Some reflections from an unapologetic Rip Roaring Zionist, an Urban Scavenger for the unexpected. Stephen Darori (#stephendarori,@stephendarori) is a Finance and Marketing Whiz,Social Media Publicist, Strategist ,Investor. Journalist,Author, Editor & Prolific Blogger.
Republished From the New York Book Review with permission of the publication and the author Mark Danner
r Donald Trump; drawing by James Ferguson
What we are witnessing now is the birth of a new political order, and the more frantic a handful of media elites become, the more powerful that new political order becomes….1
—Stephen K. Bannon
Standing beneath the dais on inauguration day, squeezed uncomfortably between the Washington establishment gathered at the west front of the Capitol and Trump’s hooting supporters on the lawn below—“Lock her up! Lock her up!” they chanted when Hillary Clinton was introduced—I marveled that the rain that had threatened for hours chose to fall at the precise second the newly sworn president opened his mouth to speak. It seemed a grim joke, so obvious as to be in bad taste, bringing forth inevitable clichés of an Age of Trump ushered in by weeping skies. I felt the water run down my face (all umbrellas had been confiscated); and yet it took only a few hours to learn I’d been mistaken. “You know, I looked at the rain,” the expansive new president told the black-tied attendees at the Liberty Ball that evening, “which just…never came!” By the next day he was telling CIA employees that “God looked down and he said, ‘We’re not going to let it rain on your speech!’” Soon he was raving about the sunshine.
If it remains to be seen whether we are truly “witnessing…the birth of a new political order,” it is clear, a month into Trump’s ascension, that we are all his prisoners, held fast in the projected drama of his mind. As the battle over that new political order is enacted on the national stage, we have all become the dragooned antagonists in the play. This is what it is to live in the realm of the Big Man: his drama perforce is ours. Relentless political struggle, permanent revolution, shattering of norms, scandal and controversy, the capital hip-deep in broken crockery: this is what his supporters signed on for and this is what he is determined to give them; perhaps he knows how to give them little else.
To him they are everything, his base: “This is a beautiful movement!” “They’ve never seen a movement like this in our country before.” They are his creation, permanent suppliers of the adulation and self-affirmation he craves.2 Now they cheer and hoot and scoff while their hero, saber in hand, slashes and hacks at his enemies among the hated status quo. The latter include not just Stephen Bannon’s “handful of media elites” but many others who are appalled and outraged and find themselves forced to live under the pall of permanent political anxiety that hangs over the nation’s cities. It is our outrage, our disgust, our knee-jerk shock and condemnation that animate the play and give verisimilitude to the battle being fought. We are the enemy and our screams of dismay are vital to the drama.
Behind the controversies about crowd size and alternative facts and illegal voters and Muslim bans, all the shock and alarm and political fatigue can be reduced to a dawning horrified recognition that President Trump is indeed…Donald Trump. His uttering a thirty-five-word oath of office did not magically make him into someone else; he is determined to change the office much more than the office could ever change him. How could anyone have doubted that President Trump would be Donald Trump plus great power and not Donald Trump plus great restraint? And that he would be determined to use that newfound power to begin to do pretty much what he told his base he was going to do?
And—a final irony—that his very determination to break crockery and spread chaos and disruption is a major obstacle standing between him and the “new political order” whose birth his Svengali Bannon claims he will oversee. The necessity for continual disruption, constant outrage, maintaining an iron grip on the news cycle, and sheer winning without ever retreating means he has a grand proclivity for getting in his own way—“stepping on his own dick,” in political parlance—and we need, not for the first time, to let ourselves be grateful for that. It has thus far proved to be the hated status quo’s most important protection—not least because in very short order he has managed to produce a growing cadre of adversaries within the government itself.
Most important, Trump’s aggressive and reckless sallies against intelligence professionals have secured him powerful enemies within the national security apparatus, who have increasingly been making use of their contacts in the elite press—particularly The Washington Post and The New York Times—to fight back and undermine his new administration. This is an important part of the so-called Russia scandal: that the “intelligence services,” in the words of Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, “seem to be at war” with the new president.3 That war has already claimed a high-level casualty in the person of General (retired) Michael Flynn, the president’s first national security adviser, who was fired after only twenty-four days in the job. Though Trump has railed against “illegal leaks” and declared that Flynn “was treated very unfairly by the media,” this side of the story—the bureaucratic war being waged against Trump from within the government—by its nature cannot be adequately told in the press itself, because reporters, however much they resist acknowledging it, in effect are vital players. This storyline is obscured, one might say, by the storytellers’ own shadows.
Four weeks of the Trump ascendancy have been an ongoing seminar on where norms end and laws begin, on how much of what we had relied on when it came to the president’s conduct rested largely on a heretofore unquestioned foundation of centuries-old custom. That the president would express respect for the prerogatives of Congress and the judiciary, that he would acknowledge the country’s need for an independent press, that he would generally tell the truth and hold in respect the public record: in little more than the time it took to recite the oath of office much of this has been swept away. Donald Trump is a proud shatterer of these norms, and the louder the crash and splatter the better: for to his supporters such norms are nostrums, antiquated excuses for the elite’s own self-protection, and the wails of outrage and protest mean their hero is doing what they sent him to Washington to do.
The norms are gone, perhaps never to be fully restored, and we have advanced now to the laws. The dividing line is surprisingly murky. That the president would not use his office to promote his personal business, for example, depends not only on the so-called emoluments clause of the Constitution but a good many subsidiary norms that Trump began shattering some time ago, when he refused to release his tax returns during the campaign. (His long-standing vow to release them once an audit was completed has been quietly abandoned.4)
It seems plain now that in the near term the emoluments clause has in common with these norms that it requires political animation: that it has life only to the degree that those in power are willing to enliven it. Thus far Republicans in Congress, still stunned to find themselves enjoying an undreamed-of monopoly on power and struggling to craft a workable political program not based solely on ressentiment, have shown themselves uninterested in pressing Trump on his business entanglements and seem willing to stand by and let the presidency become a source of great wealth for the Trump family. Thus do sacred cows perish, not with a bellow but with a whimper.
Ours is famously said to be a government of laws, not of men, and yet we find in the Age of Trump that the laws depend on men and women willing to step forward and press them and that such are not to be found in the dominant party in Congress. Republicans are too divided and too focused on the main chance to move to protect what suddenly appear to be abstract principles. In an age when their party cannot muster a national popular vote majority they find themselves unaccountably in full possession of two branches of government and face the task of mastering their divisions sufficiently to pass a political program that won’t further doom them to the wilderness. This means adopting policies of opposition designed to cultivate and harvest resentment, such as repealing Obamacare, which provides health insurance to more than twenty million Americans, while somehow shaping them into a positive program that they can present to constituents as having improved their lives. It is a daunting task and thus far they show few signs of being up to it.
Untroubled by norms, President Trump required only two weeks to come face-to-face with laws in the form not of Congress but of three judges of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Once again banning Muslims was what he had promised his base he would do. That the executive order itself was a legal mess in its drafting and in its execution stemmed both from the modus operandi that the Trump team has adopted—policies closely held, drafts jealously sheltered from the eyes of those even in the departments or agencies responsible for carrying them out (taking a page from Dick Cheney’s post–September 11 playbook)—and perhaps from the desire of the president and his advisers to stage a fight with a major institutional force not yet recumbent before him: the judiciary.
Thus the president’s assertion of his “unreviewable” powers in the face of “so-called” judges was not just absurd or ignorant but a bit of bait, establishing the basis for blaming the judiciary for any terrorist attack that was to come. On this he tweeted indefatigably and repeatedly: “Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril,” he said in his most explicit tweet. “If something happens blame him and court system. People pouring in. Bad!” Then: “I have instructed Homeland Security to check people coming into our country VERY CAREFULLY. The courts are making the job very difficult!”
“People,” of course, are not “pouring in,” certainly not from the seven countries targeted. But the phrase links once again the country’s vital security to the complex of issues at the heart of Trump’s “America First” politics: trade, immigration, and terrorism. Fortress America is being assailed by foreigners who pour into the country and take our jobs, by elite technocrats (“stupid people”) who negotiate trade deals that leave our borders unprotected, by traitorous businessmen who move factories abroad, and by terrorists who take advantage of the nonexistent immigration safeguards to penetrate our shores.
Everywhere the Other threatens. Everywhere the stupid, ineffectual, corrupt, self-dealing elites do nothing to protect the Forgotten American, in effect allying themselves with the threatening outsiders, becoming, in reality if not intent, traitors. As Trump proclaimed from the Capitol scarcely a month ago, “this stops, right here and right now.” But now “so-called judges” stand in the president’s way.
The president will likely get his immigration ban, in one form or another, by backing up, rewriting the executive order, and proclaiming victory. Commentators will bemoan the fiasco that his first immigration rollout became. But Trump will have established the precedent of saddling the judiciary with responsibility for the next attack. Jack Goldsmith, the former head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel under George W. Bush and now a professor at Harvard Law School, notes that “Trump is setting the scene to blame judges after an attack that has any conceivable connection to immigration.” He goes on:
If Trump loses in court he credibly will say to the American people that he tried and failed to create tighter immigration controls. This will deflect blame for the attack. And it will also help Trump to enhance his power after the attack. After a bad terrorist attack at home, politicians are always under intense pressure to loosen legal constraints. (This was even true for near-misses, such as the failed Underwear bomber, which caused the Obama administration to loosen constraints on its counterterrorism policies in many ways.)
Courts feel these pressures, and those pressures will be significantly heightened, and any countervailing tendency to guard against executive overreaction diminished, if courts are widely seen to be responsible for an actual terrorist attack. More broadly, the usual security panic after a bad attack will be enhanced quite a lot—in courts and in Congress—if before the attack legal and judicial constraints are seen to block safety. If Trump assumes that there will be a bad terrorist attack on his watch, blaming judges now will deflect blame and enhance his power more than usual after the next attack.5
Donald Trump; drawing by John Springs
One might add that Trump’s executive order and the presidential Twitter assault on the judiciary that followed have set up the judiciary to be blamed following any attack, not just one having “any conceivable connection to immigration.” In his followers’ view Trump has acted to protect the country and “political” judges have blocked him. He has put them in a position to take the fall. Perhaps this was not the original plan but with Trump, it is safe to say, there will likely never be an original plan that plays out to the end. As the hapless Jeb Bush observed, Trump was “a chaos candidate and he’d be a chaos president.” Better to say that Trump uses chaos as a vital element in his tactics, perhaps having learned during his long career to capitalize on the chaos that his recklessness, ignorance, and aggression inevitably create.
One might call the resulting tactics “shock and opportunity”: Trump uses chaos to shock his opponents into varying crouches of outrage and contempt and then lunges forward amid the tumult wherever he sees an opportunity presenting itself. No wonder he thinks of himself as the supreme “counter-puncher.” His virtuosity is in his opportunism.
It is against this reality that we must see the likelihood of a crisis as the vital springboard of a Trump presidency, especially an increasingly shaky, unpopular, and unstable one. The lower his poll numbers, the more outlandish his lies, the greater the resistance from opponents within the bureaucracies, the thicker his scandals and chaos, the likelier he will be to seek to use a crisis and all the opportunities it offers to lever himself from a position of defensiveness to that of dominating power.
It is impossible to say when such a crisis might present itself or what it might be: A confrontation with Iran in the Persian Gulf? A dust-up with China over its claimed possessions in the South China Sea? A terrorist attack on American soil? There is no way of predicting, but it is worth taking very seriously that some sort of crisis will come and that, given Trump’s past behavior, his ruthless opportunism, and his drumbeat emphasis on “protecting the country,” such a crisis might well serve as a turning point in a Trump presidency, particularly one that is increasingly under siege.
Consider the possibility of a terrorist attack on American soil, even a failed one. Not only would such an attack, as noted, put Trump in a perfect position to strike out at the judiciary, a major countervailing institution, it would offer him the political leverage to put down various rebellions within the bureaucracy, particularly within the intelligence agencies. There is no way to know whether such an attack will come but one can say that Trump, by attempting to strike out at Muslims generally, as he had vowed to do, has managed to place the Islamic State in the tempting position of being able to affirm, by attacking the United States, that it is the avenger of all Muslims. No accident that its propagandists have been nothing short of exultant, dubbing Trump’s executive order “the blessed order” and thus raising it to the level of the United States’ “blessed invasion” of Iraq as a miracle savior of its cause.
If, as the Islamic State has asserted, the goal of its attacks in the West has been to “eliminate the gray zone”—to place “Muslims in the West…between one of two choices,” to either “apostatize or [migrate] to the Islamic State, and thereby escape persecution from the Crusader government and citizens”6—then Trump’s immigration ban goes far toward accomplishing the same thing: isolating Islamic communities, placing them all among a besieged minority whose travel is restricted and whose loyalty to their adopted countries is put in question. Already several jihadist tweeters asserted that the prophecy of the late Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric killed in a drone attack in Yemen in 2011, that the “West would eventually turn against its Muslim citizens,” had been fulfilled.7 If one sought to design a policy to encourage radicalization, it would be hard to suggest a better one.
One needn’t posit an administration master plan to notice that a further attack, even an unsuccessful one, will find the political ground well prepared. The panic over security that follows will open the way to a variety of measures to “protect the country,” few or none of which might have been necessary to prevent the attack in the first place. As we have seen, after an attack politicians seize the opportunity to act, not least to deflect blame from themselves, and we can expect President Donald (“The hour of action has arrived!”) Trump, after his repeated vows to keep the country safe, to act aggressively and comprehensively.
How far he might go would depend on the severity of an attack, the ambitions of the administration, and perhaps how cornered the president feels himself to be. What measures might we expect under a Trump state of emergency? Probably strong steps against refugees, aliens, and immigrants. Suspending all entry of refugees. Widespread deportations. Expelling many green card holders. Further tightening and even suspending immigration. Mosques might be placed under surveillance, the much-discussed Muslim registry established.
More broadly, and again depending on the severity of an attack, bulk collection of metadata might be reinstituted along with other forms of domestic surveillance. Long-standing constraints on the military and the CIA operating domestically might be loosened or eliminated. Black sites would be reestablished and torture reintroduced. The cells at Guantánamo, nearly empty now, would once again begin to fill. The standing post–September 11 Authorization for the Use of Military Force might be expanded or replaced, allowing unlimited military strikes abroad—and, perhaps, at home. The latter might lead, in the case of a particularly severe attack, to the suspension of habeas corpus.
Certainly if such an attack were to come during the current Congress there is no reason to expect anything other than majority cooperation and support, not only for Trump’s specific responses to the attack but for the rest of his program. Democrats, whom Trump would denounce as worse than judges in their obstructionism, would be on the defensive. And the courts, whose pushback in any case would take much longer—as it did after September 11—will have been politically hamstrung by a commander in chief who will be in a position to declare, and to repeat, that he had warned the “political judges” not to second-guess him in what was needed to protect the country but that they had not listened. He will not be shy in saying the same about the press, “the most dishonest human beings on earth.”
By then his political drama will have been elevated from a battle against elites and the status quo to a heroic struggle for the survival of the nation. As the hero was fond of telling his crowds during the campaign: if he lost, “we won’t even have a country anymore.” There is little reason to suspect they don’t believe it still and no reason to think he does not. “Never let a crisis go to waste,” President Obama’s first chief of staff was fond of saying. It is fair to expect that, in the face of opportunities to increase his power, destroy the opposition, and build his “new political order,” President Trump will once again gaze upon the darkening skies and see only sunshine.
1
See Philip Rucker and Robert Costa, “Trump’s Hard-Line Actions Have an Intellectual Godfather: Jeff Sessions,” The Washington Post, January 30, 2017. ↩
2
See my “The Magic of Donald Trump,” The New York Review, May 26, 2016, and “The Real Trump,” The New York Review, December 22, 2016. ↩
3
See Laura Barron-Lopez, Jennifer Bendery, and Michael McAuliff, “Top GOP Senators Lament ‘Dribble’ of Trump’s Russia Scandal Is Making It Impossible to Get Work Done,” The Huffington Post, February 15, 2017. ↩
4
See Eric Bradner, “Conway: Trump Will Not Release Tax Returns,” CNNPolitics.com, January 22, 2017. ↩
5
Jack Goldsmith, “Does Trump Want to Lose the EO Battle in Court?…,” Lawfare, February 6, 2017. ↩
6
See Joby Warrick, “Jihadist Groups Hail Trump’s Travel Ban as a Victory,” The Washington Post, January 29, 2017. ↩
7
See “The Extinction of the Gray Zone,” Dabiq, February 2015. ↩
There was so much going on in President Donald Trump’s first week of presidential decrees that it was hard to keep track of it all. The most acute problem, in that it immediatelyaffected people’s lives, was the executive order issued on Friday that banned entry to the United States for immigrants, refugees or visitors arriving from a list of certain Muslim-majority countries designated as having terrorist activity. On Saturday when it became clear that the ban was taking effect immediately and people were being denied entry or told at their point of origin that they could not board U.S.-bound planes, all hell broke loose.
Nobody understood the rules. Passengers were being held and interrogated. Chaos ensued at international airports all over the country. Protesters gathered en masse at terminals to show their solidarity. Immigration lawyers arrived to help detainees and their families navigate a system that nobody understood — because it was arbitrary and constitutionally dubious. The world reacted with disbelief.
Finally several federal judges issued stays, for a variety of reasons, in response to suits filed by civil liberties and immigration attorneys around the country. Even hawkish constitutional experts were appalled.
It was a shocking moment in American history.
But we shouldn’t have been too surprised. Trump had promised to bar Muslims from entering the country during the campaign, famously making a speech after the San Bernardino, California, terrorist attack, saying it had to be done until the U.S. “could figure out what the hell is going on.” He modified his remarks later, apparently at the urging of former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who bragged that he had told Trump he could bar Muslims from gaining admittance only by nationality rather than religion (while offering priority to those practicing a different religion) or he would run afoul of the Constitution. Now the Trump administration has absurdly proclaimed that it was just following former president Barack Obama’s lead (an assertion refuted by The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler.)
On Saturday it soon became apparent that the order did not just apply to refugees or even visa holders but was also being used to deny entry to legal U.S. residents — green card holders who had been out of the country. It wasn’t long before leaks filtered out of the administration that Trump’s senior strategist, former Breitbart chief Steve Bannon, had personally overruled a Department of Homeland Security’s official finding that such legal residents would not be included in the ban. After an uproar, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly finally clarified that legal residency would not be “a dispositive factor in our case-by-case determinations,” basically meaning that individuals would not be denied entry and deported simply for being legal residents instead of citizens. Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, a member of Trump’s supposed party, wryly observed: “You have an extreme vetting proposal that didn’t get the vetting it should have had.”
The situation remains confused and fluid. But the fact that Bannon had the ability to do what he did suggests that he’s going to use his power to advance his white nationalist agenda. And his power is growing substantially. While the Muslim ban got most of the attention over the weekend, it was also revealed that Bannon had been named a permanent member of the National Security Council, even as the administration denied that status to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the director of national intelligence.
When asked to explain this, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said on ABC’s “This Week” that “the president gets plenty of information from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff” and pointed out that Bannon is a “former naval officer” with a “tremendous understanding of the world and the geopolitical landscape that we have now.” Bannon left the service in 1983.
Indeed, Bannon’s “understanding” of the world is exactly what has people concerned. Bannon has become Trump’s most influential adviser and (along with Stephen Miller, a former aide to attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions) seems to be guiding Trump toward his goals, even if the president is clueless about the details or the ramifications. Bannon is a radical white nationalist whose main objective, as he has openly admitted, is to blow everything up — essentially to destroy the existing social and political order. What that leaves us with after the smoke clears is anyone’s guess, since he is notably vague on the endgame.
Recall that a year before he joined the campaign, Bannon was telling people that he was Trump’s unofficial “campaign manager” and was quoted in an email as saying, “Trump is a nationalist who embraces [Sen. Jeff Sessions’] immigration plan.” Nonetheless, as recently as last summer Bannon told Vanity Fair that Trump is a “blunt instrument for us. I don’t know whether he really gets it or not.”
At this point, it seems obvious that it doesn’t really matter. Trump is a narcissist with a very few simple bedrock beliefs, most of which intersect nicely with Bannon’s propaganda and tactics — which happen to intersect with global right-wing nationalism, manifested in the U.S. as the alt-right. This movement was well described by Vanity Fair’s Henry Porter in an article about Trumpism and Brexit:
They mistrust the political establishment and elites, in general; their rhetoric on immigrants is sometimes openly racist; they have a longing for past glories and the old order of things; they are very, very angry; and they present new levels of immunity to verifiable facts and expert opinion.
That worldview is reflected in far right movements and parties in the U.K. (the UK Independence Party), Germany (the Alliance for Germany), the Netherlands (the Party for Freedom) and France (the National Front), among others, and some of these movements have also been cultivated by the Russian president Vladimir Putin. (There is evidence of his government’s attempts to meddle in European elections, in a similar fashion to what allegedly happened in the U.S. during the recent presidential campaign.) This is the worldview that is likely to inform President Trump on policy.
You can see this perfectly manifested in the first week’s orders on (nonexistent) voter fraud, immigration and deportation policies. The ban on Muslims from certain countries has particular national security implications, in that experts believe it will be a splendid propaganda tool for ISIS and will drive a wedge between the U.S. and many of its allies — something that fits perfectly with Bannon’s overall “blow it up” philosophy.
As Bannon said last summer, Trump is just a “blunt instrument” and at this point it doesn’t matter if he “gets it” or not. In his new role as Trump’s Rasputin, Bannon is now in a position to literally make his dreams of destruction come true.
In an interview with the New York Times, Steve Bannon said the media should “keep its mouth shut.”Photograph by Chris Kleponis / Bloomberg via Getty
Somewhere in the West Wing of the White House, I’m guessing, Stephen Bannon, Donald Trump’s chief political strategist, is chuckling to himself. A quick call with a Times reporter, and, a day later, there was his mug on the paper’s front page, next to a story in which he was quoted as saying, “The paper of record for our beloved Republic, the New York Times, should be absolutely ashamed and humiliated. They got it 100 per cent wrong.” Talk about hitting the enemy where it lives.
Of course, the Gray Lady didn’t give Bannon front-page treatment simply for trolling her. In his interview, Bannon delivered a broadside at the press more generally, saying, “The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while.” Bannon also said, “I want you to quote me on this. The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.”
When the Times posted its story online, the reaction in some quarters was one of righteous outrage. Jacob Weisberg, the editor-in-chief of the Slate Group, said on Twitter, “ ‘The media should keep its mouth shut’ is a terrifying, tyrannical comment. It’s coming from inside the White House.” CNN’s Christiane Amanpour asked, “Sorry, what country are we living in?”
Outrage is evidently what Bannon intended to produce. A former Goldman Sachs investment banker and Hollywood producer who remade himself as a leading figure in the alt-right, he enjoys playing the role of provocateur and bomb thrower. At a cocktail party in November, 2013, he described himself as “Leninist” to the writer and historian Ronald Radosh. In a piece at the Daily Beast, Radosh recalled that Bannon had said to him, “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal, too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.” (Bannon subsequently told Radosh that he didn’t recall the conversation.)
To a good Leninist, the very notion of an objective press is a liberal piety. Media outlets like the Times and the Washington Post are merely the ideological arm of highly educated urban cosmopolitans, liberals, and financiers—the “donor class,” Bannon calls them—who have benefitted from globalization and large-scale immigration. “I’m not a white nationalist,” Bannon told the Hollywood Reporter’sMichael Wolff shortly after the election. “I’m a nationalist. I’m an economic nationalist. The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia.”
The first part of this statement was dubious. Regardless of Bannon’s personal views, about which there is some dispute, he undoubtedly provided a platformfor white nationalists, racists, and other right-wing extremists when he ran Breitbart News, a conservative Web site. But Bannon’s reading of the past thirty years of American economic history wasn’t entirely off the mark, and neither was his claim that some in the media underestimated Trump’s appeal—and still do. To many of Trump’s critics, myself included, his first week has amply demonstrated why he isn’t fit for office. But many of his supporters, I’d be willing to bet, see a strong President who is carrying out his campaign pledges to build a wall, protect American jobs, and put America first.
Where Bannon lapsed into hyperbole was in claiming that the media is the “opposition party.” During any Administration, the relationship between the White House and the press corps is somewhat adversarial. All Administrations try to spin things their way, and the media, to a lesser or greater extent, depending on the circumstances, tries to push back. But there is also a symbiosis between the two sides. The news media needs content, which the Administration provides. The Administration needs distribution, which the media provides.
Even the advent of the Internet—and Trump’s 22.5 million Twitter followers—hasn’t altered this logic. While Bannon was lashing out at the Times and other media outlets, his boss was busy exploiting the huge amounts of free airtime that the broadcast networks continue to afford him. On Wednesday and Thursday alone, Trump conducted two hour-long interviews in prime time (ABC and Fox News) and delivered two speeches, which the cable-news networks carried in full (one at the Department of Homeland Security, the other at a Republican retreat in Philadelphia). On Friday, he held a press conference with Theresa May, the British Prime Minister. A host of networks carried the event live.
What’s new isn’t that we have a President who uses the media whenever he can. It’s that, simultaneously, he has made demonizing the press a central part of his political strategy. During the campaign, Trump’s attacks on the “dishonest media” fired up his base and kept him in the news. Now, judging by Bannon’s remarks, the aim is to portray the media as a political adversary rather than an independent monitor, so that when damaging stories appear the Administration can dismiss them. “Much of the media—not all of it—is very, very dishonest,” Trump told Sean Hannity, of Fox News, on Thursday. “Honestly, it’s fake news. Fake. They make things up.”
To repeat what I’ve said many times before: Trump is a menace. And Bannon is his eager accomplice. Even Richard Nixon at his most demented never levelled the sort of charges that Trump hurls on a daily basis. And as far as I know, there is no precedent for a senior White House official telling the press to “keep its mouth shut.”
In the months and year to come, if the Trump Administration goes beyond merely berating reporters, and tries to restrict their activities, journalists might well have to fall back on the foundations of a free media, starting with the First Amendment, which says that “Congress shall pass no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” However, as two law professors—RonNell Andersen Jones, of the University of Utah, and Sonja R. West, of the University of Georgia—pointed out in a recent Op-Ed in the Times, the Constitution provides “only limited protection for the press,” which doesn’t necessarily include the ability to gain access to information or to protect the anonymity of sources. Moreover, public confidence in the press has fallen to a historic low, many lower courts have become less favorable to reporters, and the Supreme Court hasn’t taken on a major press case in more than a decade. “Like so much of our democracy, the freedom of the press is only as strong as we, the public, demand it to be,” Andersen and West wrote.
Fortunately, large numbers of Americans are rallying behind the media just when their support is most needed. The unprecedented protest marches all across the country last weekend demonstrated the existence of a huge and active popular resistance, which is urging the press to hold Trump to account. While Bannon may be tempted to portray the marchers as out-of-touch intellectual-property lawyers and globalists, their sheer numbers belie such a description. (According to some accounts, Saturday’s marches were the biggest political demonstration in American history.) As Trump’s Presidency gets under way, marches and protests provide an essential reminder that, although he rallied an impressive number of alienated and dispossessed white voters, the majority of Americans rejected him, and still reject him. They are the real opposition, and they are too many for Trump and Bannon to silence.
Another reason not to despair is Trump himself. During his first week in office, he was the person who did most to undermine his credibility and authority. By repeatedly saying things that weren’t true, or even nearly true—that his Inauguration drew the biggest audience ever; that he would have won the popular vote but for enormous voter fraud—he invited criticism and ridicule, which duly poured down upon him. Perhaps his ravings didn’t do him much damage among his core supporters: they tend to cheer anything he says. But the impetuous behavior unnerved Republicans on Capitol Hill, some of Trump’s business supporters, and, judging by the steady stream of leaks to reporters, even some of his own staff and appointees. On Friday, Brian Beutler, of The New Republic, pointed out that, in the past few days, the Times, the Washington Post, and Politico have all published stories “sourced to the White House—portraying Trump as a fragile, erratic, television-obsessed snowflake.”
Trump’s tender ego and impulsiveness aren’t his only vulnerabilities. In refusing to divest his businesses, he has invited the suspicion that he intends to enrich himself and his family. In cozying up to Vladimir Putin, he has invited speculation about whether the Russians have some sort of hold over him. Going forward, both of these areas will continue to provide target-rich environments for investigative reporters and other Trump antagonists.
Bannon, by the way, has had some critical things to say about Putin in the past. “I think that Putin and his cronies are really a kleptocracy . . . an imperialist power that wants to expand,” he said in a speech in 2014, according to a transcriptobtained by BuzzFeed. The next time a reporter gets Bannon on the phone, that quote might be worth bringing up. On Friday, Trump confirmed that he is weighing whether to lift economic sanctions that are aimed squarely at Putin and his cronies.
Republished with permission of the Author Joshua Green and Businessweek inwhich the article first appeared. Photographs by Jeremy Liebman for Bloomberg Businessweek
This Man Is the Most Dangerous Political Operative in America Steve Bannon runs the new vast right-wing conspiracy—and he wants to take down both Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush.
It’s nearing midnight as Steve Bannon pushes past the bluegrass band in his living room and through a crowd of Republican congressmen, political operatives, and a few stray Duck Dynasty cast members. He’s trying to make his way back to the SiriusXM Patriot radio show, broadcasting live from a cramped corner of the 14-room townhouse he occupies a stone’s throw from the Supreme Court. It’s late February, the annual Conservative Political Action Conference is in full swing, and Bannon, as usual, is the whirlwind at the center of the action.
Bannon is the executive chairman of Breitbart News, the crusading right-wing populist website that’s a lineal descendant of the Drudge Report (its late founder, Andrew Breitbart, spent years apprenticing with Matt Drudge) and a haven for people who think Fox News is too polite and restrained. He’d spent the day at CPAC among the conservative faithful, zipping back and forth between his SiriusXM booth and an unlikely pair of guests he was squiring around: Nigel Farage, the leader of Britain’s right-wing UKIP party, and Phil Robertson, the bandanna’d, ayatollah-bearded Duck Dynasty patriarch who was accepting a free-speech award. CPAC is a beauty contest for Republican presidential hopefuls. But Robertson, a novelty adornment invited after A&E suspended him for denouncing gays, delivered a wild rant about “beatniks” and sexually transmitted diseases that upstaged them all, to Bannon’s evident delight. “If there’s an explosion or a fire somewhere,” says Matthew Boyle, Breitbart’s Washington political editor, “Steve’s probably nearby with some matches.” Afterward, everyone piled into party buses and headed for the townhouse. “Honey badger don’t give a s---” is the Breitbart motto
Bannon, an ex-Goldman Sachs banker, is the sort of character who would stand out anywhere, but especially in the drab environs of Washington. A mile-a-minute talker who thrums with energy, his sentences speed off ahead of him and spin out into great pileups of nouns, verbs, and grins. With his swept-back blond hair and partiality to cargo shorts and flip-flops, he looks like Jeff Spicoli after a few decades of hard living, and he employs “dude” just as readily.
Ordinarily, Bannon’s townhouse is crypt-quiet and feels like a museum, as it’s faithfully decorated down to its embroidered silk curtains and painted murals in authentic Lincoln-era detail. When I first stopped by in January, about the only sign that I hadn’t teleported back to the 1860s was a picture on the mantle of a smiling woman on a throne with a machine gun in her lap (it was Bannon’s daughter Maureen, a West Point grad and lieutenant in the 101st Airborne Division; the throne belonged to Saddam Hussein—or once did). Until Bannon showed up, the only sounds I heard were faint noises from the basement, which might have been the young women he calls the Valkyries, after the war goddesses of Norse mythology who decided soldiers’ fates in battle. More on them later.
On this February night, however, the party is roaring. Along with his CPAC triumph, a secret project he’d conceived was nearing fruition: His lawyers were almost finished vetting a book about Bill and Hillary Clinton’s murky financial dealings that he’s certain will upend the presidential race. “Dude, it’s going to be epic,” he tells me. I sip my “moonshine”—his wink at the Dynasty guests—and wonder, as people often do, whether Bannon is nuts. On my way out, the doorman hands me a gift: a silver hip flask with “Breitbart” printed above an image of a honey badger, the insouciant African predator of YouTube fame whose catchphrase, “Honey badger don’t give a s---,” is the Breitbart motto. Steve Bannon
Bannon’s life is a succession of Gatsbyish reinventions that made him rich and landed him squarely in the middle of the 2016 presidential race: He’s been a naval officer, investment banker, minor Hollywood player, and political impresario. When former Disney chief Michael Ovitz’s empire was falling to pieces, Bannon sat Ovitz down in his living room and delivered the news that he was finished. When Sarah Palin was at the height of her fame, Bannon was whispering in her ear. When Donald Trump decided to blow up the Republican presidential field, Bannon encouraged his circus-like visit to the U.S.-Mexico border. John Boehner just quit as House speaker because of the mutinous frenzy Bannon and his confederates whipped up among conservatives. Today, backed by mysterious investors and a stream of Seinfeld royalties, he sits at the nexus of what Hillary Clinton once dubbed “the vast right-wing conspiracy,” where he and his network have done more than anyone else to complicate her presidential ambitions—and they plan to do more. But this “conspiracy,” at least under Bannon, has mutated into something different from what Clinton described: It’s as eager to go after establishment Republicans such as Boehner or Jeb Bush as Democrats like Clinton.
“I come from a blue-collar, Irish Catholic, pro-Kennedy, pro-union family of Democrats,” says Bannon, by way of explaining his politics. “I wasn’t political until I got into the service and saw how badly Jimmy Carter f---ed things up. I became a huge Reagan admirer. Still am. But what turned me against the whole establishment was coming back from running companies in Asia in 2008 and seeing that Bush had f---ed up as badly as Carter. The whole country was a disaster.”
As befits someone with his peripatetic background, Bannon is a kind of Jekyll-and-Hyde figure in the complicated ecosystem of the right—he's two things at once. And he’s devised a method to influence politics that marries the old-style attack journalism of Breitbart.com, which helped drive out Boehner, with a more sophisticated approach, conducted through the nonprofit Government Accountability Institute, that builds rigorous, fact-based indictments against major politicians, then partners with mainstream media outlets conservatives typically despise to disseminate those findings to the broadest audience. The biggest product of this system is the project Bannon was so excited about at CPAC: the bestselling investigative book, written by GAI’s president, Peter Schweizer, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich. Published in May by HarperCollins, the book dominated the political landscape for weeks and probably did more to shape public perception of Hillary Clinton than any of the barbs from her Republican detractors.
Jeb Bush is about to come in for the same treatment. On Oct. 19, GAI will publish Schweizer’s e-book, Bush Bucks: How Public Service and Corporations Helped Make Jeb Rich, that examines how Bush enriched himself after leaving the Florida governor’s mansion in 2007. A copy obtained by Bloomberg Businessweek examines Bush’s Florida land deals, corporate board sinecures, and seven-figure salary with Lehman Brothers, whose 2008 bankruptcy touched off the financial crisis. “It’s not as cinematic as the Clintons, with their warlords and Russian gangsters and that whole cast of bad guys,” says Bannon. “Bush is more prosaic. It’s really just grimy, low-energy crony capitalism.”
While attacking the favored candidates in both parties at once may seem odd, Bannon says he’s motivated by the same populist disgust with Washington that’s animating candidates from Trump to Bernie Sanders. Like both, Bannon is having a bigger influence than anyone could have reasonably expected. But in the Year of the Outsider, it's perhaps fitting that a figure like Bannon, whom nobody saw coming, would roil the national political debate. Bannon’s Bulldogs, at the “Breitbart Embassy”: Alex Swoyer, Jarrett Stepman, Julia Hahn. Back row: Bigz Aloysious Bigirwa, Jordan Schachtel, Larry Solov, Alex Marlow, Bannon, Matthew Boyle, Edwin Mora.
Most days, Bannon can be found in his Hyde persona, in the Washington offices of Breitbart News. Operating from the basement of his townhouse—known to all as the Breitbart Embassy—Breitbart’s pirate crew became tribunes of the rising Tea Party movement after Barack Obama’s election, bedeviling GOP leaders and helping to foment the 2013 government shutdown. The site has also made life hell for Democrats by, for example, orchestrating the career-ending genital tweeting misfortune that cost New York Representative Anthony Weiner his seat in Congress in 2011. Tipped to Weiner’s proclivity for sexting with female admirers, Bannon says, the site paid trackers to follow his Twitter account 24 hours a day and eventually intercepted a crotch shot Weiner inadvertently made public. The ensuing scandal culminated in the surreal scene, carried live on television, of Andrew Breitbart hijacking Weiner’s press conference and fielding questions from astonished reporters.
On occasion, this partisan zeal has led to egregious errors. Just before our lunch in January, a Breitbart reporter published an article assailing Obama’s nominee for attorney general, Loretta Lynch—but went after the wrong woman. She wasn’t, as the site reported, the Loretta Lynch who was once part of Bill Clinton’s defense team. The embarrassed reporter asked for time off. Bannon, allergic to any hint of concession, refused: “I told him, ‘No. In fact, you’re going to write a story every day this week.’ ” He shrugs. “We’re honey badgers,” he explains. “We don’t give a s---.”
But Bannon realizes that politics is sometimes more effective when it’s subtle. So he’s nurtured a Dr. Jekyll side: In 2012 he became founding chairman of GAI, a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) research organization staffed with lawyers, data scientists, and forensic investigators. “What Peter and I noticed is that it’s facts, not rumors, that resonate with the best investigative reporters,” Bannon says, referring to GAI’s president. Established in Tallahassee to study crony capitalism and governmental malfeasance, GAI has collaborated with such mainstream news outlets as Newsweek, ABC News, and CBS’s 60 Minutes on stories ranging from insider trading in Congress to credit card fraud among presidential campaigns. It's essentially a mining operation for political scoops that now churns out books like Clinton Cash and Bush Bucks. Featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, Oct. 12, 2015. Subscribe now.
What made Clinton Cash so unexpectedly influential is that mainstream news reporters picked up and often advanced Schweizer’s many examples of the Clintons’ apparent conflicts of interest in accepting money from large donors and foreign governments. (“Practically grotesque,” wrote Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig, who’s running for the Democratic presidential nomination. “On any fair reading, the pattern of behavior that Schweizer has charged is corruption.”) Just before the book’s release, the New York Times ran a front-page story about a Canadian mining magnate, Frank Giustra, who gave tens of millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation and then flew Bill Clinton to Kazakhstan aboard his private jet to dine with the country’s autocratic president, Nursultan Nazarbayev. Giustra subsequently won lucrative uranium-mining rights in the country. (Giustra denies that the Clinton dinner influenced his Kazakh mining decision.) The Times piece cited Schweizer’s still-unpublished book as a source of its reporting, puzzling many Times readers and prompting a reaction from the paper’s ombudswoman, Margaret Sullivan, who grudgingly concluded that, while no ethical standards were breached, “I still don’t like the way it looked.”
For Bannon, the Clinton Cash uproar validated a personal theory, informed by his Goldman Sachs experience, about how conservatives can influence the media and why they failed the last time a Clinton was running for the White House. “In the 1990s,” he told me, “conservative media couldn’t take down [Bill] Clinton because most of what they produced was punditry and opinion, and they always oversold the conclusion: ‘It’s clearly impeachable!’ So they wound up talking to themselves in an echo chamber.” What news conservatives did produce, such as David Brock’s Troopergate investigation on Paula Jones in the American Spectator, was often tainted in the eyes of mainstream editors by its explicit partisan association.
In response, Bannon developed two related insights. “One of the things Goldman teaches you is, don’t be the first guy through the door because you’re going to get all the arrows. If it’s junk bonds, let Michael Milken lead the way,” he says. “Goldman would never lead in any product. Find a business partner.” His other insight was that the reporters staffing the investigative units of major newspapers aren’t the liberal ideologues of conservative fever dreams but kindred souls who could be recruited into his larger enterprise. “What you realize hanging out with investigative reporters is that, while they may be personally liberal, they don’t let that get in the way of a good story,” he says. “And if you bring them a real story built on facts, they’re f---ing badasses, and they’re fair.” Recently, I met with Brock, who renounced conservatism and became an important liberal strategist, fundraiser, and Clinton ally. He founded the liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America and just published a book, Killing The Messenger: The Right-Wing Plot to Derail Hillary and Hijack Your Government. Brock’s attitude toward Bannon isn’t enmity toward an ideological opponent, as I'd expected, but rather a curiosity and professional respect for the tradecraft Bannon demonstrated in advancing the Clinton Cash narrative. What conservatives learned in the ’90s, Brock says, is that “your operation isn’t going to succeed if you don’t cross the barrier into the mainstream.” Back then, he says, conservative reporting had to undergo an elaborate laundering to influence U.S. politics. Reporters such as Brock would publish in small magazines and websites, then try to get their story planted in the British tabloids and hope a right-leaning U.S. outlet such as the New York Post or the Drudge Report picked it up. If it generated enough heat, it might break through to a mainstream paper. “From their point of view, the Times is the perfect host body for the virus”
“It seems to me,” says Brock of Bannon and his team, “what they were able to do in this deal with the Times is the same strategy, but more sophisticated and potentially more effective and damaging because of the reputation of the Times. If you were trying to create doubt and qualms about [Hillary Clinton] among progressives, the Times is the place to do it.” He pauses. “Looking at it from their point of view, the Times is the perfect host body for the virus.”
It wasn’t the only one. In June, when the Clinton Cash frenzy hit its apex, Bannon said: “We’ve got the 15 best investigative reporters at the 15 best newspapers in the country all chasing after Hillary Clinton.” There’s more coming, Bannon reveals, including a graphic novel of Clinton Cash, in January, and a Clinton Cash movie set to arrive in February, just as the presidential primary voting gets under way.
In the ’90s, right-wing activists enjoyed a long period of ascendancy, and then collapsed. Then, as now, their prime target was a Clinton, their great ally the House Republicans. What halted this uprising was the sheer lunacy of its perpetrators. The classic example is House Oversight Chairman Dan Burton of Indiana, who became convinced that the 1993 suicide of White House Deputy Counsel Vince Foster was actually murder—a theory he sought to prove by reenacting the crime in his backyard with a pistol and a watermelon. Democrats seized on the episode to impugn his credibility, branding him “Watermelon Dan.” “We used the watermelon and the phantom Vince Foster sightings again and again," says Chris Lehane, a Clinton White House staffer and field marshal in the partisan wars of the ’90s. "The phrase didn’t exist then, but that’s when the right-wing conspiracy jumped the shark.”
Bannon believes that episodes like these killed conservatives’ credibility, and with it, their political influence. He’s set out to balance conservatives’ wilder impulses with professionalism, a running theme in his own life. Born into a working-class family within sight of the naval base in Norfolk, Va., he signed up straight out of college, and spent four years at sea aboard a destroyer, first as an auxiliary engineer in the Pacific, then as a navigator in the north Arabian Sea during the Iranian hostage crisis. By the time he arrived in the Persian Gulf in 1979, the U.S. was preparing its ill-fated assault on Tehran, and Bannon’s faith in his commander in chief had dimmed: “You could tell it was going to be a goat f---.” His battle group rotated out just before Carter’s Desert One debacle.
Bannon became a special assistant to the chief of Naval operations at the Pentagon, earning a master’s degree in national security studies at Georgetown University at night. But he was restless. The siren of Reagan-era Wall Street capitalism drained the military life of its luster, so he resolved to make the leap. “Somebody told me,” he says, “if you want to go to Wall Street, you have to go to Harvard Business School.” HBS accepted him, and Bannon, at 29, matriculated in 1983.
Bannon’s Harvard stint coincided with Wall Street’s boom, which fueled fantasies among his classmates of the full-on, debauched 1980s investment-banker lifestyle. Bannon became a grind, made first-year honors, and blanketed the top firms with applications for summer associateships. He was universally rejected. Classmates told him that his age and Navy background were obstacles—he hadn’t come up through the right schools.
One day, a Goldman Sachs representative invited Bannon to a campus recruiting party: Thinking he could talk himself into a job, he donned a suit and headed over. “I get there, and there’s like 700 people jammed into this tent,” he says. “I said, ‘F--- it. There’s no chance.’ So I stood off on the side with a drink and these two other schmendricks standing next to me. And I talk to these guys. We have the greatest conversation about baseball, and I find out after half an hour it was John Weinberg Jr., whose dad runs the firm, and a guy named Rob Kaplan, who became a senior partner.” That night the Goldman executives gathered to discuss prospective hires. One later recounted the scene. “They said, ‘Well, Bannon, I guess we’re gonna reject him. He’s too old for a summer job,’ ” Bannon says. “And these guys say, ‘Oh no, we talked to him. He’s terrific.’ Literally, a complete crapshoot. But I got a job.”
Bannon landed in Goldman’s New York office at the height of the hostile takeover boom. “Everything in the Midwest was being raided by Milken,” he says. “It was like a firestorm.” Goldman didn’t do hostile takeovers, instead specializing in raid defense for companies targeted by the likes of Drexel Burnham and First Boston. The first few years, he worked every day except Christmas and loved it: “The camaraderie was amazing. It was like being in the Navy, in the wardroom of a ship.” Later, he worked on a series of leveraged buyouts, including a deal for Calumet Coach that involved Bain Capital and an up-and-comer named Mitt Romney.
Two big things were going on at Goldman Sachs in the late ’80s. The globalization of world capital markets meant that size suddenly mattered. Everyone realized that the firm, then a private partnership, would have to go public. Bankers also could see that the Glass-Steagall Act separating commercial and investment banking was going to fall, setting off a flurry of acquisitions. Specialists would command a premium. Bannon shipped out to Los Angeles to specialize in media and entertainment. “A lot of people were coming from outside buying media companies,” he says. “There was huge consolidation.”
After a few years, in 1990, Bannon and a couple of Goldman colleagues set off to launch Bannon & Co., a boutique investment bank specializing in media. At the time, investors preferred hard assets—manufacturing companies, real estate—and avoided things like movie studios and film libraries, which were harder to price. Bannon’s group, drawing on data such as VHS cassette sales and TV ratings, devised a model to value intellectual property in the same way as tangible assets. “We got a ton of business,” he says.
When the French bank Crédit Lyonnais, a major financier of independent Hollywood studios, almost went bankrupt, Bannon & Co. rolled up its loan portfolio. When MGM went bust, it worked on the studio’s financing. When Polygram Records got into the film business, Bannon’s firm handled its acquisitions.
And then, serendipitously, Bannon wound up in the entertainment business himself. Westinghouse Electric, a client, was looking to unload Castle Rock Entertainment, which had a big TV and movie presence, including Billy Crystal’s films. Bannon reeled in an eager buyer: Ted Turner. “Turner was going to build this huge studio,” he says, “so we were negotiating the deal at the St. Regis hotel in New York. As often happened with Turner, when it came time to actually close the deal, Ted was short of cash. ... Westinghouse just wanted out. We told them, ‘You ought to take this deal. It’s a great deal.’ And they go, ‘If this is such a great deal, why don’t you defer some of your cash fee and keep an ownership stake in a package of TV rights?’ ” In lieu of a full adviser’s fee, the firm accepted a stake in five shows, including one in its third season regarded as the runt of the litter: Seinfeld. “We calculated what it would get us if it made it to syndication,” says Bannon. “We were wrong by a factor of five.”
After Société Générale bought Bannon & Co. in 1998, Bannon, no longer needing a day job, dove into Hollywood moguldom, becoming an executive producer of movies, including Anthony Hopkins’s 1999 Oscar-nominated Titus. He met a hard-partying talent manager named Jeff Kwatinetz who had discovered the band Korn and managed the Backstreet Boys. As Bannon was selling his company, Kwatinetz was launching one of his own, a management outfit called the Firm whose clients included Ice Cube and Martin Lawrence. Newly flush and sensing adventure, Bannon became a partner and a key player in the Firm’s great coup, its acquisition of former Disney chief Ovitz’s company, Artists Management Group. Ovitz had spent $100 million building a media giant he thought would conquer Hollywood, but AMG was bleeding money. Selling to the Firm was a last-ditch bid to save face. Instead, as Vanity Fair recounted, Bannon was dispatched to Ovitz’s Beverly Hills mansion to deliver the final humiliation in person, an offer for AMG of $5 million, less than the value of Ovitz’s home.
The Hollywood ether soon convinced Bannon that his passion wasn’t financing films, but making them. He was souring on Wall Street and what it had come to represent. “Goldman in the ’80s was like a priesthood, a monastic experience where you worked all the time but were incredibly dedicated to client services, to building and growing companies,” he says. He underwent a conversion like the one Michael Lewis has described, watching with horror as staid private partnerships such as Goldman Sachs became highly leveraged, publicly traded companies operating like casinos. “I turned on Wall Street for the same reason everybody else did: The American taxpayer was forced to cut mook deals to bail out guys who didn’t deserve it.”
Bannon’s political awakening was also spurred by the Sept. 11 attacks, which led him, in 2004, to make a Reagan-venerating documentary, In the Face of Evil (“A brilliant effort … extremely well done,” said Rush Limbaugh). This introduced him to Schweizer, a Cold War scholar whose book, Reagan’s War, was the basis of the film. It also brought him into Andrew Breitbart’s orbit. “We screened the film at a festival in Beverly Hills,” Bannon recalls, “and out of the crowd comes this, like, bear who’s squeezing me like my head’s going to blow up and saying how we’ve gotta take back the culture.” His films are peppered with footage of lions attacking helpless gazelles, seedlings bursting from the ground into glorious bloom
Breitbart, who also lived in Los Angeles, had a profound influence on Bannon. When they met, Breitbart was starting his website, after having worked with Drudge and having helped Arianna Huffington launch the Huffington Post. Bannon lent his financial acumen and office space. He marveled at Breitbart’s visceral feel for the news cycle and his ability to shape coverage through the Drudge Report, which is avidly followed by TV producers and news editors.
“One of the things I admired about him was that the dirtiest word for him was ‘punditry,’ ” says Bannon. “Our vision—Andrew’s vision—was always to build a global, center-right, populist, anti-establishment news site.” With this in mind, he set out to line up investors.
Bannon continued making documentaries—big, crashing, opinionated films with Wagner scores and arresting imagery: Battle for America (2010), celebrating the Tea Party; Generation Zero (2010), examining the roots of the financial meltdown; The Undefeated (2011), championing Palin. In the Bannon repertoire, no metaphor is too direct. His films are peppered with footage of lions attacking helpless gazelles, seedlings bursting from the ground into glorious bloom. Palin, for one, ate it up and traveled to Iowa, trailed by hundreds of reporters, to appear with him at a 2011 screening in Pella that the press thought might signal her entrance into the 2012 presidential race. (No such luck.) Breitbart came along as promoter and ringmaster. When I spoke with him afterward, he described Bannon, with sincere admiration, as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Tea Party movement. Andrew Breitbart in 2010. Photographer: Reed Saxon/AP Photo
In 2010, Breitbart News hit a wall. The site published video, furnished by a conservative activist, of a speech to the NAACP by a Department of Agriculture official named Shirley Sherrod, in which she appeared to advocate anti-white racism. Within hours, she was fired, as the story blanketed cable news. It soon became clear that the Breitbart News video was misleadingly edited—that Sherrod’s point was the opposite of what was portrayed Fox News, which aggressively promoted the video, banned Andrew Breitbart as an on-air guest. Bannon, who was raising capital for the site’s relaunch, suddenly encountered “nuclear winter.”
But in a gauge of how media standards have shifted since the ’90s, the ostracization of Breitbart News didn’t last long. Less than a year later, when the site caught Weiner tweeting pictures of his genitals, Andrew Breitbart was welcomed back on Fox News. The experience taught Bannon the power of real news.
On the morning of March 1, 2012, with the relaunch just days away, Andrew Breitbart was walking in his Brentwood neighborhood when he collapsed. He died soon after of heart failure, at 43. Bannon got the news while in New York pitching investors. At the funeral, Drudge asked Bannon what he planned to do. “We’re going ahead with the launch,” he replied. Bannon stepped in as executive chairman.
Breitbart’s genius was that he grasped better than anyone else what the early 20th century press barons understood—that most readers don’t approach the news as a clinical exercise in absorbing facts, but experience it viscerally as an ongoing drama, with distinct story lines, heroes, and villains. Breitbart excelled at creating these narratives, an editorial approach that's lived on. “When we do an editorial call, I don’t even bring anything I feel like is only a one-off story, even if it’d be the best story on the site,” says Alex Marlow, the site’s editor in chief. “Our whole mindset is looking for these rolling narratives.” He rattles off the most popular ones, which Breitbart News covers intensively from a posture of aggrieved persecution. “The big ones won’t surprise you,” he says. “Immigration, ISIS, race riots, and what we call ‘the collapse of traditional values.’ But I’d say Hillary Clinton is tops.”
The website, which Breitbart News Network CEO Solov says draws 21 million unique users a month, has often managed to inject these narratives into the broader discourse. It was Breitbart News, for example, that first drew attention to the child migrant crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border last summer that killed any chance of Congress passing immigration reform. “They have an incredible eye for an important story, particular ones that are important to conservatives and Republicans,” says Senator Jeff Sessions, an Alabama Republican. “They’ve become extraordinarily influential. Radio talk show hosts are reading Breitbart every day. You can feel it when they interview you.”
Lately, the site has championed Trump’s presidential candidacy, helping to coalesce a splinter faction of conservatives irate over Fox News’ treatment of the Republican frontrunner. Fighting crony capitalism from Bannon’s Lincoln-esque dining room.
Tallahassee is about as far as you can get in the U.S., geographically and psychically, from the circus of the presidential campaign trail. That’s why Bannon chose to locate the Government Accountability Institute there—that, and the fact that Schweizer had moved down from Washington. “There’s nothing to do in Tallahassee, so I get a lot more work done,” Schweizer jokes, on my recent visit. GAI is housed in a sleepy cul de sac of two-story brick buildings that looks like what you’d get if Scarlett O’Hara designed an office park. The unmarked entrance is framed by palmetto trees and sits beneath a large, second-story veranda with sweeping overhead fans, where the (mostly male) staff gathers every afternoon to smoke cigars and brainstorm.
Schweizer began his career as a researcher at the conservative Hoover Institution, digging through Soviet archives. In 2004 he co-authored a well-regarded history of the Bush family, The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty, that drew on interviews with many of its members, including Jeb. But Schweizer grew disillusioned with Washington and became radicalized against what he perceived to be a bipartisan culture of corruption. “To me, Washington, D.C., is a little bit like professional wrestling,” he told me. “When I was growing up in Seattle, I’d turn on Channel 13, the public-access station, and watch wrestling. At first I thought, ‘Man, these guys hate each other because they’re beating the crap out of each other.’ But I eventually realized they’re actually business partners.”
Schweizer’s interest turned toward exposing this culture, and his books became more denunciatory. In 2011 he published Throw Them All Out: How Politicians and Their Friends Get Rich Off Insider Stock Tips, Land Deals, and Cronyism That Would Send the Rest of Us to Prison. The book caught the attention of 60 Minutes and led Congress to pass a law, the STOCK Act, aimed at curbing the abuses Schweizer documented. Bannon encouraged these investigations and eventually offered Schweizer a job. “He told me, ‘I know people who will support this kind of work,’” Schweizer says. In 2012, GAI set up shop.
Schweizer, 50, is friendly, sandy-haired, and a little pudgy, the sort of fellow you’d meet at a neighborhood barbecue and instantly take a liking to. (Bannon nurses this regular-Joe appeal by forbidding him from wearing a tie when he’s on TV.) Bannon and Schweizer had two principles when they conceived the Clinton Cash project. First, it would avoid the nuttier conspiracy theories. “We have a mantra,” says Bannon. “Facts get shares, opinions get shrugs.” Second, they would heed the lesson Bannon learned at Goldman: specialize. Hillary Clinton’s story, they believed, was too sprawling and familiar to tackle in its entirety. So they'd focus only on the last decade, the least familiar period, and especially on the millions of dollars flowing into the Clinton Foundation. Bannon calls this approach “periodicity.”
As with many of the Clintons’ troubles, the couple’s own behavior provided copious material for investigators. When Clinton became secretary of state, the foundation signed an agreement with the White House to disclose all of its contributors. It didn’t follow through. So GAI researchers plumbed tax filings, flight logs, and foreign government documents to turn up what the foundation withheld. Their most effective method was mining the so-called Deep Web, the 97 percent or so of information on the Internet that isn’t indexed for search engines such as Google and therefore is difficult to find. Bannon “weaponizes” scoops through mainstream outlets.
“Welcome to The Matrix,” says Tony, GAI’s data scientist, as he maps out the Deep Web for me on a whiteboard (we agreed I wouldn’t publish his last name). A presentation on the hidden recesses of the Web follows. “The Deep Web,” he explains, “consists of a lot of useless or depreciated information, stuff in foreign languages, and so on. But a whole bunch of it is very useful, if you can find it.” Tony specializes in finding the good stuff, which he does by writing software protocols that spider through the Deep Web. Since this requires heavy computing power, Tony struck a deal to use the services of a large European provider during off-peak hours. “We’ve got $1.3 billion of equipment I’m using at almost full capacity,” he says. This effort yielded a slew of unreported foundation donors who appear to have benefited financially from their relationship with the Clintons, including the uranium mining executives cited by the New York Times (who showed up on an unindexed Canadian government website). These donations illustrate a pattern of commingling private money and government policy that disturbed even many Democrats.
Clinton Cash caused a stir not just because of these revelations, but because of how they arrived. GAI is set up more like a Hollywood movie studio than a think tank. The creative mind through which all its research flows and is disseminated belongs to a beaming young Floridian named Wynton Hall, a celebrity ghostwriter who’s penned 18 books, six of them New York Times best-sellers, including Trump’s Time to Get Tough. Hall’s job is to transform dry think-tank research into vivid, viral-ready political dramas that can be unleashed on a set schedule, like summer blockbusters. “We work very long and hard to build a narrative, storyboarding it out months in advance,” he says. “I’m big on this: We’re not going public until we have something so tantalizing that any editor at a serious publication would be an idiot to pass it up and give a competitor the scoop. ”
To this end, Hall peppers his colleagues with slogans so familiar around the office that they’re known by their abbreviations. “ABBN — always be breaking news,” he says. Another slogan is “depth beats speed.” Time-strapped reporters squeezed for copy will gratefully accept original, fact-based research because most of what they’re inundated with is garbage. “The modern economics of the newsroom don’t support big investigative reporting staffs,” says Bannon. “You wouldn’t get a Watergate, a Pentagon Papers today, because nobody can afford to let a reporter spend seven months on a story. We can. We’re working as a support function.”
The reason GAI does this is because it’s the secret to how conservatives can hack the mainstream media. Hall has distilled this, too, into a slogan: “Anchor left, pivot right.” It means that “weaponizing” a story onto the front page of the New York Times (“the Left”) is infinitely more valuable than publishing it on Breitbart.com. “We don’t look at the mainstream media as enemies because we don’t want our work to be trapped in the conservative ecosystem,” says Hall. “We live and die by the media. Every time we’re launching a book, I’ll build a battle map that literally breaks down by category every headline we’re going to place, every op-ed Peter’s going to publish. Some of it is a wish list. But it usually gets done.”
Once that work has permeated the mainstream—once it’s found “a host body,” in David Brock's phrase—then comes the “pivot.” Heroes and villains emerge and become grist for a juicy Breitbart News narrative. “With Clinton Cash, we never really broke a story,” says Bannon, “but you go [to Breitbart.com] and we’ve got 20 things, we’re linking to everybody else’s stuff, we’re aggregating, we’ll pull stuff from the Left. It’s a rolling phenomenon. Huge traffic. Everybody’s invested.” “We’ve got $1.3 billion of equipment I’m using at almost full capacity”
Over the summer, Hillary Clinton failed to emerge as the overwhelming frontrunner everyone expected. She’s been weighed down by the Clinton Foundation buckraking and the revelation that she kept a private e-mail server as secretary of state and destroyed much of her correspondence. Recently, the scandals have merged. In August e-mails surfaced showing that Bill Clinton, through the foundation, sought State Department permission to accept speaking fees in such repressive countries as North Korea and the Congo. A poll the same day found that the word voters associate most with his wife is “liar.” On Oct. 22, Hillary Clinton will testify on these matters before the Select Committee on Benghazi. Her troubles aren’t going away.
Veteran Democrats such as Lehane concede that Bannon and his ilk have been more effective than conservatives who targeted Bill Clinton 25 years ago. “They’ve adapted into a higher species,” he says. There’s more on the way. “We’ve got two more waves of stuff on Clinton corruption," says Bannon, including a focus on how the donors highlighted in Clinton Cash violated many of the principles liberals hold dear: “You look at what they’ve done in the Colombian rain forest, look at the arms merchants, the warlords, the human trafficking—if you take anything that the Left professes to be a cornerstone value, the Clintons have basically played them for fools. They’ve enriched themselves while playing up the worst cast of characters in the world.”
While this is surely unwelcome news for Clinton, Lehane argues that where the Clintons are concerned, their opponents invariably become consumed by partisan zeal and undermine their own cause. “Remember the old Pink Panther movies when Clouseau would walk in and the chief inspector would be there, and he’d just start losing his marbles, no matter what?” he says. “That’s how these guys are.”
Bannon does, indeed, have a touch of Clinton Madness. When we met in January, Bill Cosby’s serial predations had just exploded into the news after laying dormant for many years. Bannon was certain this signaled trouble for Bill Clinton, whose own sexual history some conservatives long to revive as a way of hampering his wife’s campaign. His conviction stems from the group of young, female Breitbart News reporters whom he’s dubbed the Valkyries. When I expressed skepticism about the value of reintroducing old scandals, Bannon countered that the Valkyries—a sort of in-house focus group of millennial voter sentiment—were unfamiliar with Clinton contretemps that most older people consider settled. "There’s a whole generation of people who love the news but were 7 or 8 years old when this happened and have no earthly idea about the Clinton sex stuff,” he says. Bannon’s motto: “Honey badger don’t give a s---.”
It’s impossible to predict how Bannon’s plots and intrigues will ultimately affect the presidential race. It’s not even clear on whose behalf he’s acting—his own or someone else’s? Are Seinfeld royalties enough to take on Clinton and Bush? Or do others have a stake? Solov, the CEO, won’t say. “I can’t go into that,” he says. “It’s privately owned.” Bannon wouldn’t comment either. However, a prominent conservative says Robert Mercer, the reclusive co-founder of hedge fund Renaissance Technologies and a major donor to Texas Senator Ted Cruz, has invested $10 million. Mercer’s daughter, Rebekah, is listed in 2013 tax documents as a GAI board member.
Even without knowing the identity of his backers, Bannon’s designs are clear enough. While he’d blanch at the comparison, he’s pursuing something like the old Marxist dialectical concept of “heightening the contradictions,” only rather than foment revolution among the proletariat, he’s trying to disillusion Clinton’s and Bush’s natural base of support, recognizing, as Goldman Sachs taught him, that you’re more effective if others lead the way.
To succeed, Bannon will need to activate the anger and disgust with cronyism that’s as powerful among supporters of Sanders as it is among fans of Trump. In Tallahassee, as GAI’s phone keeps ringing, the vehicle for achieving this is clear. Editors and reporters at prominent magazines and newspapers, including ones that had passed when approached with Clinton Cash revelations, are calling to ask when the next salvo will arrive—and might they arrange an exclusive?
For many, the answer will be yes. “We’re going to go to the investigative units, not the political reporters, and just give them the stuff,” says Bannon. “We have faith they’ll take the stories and do the additional reporting.” The thought pleases him, and he grins. “Just like last time, we’ll go out and say, ‘Hey, here’s what we’ve got. You guys take it from here.’ ”
Donald Trump; drawing by James Ferguson
