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

by Joshua Green

  By the time Trump arrived at his next event, in Lisbon, Maine, he had hit upon an even better sound bite to capture Clinton’s travails. “This,” he told the audience, “is the biggest political scandal since Watergate.”

  —

  Over the next eleven days, Trump did something that he hadn’t managed to do in months: he kept focused. Somehow, at this decisive final moment, he stuck to a script that extolled Bannon-style, “America first” nationalism while issuing elaborate condemnations of Clinton’s character and moral corruption. He had reason to be encouraged. His internal polls, which showed him already ascending before the Comey letter, now had him turning sharply upward in every state and continuing to climb.

  On November 3, a report was circulated among Trump’s top advisers that took note of the Comey effect. “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,” it read. “Early polling numbers show declining support for Clinton, shifting in favor of Mr. Trump, suggesting this may have a fundamental impact on the race.”

  Five days out, Trump still trailed Clinton in nearly every public poll, and his forecasting model, although it showed improved odds of victory, still implied that a loss was the likelier outcome. And the Comey letter was not a panacea. The report noted that the jolt it gave Trump was already leveling off in all but a few places. “As of today, we have started to realize what the ‘ceiling’ is in many states, though four states continue to rise: PA, IN, MO, and NH,” the report said. “We will continue tracking these states to hopefully understand where the continued movement takes us.”

  —

  Throughout the general election, both campaigns battled for a group of voters who would ultimately decide the race. While media outlets fixated on distinct character types considered representative of the election—the dispossessed factory worker registering to vote for Trump, the elderly woman longing to see a female president—the real competition between the campaigns was for voters of a less vivid hue.

  Trump’s data analysts gave them a nickname: “double haters.” These were people who disliked both candidates but traditionally showed up at the polls to vote. They were a sizable bloc: 3 to 5 percent of the 15 million voters across seventeen battleground states that Trump’s staff believed were persuadable. Early on, many indicated support for third-party candidate Gary Johnson. But after a series of televised flubs, including Johnson’s admission that he didn’t know what “Aleppo” was (it was a city caught in the middle of Syria’s civil war), they largely abandoned him. What made the double haters so vexing to Trump’s analysts was that their intentions were difficult to discern. Many refused to answer pollsters’ questions or declared themselves undecided.

  The Clinton campaign thought of these persuadable voters as being mainly “pocketbook Republicans”—people whose votes were driven by kitchen-table economic concerns but were made deeply uncomfortable by Trump’s racist and sexist outbursts. These were the voters Clinton had hoped to shear off from Trump with her “alt-right” speech in August.

  “What we found is that they were very fickle: they’d toggle between telling pollsters that they were leaning Clinton or leaning Trump, depending on where the news cycle was that week,” said Fallon. “This is the largest piece of fallout we ascribe to the Comey letter. In ending the campaign on a note where people were reminded about the worst of our controversies, we saw those fickle, Republican-leaning voters that we’d been successfully attracting off and on throughout the general election revert back to Trump at the end.”

  For all their many differences, on this subject the campaigns generally agreed. Comey’s letter had the effect of convincing the double haters to finally choose an affiliation—or, in the case of many who had been leaning toward Clinton, choose to stay home. “What we saw is that it gave them a reason to vote against her instead of voting for him,” said Matt Oczkowski. “They were finally able to admit that to pollsters without feeling any guilt. All of those double haters and last-minute undecideds started to break heavily toward Trump in the polling and research when, deep down, they were probably going to vote for him anyway. Now they had a reason.”

  There was nothing Clinton could do to stop them.

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  As midnight approached on November 7, a restive Trump audience was packed into the DeVos Place Convention Center in Grand Rapids, Michigan. On this single day, the last before Election Day, Trump had barnstormed across many of the states his campaign was now certain were in play: Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and then one final rally in Michigan. Too late, Clinton had awoken to the danger of the tightening race: she, too, had swept through Pennsylvania (twice) and North Carolina, and had also visited Grand Rapids earlier in the day.

  Before Trump appeared, Ted Nugent hit the stage in a camouflage jacket and cap to play “The Star-Spangled Banner” on an electric guitar, shouting “This is real Michigan!” It was past midnight when Pence took the lectern to introduce “the next president of the United States, Donald Trump.”

  “So you know, we added this stop about twelve minutes ago, and look at this place—is this incredible?” Trump said. “We don’t need Jay Z or Beyoncé, we don’t need Jon Bon Jovi. We don’t need Lady Gaga. All we need is great ideas to make America great again.”

  For the last time as a candidate, Trump worked through all his famous tropes, pausing wistfully at times and basking in the crowd’s energy. “We’re hours away from a once-in-a-lifetime change,” he said. “Today is our Independence Day.”

  “Today the American working class is going to strike back,” he said, marveling at the thought. “The election is now. Can you believe it? It’s today.”

  Soon, Trump and his audience slid into the familiar call-and-response rhythms of his rallies.

  “Hillary Clinton is the most corrupt person ever to seek the presidency of the United States.”

  Lock her up! Lock her up!

  “Our jobs are being stolen like candy from a baby—not going to happen anymore, folks.”

  Booooo!

  “It used to be, the cars were made in Flint and you couldn’t drink the water in Mexico. Now the cars are made in Mexico and you can’t drink the damned water in Flint. What the hell?”

  Trump! Trump! Trump!

  “We’re going to fix our inner cities. Right now they’re so unsafe, you walk to the store to pick up a loaf of bread, you get shot.”

  “A Trump administration will also secure and defend the borders of the United States. And yes, we will also build a great, great wall.”

  Build the Wall! Build the Wall!

  At this, Trump stepped back from the lectern and opened his arms, smiling at the audience. “I just want to ask you one question, if you don’t mind, at one in the morning,” he said. “Who is going to pay for the wall?”

  Mexico!

  “One hundred percent,” he said. “They don’t know it yet, but they’re going to pay.”

  In the end, he came back to his signature phrase, emblazoned on hats and placards throughout the hall: “To all Americans tonight in all of our cities and all of our towns, I pledge to you one more time, together, we will make America wealthy again. We will make America strong again. We will make America safe again. And we will make America great again.”

  And then Trump delivered one final importunement to the crowd.

  “Go to bed!” he told them. “Go to bed right now! Get up and vote!”

  On Election Day, Trump’s forecasting model indicated that he probably wouldn’t make it. Some of his advisers said his odds of victory were 30 percent; others went as high as 40 percent. At least one adviser said, “It will take a miracle for us to win.”

  And then the world turned upside down.

  —

  On the morning after the election, Bannon had barely slept. The sud
den rush of victory, the drama of Clinton’s concession call as Trump was about to take the stage, the glare of the spotlight in his eyes as he gazed out on the drunken, jubilant revelers in MAGA hats at the victory party—it left him in a fugue state.

  But now, as the sun came up over Manhattan, he could see how everything had come together exactly according to script. “Hillary Clinton was the perfect foil for Trump’s message,” Bannon marveled to a reporter. “From her e-mail server, to her lavishly paid speeches to Wall Street bankers, to her FBI problems, she represented everything that middle-class Americans had had enough of.”

  The beauty of it was that no one had seen her downfall coming. “Their minds are totally blown,” he said, laughing. Clinton’s great mistake—the Democrats’ great mistake—was one he recognized all too well, since he’d watched Republicans commit it during their anti-Clinton witch hunts of the nineties: they’d become so intoxicated with the righteousness of their cause, so thoroughly convinced that a message built on identity politics would carry the day and drown out the “deplorables,” that they became trapped in their own bubble and blind to the millions who disagreed with them—“and that goes for you guys in the media, too,” he added.

  Now Trump had shattered that illusion, and the wave that had swept across Europe and Great Britain had come crashing down on America’s shores. “Trump,” Bannon proclaimed, “is the leader of a populist uprising. . . . What Trump represents is a restoration—a restoration of true American capitalism and a revolution against state-sponsored socialism. Elites have taken all the upside for themselves and pushed the downside to the working- and middle-class Americans.” Bernie Sanders had tried to warn them, but the Democrats hadn’t listened and didn’t break free of crony capitalism. “Trump saw this,” Bannon said. “The American people saw this. And they have risen up to smash it.”

  For all his early-morning bravado, Bannon sounded as if he still couldn’t quite believe it all. And what an incredible story it was. Given the central role he had played in the greatest political upset in American history, the reporter suggested that it had all the makings of a Hollywood movie.

  Without missing a beat, Bannon shot back a reply worthy of his favorite vintage star, Gregory Peck in Twelve O’Clock High.

  “Brother,” he said, “Hollywood doesn’t make movies where the bad guys win.”

  AFTERWORD: KALI YUGA

  In the shell-shocked aftermath of the election, President Obama, looking shaken, appeared in the White House Rose Garden to deliver public remarks intended to project a sense of calm—a sense, really, that the basic stability of the country remained intact. “The sun is up,” Obama said. “I know everybody had a long night. I did as well. I had a chance to talk to President-elect Trump last night—about 3:30 in the morning, I think it was—to congratulate him on winning the election.” The next day, when the two men appeared together in the Oval Office, it felt as if the world had slipped through the looking glass. Trump quickly named Bannon his chief White House strategist. Republicans controlled every branch of government. With Trump’s ability to defy every political norm, anything seemed possible. Who could argue otherwise after what had just transpired?

  And yet within days of his inauguration, Trump’s White House was plunged into chaos and scandal from which it has not recovered—and may never. Bannon, the imaginative reconceiver of U.S. politics, hung streams of paper listing Trump’s “promises” from the walls of his West Wing office. His strategy, as always, was to launch furious attacks, this time to “shock the system” and rapidly reorient the federal government in a more nationalist direction. He called this, with what I took to be intentional irony, a “shock and awe approach” to asserting Trump’s power. But Trump’s flurry of activity quickly ran into problems. There was his executive order, sprung a week after his inauguration, banning immigrants from seven majority-Muslim countries, which set off nationwide protests and was blocked by the courts; his firing two weeks later of national security director Michael Flynn for contacts with the Russians; the collapse of his first major legislative initiative, a bill to repeal Obamacare; his firing of FBI director James Comey; and the swift descent of the West Wing into a viper’s nest of backstabbing and leaks.

  This quick turn toward a crackup was hardly unforeseeable or even altogether surprising. But it contrasted sharply with the success of a candidate who had dominated his opponents, shaped news coverage, and shown himself to be all but impervious to forces that overwhelm other politicians.

  Bannon, whose wild gambits in the campaign had invariably paid off, seemed to run out of magic tricks once Hillary Clinton was no longer a target. The government wasn’t as malleable to Trump and Bannon’s aggressions as the Republican Party and the cable news channels had been, and they found themselves consistently thwarted and undermined—by the courts, by right-wing hardliners in Congress, by their own inexperience and Trump’s errant tweets, and by the bureaucracy they were now overseeing. The crises these failures precipitated in the White House cost Bannon much of his influence and soon threatened Trump’s presidency.

  While it’s still early in his term, the possibilities that Trump’s most ardent supporters once imagined for his presidency already seem to be mostly foreclosed. I think there are three main reasons why Trump’s administration has so quickly fallen into disorder and confusion.

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  Trump thought being president was about asserting dominance. Just after he’d locked up the GOP nomination, Trump said something to me that crystallized his view of politics and explains, to my mind, much of his subsequent difficulties. “I deal with people that are very extraordinarily talented people,” he told me. “I deal with Steve Wynn. I deal with Carl Icahn. I deal with killers that blow these [politicians] away. It’s not even the same category. This”—he meant politics—“is a category that’s like nineteen levels lower. You understand what I’m saying? Brilliant killers.”

  Trump was equating politics with business and the presidency with the job of being a big-shot CEO, a “killer.” He filled the upper ranks of his administration with people of a similar mindset: Gary Cohn, Wilbur Ross, Steve Bannon—aggressive, domineering men accustomed to getting their way by dint of their position. None had government experience (nor did many others in the West Wing), so none anticipated the problems this approach to governing would cause. Trump’s self-conception as the all-powerful Apprentice boss blinded him to a fundamental truth of the modern presidency: that the president needs Congress more than Congress needs the president. Trump’s domineering instinct served him poorly, since most members of Congress are secure in their jobs and accountable mainly to their own constituents. And it backfired disastrously when Trump fired Comey after he refused to submit to a pledge of loyalty to the big boss.

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  Trump ran against the Republican Party, Wall Street, and Paul Ryan, but then took up their agenda. Populists often struggle to govern. But Trump scarcely attempted to lead the populist revolution he promised. In May, he’d told me he would transform the GOP into a “workers’ party.” But while he kept voicing populist shibboleths, the legislative agenda he took up was the standard conservative fare pushed by Paul Ryan. During the GOP primary, Trump had shrewdly sensed its weak point: Ryan’s desire to finance tax cuts for the rich by cutting programs such as Social Security and Medicaid harmed the party’s white, blue-collar base. Trump told me he’d made this point to Ryan directly: “I said, ‘There’s no way a Republican is going to beat a Democrat when the Republican is saying, “We’re going to cut your Social Security” and the Democrat is saying, “We’re going to keep it and give you more.”’”

  Yet Trump’s first legislative push was for Ryan’s bill repealing the Affordable Care Act, which would eliminate health insurance coverage for twenty-four million people, cutting Medicaid, which benefits Trump’s working-class voters, to pay for high-end tax cuts. Not only was the bill deeply unpopular—a Quinnipiac poll in Ma
rch found that only 17 percent of Americans supported it—but it galvanized grassroots Democratic opposition to Trump. Bannon went along because he thought Ryan had become a convert to nationalism, in the belief that it could give the GOP an electoral hammerlock on the upper Midwest. Bannon also thought Ryan’s tax plan, funded by a tax on imports, was “the most nationalist feasible plan” and that his former enemy could deliver on it.

  The great fear among Democratic leaders was that Trump would be true to his word and lead a populist rebellion that would cripple their party. “I know what you’re doing, and I’m not going to let it happen,” Senator Charles Schumer, the Democratic leader, told Bannon in the early days of the administration. Schumer feared that Trump would begin by pursuing a $1 trillion infrastructure bill—a massive project of roads and bridges that would neatly align with Trump’s “builder” image, produce tangible benefits, win over union voters Democrats rely on, and stand as a testament to what “America first nationalism” could mean. As it turned out, Schumer needn’t have worried.

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  Trump doesn’t believe in nationalism or any other political philosophy—he’s fundamentally a creature of his own ego. Over the years, Trump repeated certain populist themes: the United States is being ripped off in trade deals by foreign competitors; elites and politicians are stupid crooks. These were expressions of an attitude—a marketing campaign—rather than commitments to a set of policies. When Trump sensed nationalism was no longer generating a positive response for him, he abandoned it, announcing in April, “I’m a nationalist and a globalist,” as if the two weren’t opposed. At heart, Trump is an opportunist driven by a desire for public acclaim, rather than a politician with any fixed principles.

  An early indicator was his decision to fill his administration with veterans of Goldman Sachs. Trump was gratified that they wanted to work for him, and he was willing to heed their counsel despite vilifying Goldman as a candidate. This opened up a rift that didn’t exist in his campaign between “nationalists” like Bannon and “globalists” like Cohn, a top Goldman executive who became head of the National Economic Council.