Sunday, July 29, marked one hundred days to go until the midterm elections.
Reince Priebus, Trump’s chief of staff for the first six months of his administration, invited Bannon to have dinner with him at his country club in suburban Virginia. A year had passed since Priebus departed his White House job, the president dismissing him in a tweet as Priebus, disembarking from Air Force One, stood on the airport tarmac. Since then he had failed to land the kind of prestige position that customarily went to a former chief of staff. Now slated to step into one of the Trump campaign operations, Priebus was hesitating, foreseeing more backlash toward anyone connected to the president.
Bannon was encouraging him to take the job. “I don’t know,” said Priebus. “Mitch McConnell is a pretty smart guy, and he has us down by forty seats in the House. Paul Ryan is a pretty smart guy and thinks forty is optimistic.”
In politics, one hundred days was ordinarily an eternity, but right now many Republicans felt like time had stopped and there was no way forward. Sometimes it seemed as if the whole campaign consisted only of Don Jr. and his girlfriend, former Fox star Kimberly Guilfoyle, out on the road supporting Trump, with Don Jr. finally getting the personal acknowledgment from the base that he had never gotten from his father. It was a largely skeptical party, no matter how much it was theoretically bent to Trump’s will.
“It’s over,” Jason Miller, the White House’s designated CNN messenger and among Trump’s most indefatigable surrogates, told Bannon.
Meanwhile, there was the continual and unprecedented departure of White House staffers; the day-by-day attrition from the senior ranks was relentless. The latest to go was legislative director Marc Short. To be the legislative director for a party that controls both houses of Congress is one of the plum jobs in politics. You’re the point person for the push to deliver on your party’s promises. You’re the can-do guy. For all practical purposes, you can’t fail, and your big-money future career is ensured. But Short couldn’t wait to get out.
Ordinarily, a flood of résumés would stream into the White House in the wake of a departure like Short’s. But the number of résumés that came in from people eager to take his job was … zero. The position was finally filled by Shahira Knight, a low-profile lobbyist and former aide to Gary Cohn.
Bill Shine, only weeks into the job, was beside himself with fury, telling everyone that this wasn’t what he had signed up for. There was no organization. There was no plan. There were literally no bodies to do anything—he had to do everything himself. Plus, it was a full-time job just to deal with Trump, a vastly more difficult star than anyone at Fox. Trump was worse, said Shine, than Bill O’Reilly, who, by almost all accounts, was the most difficult man in television (in the history of television, according to longtime Fox boss Roger Ailes). But Trump, in Shine’s telling, needed an even higher level of stroking, reassurance, and attention to his appearance.
Trump was at least as unhappy with Shine. “Hannity said Shine was talented,” he groused. “He’s a no-talent. Hannity said I was getting Ailes. Shine’s no Ailes.”
A year and a half into Trump’s administration, it often seemed as if nobody worked at the White House anymore. One hundred days out from the most consequential midterm elections in a generation, no one was pushing out the White House message; even Kellyanne Conway seemed to have disappeared. (“Into witness protection,” said Bannon.) Worse, there was no message. Jason Miller, the president’s chief defender on CNN, was writing his own talking points for his appearances.
Bannon, however, was back in campaign mode. It was all war all the time: no matter how dismal your prospects, you could only believe in a positive outcome—that was the nature of a campaign. His war-room operation in the Embassy in full swing, he tried to revert to his August 2016 Trump Tower mindset, when he had arrived to take over a failing campaign. But at that critical moment he had a huge advantage: his enemy was asleep, fat and happy in the conviction that Hillary Clinton had the presidency locked. Now he was facing an enemy totally on the trigger, watching every opportunity to pour in more resources. Whatever happened, the other side would not be caught sleeping this time around; that arrogance did not exist. The Democrats, Bannon understood, had their existential boots on. If they blew this, they blew everything.
In the White House, there was lassitude, fatalism, and, above all, a disinclination to take responsibility for the woeful outcome that now seemed inevitable. The Democrats may have dramatically altered their mindset from 2016, but not the Trumpers: as in 2016, they assumed they would lose, even should lose.
It wasn’t lost on anybody that Don Jr., in everybody’s estimation a very weak link in the Trump family’s march forward, was his father’s chief booster. (This was a development that worried even the president. “He’s a pretty stupid boy,” said a realistic Trump.) Enjoying his new visibility, his son was now telling everyone that it didn’t matter if they lost, and that impeachment would be a good thing. “Let them try it. Bring it on. I’m glad. This is going to be the best thing that could ever happen,” said Don Jr., hitting his fists against his chest. “The Democrats are going to be very, very sorry.”
“I just hope people don’t really believe this shit,” Bannon said to Priebus. “When the Dems get the gavel and start running through everything, if you think Trump is King Lear now, wait until every day is hearings, investigations, subpoenas. He will lose his shit.”
Bannon, spending more and more time in New York, was being urged to dump Trump by some of the contributors and media figures he had befriended since leaving the White House. His reinvented career, from marginal political participant to kingmaker and international political celebrity, might well die if Trump died. Bannon understood that. “I’m just a movement guy staying with Trump because he’s part of this movement,” said Bannon, hardly affirming his passionate enthusiasm for Trump.
Curiously, at the same time that Bannon, along with the rest of the party, had grown more and more weary of Trump—for many, a pitiless exhaustion—there was now wide addiction to Trump’s wild-card genius. He had imagination or instincts or a shamelessness so beyond the boundaries of traditional political conduct that no conventional politician—and politics remained the province of conventional politicians—had yet found a way to anticipate and counter Trump’s disruptive behavior. “This is a herculean struggle, but at the end of the day we’ve got Trump, and no one in American politics has yet figured out how to deal with that,” said Bannon.
This was just as true of the Republicans as the Democrats. In a sense, the Republicans—the RNC and the congressional leadership—were hardly mounting a midterm campaign. The elections in November weren’t, after all, about the Republican Party. They were about Donald Trump. The party was just going through the motions, waiting for Trump to pull off a miracle. Somehow.
The Republicans were set to spend more than $500 million on House races (they would ultimately spend $690 million). But that was separate from Trump’s own campaign—or, in his view, the real campaign—which would focus on what Trump liked doing best and what he had concluded was the singular reason for his victory in 2016: rallies.
In some perhaps unconscious but none-too-subtle sense, the purpose of Trump’s presidency—its style and emphasis and daily bid for attention—was not so much about winning votes but about filling stadiums. Here, Trump was fed by Bannon’s nearly constant exhortations that the election needed to be only about him. On T minus 102 days, Bannon had appeared on Hannity’s Fox show, with both men speaking directly to the president: only you can save yourself.
Trump’s fate, Bannon declared, rested with the deplorables, who had to be brought to the kind of fearful emotional pitch that would get them to the polls. Trump alone could accomplish this.
The feeling of resignation among the Republican ranks was overwhelming. The prospect of losing provided the only rationale for winning. “If we don’t win, our situation will be so catastrophic we can’t even think about it,” said Bannon. “The internecine warfare between Mitch McConnell, the establishment, the donors, the bloodletting—no one will be left standing.”
This rationale held equally for the Democrats, however. The party that lost the midterms would implode and be consumed by internal strife. Bannon, as though operating a political hedge fund, was hoping to benefit from either side’s civil war.
If the Republicans lost their House majority, Trump would surely be the key reason for that loss. Just as surely, he would off-load the blame, in his most withering and abusive terms, on the Republican leadership. Trump flourished most of all as a contrast gainer to his enemies. Corry Bliss, the Republican operative running the party’s efforts to hold the House, told people he wasn’t so much afraid of losing the House, but of losing the House and having Donald Trump still in the White House. Given the certainty that Trump was not going to blame himself, nor give credit to the Democrats, then the fault was going to fall on the heads of the congressional Republicans and their donors.
Trump, as Bannon had to regularly remind his Republican friends, was not in fact a Republican. His party affiliation was purely a relationship of convenience, ready to be broken at any moment. “If you think Trump is dangerous now,” said Bannon, “a wounded Trump knows no bounds.”
For Bannon, losing the House could in fact be quite the perfect plan. A good part of his bitter fight with Trump—beyond the fact that everyone fought bitterly with Trump—had to do with Trump’s willingness to let the Republican leadership substitute its agenda for his. Trump and Bannon’s populist revolution had, too often, defaulted to standard Republican politics. So here, in defeat, Bannon might get his all-out war with the Republican Party. It was the RINOs—the Republicans in Name Only—who had not adequately defended Trump; hence, if the House was lost, it was the RINOs who would be responsible for his impeachment.
If the House flipped and Trump was threatened with impeachment, the deplorable wing of the party would be energized and ascendant (although even for Bannon the nature of that energy had its fearsome prospects). What would rouse this beast more than anything was its leader’s destruction. Depending on Bannon’s mood, he was ready to bring it on, and he could see how the martyrdom of Donald Trump might be a net positive for himself and the populist movement. Trump would be turned into a powerful symbol, victim and martyr, and in the end that might play better than Trump as the movement’s infuriating and unpredictable standard-bearer.
But if the Democrats failed to win the House, this outcome, too, held all manner of advantages for Bannon. Here would be an epochal accounting. Universal revulsion toward Donald Trump across the liberal bandwidth had brought the Democrats together after the 2016 election. They had blamed Trump for stealing the election; they had not, more logically, blamed themselves for losing it. But if they could not take him on now—with money, righteousness, ground troops, and minus the drag of Hillary Clinton—then surely they would have to accept that the problem was the identity of the Democratic Party itself. In this scenario as well, it would be the establishment against the party’s own great unwashed. The left wing, searching for new meaning and leadership, would, in Bannon’s view, embrace its own militant version of populism.
And in this polarization and realignment would lie Bannon’s opportunity—and amusement. Indeed, Bannon found himself drawn equally to the left and the right. His insight, yet to be shared by the left, was that he could be one of its natural leaders. Italy was his proof of concept: he had helped bring together the nationalist Northern League and the populist Five Star Movement. Both parties felt deep antipathy toward corporate influence, elite power brokers, a mordant status quo, and self-sustaining expertise—that was unifying. The rest was just details.
Since leaving the White House in August 2017 and then exiting Breitbart at the beginning of 2018, Bannon had paid increasing amounts of attention to liberal media, even as liberal media reviled him all the more. There was his widely discussed 60 Minutes interview. There was his list of go-to liberal reporters and producers: Costa at the Washington Post, Gabe Sherman at Vanity Fair, Maggie Haberman at the Times, Ira Rosen at 60 Minutes, seemingly almost anyone who called him from the Daily Beast.
Bannon had heard that Steve Jobs’s wife, Laurene Powell—who was now using her billions to build a progressive media company—had said she was “a huge fan” of his. He had heard that a character in the forthcoming spy thriller Mile 22, starring Mark Wahlberg, was based on him. And Michael Moore’s soon-to-be-released Fahrenheit 11/9—he appeared in that, too. He was also, while traveling the globe, being followed by a full-time documentary team.
Bannon was most especially looking forward to an Errol Morris documentary, which was due to be literally all about him—a 110-minute single-subject interview. One of Morris’s most famous documentaries, The Fog of War, focused exclusively on Robert McNamara, secretary of defense under Kennedy and Johnson, an epochal and tragic figure of the Vietnam War. Morris’s new film would, ipso facto, confirm that Bannon was just as epochal. The film—originally titled American Carnage, after Trump’s dark inaugural speech, which Bannon had written—was now, for fear of offending liberal audiences before they had even seen the film, called American Dharma. It would play at the Venice, Toronto, and New York film festivals in the fall, thereby thrusting Bannon’s views straight into the center of the liberal bleeding heart.
While Bannon was courting the mainstream and lefty media, he was also hard at work on a right-wing—far-right-wing—piece of propaganda. One of Bannon’s peripatetic occupations was as an independent filmmaker; he had produced some eighteen films, most of them conservative documentaries, but also three Hollywood feature films. Trump @War was a bellicose, head-splitting, often surreal work, a fusillade of punches, screaming, fires, and bitter confrontations at the barricade. Bannon believed that the Left would have gladly made this film about the Right’s merciless attacks on the Left’s good people; instead, in his film, the Left mercilessly attacked the Right’s good people.
The film was meant to have, after its release in September, a viral life driven by tens of millions of downloads. But it was also meant for an audience of one. And, indeed, when Trump was shown the Bannon film later in the summer, he was full of praise: “Very talented guy. You have to admit, very talented guy. Can really hold your attention.”
In mid-July, in the days after Trump’s Helsinki debacle, Bannon saw yet another opportunity to take center stage: he was due to appear as a surprise guest at a music-and-culture rally in New York’s Central Park. Alexandra Preate, his dogged PR adviser, was more than dubious about the benefits of participating in this event, and she was intently trying to talk him out of appearing before a live Manhattan audience.
Yet Bannon would not be deterred. “I’m going to say you’re a bunch of fucking suckers. You put your heart and soul into the gig economy, and you’ve got nothing. A bunch of serfs—no ownership, no benefits, no equity, your savings account at zero.”
But then he added: “The problem with the speech is that this is New York, and all these people are either rich or sure they will be rich. They want to be the owners. Preate is praying I’ll be rained out.”
Which he was.
After Helsinki, Trump began a new riff about what in his administration needed to change. This was perhaps an indication that his progress was less random than it invariably seemed, that there was at least an atavistic desire to survive, if not a clear strategy.
Back into his conversation came the forbidden subject of Steve Bannon. Not that the reintroduction was positive: Bannon was a loser, a turncoat, a mess of a human being. But by trashing his former strategist and setting people up to agree with his criticism, he could then disagree with them. Yes, Bannon was an asshole and a leaker, but at least he wasn’t an idiot like all the other White House assholes and leakers.
This reevaluation of Bannon was partly directed at Jared, at Jared’s proxy Brad Parscale, and at Jared’s intention to run the reelection campaign. That was now Jared’s plan. He no longer intended to return to New York after the midterms, an outcome Trump seemed to be promoting among people who could promote it to Jared. Instead, he would stay in D.C. and take over the 2020 reelection campaign. Trump was resisting this because he didn’t like to think ahead—bad luck to make too many plans. But another reason for Trump’s new negative attitude toward his son-in-law was a sudden profusion of rumors about Jared’s possible indictment. As it happened, many of these rumors were spread by Bannon. They were also spread by Trump himself, who discussed the chances of his son-in-law’s indictment freely and to a large call list, causing the rumors to circle back. But that didn’t matter: rumors were rumors.
So with Trump’s blessing, White House intermediaries floated the question: Would Bannon consider coming back?
Bannon’s intermediaries sent back his answer: “Fuck, no.”
Yet Trump couldn’t quite let the idea go. What if, he wondered, Bannon were to take over the campaign? The what-if was not so much about what this would mean for Bannon, but what it would mean for Trump. Would it mean that he didn’t believe he could win without Bannon? Or would it appear that he was so confident he could be magnanimous and bring Bannon back?
Another question was floated: If the president asked, would Bannon come in to see him?
Bannon would … if the visit took place in the residence and not in the Oval. Specifically: “I will get there early in the morning and come to the residence, and after you watch TV we’ll talk.”
Bannon knew precisely what he would say to Trump if the meeting came through: “If you get your fucking relatives and Parscale out of there, I will run the fucking campaign. No promises after that.”
Hearing Bannon’s conditional assent to the notion of a visit, Trump seemed on the verge of inviting him. “I’m going to call him,” he told a friend in New York. But then, to the same friend, he immediately said: “Jared’s hearing bad stuff about him.” Later, he debated the issue with Hannity. Should I call him? he asked.
In the end, the call never came. Bannon understood that Trump was incapable of publicly admitting he was in so much trouble that he needed help. “I know this guy,” Bannon said. “Psychologically he can’t handle dependence. In fact, I wouldn’t be able to save him, because if it started to look like I was saving him, or if I got credit for saving him, he’d crack in front of everybody.”
“Exogenous events”—these were the unknowable, almost mystical, forces and alignment of the stars that would, Bannon believed, determine the outcome of the midterm elections. As party loyalty eroded, as suspicion of all politicians increased, as the donor class on both sides ponied up the money to saturate all media markets, what happened in the final weeks of a campaign was likely to be determinative. Especially in the age of Trump, when the most recent event often eclipsed all that had come before it—with Trump’s brinksmanship and showmanship amping up the drama—earlier advantages or deficits might not matter in the least. Even the stunning success of the Trump economy—the unemployment rate was the lowest it had been in years—would likely mean very little. More and more, elections represented a snapshot in time, not a cumulative experience. That, certainly, was the lesson of 2016: Trump probably won the White House because at the eleventh hour James Comey had revisited Hillary Clinton’s email issues.
What might happen—that, Bannon believed, was the game to play. So what did Donald Trump or the gods have up their sleeves? Bannon imagined the wealth of exogenous events that might happen before November 6.
The hedge fund guys might return from the Hamptons in September and, with their big gains already made for the year, start to wonder where the off-ramp would be for the growing conflict with China. Threats were one thing, but a take-no-prisoners trade war was another. If the market movers turned negative and began taking profits, the market could swoon. A big correction could shatter Trump’s confidence and cause him to behave even more erratically.
Or: if Trump did not get his funding for the Wall in the fiscal year beginning October 1, he might force the government to shut down. This time, weeks before the election, he might accept chaos, even revel in it. In February, after bitterly accepting his last humiliating compromise, he had vowed never again to let a budget pass without funding for the Wall. Now, at the end of July, he was still making the threat: no Wall, no budget. If he accepted anything less, the base would remember it.
Or: the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, which would play out in September, might deliver to the base the raw meat of cultural war. Kavanaugh, a conservative, would move the Court decisively to the right, and the Republicans hoped that the Democrats would launch a furious, foam-at-the-mouth, and ultimately futile campaign of opposition.
Or: Bob Woodward, the Nixon-slayer and backstage chronicler of every administration since Watergate—the purest voice of the Washington establishment—might deliver a knockout verdict on the Trump presidency. Indeed, the book, scheduled for mid-September publication, was precisely timed to disrupt the midterm elections and help put Trump’s presidency in serious jeopardy.
Or: Trump might yet fire Sessions, or Rosenstein, or Mueller—or all three of them. He might try to blow up “the Russia thing,” which in turn could work to his advantage or his mortal detriment.
“Just assume,” said Bannon in late July, “that this thing is going to get insane.”