At nine-thirty, three hours late, a good part of the dinner already eaten, Bannon finally arrived.
Wearing a disheveled blazer, his signature pairing of two shirts, and military fatigues, the
unshaven, overweight sixty-three-year-old joined the other guests at the table and immediately
took control of the conversation. Pushing a proffered glass of wine away—“I don’t drink”—he
dived into a live commentary, an urgent download of information about the world he was about
to take over.
“We’re going to flood the zone so we have every cabinet member for the next seven days through their confirmation hearings,” he said of the business-and-military 1950s-type cabinet choices. “Tillerson is two days, Session is two days, Mattis is two days……………………………………………………………………… ”
Bannon veered from “Mad Dog” Mattis—the retired four-star general whom Trump had nominated as secretary of defense—to a long riff on torture, the surprising liberalism of generals, and the stupidity of the civilian-military bureaucracy. Then it was on to the looming appointment of Michael Flynn—a favorite Trump general who’d been the opening act at many Trump rallies —as the National Security Advisor.
“He’s fine. He’s not Jim Mattis and he’s not John Kelly . . . but he’s fine. He just needs the
right staff around him.” Still, Bannon averred: “When you take out all the never-Trump guys
who signed all those letters and all the neocons who got us in all these wars . . . it’s not a deep
bench.”
Bannon said he’d tried to push John Bolton, the famously hawkish diplomat, for the job as National Security Advisor. Bolton was an Ailes favorite, too.
“He’s a bomb thrower,” said Ailes. “And a strange little fucker. But you need him. Who else is good on Israel? Flynn is a little nutty on Iran. Tillerson”—the secretary of state designate —“just knows oil.”
“Bolton’s mustache is a problem,” snorted Bannon. “Trump doesn’t think he looks the part. You know Bolton is an acquired taste.”
“Well, rumors were that he got in trouble because he got in a fight in a hotel one night and chased some woman.”
“If I told Trump that, he might have the job.”
* * *
Bannon was curiously able to embrace Trump while at the same time suggesting he did not take
him entirely seriously. He had first met Trump, the on-again off-again presidential candidate, in
2010; at a meeting in Trump Tower, Bannon had proposed to Trump that he spend half a million
dollars backing Tea Party-style candidates as a way to further his presidential ambitions. Bannon
left the meeting figuring that Trump would never cough up that kind of dough. He just wasn’t a
serious player. Between that first encounter and mid-August 2016, when he took over the Trump
campaign, Bannon, beyond a few interviews he had done with Trump for his Breitbart radio
show, was pretty sure he hadn’t spent more than ten minutes in one-on-one conversation with
Trump.
But now Bannon’s Zeitgeist moment had arrived. Everywhere there was a sudden sense of
global self-doubt. Brexit in the UK, waves of immigrants arriving on Europe’s angry shores, the
disenfranchisement of the workingman, the specter of more financial meltdown, Bernie Sanders
and his liberal revanchism—everywhere was backlash. Even the most dedicated exponents of
globalism were hesitating. Bannon believed that great numbers of people were suddenly
receptive to a new message: the world needs borders—or the world should return to a time when
it had borders. When America was great. Trump had become the platform for that message.
By that January evening, Bannon had been immersed in Donald Trump’s world for almost five
months. And though he had accumulated a sizable catalogue of Trump’s peculiarities, and cause
enough for possible alarm about the unpredictability of his boss and his views, that did not detract from Trump’s extraordinary, charismatic appeal to the right-wing, Tea Party, Internet meme base, and now, in victory, from the opportunity he was giving Steve Bannon.