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

by Joshua Green

  News of Trump’s announcement speech instantly went viral, rocketing across cable television and Twitter. But while party leaders winced, Trump’s small coterie of advisers (with the exception of his daughter, Ivanka) wasn’t panicking over the “rapists” charge, as any normal campaign would have, but was in fact relieved and excited that his presidential announcement had broken through. A few days earlier, Trump and some aides had offered the exclusive story of his upcoming entrance into the race to Maggie Haberman, a star reporter at The New York Times—and had been rebuffed. Trump’s long history of self-promotional flirtations with running had left most insiders skeptical that he would ever follow through. Fearing that Trump might be ignored, his aides had pushed back his announcement date. “We were originally trying to do it on June fourteenth, which happens to be Flag Day and Mr. Trump’s birthday,” said Corey Lewandowski, his first campaign manager. “But it fell on a Sunday, and we knew that we wanted to announce on a Tuesday or a Wednesday to get as much attention as we could,” ideally enough to carry through into the Sunday shows.

  Trump’s attacks on Mexican immigrants and his vow to “build a great wall” at the U.S.–Mexico border ensured that a lack of attention was one problem Trump would not have to confront—not then, not ever. Leaving nothing to chance, he invited Breitbart News’ Matthew Boyle up to his twenty-sixth-floor office immediately following his announcement for an exclusive interview and some extra anti-immigrant, anti-establishment jawboning, just to ensure that the Republican base heard his message loud and clear. They heard it, and they loved it. Bannon, who was ecstatic that Trump had not softened his message now that he was truly in the race, splashed the news across Breitbart. Then he got busy arranging a surreal visit Trump would make to the U.S.–Mexico border a few weeks hence, one that would further affix his anti-immigrant identity at the center of his presidential campaign.

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  Although it wasn’t included in the sound bites broadcast on the evening news, Trump, just after he delivered his notorious “rapists” line, had given a citation for the charge. “I speak to border guards,” he said, “and they tell us what we’re getting.” Trump really did do this, and it was an early example of the Trump-Bannon-Breitbart nexus that operated continually throughout the campaign, in varying degrees of public acknowledgment. While Trump was unquestionably his own chief strategist (and often a shrewd one), he had a constant thirst for input, whether it came in the form of cable-news punditry, phone calls with friends, or visits with politically sympathetic groups like the border guards.

  One reason Bannon decided to establish a Texas bureau was to help Breitbart develop sources among the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and border patrol officers stationed at the U.S.–Mexico border. Many of them held fiercely restrictionist views on immigration that mirrored those of Breitbart’s editors and left the agents increasingly at odds with the pro-reform sentiment building among the leaders in both parties. By letting it be known that Breitbart was, as Bannon put it, “a safe pair of hands,” the site became the go-to destination for border agents seeking a sympathetic media outlet in which to express their views or vent about immigration matters that they believed the mainstream media was purposely suppressing. This is how Breitbart became one of the first outlets to publicize the child migrant crisis at the U.S.–Mexico border in the summer of 2014: border agents took snapshots of overcrowded detention facilities and provided them to Breitbart, whose alarmist stories (“Border Open for Criminals as Agents Forced to Babysit Illegals”) were amplified by the Drudge Report and spread to dozens of mainstream outlets.

  In the weeks following Trump’s announcement, Bannon arranged to have Local 2455, the Border Patrol Union in Laredo, Texas, invite Trump to the border for a visit on July 23. (The union’s Laredo spokesman was a regular guest on Bannon’s radio show.) Under pressure from the national union, Local 2455 was forced at the last minute to rescind the invitation. But Trump came anyway, trailing a massive press contingent—and was clearly welcomed by the local border agents.*

  From the moment the “Trump”-emblazoned Boeing 757-200 airliner touched down in Laredo, Trump’s visit was sheer pandemonium. He had spent the days leading up to the trip bizarrely insisting that he was putting himself in grave danger—even though FBI statistics showed that Laredo was the nineteenth-safest city in the country. Trump didn’t exactly dress for combat. He arrived at the Laredo airport in a gold-buttoned navy blazer, khakis, and white golf shoes, with a matching white “Make American Great Again” cap, and was besieged by more than a hundred reporters and dozens of camera crews. Still, he kept up the ruse. “People are saying, ‘Oh, it’s so dangerous what you’re doing, Mr. Trump, it’s so dangerous!’” a straight-faced Trump told the assembled press. “I have to do it. We’re showing something.”

  Reporters piled into two charter buses furnished by Trump and followed his police-escorted motorcade to the World Trade Bridge, where eighteen-wheelers were lined up waiting to cross the border. In a brief press conference, Trump, always the ringmaster, attacked the anti-immigration bona fides of Texas governor Rick Perry, boasted about his own poll numbers, insisted that anti-Trump protesters along the highway “were all in favor of Trump,” and reiterated his vow to build a wall and “stop the illegals.” “I’ll bring the jobs back,” he declared. “And, you know, the Hispanics are going to get those jobs, and they’re going to love Trump.” He corrected himself: “They already do.” And with that, Trump zipped back to the airport and went home to New York, having spent all of three hours on the ground.

  The trip’s purpose was pure theater. It was intended to show that Trump meant what he’d said and was willing to go to the border and say it there, too, without equivocation. It was also Trump’s way of thumbing his nose at critics of his “rapists” comment, such as Jeb Bush (who called it “extraordinarily ugly”), even as he denied Bush political oxygen by dominating presidential campaign coverage. In fact, Bush’s support was already crumbling under the weight of Trump’s steady, emasculating (“low energy”) assaults. Three days before the Laredo visit, Trump had surged past Bush to take a commanding lead in the Washington Post–ABC News poll of Republican voters. He would never relinquish it.

  It took a certain moxie to dream up stunts like the border visit. Trump loved moxie. And he liked the ideas he was getting from Bannon, especially the dropped-jaw reaction they produced on cable news. Although Trump didn’t dwell on policy details, Bannon pitched in there, too. Trump was coming under fire because his campaign hadn’t produced a single policy paper. So Bannon arranged for Nunberg and Ann Coulter, the conservative pundit, to quickly produce a white paper on Trump’s immigration policies. (When the campaign released it, Coulter, without disclosing her role, tweeted that it was “the greatest political document since the Magna Carta.”)

  “Throughout the campaign—long before Steve actually joined the campaign—he was active through Breitbart, but also by providing very important and unsolicited advice,” said Lewandowski. “He would call Mr. Trump, or he would call me, and say, ‘Hey, here’s a recommendation.’ We talked to Steve a lot. I think for Mr. Trump, authenticity is the most important thing. Steve’s authentic. His success financially gave him the freedom to not have to do things he doesn’t want to do—not shave, not wear a tie. That’s unheard-of in the world of Trump. But he’s achieved a remarkable amount of personal success, and that matters a lot to Trump.”

  It helped, too, that Bannon’s success included Hollywood and a background in entertainment. On The Apprentice, Trump rarely followed a script, instead taking a concept and improvising to fill the role. In politics, as in television, Trump could instantly spot a good idea, and then, through some combination of intuition and bravado, improvise with consistently successful results. As the world was learning, television and politics were not so different.

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  By August, Trump sat comfortably atop every major Republican presidential
poll. The Laredo trip and, more broadly, his refusal to apologize for any transgression, no matter how crass or offensive, lit up a segment of the Republican base that had been dormant or uncommitted. Trump’s celebrity and name ID had always gotten him a respectable percentage in the polls, usually somewhere in the low teens. Now he shot up into the mid to high twenties, which, in a crowded field of seventeen candidates, was enough to put him solidly in the lead. Even so, the party establishment took solace in the belief that Trump was heading for an inevitable fall. The first GOP debate, sponsored by Fox News, loomed on August 6 in Cleveland.

  Within Fox, Trump was fast emerging as a polarizing figure. He had long been a friend of the network and cherished his weekly Monday call-in segment on Fox & Friends, but his entrance into the race and surprising strength in the Republican field were causing tension. Fox anchors, like other media figures, initially treated his candidacy with arched-eyebrow amusement. But as Trump pulled ahead of the field, that began to change. Murdoch and Ailes, both champions of immigration reform, had had a soft spot for Marco Rubio ever since the dynamic young Florida senator had pitched them on the merits of his Gang of Eight reform bill over a private dinner in 2013 in the executive dining room of News Corporation’s Manhattan headquarters. In response, the network curbed its criticism of the reform plan. But others at Fox News, Sean Hannity foremost among them, were ardent Trump backers with a direct line to Bannon (whose influence some Fox hosts knew about and didn’t like. “Bannon is human garbage,” one of them fumed). Lurking beneath it all was a worry that Trump’s antics might tarnish the Republican brand and thereby ease Hillary Clinton’s path to the White House.

  Amid this uneasiness and suspicion, Megyn Kelly, who was set to co-moderate the Cleveland debate, was something of a wild card. A former defense attorney and political independent, Kelly was a rising star at Fox News, with pretensions to being a serious journalist. In May, Trump had appeared on her prime-time show, The Kelly File, without incident. But a week before the debate, Trump’s network grew alarmed at Kelly’s eagerness to tout a story published in The Daily Beast recounting accusations Trump’s ex-wife Ivana made in a divorce deposition that he had raped her in 1989. Over two nights, Kelly did multiple segments on the story that included her sharp criticism of Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen, who had wrongly claimed, “You cannot rape your spouse. And there’s very clear case law,” and then made vague but ominous threats to The Daily Beast reporter.

  Trump was scheduled to appear on The Kelly File three days before the debate, but lost his nerve and canceled at the last minute. Kelly had been hammering him all week, he complained to a friend, and he was certain she was out to get him.

  It turned out he was right: Trump’s toughest opponents in Cleveland were not his fellow candidates but the Fox News moderators, who went right after him—none with more gusto than Kelly.

  As soon as the lights went up, she went straight for the jugular. “You’ve called women you don’t like ‘fat pigs,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘slobs,’ and ‘disgusting animals,’” she admonished him. “Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president?”

  Trump saw the attack coming and cut her off. “Only Rosie O’Donnell,” he barked.

  “No, it wasn’t,” Kelly replied. “Your Twitter account—”

  The audience interrupted with applause for Trump.

  “Thank you,” he replied.

  “For the record, it was well beyond Rosie O’Donnell—”

  “Yes, I’m sure it was.”

  “Your Twitter account has several disparaging comments about women’s looks,” Kelly continued. “You once told a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president? And how will you answer the charge from Hillary Clinton, who is likely to be the Democratic nominee, that you are part of the war on women?”

  “The big problem this country has is being politically correct,” Trump practically shouted, invoking conservatives’ favorite term of disdain. “I’ve been challenged by so many people, and I don’t frankly have time for total political correctness—and to be honest with you this country doesn’t have time either.”

  The crowd roared again.

  Trump continued hurling insults, going after O’Donnell, political reporters, Bowe Bergdahl, China, Mexico, Japan, money lenders, and just about everyone in Washington. “Our leaders are stupid,” he declared. “Our politicians are stupid.” He soon worked around to his greatest applause line. “We need to build a wall, and it has to be built quickly,” he said. “We need to keep illegals out.”

  Although Kelly was correct in every citation, the audience in the hall was plainly with Trump, cheering and oohing at each thrilling provocation, as if they were ringside at a prizefight. The evening proved to be pivotal for Trump. Going in, he’d never had to debate his opponents, nor submit to steady, hostile questioning by seasoned journalists. Because Trump didn’t even feign interest in the policy details that are the ammunition of most candidate debates, the broad expectation was that he was walking into a turkey shoot.

  Yet not only was Trump unrattled, but his bravado and aggression set the tone for the debate. Every candidate strained to match his energy. Emulating Trump’s swagger, New Jersey governor Chris Christie tore into Kentucky senator Rand Paul. But no one except Paul mustered the courage to directly attack Trump, and Paul may have regretted it, as Trump dispatched him with a devastating put-down (“You’re having a hard time tonight”) that was deadly because it was true. Consciously or otherwise, several candidates echoed Trump’s points and some even genuflected before the unlikely front-runner. “Donald Trump is hitting a nerve in this country,” Ohio governor John Kasich said at one point. “Mr. Trump is touching a nerve because people want to see a wall being built.”

  Going into the debate, the big battle was supposed to be between Trump and Jeb Bush. But Trump sensed that his real opponent was Fox News, and throughout the evening, he and his inquisitors battled back and forth like gladiators. Kelly did manage to inflict some wounds. Rattling off the liberal positions Trump had once held, she stopped him cold by asking: “When did you actually become a Republican?” Trump’s bluster momentarily escaped him. “I’ve evolved on many issues over the years, and do you know who else has? Ronald Reagan,” he answered feebly. “Very much evolved.”

  But Trump wasn’t finished—not even when the moderators were done. After the debate, he inaugurated what was soon to become a tradition of walking off the stage and directly to the television cameras to critique the event he’d just participated in. He didn’t let up. The next evening, Trump lit into the Fox News moderators and complained about Kelly in particular. To CNN’s Don Lemon, he said, “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”

  A media storm quickly ensued over whether Trump was suggesting that Kelly had gone after him unfairly because she was menstruating. But Trump’s anger at Fox News and Kelly also set off another storm that didn’t fully register until the next day—yet it opened up an enduring divide in the Republican Party that would carry through the election. The divide was between mainstream Republicans and those primarily loyal to Trump, and centered on whether Fox was subjecting Trump to ordinary journalistic inquiry or attacking him with the intention of destroying him to make way for a more acceptable candidate. Among other things, this divide split Fox News and Breitbart.

  Within minutes of the debate’s end, even as Trump was still nursing his grievances on live television, reporters began to realize that the revelations of his past behavior, so bluntly excavated by Kelly, had indeed caused an intense reaction among Republican voters—not against Trump, but against Fox News. One method reporters use to gauge voter sentiment is to arrange ahead of time to speak with supporters of a candidate as soon as a debate concludes. Among Trump suppor
ters, the sense of betrayal was acute. “I had more emotion about Fox News tonight than I did about Donald Trump,” said Janet Roberts, sixty-nine, a nurse in Bellville, Ohio, who was backing Trump. “Those questions were not professional questions. They were bullying. They were set up to purposely make them all look bad. Our country is a mess, and I feel like the debate was an example of that. I’m still with Trump.”

  Bannon and the Breitbart editors had the same reaction and immediately turned on Megyn Kelly, with a fusillade of negative articles. She became the newest Breitbart narrative: the back-stabbing, self-promoting betrayer-of-the-cause. And Breitbart became the locus of pro-Trump, anti-Fox conservative anger. Between Thursday night, when the debate took place, and Sunday evening, Breitbart published twenty-five stories on Kelly, and the site’s editor in chief, Alex Marlow, went on CNN to accuse Fox News of “trying to take out Donald Trump” and staging “a gotcha debate.”

  The intensity of Republican anger stunned Fox News executives. The debate had drawn a record 24 million viewers. Now many of them were apoplectic at the network’s top talent. “In the beginning, virtually 100 percent of the emails were against Megyn Kelly,” a Fox source told New York’s Gabriel Sherman. “Roger was not happy. Most of the Fox viewers were taking Trump’s side.” Word spread through the building that Kelly was furious and had personally complained to Ailes. By Sunday, the attacks against her showed no sign of letting up, as other conservative opinion makers, such as radio host Mark Levin, agreed that her questions to Trump had been “unfair.”

  In a panic, Ailes called Bannon and begged him to call off the attacks.