their jackets and decided to walk the four blocks to the Hilton. Although by now they were certain of victory, they wondered what Trump would say—there had still been no word from the Clinton campaign.

  A week earlier, Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, had reached out to Conway to choreograph the Election Night formalities. Mook had informed her that if Clinton lost, she would call and concede fifteen minutes after the AP called the race—but should Clinton win, he added, “if we don’t hear from you after fifteen minutes, she’s going to go out onstage and give her victory speech.” Bannon thought the message was arrogant—a veiled threat that Trump had better fall in line—and told Conway to ignore it.

  Trump was just preparing to take the stage at the Hilton when the AP made the call. At 2:34 a.m., the news flashed across the wire: “BREAKING: Donald Trump is elected president of the United States.” Quickly, Bannon and Priebus huddled with him to figure out what he should say. And then, just as Mook had promised, the call came from Clinton. Her prompt, graceful concession was, even Bannon had to admit, “very classy.” And with that last, outstanding bit of business put to rest, Trump and his family took to the stage and made it official.

  From the far left end of the stage, half eclipsed by Conway, Bannon stood gazing out over the raucous crowd still absorbing the news of the AP’s call. Total shit show, he thought, approvingly. It was true, and not least because the audience was filled with Bannons. More than twenty of his relatives, including his ninety-five-year-old father, Martin, were on hand for the celebration. One relative even became a minor icon of sorts, when the next day’s Bloomberg Businessweek chose for its cover an image of a stereotypical “Trump bro” in a red “Make America Great Again” baseball cap grinning like a jackal and pointing at the camera—it was Bannon’s nephew Sean, a “total fucking hammerhead,” as he put it, affectionately.

  After the Hilton shut down and the revelers spilled out onto Sixth Avenue, Spicer, still unable to process what had just happened, found himself roaming the streets of Manhattan alone, not ready for the historic evening to end. He wandered north for a while until he hit Central Park, then he turned east. Finally, realizing the chaos that dawn would bring, he decided to head back to his hotel and turned south.

  His path took him down Fifth Avenue, right past Trump Tower. As he was about to cross Fifty-sixth Street, he noticed flashing lights and looked up. Trump’s motorcade was just pulling up to the tower’s residential entrance. As it rolled to a stop, a door flew open and a grizzled, grinning, disheveled figure with two pens still clipped to his shirt placket hopped out and enveloped him in a bear hug. Spicer, grinning wildly, reached out an arm and snapped a selfie—and it was at that moment, at exactly 3:27 a.m., standing with Bannon in the pitch black outside Trump Tower, that the magnitude of what they had accomplished finally sunk in. They had just carried off the greatest political upset in U.S. history and sent Donald J. Trump to the White House.

  —

  In the days after the election, the world wondered: How could this happen? Many people still wonder. No shortage of scapegoats and malefactors were offered up by way of explanation: James Comey, the Russians, the media, “fake news,” sexism—the list went on and on. Yet none was entirely satisfying, or big enough to encompass the scale of the shock, or capable of unwinding the sense of dislocation so many people felt when they awoke to the realization that something so seemingly unlikely—so utterly extreme—as Trump’s election could happen in plain view of everyone, without anyone really seeing it coming. It was like the opening scene of a Hollywood thriller, the sudden jolt that makes you sit upright in your seat, and after which some remarkable, winding backstory is gradually revealed. But the revelation never arrived. Even now, there’s a sense that some vital piece of the puzzle is missing.

  That piece is Steve Bannon.

  From Machiavelli to Karl Rove, politics has a rich history of the genius figure whose plots and intrigues on behalf of a ruler make him the hidden hand behind the throne, the wily strategist secretly guiding the nation’s affairs. So familiar has this story become that it’s a trope of American political journalism: if you’re a presidential candidate without a brilliant strategist, the media will often take it upon themselves to anoint one you never knew you had. The strategists, aware of this narrative compulsion, openly jockey to win the position.

  Although he’s been cast in the role, Bannon is no such figure—or in any event, he doesn’t fit the typical mold any more than Trump fit the mold of “typical presidential candidate.” What Bannon is instead is a brilliant ideologue from the outer fringe of American politics—and an opportunistic businessman—whose unlikely path happened to intersect with Trump’s at precisely the right moment in history.

  For years, Bannon had been searching for a vessel for hi
s populist-nationalist ideas, trying out and eventually discarding Tea Party politicians such as Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann. At the same time, he was building an elaborate machine designed to destroy the great enemy whose march to the White House posed the biggest threat to those ideas and to everyone whose beliefs hewed to the right of center: Hillary Clinton. In 1998, when Clinton first posited a “vast right-wing conspiracy” bent on ruining her and her husband, she was widely ridiculed. But she wasn’t wrong. By the time she launched her 2016 campaign, Bannon was sitting at the nexus of a far-flung group of conspirators whose scope and reach Clinton and her campaign didn’t fathom until far too late.

  At first, Bannon didn’t understand that he’d found the figure he’d been looking for. Trump wasn’t a serious candidate and would never deign to let some Rove figure govern his behavior—that much was clear from the outset. But Bannon soon discovered that Trump’s great personal force could knock down barriers that impeded other politicians. And Trump, for his part, seemed to recognize that Bannon alone could focus and channel his uncanny political intuition with striking success. Bannon didn’t make Trump president the way Rove did George W. Bush—but Trump wouldn’t be president if it weren’t for Bannon. Together, their power and reach gave them strength and influence far beyond what either could have achieved on his own.

  Any study of Trump’s rise to the presidency is therefore unavoidably a study of Bannon, too. It’s a story Trump won’t like, because he isn’t always the central character. And because, contrary to his blustery assertions, his victory wasn’t a landslide, didn’t owe solely to the force of his personality or his business savvy, and happened only due to a remarkable confluence of circumstances. This confluence occurred in large part because Bannon had built a trap that snapped shut on Clinton, and the success of this, too, was an incredible long shot. In fact, the whole saga of Bannon is every bit as strange and unlikely as that of Trump. He’s like an organism that could have grown and blossomed only under a precise and exacting set of conditions—a black orchid.

  This book is the backstory of how those conditions came to be—it’s the part of the movie you haven’t seen. To understand Trump’s extraordinary rise, you have to go all the way back and begin with Steve Bannon, or else it doesn’t make sense.

  TWO

  “WHERE’S MY STEVE?”

  The Trump-Bannon partnership, like so much else in Trump’s life, has a bizarre and winding lineage that traces back to a lawsuit. In the mid-1990s, Steve Wynn, the Las Vegas casino mogul, was looking to move in on Atlantic City, New Jersey, a possibility that threatened the livelihoods of the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, the Trump Taj Mahal, and other gambling establishments along Atlantic City’s Boardwalk. Unable to make headway, Wynn’s Mirage Resorts, Inc., filed an antitrust suit against Trump’s company and Hilton Hotels, setting the stage for an epic showdown. At the time, Trump and Wynn were both in their fifties, both graduates of the University of Pennsylvania, both fiercely competitive giants of the casino industry, possessed of healthy egos, and operating at the peak of their powers. And perhaps because they shared so much in common, they were bitter enemies. “They hate each other’s guts,” a casino analyst told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “It’s like poison.”

  Right away, things had gotten very strange. A private investigator working for Trump’s defense team had gone off to dig up dirt on Wynn and Mirage, only to switch allegiances partway through his assignment and secretly defect to his target. The resourceful sleuth—whose tradecraft included using a “modified jock strap” with a hidden tape recorder and microphones concealed in a belt—turned over to Wynn the secrets he had purloined for Trump, later claiming that he was moved to do so by a crisis of conscience (and not, as Trump’s lawyers suggested, a $10,000-a-month consulting deal with Mirage).

  Wynn and Mirage sued again, this time claiming that Trump’s company had engaged in a conspiracy to steal its trade secrets—including a list of high-rolling Korean gamblers about whom, Wynn’s suit alleged, it spread dark rumors of money laundering and mob ties, in hopes that Wynn Resorts would be denied a New Jersey casino license. (The lawsuit revealed, among many other colorful details, that the investigator had given his counterintelligence mission the code name “Operation Seoul Train.”) An attorney for Trump likened the investigator, not unreasonably, to Judas Iscariot. Wynn shot back that the case exemplified “the most outrageous misconduct, the most flagrant violations of law and decent behavior in the history of the resort hotel industry.”

  It was all about to explode into open court—until, on February 23, 2000, the case was abruptly settled. A week later, the reason became clear: MGM made an offer to buy Mirage Resorts that eventually netted Wynn, its largest shareholder, around $300 million. Wynn’s designs to build a casino in Atlantic City never came to fruition. In the aftermath, with both men having effectively “won” their battle, Trump and Wynn became friends.

  And that is how, several years later, at a fund-raiser for Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C., Steve Wynn called his friend Donald Trump over and introduced him to a man who would soon set the course for his unlikely political rise: David Bossie.

  —

  By the time he met Trump in the late 2000s, Bossie, then still in his early forties, was already a hardened veteran of Washington’s political wars. Smitten with Ronald Reagan as a teenager growing up in Boston, he became youth director of Bob Dole’s 1988 presidential campaign, and then a foot soldier in Newt Gingrich’s Republican revolution when the GOP took back the House of Representatives in the 1994 election. Not long afterward, the beefy, buzz-cut, hyperintense Bossie (who still resembles a Dick Tracy villain) landed a job as chief investigator for the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee.

  The job put Bossie at the beating heart of the Republican anti-Clinton movement that was then still picking up steam, and in the employ of perhaps its fiercest prosecutor, Representative Dan Burton of Indiana, the committee’s new chairman. Even before Burton took the gavel in 1997, his unhinged zeal to take down Bill Clinton was the stuff of legend. A few years earlier, convinced that the 1993 suicide of Clinton’s deputy White House counselor, Vincent Foster, was in fact a cold-blooded murder, Burton had re-created the event by shooting a watermelon with a pistol in his backyard in an effort to prove his theory. (He didn’t convince too many people, but he did earn the enduring nickname “Watermelon Dan.”)

  When he became Oversight chairman, Burton quickly laid waste to the committee’s tradition of august bipartisan restraint and seized on its considerable legal powers—in particular, the power to issue subpoenas—to torment the Clintons, often by dispatching his chief investigator to hound anyone he suspected of abetting them.

  Bossie required no special encouragement. He routinely evinced a zealousness that matched, or even eclipsed, that of his boss. The New York Times once described him, in a news story, as “a relentless ferret.” He cut a strange figure. A volunteer firefighter, he lived in a firehouse in Burtonsville, Maryland, where he slept in a bunk bed and responded to emergency calls when he wasn’t racing off in pursuit of real and imagined Clinton perfidies. But some of those Clinton scandals were legitimate. And Bossie, who was often first to document them, was a favorite source of political reporters, to whom he reliably leaked the latest incriminating details about the first family—even if his methods rubbed some of his own colleagues the wrong way. Not long after Bossie’s arrival, the Oversight Committee’s counsel abruptly quit, blast-faxing to reporters a letter of resignation that attacked “the unrelenting self-promoting actions of the Committee’s Investigative Coordinator.”

  Relentlessness and self-promotion were no sins in Gingrich’s Washington. But Bossie’s fanatical desire to fell the Clintons at any cost eventually did him in. Burton’s committee developed a troubling reckless streak that led to unconscionable errors. In their determination to prove that Clinton was illegally taking money from Chinese don
ors, Burton’s staff fired off hundreds of subpoenas, sometimes targeting the wrong person. In 1997, for instance, his investigators mistakenly subpoenaed the telephone and financial records of an elderly Georgetown University professor named Chi Wang, who happened to share a name with a major Democratic donor, and yet, when Bossie was apprised of the error, he still wouldn’t relent. “Whether he deserves a subpoena or not, we haven’t decided,” he said of the innocent professor. “If you make a mistake—and we’re not sure we made one—you want to look into it.”

  But it was Bossie’s recklessness in a different Clinton investigation—this one involving the jailed former White House associate attorney general Webster Hubbell, once a partner at Hillary Clinton’s Little Rock, Arkansas, law firm—that finally brought about his downfall. In 1998, Burton released some transcripts of prison recordings of Hubbell’s private telephone conversations. (Hubbell had been convicted of fraudulently billing his law firm.) Burton went on Nightline and Meet the Press to announce that the conversations implicated Clinton herself in the fraud. The media, by now conditioned to tout Burton’s charges, went into overdrive on what looked to be a major new scandal. Burton didn’t know it, but he was about to walk into a trap.

  His Democratic counterpart on the Oversight Committee, Henry Waxman of California, was a legendary investigator himself, with a clever and sharp-eyed staff alert to Bossie’s recklessness. (At the time, Waxman’s Oversight investigation of the tobacco industry was being made into the Oscar-nominated Al Pacino–Russell Crowe film The Insider.) While conducting its own forensic examination of the Hubbell transcripts, Waxman’s team discovered that the excerpts Burton had released to the press had been doctored in such a way as to appear to incriminate Clinton, when the full transcript plainly did not. They had a good idea of who the culprit was.