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But Ailes was convinced that Trump had no political beliefs or backbone.
Bannon was curiously able to embrace Trump while at the same time suggesting he did not take him entirely seriously.
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.
Bannon plunged on with the Trump agenda. “Day one we’re moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem.
The unspoken agreement among them: not only would Donald Trump not be president, he should probably not be. Conveniently, the former conviction meant nobody had to deal with the latter issue.
Donald Trump and his tiny band of campaign warriors were ready to lose with fire and fury. They were not ready to win.
PayPal cofounder and Facebook board member Peter Thiel—really the only significant Silicon Valley voice to support Trump
The job has been construed as deputy president, or chief operating officer, or even prime minister.
George W. Bush, on the dais, supplied what seemed likely to become the historic footnote to the Trump address: “That’s some weird shit.”
In Bannon’s view: (1) Trump was never going to change; (2) trying to get him to change would surely cramp his style; (3) it didn’t matter to Trump supporters; (4) the media wasn’t going to like him anyway; (5) it was better to play against the media than to the media; (6) the media’s claim to be the protector of factual probity and accuracy was itself a sham; (7) the Trump revolution was an attack on conventional assumptions and expertise, so better to embrace Trump’s behavior than try to curb it or cure it.
Steve Bannon was the first Trump senior staffer in the White House after Trump was sworn in.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
The American man story is a right-wing story.
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.
Bob and Rebekah Mercer,
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, small-government, home-schooling, antiliberal, gold-standard, pro-death-penalty, anti-Muslim, pro-Christian, monetarist, anti-civil-rights political movement in the United States.
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.
that the path to victory was an economic and cultural message to the white working class in Florida, Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
But the first step in the new Trump administration had to be immigration, in Bannon’s certain view.
Bannon got Stephen Miller to write the immigration EO. Miller, a fifty-five-year-old trapped in a thirty-two-year-old’s body,
In the mania to seize the day, with an almost total lack of knowing how, the nutty inaugural crowd numbers and the wacky CIA speech were followed, without almost anybody in the federal government having seen it or even being aware of it, by an executive order overhauling U.S. immigration policy.
On Friday, January 27, the travel ban was signed and took immediate effect.
On January 6, 2017—nearly six months to the day after Foer’s piece was published—the CIA, FBI, and NSA announced their joint conclusion that “Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election.”
Good management reduces ego.
(It is an anomaly of Republican politics that young people motivated to work in the public sector find themselves working to limit the public sector.)
It was, said Walsh, “like trying to figure out what a child wants.”
Here was a key Trump White House rationale: expertise, that liberal virtue, was overrated.
Bannon was the alt-right militant. Kushner was the New York Democrat. And Priebus was the establishment Republican.
As Walsh saw it, Steve Bannon was running the Steve Bannon White House, Jared Kushner was running the Michael Bloomberg White House, and Reince Priebus was running the Paul Ryan White House.
He was something like what used to be called a Rockefeller Republican and now might more properly be a Goldman Sachs Democrat.
When the president got on the phone after dinner, it was often a rambling affair. In paranoid or sadistic fashion, he’d speculate on the flaws and weaknesses of each member of his staff. Bannon was disloyal (not to mention he always looks like shit). Priebus was weak (not to mention he was short—a midget). Kushner was a suck-up. Spicer was stupid (and looks terrible too). Conway was a crybaby. Jared and Ivanka should never have come to Washington.
it endorsed Reagan-era small government and antiregulatory reform, and then added the components of the cultural wars—antiabortion, anti-gay-marriage, and a tilt toward evangelicals—and married itself to conservative media, first right-wing radio and later Fox News.
Trump and Bannon, with Sessions in the mix, too, had come closer than any major national politician since the civil rights movement to tolerating a race-tinged political view.
For Trump, giving Israel to Kushner was not only a test, it was a Jewish test: the president was singling him out for being Jewish, rewarding him for being Jewish, saddling him with an impossible hurdle for being Jewish—and, too, defaulting to the stereotyping belief in the negotiating powers of Jews.
Baffling to almost everyone, Hicks remained his closest and most trusted aide, with, perhaps, the single most important job in this White House: interpreting the media for him in the most positive way it could be interpreted, and buffering him from the media that could not be positively spun.
Without consulting the president or, ostensibly, anyone in the White House, Sessions decided to move as far as possible out of harm’s way. On March 2, the day after the Post story, he recused himself from anything having to do with the Russia investigation.
(Bannon, typically, had turned this trope into an official Trumpist talking point: “Ryan was created in a petri dish at the Heritage Foundation.”)
The paradox of the Trump presidency was that it was both the most ideologically driven and the least.
Just before seven o’clock on the morning of Tuesday, April 4, the seventy-fourth day of the Trump presidency, Syrian government forces attacked the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun with chemical weapons. Scores of children were killed.
Obama’s consideration had in fact been less than skillful in proclaiming the use of chemical weapons as a red line—and then allowing it to be crossed.
the military would launch a Tomahawk cruise missile strike at Al Shayrat airfield.
On April 19, Bill O’Reilly, the Fox anchor and the biggest star in cable news, was pushed out by the Murdoch family over charges of sexual harassment.
O’Reilly and Hannity are in, what about you?
For twenty years, Fox had honed its populist message: liberals were stealing and ruining the country.
(1) Trump’s election proved the power of a significantly smaller but more dedicated electoral base—just as, in cable television terms, a smaller hardcore base was more valuable than a bigger, less committed one; (2) this meant an inverse dedication by an equally small circle of passionate enemies; (3) hence, there would be blood.
Ailes’s message to his would-be protégé was plain: not just the rise of Trump, but the fall of Fox could be Bannon’s moment.
