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

  PENGUIN PRESS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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  New York, New York 10014

  penguin.com

  Copyright © 2017 by Joshua Green

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  ISBN 9780735225022 (hardcover)

  ISBN 9780735225039 (e-book)

  Portions of this book have appeared in different form in Bloomberg Businessweek.

  Version_1

  For Alicia

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  PREFACE

  1. “It Will Take a Miracle”

  2. “Where’s My Steve?”

  3. Bildungsroman

  4. “A Dangerous Way to Look at the World”

  5. Nobody Builds Walls Like Trump

  6. The Alt-Kochs

  7. A Rolling Tumbleweed of Wounded Male Id and Aggression

  8. “The Traffic Is Absolutely Filthy!”

  9. “Honest Populism”

  10. Burn Everything Down

  11. “The FBI Has Learned of the Existence . . .”

  Afterword: Kali Yuga

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  INDEX

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PREFACE

  In the late spring of 2011, I got a phone call from a publicist inviting me to a screening of a documentary film about Sarah Palin. At the time, I was a political writer for The Atlantic, and I’d just returned from a reporting trip to Alaska and published a long, somewhat contrarian article on Palin’s aborted governorship. My piece argued that Palin had done more good than people realized—cleaning up a corrupt state GOP, raising oil taxes, fixing Alaska’s budget—and that if she was going to run for president in 2012, which was a live possibility, then she should revert to her populist instincts. The filmmaker had read my article and loved it, the publicist told me.

  A few days later, I showed up at a sound studio in Arlington, Virginia, and met the filmmaker. His name was Steve Bannon. His film, a soaring testimony to Palin oddly titled The Undefeated (she and John McCain lost the 2008 election), was forgettable. Bannon himself was unforgettable. Brimming with vigor in a military field jacket, he made an impassioned speech about the power of the Tea Party movement, still a gathering force, and Palin’s place in the vanguard of a new populist conservatism. He was clearly intelligent, had a manic charisma, and espoused a distinct and unusual politics. He also claimed to have been a Goldman Sachs investment banker and Hollywood producer, recently returned from running a video-game empire in Hong Kong.

  I quickly sized him up as a colorful version of a recognizable Washington character type: the political grifter seeking to profit from the latest trend. No politician was hotter in 2011 than Palin. And Washington was rife with Tea Party con men. We agreed to stay in touch (grifters can be good sources). Later on, out of idle curiosity as much as anything else, I called Goldman Sachs to see if Bannon had really worked there. He had. A quick check revealed that he had also produced movies for Sean Penn and Anthony Hopkins. His story, in all its multifaceted oddness, checked out.

  One of the joys of being a magazine feature writer is that you can collect interesting characters and find excuses to write about them later on. I decided right away that I would profile Bannon, but took years to get around to actually doing it. In the meantime, we hung out at political events or at the Capitol Hill headquarters of Breitbart News, which he took over in 2012. Through the years, I discovered seemingly endless new dimensions (and contradictions): his admiration for Rachel Maddow, whom he considered a master of fact-based partisan polemics; his controversial stint overseeing the Biosphere 2 Project in Arizona; his deep interest in Christian mysticism and esoteric Hinduism; and his particular fascination with an obscure, early-twentieth-century French intellectual, René Guénon, who became a Muslim and observed the Sharia—a jarring contrast to the bombastic Islamophobia Bannon often espoused. What also became clear was his sincere belief that right-wing Tea Party populism was a global phenomenon: Palin soon faded, but Bannon’s conviction in his political ideas only grew stronger. And although I didn’t know it at the time of the screening, he had recently met Donald Trump and begun informally advising him on this very subject.

  In 2015, I finally found an angle for my profile. Bannon had spent two years masterminding an investigative book about Bill and Hillary Clinton, marshaling an entire research team at a Florida think tank to conduct a forensic examination of the Clinton Foundation’s financial backers. He thought that the contributions the Clintons had solicited and received from foreign donors of dubious character and motivation posed a serious political threat to Hillary Clinton’s designs on the White House. And he had devised what struck me as a rather ingenious plan to get the mainstream media to write about it (a plan I elucidate later in this book).

  That summer Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, by Peter Schweizer, was published and immediately upended the presidential race, sullying Clinton’s image in a way that she never fully recovered from. My profile of Bannon explaining what he’d done appeared on the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek that fall.

  Of course, that turned out to be only a piece of a much larger story—the story of the greatest political upset in modern American history, and one that ended with Donald Trump and Steve Bannon in the White House. As someone whose job it was the last three years to immerse himself in right-wing politics, as someone who had up-close access to many of the principals, I’d like to be able to say that I saw this coming. But that would be entirely untrue. Never did I imagine that Trump would win the Republican nomination, would install Bannon to run his campaign, or would defeat Hillary Clinton in the general election. Only in hindsight did it become clear that Bannon had a better feel for the American electorate’s anxieties than almost anyone else in the arena, save perhaps Donald Trump.

  This book is an attempt to go back and tell the story from the beginning, charting its unlikely origins and following the two men whose partnership was its epicenter—how they came together, how they triumphed, and how their relationship ultimately came apart. The seeds of this effort are the twenty-plus hours of interviews I conducted over eight months with Bannon and his associates in Washington and Florida while reporting my original profile. I’ve also drawn on dozens of conversations before that period and since, including reporting conducted for subsequent Businessweek feature stories on Trump, his campaign, and several of his top advisers. Shortly after he locked up the Republican nomination, Trump granted me a wide-ranging ninety-minute interview in his Trump Tower office. I’ve included some of that material here. During the campaign, and in some cases also the transition and early months of the Trump administration, I conducted interviews that inform this book with figures who include: Reince Priebus, Jeff Sessions, Sean Spicer, Stephen Miller, David Bossie, Kellyanne Conway, Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, Roger Stone, and Nigel Farage, as well as other Trump advisers and intimates who preferred not to b
e named.

  Several provided e-mails, strategy memos, polling data, photographs, and notes, some of which are quoted or described herein. With help from participants, those they confided in, or contemporaneous recordings, I’ve reconstructed dialogue in a number of places. Wherever I’ve drawn on the work of other journalists, I’ve tried to include a citation, either in the text or in an endnote. Quotes that are not cited there are drawn from my own reporting.

  While no work of this kind can hope to be a comprehensive account of every twist and turn in a campaign that featured (by my count) twenty-two major candidates, what I hope I’ve done here is to better illuminate the core of the story. I also argue that an implicit bargain lay at the heart of the relationship between Trump and Bannon, the same one Bannon was hoping to strike with Palin when I first met him: that his hard-right nationalist politics could carry the right person to the White House—at which point the powers of the presidency would be marshaled to faithfully enact it. Trump sold this brand of nationalism with the same all-out conviction he brought to selling his own name. Whether he actually believed in it, he recognized that it was the key to closing the biggest deal of his life.

  ONE

  “IT WILL TAKE A MIRACLE”

  Fucking unbelievable, Steve Bannon thought, shaking his head in disgust as the “Breaking News” alert raced across the television screens in the Trump Tower war room. It was 7:22 p.m. on Election Night, the polls hadn’t even closed, and yet here was CNN’s Jim Acosta breathlessly touting a damning quote he’d pried out of an anonymous senior Trump adviser: “It will take a miracle for us to win.”

  Bannon didn’t have to guess at the culprit. He simply assumed it was Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager, and how the hell would she know? Conway was a pollster by trade, but she tested messaging, not horse race, and the campaign had cut her off weeks earlier because Trump preferred to see her spinning on TV. If Bannon cared to—and right now, he did not—he could have watched Acosta’s full report and looked for the Tell. That’s what always gave her away. Because Conway was the only woman on Trump’s senior staff, reporters avoided using gender pronouns when quoting her anonymously, lest an errant “she” slip out and reveal their source. Instead, they employed the awkward but gender-neutral “this adviser” or “this person,” and by the third or fourth reference what they were doing became pretty obvious. That was the Tell. Some of Trump’s advisers had long ago caught on and joked about it.

  Sure enough, Acosta cited “a senior adviser from Donald Trump’s inner circle,” followed by a trifecta of “this adviser”s, with nary a “he” or a “she” to be heard. Even before he’d finished talking, CNN—Trump’s obsession and bête noire—had billboarded the “take a miracle” quote in a banner that stretched across the screen.

  But Bannon had already moved on. He could never fathom why people like Conway worked so hard to win goodwill from reporters (most of whom, he thought, were idiots with no earthly idea what was really going on) or why they cared so much about appearances.

  It took only a glance to see that Bannon himself cared not a whit for appearances—at least not his own. This was, in fact, one of his defining traits. He had spent most of his life donning the uniform of the various institutions to which he belonged: the cadet’s uniform at Benedictine High School, the all-male Roman Catholic military school he and his brothers attended in Richmond, Virginia; the naval officer’s starched whites during his eight-year stint aboard destroyers in the Pacific and the Persian Gulf; and the banker’s expensive suits, a uniform of their own, which he’d worn during his tenure at Goldman Sachs.

  But once he made real money and cashed out, Bannon gleefully threw off the strictures of the working stiff and adopted a singular personal style: rumpled oxfords layered over multiple polo shirts, ratty cargo shorts, and flip-flops—a sartorial middle finger to the whole wide world.

  Even now, at sixty-three, having left a right-wing media empire a few months earlier to become Trump’s chief campaign strategist, Bannon made only the tiniest concession to the Trump world’s boardroom ethos by swapping the cargo shorts for cargo pants and tossing a blazer over his many layers of shirting. Although it was Election Night and television satellite trucks stretched for blocks around Trump Tower, Bannon hadn’t bothered with a shave or a haircut, and he had a half dozen pens clipped to his shirt placket, like some bizarre military epaulet. “Steve needs to be introduced to soap and water,” said Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime political adviser. He looked for all the world like someone preparing to spend the night on a park bench.

  But Trump needed him. Practically alone among his advisers, Bannon had had an unshakable faith that the billionaire reality-TV star could prevail—and a plan to get him there. “It’s gonna be ugly,” Bannon would tell anyone who would listen during the closing weeks of the campaign. “But there’s a path.”

  —

  Trump had turned to Bannon in August to rescue his floundering presidential campaign at a time when nearly everyone agreed that he was headed for a landslide loss. He had burned through two campaign chiefs already. First was the volatile Corey Lewandowski, a walk-through-walls yes-man whose blind devotion and willingness to defend any outrage was appreciated by Trump.

  But Lewandowski had gotten crosswise with some important family members, in particular Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and he lacked strategic vision. He was ousted in June. Next came Paul Manafort, a longtime Washington lobbyist with murky ties to foreign autocrats. Manafort had attempted to refashion Trump into someone who would be acceptable to the moneyed GOP establishment, an effort Trump had bridled against at every step. By the time reports surfaced in August that Manafort was the designated recipient of millions of dollars in cash payments from Russian-aligned politicians in Ukraine, Trump had all but signed his death warrant, tagging him with the dreaded “low energy” epithet he’d applied to the woeful Jeb Bush. “My father just didn’t want to have the distraction looming over the campaign,” Trump’s son Eric explained to Fox News on the day Manafort was shown the door.

  The surprise elevation of Bannon to head Trump’s campaign on August 17 hit political Washington like a thunderclap—and, to most insiders, like a bad punch line. Bannon had never worked on a campaign; he was despised by Democrats and Republicans alike for his eagerness to attack them both; and he had a profile that guaranteed still more terrible headlines for Trump. He was executive chairman of Breitbart News, the crusading, racially charged, hard-right populist website that had helped spark the 2013 Republican-led government shutdown and then bullied House Speaker John Boehner into resigning. Bannon’s personal motto was “Honey badger don’t give a shit,” a reference to the insouciant African predator of YouTube fame whose catchphrase became a viral sensation.

  To Washington Republicans, Bannon was about the worst choice Trump could have made because it signaled that, rather than steer toward a gentlemanly defeat that might preserve Republican seats in the House and Senate, Trump was going to burn it all down en route to a loss so ugly it might destroy the party. Even on his best days, these Republicans agreed, Trump was never more than a hairsbreadth from blowing himself up and taking out the party with him. No one who had encountered Bannon or Breitbart doubted for a moment that he would encourage Trump’s worst tendencies. He was a human hand grenade, an Internet-era update of the Slim Pickens character in Dr. Strangelove who rides the bomb like a rodeo bull, whoopin’ and hollerin’ all the way to nuclear annihilation. As one of his Breitbart News employees admiringly put it, “If there’s an explosion or a fire somewhere, Steve is probably nearby with some matches.”

  But Trump, a honey badger himself, saw plenty to like. Bannon was nothing if not high-energy, a mile-a-minute talker who rarely slept and possessed a media metabolism to rival Trump’s own. His first instinct was always to attack. Bannon’s distinctive vocabulary, an admixture of Navy boiler room and ’80s Wall Street, was another point of appeal. A blue
-collar kid from a Navy family, Bannon gloried in the slights and scorn directed at Trump supporters, proudly insisting that elitist Clintonites looked down on them as “hobbits,” “grundoons,” and—co-opting Clinton’s own ill-advised term—“deplorables.” Anyone who thought otherwise was a “mook” or a “schmendrick.” And Clinton herself was the subject of a steady stream of derision, carefully pitched to Trump’s own biases and insecurities, and delivered with the passion of a cornerman firing up a boxer for one last grueling round in the ring. Clinton, Bannon would insist, was “a résumé,” “a total phony,” “terrible on the stage,” “a grinder, but not smart,” “a joke who hides behind a complacent media,” “an apple-polisher who couldn’t pass the D.C. bar exam,” “thinks it’s her turn,” but “has never accomplished anything in her life”—and, for good measure, was “a fucking bull dyke.”

  Trump loved it. And he loved how Bannon, an avid reader of history and military biographies, fitted Trump’s outsider campaign into the broader sweep of history. For years, Bannon had tracked, and occasionally abetted, the right-wing populist uprisings sweeping across Europe and Great Britain. Where others saw Trump’s campaign as a joke or an ego trip, Bannon framed it as the inevitable U.S. manifestation of these same forces and Trump as the avatar of an us-versus-them populism that could galvanize an electoral majority to rise up and smash a corrupt establishment. He had a role for himself, too. On his office wall hung an oil painting of Bannon dressed as Napoleon in his study at the Tuileries, done in the style of Jacques-Louis David’s famous Neoclassical painting—it was a gift from Nigel Farage, a nationalist-minded friend.

  For all its shock, the choice of Bannon wasn’t nearly as random as it seemed. He had first been brought into Trump’s orbit years earlier by David Bossie, the veteran Republican operative, to provide informal counsel on a potential presidential bid. At the time, Bannon hadn’t thought much of Trump’s chances and regarded these visits as an adventure and a lark. He doubted that Trump would run. But this hadn’t prevented him from imparting his nationalist worldview—particularly his hostility to illegal immigration—and long before Trump declared his candidacy, the billionaire was reading Breitbart News articles flagged by Bannon and then printed out on paper (Trump’s preferred medium for reading) and delivered to him in a manila folder by his staff.