PROLOGUE: AILES AND BANNON
The evening began at six-thirty, but Steve Bannon, suddenly among the world’s most powerful men and now less and less mindful of time constraints, was late.
Bannon had promised to come to this small dinner arranged by mutual friends in a Greenwich
Village town house to see Roger Ailes, the former head of Fox News and the most significant
figure in right-wing media and Bannon’s sometime mentor. The next day, January 4, 2017—little
more than two weeks before the inauguration of his friend Donald Trump as the forty-fifth
president—Ailes would be heading to Palm Beach, into a forced, but he hoped temporary,
retirement.
Snow was threatening, and for a while the dinner appeared doubtful. The seventy-six-year-old Ailes, with a long history of leg and hip problems, was barely walking, and, coming in to Manhattan with his wife Beth from their upstate home on the Hudson, was wary of slippery streets. But Ailes was eager to see Bannon. Bannon’s aide, Alexandra Preate, kept texting steady updates on Bannon’s progress extracting himself from Trump Tower.
As the small group waited for Bannon, it was Ailes’s evening. Quite as dumbfounded by his
old friend Donald Trump’s victory as most everyone else, Ailes provided the gathering with
something of a mini-seminar on the randomness and absurdities of politics. Before launching
Fox News in 1996, Ailes had been, for thirty years, among the leading political operatives in the
Republican Party. As surprised as he was by this election, he could yet make a case for a straight
line from Nixon to Trump. He just wasn’t sure, he said, that Trump himself, at various times a
Republican, Independent, and Democrat, could make the case. Still, he thought he knew Trump
as well as anyone did and was eager to offer his help. He was also eager to get back into the
right-wing media game, and he energetically described some of the possibilities for coming up
with the billion or so dollars he thought he would need for a new cable network.
Both men, Ailes and Bannon, fancied themselves particular students of history, both autodidacts partial to universal field theories. They saw this in a charismatic sense—they had a personal relationship with history, as well as with Donald Trump.
Now, however reluctantly, Ailes understood that, at least for the moment, he was passing the
right-wing torch to Bannon. It was a torch that burned bright with ironies. Ailes’s Fox News,
with its $1.5 billion in annual profits, had dominated Republican politics for two decades. Now
Bannon’s Breitbart News, with its mere $1.5 million in annual profits, was claiming that role.
For thirty years, Ailes—until recently the single most powerful person in conservative politics—
had humored and tolerated Donald Trump, but in the end Bannon and Breitbart had elected him.
Six months before, when a Trump victory still seemed out of the realm of the possible, Ailes,
accused of sexual harassment, was cashiered from Fox News in a move engineered by the liberal
sons of conservative eighty-five-year-old Rupert Murdoch, the controlling shareholder of Fox
News and the most powerful media owner of the age. Ailes’s downfall was cause for much liberal celebration: the greatest conservative bugbear in modern politics had been felled by the new social norm. Then Trump, hardly three months later, accused of vastly more louche and abusive behavior, was elected president.