Hence, within twenty-four hours of the inauguration, the president had invented a million or so people who did not exist. He sent his new press secretary, Sean Spicer—whose personal mantra would shortly become “You can’t make this shit up”—to argue his case in a media moment that turned Spicer, quite a buttoned-down political professional, into a national joke, which he seemed destined to never recover from. To boot, the president blamed Spicer for not making the million phantom souls seem real.
It was the first presidential instance of what the campaign regulars had learned over many months: on the most basic level, Trump just did not, as Spicer later put it, give a fuck. You could tell him whatever you wanted, but he knew what he knew, and if what you said contradicted what he knew, he simply didn’t believe you.
The next day Kellyanne Conway, her aggressive posture during the campaign turning more and more to petulance and self-pity, asserted the new president’s right to claim “alternative facts.” As it happened, Conway meant to say “alternative information,” which at least would imply there might be additional data. But as uttered, it certainly sounded like the new administration was claiming the right to recast reality. Which, in a sense, it was. Although, in Conway’s view, it was the media doing the recasting, making a mountain (hence “fake news”) out of a molehill (an honest minor exaggeration, albeit of vast proportions).
Anyway, the frequently asked question about whether Trump would continue his unsupervised
and often inexplicable tweets now that he was officially in the White House and the president of
the United States—a question as hotly asked inside the White House as out—was answered: he
would.
This was his fundamental innovation in governing: regular, uncontrolled bursts of anger and
spleen.
* * *
The president’s immediate official business, however, was to make nice with the CIA.
On Saturday, January 21, in an event organized by Kushner, the president, in his first
presidential act, paid a call on Langley to, in Bannon’s hopeful description, “play some politics.”
In carefully prepared remarks in his first act as president, he would lay some of the famous
Trump flattery on the CIA and the rest of the sprawling, and leaking, U.S. intelligence world.
Not taking off his dark overcoat, lending him quite a hulking gangster look, pacing in front of
the CIA’s wall of stars for its fallen agents, in front of a crowd of about three hundred agency
personnel and a group of White House staffers, and, suddenly, in a mood of sleepless cockiness
and pleasure at having a captive crowd, the new president, disregarding his text, launched into
what we could confidently call some of the most peculiar remarks ever delivered by an American
president.
“I know a lot about West Point, I’m a person who very strongly believes in academics. Every time I say I had an uncle who was a great professor at MIT for 35 years, who did a fantastic job in so many ways academically—he was an academic genius—and then they say, Is Donald Trump an intellectual? Trust me, I’m like a smart person.”
Which was all somehow by way of praise for the new, soon-to-be-confirmed CIA director, Mike Pompeo, who had attended West Point and who Trump had brought with him to stand in the crowd—and who now found himself as bewildered as everyone else.
“You know when I was young. Of course I feel young—I feel like I was 30 . . . 35 . . . 39……..
Somebody said, Are you young? I said, I think I’m young. I was stopping in the final months of
the campaign, four stops, five stops, seven stops—speeches, speeches in front of twenty-five,
thirty thousand people . . . fifteen, nineteen thousand. I feel young—I think we’re all so young.
When I was young we were always winning things in this country. We’d win with trade, we’d
win with wars—at a certain age I remembering hearing from one of my instructors, the United
States has never lost a war. And then, after that, it’s like we haven’t won anything. You know the
old expression, to the victor belongs the spoils? You remember I always say, keep the oil.”
“Who should keep the oil?” asked a bewildered CIA employee, leaning over to a colleague in
the back of the room.
“I wasn’t a fan of Iraq, I didn’t want to go into Iraq. But I will tell you when we were in we got out wrong and I always said in addition to that keep the oil. Now I said it for economic reasons, but if you think about it, Mike”—he called out across the room, addressing the soon-to-
be director—“if we kept the oil we wouldn’t have ISIS because that’s where they made their money in the first place, so that’s why we should have kept the oil. But okay—maybe you’ll have another chance—but the fact is we should have kept the oil.”
The president paused and smiled with evident satisfaction.
“The reason you are my first stop, as you know I have a running war with the media, they are
among the most dishonest human beings on earth, and they sort of made it sound like I had a
feud with the intelligence community and I just want to let you know the reason you’re the
number one stop is exactly the opposite, exactly, and they understand that. I was explaining
about the numbers. We did, we did a thing yesterday at the speech. Did everybody like the
speech? You had to like it. But we had a massive field of people. You saw them. Packed. I get up
this morning, I turn on one of the networks, and they show an empty field and I say, Wait a
minute, I made a speech. I looked out—the field was—it looked like a million, million and half
people. They showed a field where there were practically nobody standing there. And they said
Donald Trump did not draw well and I said it was almost raining, the rain should have scared
them away, but God looked down and said we’re not going to let it rain on your speech and in
fact when I first started I said, Oooh no, first line I got hit by a couple of drops, and I said, Oh
this is too bad, but we’ll go right through it, the truth is it stopped immediately…… ”
“No, it didn’t,” one of the staffers traveling with him said reflexively, then catching herself
and, with a worried look, glancing around to see if she had been overheard.
“. . . and then it became really sunny and I walked off and it poured right after I left. It poured
but we have something amazing because—honestly it looked like a million, million and a half
people, whatever it was it was, but it went all the way back to the Washington Monument and by
mistake I get this network and it showed an empty field and it said we drew two hundred fifty
thousand people. Now that’s not bad, but it’s a lie……. And we had another one yesterday which
was interesting. In the Oval Office there’s a beautiful statue of Dr. Martin Luther King and I also
happen to like Churchill—Winston Churchill—I think most of us like Churchill, doesn’t come
from our country but had a lot to do with it, helped us, real ally, and as you know the Churchill
statue was taken out……… So a reporter for Time magazine and I have been on the cover like
fourteen or fifteen times. I think I have the all-time record in the history of Time magazine. Like
if Tom Brady is on the cover it’s one time because he won the Super Bowl or something. I’ve
been on fifteen times this year. I don’t think, Mike, that’s a record that can ever be broken, do
you agree with that……. What do you think?”
“No,” said Pompeo in a stricken voice.
“But I will say that they said it was very interesting that ‘Donald Trump took down the bust,
the statue, of Dr. Martin Luther King,’ and it was right there, there was a cameraman that was in
front of it. So Zeke . . . Zeke . . . from Time magazine . . . writes a story that I took it down. I
would never do that. I have great respect for Dr. Martin Luther King. But this is how dishonest
the media is. Now big story, but the retraction was like this”—he indicated ever-so-small with
his fingers. “Is it a line or do they even bother putting it in? I only like to say I love honesty, I
like honest reporting. I will tell you, final time, although I will say it when you let in your
thousands of other people who have been trying to come in, because I am coming back, we may
have to get you a larger room, we may have to get you a larger room and maybe, maybe, it will
be built by somebody that knows how to build and we won’t have columns. You understand
that? We get rid of the columns, but you know I just wanted to say that I love you, I respect you,
there’s nobody I respect more. You do a fantastic job and we’re going to start winning again, and
you’re going to be leading the charge, so thank you all very much.”
In a continuing sign of Trump’s Rashomon effect—his speeches inspiring joy or horror—
witnesses would describe his reception at the CIA as either a Beatles-like emotional outpouring
or a response so confounded and appalled that, in the seconds after he finished, you could hear a
pin drop.
4
BANNON
Steve Bannon was the first Trump senior staffer in the White House after Trump was sworn in. On the inauguration march, he had grabbed the newly appointed deputy chief of staff, Katie Walsh, Reince Priebus’s deputy at the RNC, and together they had peeled off to inspect the now vacant West Wing. The carpet had been shampooed, but little else had changed. It was a warren of tiny offices in need of paint, not rigorously cleaned on a regular basis, the décor something like an admissions office at a public university. Bannon claimed the nondescript office across from the much grander chief of staff’s suite, and he immediately requisitioned the white boards on which he intended to chart the first hundred days of the Trump administration. And right away he began moving furniture out. The point was to leave no room for anyone to sit. There were to be no meetings, at least no meetings where people could get comfortable. Limit discussion. Limit debate. This was war. This was a war room.
Many who had worked with Bannon on the campaign and through the transition shortly noticed a certain change. Having achieved one goal, he was clearly on to another. An intense man, he was suddenly at an even higher level of focus and determination.
“What’s up with Steve?” Kushner began to ask. And then, “Is something wrong with Steve?” And then finally, “I don’t understand. We were so close.”
Within the first week, Bannon seemed to have put away the camaraderie of Trump Tower—
including a willingness to talk at length at any hour—and become far more remote, if not
unreachable. He was “focused on my shit.” He was just getting things done. But many felt that
getting things done was was more about him hatching plots against them. And certainly, among
his basic character notes, Steve Bannon was a plotter. Strike before being struck. Anticipate the
moves of others—counter them before they can make their moves. To him this was seeing things
ahead, focusing on a set of goals. The first goal was the election of Donald Trump, the second
the staffing of the Trump government. Now it was capturing the soul of the Trump White House,
and he understood what others did not yet: this would be a mortal competition.
* * *
In the early days of the transition, Bannon had encouraged the Trump team to read David
Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest. (One of the few people who seem actually to have
taken him up on this reading assignment was Jared Kushner.) “A very moving experience
reading this book. It makes the world clear, amazing characters and all true,” Bannon enthused.
This was a personal bit of branding—Bannon made sure to exhibit the book to many of the
liberal reporters he was courting. But he was also trying to make a point, an important one
considering the slapdash nature of the transition team’s staffing protocols: be careful who you
hire.
Halberstam’s book, published in 1972, is a Tolstoyan effort to understand how great figures of
the academic, intellectual, and military world who had served during the Kennedy and Johnson
years had so grievously misapprehended the nature of the Vietnam War and mishandled its
prosecution. The Best and the Brightest was a cautionary tale about the 1960s establishment—the
precursor of the establishment that Trump and Bannon were now so aggressively challenging.
But the book also served as a reverential guide to the establishment. For the 1970s generation
of future policy experts, would-be world leaders, and Ivy League journalists aiming for big-time
careers—though it was Bannon’s generation, he was far outside this self-selected elite circle
—The Best and the Brightest was a handbook about the characteristics of American power and
the routes to it. Not just the right schools and right backgrounds, although that, too, but the
attitudes, conceits, affect, and language that would be most conducive to finding your way into
the American power structure. Many saw the book as a set of prescriptions about how to get
ahead, rather than, as intended, what not to do when you are ahead. The Best and the Brightest
described the people who should be in power. A college-age Barack Obama was smitten with the
book, as was Rhodes Scholar Bill Clinton.
Halberstam’s book defined the look and feel of White House power. His language, resonant
and imposing and, often, boffo pompous, had set the tone for the next half century of official
presidential journalism. Even scandalous or unsuccessful tenants of the White House were
treated as unique figures who had risen to the greatest heights after mastering a Darwinian
political process. Bob Woodward, who helped bring Nixon down—and who himself became a
figure of unchallengeable presidential mythmaking—wrote a long shelf of books in which even
the most misguided presidential actions seemed part of an epochal march of ultimate
responsibility and life-and-death decision making. Only the most hardhearted reader would not
entertain a daydream in which he or she was not part of this awesome pageant.
Steve Bannon was such a daydreamer.
* * *
But if Halberstam defined the presidential mien, Trump defied it—and defiled it. Not a single
attribute would place him credibly in the revered circle of American presidential character and
power. Which was, in a curious reversal of the book’s premise, just what created Steve Bannon’s
opportunity.
The less likely a presidential candidate is, the more unlikely, and, often, inexperienced, his
aides are—that is, an unlikely candidate can attract only unlikely aides, as the likely ones go to
the more likely candidates. When an unlikely candidate wins—and as outsiders become ever
more the quadrennial flavor of the month, the more likely an unlikely candidate is to get elected
—ever more peculiar people fill the White House. Of course, a point about the Halberstam book
and about the Trump campaign was that the most obvious players make grievous mistakes, too.
Hence, in the Trump narrative, unlikely players far outside the establishment hold the true
genius.
Still, few have been more unlikely than Steve Bannon.
At sixty-three, Bannon took his first formal job in politics when he joined the Trump
campaign. Chief Strategist—his title in the new administration—was his first job not just in the
federal government but in the public sector. (“Strategist!” scoffed Roger Stone, who, before
Bannon, had been one of Trump’s chief strategists.) Other than Trump himself, Bannon was certainly the oldest inexperienced person ever to work in the White House.
It was a flaky career that got him here.
Catholic school in Richmond, Virginia. Then a local college, Virginia Tech. Then seven years in the Navy, a lieutenant on ship duty and then in the Pentagon. While on active duty, he got a master’s degree at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, but then he washed out of his naval career. Then an MBA from Harvard Business School. Then four years as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs—his final two years focusing on the media industry in Los Angeles—but not rising above a midlevel position.
In 1990, at the age of thirty-seven, Bannon entered peripatetic entre-preneurhood under the auspices of Bannon & Co., a financial advisory firm to the entertainment industry. This was something of a hustler’s shell company, hanging out a shingle in an industry with a small center of success and concentric rings radiating out of rising, aspiring, falling, and failing strivers. Bannon & Co., skirting falling and failing, made it to aspiring by raising small amounts of money for independent film projects—none a hit.
Bannon was rather a movie figure himself. A type. Alcohol. Bad marriages. Cash-strapped in a
business where the measure of success is excesses of riches. Ever scheming. Ever disappointed.
For a man with a strong sense of his own destiny, he tended to be hardly noticed. Jon Corzine,
the former Goldman chief and future United States senator and governor of New Jersey,
climbing the Goldman ranks when Bannon was at the firm, was unaware of Bannon. When
Bannon was appointed head of the Trump campaign and became an overnight press sensation—
or question mark—his credentials suddenly included a convoluted story about how Bannon &
Co. had acquired a stake in the megahit show Seinfeld and hence its twenty-year run of residual
profits. But none of the Seinfeld principals, creators, or producers seem ever to have heard of
him.
Mike Murphy, the Republican media consultant who ran Jeb Bush’s PAC and became a leading anti-Trump movement figure, has the vaguest recollection of Bannon’s seeking PR services from Murphy’s firm for a film Bannon was producing a decade or so ago. “I’m told he was in the meeting, but I honestly can’t get a picture of him.”
The New Yorker magazine, dwelling on the Bannon enigma—one that basically translated to: How is it that the media has been almost wholly unaware of someone who is suddenly among the most powerful people in government?—tried to trace his steps in Hollywood and largely failed to find him. The Washington Post traced his many addresses to no clear conclusion, except a suggestion of possible misdemeanor voter fraud.
In the midnineties, he inserted himself in a significant role into Biosphere 2, a project
copiously funded by Edward Bass, one of the Bass family oil heirs, about sustaining life in
space, and dubbed by Time one of the hundred worst ideas of the century—a rich man’s folly.
Bannon, having to find his opportunities in distress situations, stepped into the project amid its
collapse only to provoke further breakdown and litigation, including harassment and vandalism
charges.
After the Biosphere 2 disaster, he participated in raising financing for a virtual currency scheme (MMORPGs, or MMOs) called Internet Gaming Entertainment (IGE). This was a successor company to Digital Entertainment Network (DEN), a dot-com burnout, whose principals included the former child star Brock Pierce (The Mighty Ducks) who went on to be the founder of IGE, but was then pushed out. Bannon was put in as CEO, and the company was subsumed by endless litigation.
Distress is an opportunistic business play. But some distress is better than others. The kinds of situations available to Bannon involved managing conflict, nastiness, and relative hopelessness —in essence managing and taking a small profit on dwindling cash. It’s a living at the margins of people who are making a much better living. Bannon kept trying to make a killing but never found the killing sweet spot.
Distress is also a contrarian’s game. And the contrarian’s impulse—equal parts personal dissatisfaction, general resentment, and gambler’s instinct—started to ever more strongly fuel Bannon. Part of the background for his contrarian impulse lay in an Irish Catholic union family, Catholic schools, and three unhappy marriages and bad divorces (journalists would make much of the recriminations in his second wife’s divorce filings).
Not so long ago, Bannon might have been a recognizably modern figure, something of a
romantic antihero, an ex-military and up-from-the-working-class guy, striving, through multiple
marriages and various careers, to make it, but never finding much comfort in the establishment
world, wanting to be part of it and wanting to blow it up at the same time—a character for
Richard Ford, or John Updike, or Harry Crews. An American man’s story. But now such stories
have crossed a political line. The American man story is a right-wing story. Bannon found his
models in political infighters like Lee Atwater, Roger Ailes, Karl Rove. All were larger-than-life
American characters doing battle with conformity and modernity, relishing ways to violate
liberal sensibilities.
The other point is that Bannon, however smart and even charismatic, however much he
extolled the virtue of being a “stand-up guy,” was not necessarily a nice guy. Several decades as
a grasping entrepreneur without a satisfying success story doesn’t smooth the hustle in hustler.
One competitor in the conservative media business, while acknowledging his intelligence and the
ambitiousness of his ideas, also noted, “He’s mean, dishonest, and incapable of caring about
other people. His eyes dart around like he’s always looking for a weapon with which to bludgeon
or gouge you.”
Conservative media fit not only his angry, contrarian, and Roman Catholic side, but it had low barriers to entry—liberal media, by contrast, with its corporate hierarchies, was much harder to break into. What’s more, conservative media is a highly lucrative target market category, with books (often dominating the bestseller lists), videos, and other products available through direct sales avenues that can circumvent more expensive distribution channels.
In the early 2000s, Bannon became a purveyor of conservative books products and media. His
partner in this enterprise was David Bossie, the far-right pamphleteer and congressional
committee investigator into the Clintons’ Whitewater affair, who would join him as deputy
campaign manager on the Trump campaign. Bannon met Breitbart News founder Andrew
Breitbart at a screening of one of the Bannon-Bossie documentaries In the Face of Evil (billed as
“Ronald Reagan’s crusade to destroy the most tyrannical and depraved political systems the
world has ever known”), which in turn led to a relationship with the man who offered Bannon
the ultimate opportunity: Robert Mercer.
* * *
In this regard, Bannon was not so much an entrepreneur of vision or even business discipline, he
was more simply following the money—or trying to separate a fool from his money. He could
not have done better than Bob and Rebekah Mercer. Bannon focused his entrepreneurial talents
on becoming courtier, Svengali, and political investment adviser to father and daughter.
Theirs was a consciously quixotic mission. They would devote vast sums—albeit still just a
small part of Bob Mercer’s many billions—to trying to build a radical free-market, smallgovernment, home-schooling, antiliberal, gold-standard, pro-death-penalty, anti-Muslim, proChristian, monetarist, anti-civil-rights political movement in the United States.
Bob Mercer is an ultimate quant, an engineer who designs investment algorithms and became
a co-CEO of one of the most successful hedge funds, Renaissance Technologies. With his
daughter, Rebekah, Mercer set up what is in effect a private Tea Party movement, self-funding
whatever Tea Party or alt-right project took their fancy. Bob Mercer is almost nonverbal, looking
at you with a dead stare and either not talking or offering only minimal response. He had a
Steinway baby grand on his yacht; after inviting friends and colleagues on the boat, he would
spend the time playing the piano, wholly disengaged from his guests. And yet his political
beliefs, to the extent they could be discerned, were generally Bush-like, and his political
discussions, to the extent that you could get him to be responsive, were about issues involving
ground game and data gathering. It was Rebekah Mercer—who had bonded with Bannon, and
whose politics were grim, unyielding, and doctrinaire—who defined the family. “She’s . . . like
whoa, ideologically there is no conversation with her,” said one senior Trump White House
staffer.
With the death of Andrew Breitbart in 2012, Bannon, in essence holding the proxy of the
Mercers’ investment in the site, took over the Breitbart business. He leveraged his gaming
experience into using Gamergate—a precursor alt-right movement that coalesced around an
antipathy toward, and harassment of, women working in the online gaming industry—to build
vast amounts of traffic through the virality of political memes. (After hours one night in the
White House, Bannon would argue that he knew exactly how to build a Breitbart for the left.
And he would have the key advantage because “people on the left want to win Pulitzers, whereas
I want to be Pulitzer!”)
Working out of—and living in—the town house Breitbart rented on Capitol Hill, Bannon became one of the growing number of notable Tea Party figures in Washington, the Mercers’ consigliere. But a seeming measure of his marginality was that his big project was the career of Jeff Sessions—“Beauregard,” Sessions’s middle name, in Bannon’s affectionate moniker and evocation of the Confederate general—among the least mainstream and most peculiar people in the Senate, whom Bannon tried to promote to run for president in 2012.
Donald Trump was a step up—and early in the 2016 race, Trump became the Breitbart totem. (Many of Trump’s positions in the campaign were taken from the Breitbart articles he had printed out for him.) Indeed, Bannon began to suggest to people that he, like Ailes had been at Fox, was the true force behind his chosen candidate.
Bannon didn’t much question Donald Trump’s bona fides, or behavior, or electability, because, in part, Trump was just his latest rich man. The rich man is a fixed fact, which you have to accept and deal with in an entrepreneurial world—at least a lower-level entrepreneurial world. And, of course, if Trump had had firmer bona fides, better behavior, and clear electability, Bannon would not have had his chance.
However much a marginal, invisible, small-time hustler Bannon had been—something of an
Elmore Leonard character—he was suddenly transformed inside Trump Tower, an office he
entered on August 15, and for practical purposes, did not exit, save for a few hours a night (and
not every night) in his temporary midtown Manhattan accommodations, until January 17, when
the transition team moved to Washington. There was no competition in Trump Tower for being
the brains of the operation. Of the dominant figures in the transition, neither Kushner, Priebus,
nor Conway, and certainly not the president-elect, had the ability to express any kind of coherent
perception or narrative. By default, everybody had to look to the voluble, aphoristic, shambolic, witty, off-the-cuff figure who was both ever present on the premises and who had, in an unlikely attribute, read a book or two.
And indeed who, during the campaign, turned out to be able to harness the Trump operation,
not to mention its philosophic disarray, to a single political view: that the path to victory was an
economic and cultural message to the white working class in Florida, Ohio, Michigan, and
Pennsylvania.
* * *
Bannon collected enemies. Few fueled his savagery and rancor toward the standard-issue
Republican world as much as Rupert Murdoch—not least because Murdoch had Donald Trump’s
ear. It was one of the key elements of Bannon’s understanding of Trump: the last person Trump
spoke to ended up with enormous influence. Trump would brag that Murdoch was always calling
him; Murdoch, for his part, would complain that he couldn’t get Trump off the phone.
“He doesn’t know anything about American politics, and has no feel for the American people,” said Bannon to Trump, always eager to point out that Murdoch wasn’t an American. But Trump couldn’t get enough of him. With his love of “winners”—and he saw Murdoch as the ultimate winner—Trump was suddenly bad-mouthing his friend Ailes as a “loser.”
And yet in one regard Murdoch’s message was useful to Bannon. Having known every president since Harry Truman—as Murdoch took frequent opportunities to point out—and, he conjectured, as many heads of state as anyone living, Murdoch believed he understood better than younger men, even seventy-year-old Trump, that political power was fleeting. (This was in fact the same message he had imparted to Barack Obama.) A president really had only, max, six months to make an impact on the public and set his agenda, and he’d be lucky to get six months. After that it was just putting out fires and battling the opposition.
This was the message whose urgency Bannon himself had been trying to impress on an often
distracted Trump. Indeed, in his first weeks in the White House, an inattentive Trump was
already trying to curtail his schedule of meetings, limit his hours in the office, and keep his
normal golf habits.
Bannon’s strategic view of government was shock and awe. Dominate rather than negotiate. Having daydreamed his way into ultimate bureaucratic power, he did not want to see himself as a bureaucrat. He was of a higher purpose and moral order. He was an avenger. He was also, he believed, a straight shooter. There was a moral order in aligning language and action—if you said you were going to do something, you do it.
In his head, Bannon carried a set of decisive actions that would not just mark the new administration’s opening days, but make it clear that nothing ever again would be the same. At the age of sixty-three, he was in a hurry.
* * *
Bannon had delved deeply into the nature of executive orders—EOs. You can’t rule by decree in the United States, except you really can. The irony here was that it was the Obama administration, with a recalcitrant Republican Congress, that had pushed the EO envelope. Now, in something of a zero-sum game, Trump’s EOs would undo Obama’s EOs.
During the transition, Bannon and Stephen Miller, a former Sessions aide who had earlier
joined the Trump campaign and then become Bannon’s effective assistant and researcher,
assembled a list of more than two hundred EOs to issue in the first hundred days.
But the first step in the new Trump administration had to be immigration, in Bannon’s certain view. Foreigners were the ne plus ultra mania of Trumpism. An issue often dismissed as living on the one-track-mind fringe—Jeff Sessions was one of its cranky exponents—it was Trump’s firm belief that a lot of people had had it up to here with foreigners. Before Trump, Bannon had bonded with Sessions on the issue. The Trump campaign became a sudden opportunity to see if nativism really had legs. And then when they won, Bannon understood there could be no hesitation about declaring their ethnocentric heart and soul.
To boot, it was an issue that made liberals bat-shit mad.
Laxly enforced immigration laws reached to the center of the new liberal philosophy and, for
Bannon, exposed its hypocrisy. In the liberal worldview, diversity was an absolute good,
whereas Bannon believed any reasonable person who was not wholly blinded by the liberal light
could see that waves of immigrants came with a load of problems—just look at Europe. And
these were problems borne not by cosseted liberals but by the more exposed citizens at the other
end of the economic scale.
It was out of some instinctive or idiot-savant-like political understanding that Trump had made
this issue his own, frequently observing, Wasn’t anybody an American anymore? In some of his
earliest political outings, even before Obama’s election in 2008, Trump talked with
bewilderment and resentment about strict quotas on European immigration and the deluge from
“Asia and other places.” (This deluge, as liberals would be quick to fact-check, was, even as it
had grown, still quite a modest stream.) His obsessive focus on Obama’s birth certificate was in
part about the scourge of non-European foreignness—a certain race-baiting. Who were these
people? Why were they here?
The campaign sometimes shared a striking graphic. It showed a map of the country reflecting
dominant immigration trends in each state from fifty years ago—here was a multitude of
countries, many European. Today, the equivalent map showed that every state in the United
States was now dominated by Mexican immigration. This was the daily reality of the American
workingman, in Bannon’s view, the ever growing presence of an alternative, discount workforce.
Bannon’s entire political career, such as it was, had been in political media. It was also in
Internet media—that is, media ruled by immediate response. The Breitbart formula was to so
appall the liberals that the base was doubly satisfied, generating clicks in a ricochet of disgust
and delight. You defined yourself by your enemy’s reaction. Conflict was the media bait—hence,
now, the political chum. The new politics was not the art of the compromise but the art of
conflict.