The Rise and Fall of Steve Bannon
With most of his policy proposals blocked, Steve Bannon’s legacy will likely be one of xenophobia and hostility to nonwhites.
In March, I went to the White House to visit Steve Bannon, who today was fired by President Trump. After Bannon
showed off his office and his famous whiteboard, we sat down at a wooden
conference table in the large corner office of Reince Priebus, who was
then the White House chief of staff. Moments earlier, Priebus had left
the building, and Bannon seemed to use the chief of staff’s office as if
it were his own, roaming around while he talked, and flinging a Coke can
in Priebus’s trash bin, as if he were marking territory. Despite the
show of confidence, Bannon felt like he was beset by enemies.
Since the day after the election, Bannon had been fighting against
forces that he believed were trying to roll back the promises of the
Trump campaign. The whiteboard was so important to Bannon because it
represented the policy ideas that he had been instrumental in foisting
on Trump. And Bannon wanted everyone who came into the West Wing to know
precisely what Trump was elected to enact: a Muslim ban, a border wall,
a protectionist trade agenda (especially with China), and a more
isolationist foreign policy. Bannon was obsessed with defeating the
elements in the White House who hadn’t worked on the campaign and didn’t
understand those policies.
“Did you see the lead story in today’s Financial Times?” Bannon asked
me. He summoned an aide to retrieve it and threw the pink broadsheet,
the paper of record for what he calls the global élite, on the table.
“The lead story is ‘explosion of civil war in White House, fiery debate
in Oval Office,’ ” Bannon said. The story was one of many then detailing
the internal combat between Gary Cohn, Trump’s top economic adviser, and
Bannon. What was somewhat unusual was that Bannon was bragging about it.
In previous White Houses, officials downplayed this sort of internal
combat, insisting that everyone was united around the President’s
agenda. But in the Trump White House there is no Trump agenda. There is
a mercurial, highly emotional narcissist with no policy expertise who
set up—or allowed his senior staffers to set up—competing ideological
fiefdoms that fight semi-public wars to define the soul of Trumpism.
The March meeting in the Oval Office was a pivotal battle between the
two main factions: what the Financial Times called the “economic
nationalists close to Donald Trump” and the “pro-trade moderates from
Wall Street.” Bannon had spent every hour since Election Day fighting to
preserve the Trump of the campaign—raw, populist, unapologetically
nativist, anti-corporate. And Bannon, at least back in March, before he
ran afoul of Jared Kushner and Trump and was almost booted out of the
White House, seemed to be succeeding. At Bannon’s direction, Trump hung
a painting of Andrew Jackson, a hero to the nationalists, in the Oval
Office. Bannon installed himself on the National Security Council as
principal, putting himself on par with the Secretaries of Defense and
State. The President issued a series of decrees from Bannon’s punch
list: the travel ban on majority-Muslim countries, a budget with vast
new funding for a border wall and ICE agents, withdrawal from the
Trans-Pacific Partnership. Everything seemed to be going according to
plan.
In January, 2013, Bannon, Stephen Miller, and Jeff Sessions had dinner
in Washington to talk about the 2016 Presidential campaign. Barack Obama
had just won reëlection, and the reigning explanation for his victory
was that an unstoppable demographic surge of nonwhite voters had given
Democrats a lock on the Electoral College. Most political strategists
argued that the Republican Party was doomed unless it could crack the
Hispanic vote, and that the only way to do that was for the G.O.P. to
embrace comprehensive immigration reform that included a pathway to
citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants living in
America—amnesty. The three men plotted a way to stop the coming push for
immigration reform.
That same month, there was another dinner happening in New York. Rupert
Murdoch and Roger Ailes met with Senators Marco Rubio and Chuck Schumer,
who pleaded with the Fox News leaders to soften the network’s coverage of
the immigration debate, and Fox eventually did that. The four men
plotted a way to help Republicans pass immigration reform.
Bannon’s path to nationalism is famously circuitous. He grew up near
Richmond, Virginia, in a big Irish Catholic family of Kennedy Democrats.
Although he came of age in the late sixties, his high school, a religious
military academy where he was taught by monks, kept him away from the
mass protests happening in nearby Washington. He went to college at
Virginia Tech, where he became the student-government president after
attacking his opponent for offering only “Platitudes, Promises and
Slogans.” Bannon says it was during the first years of an eight-year
stint in the Navy, from 1977 to 1985, that he became reliably
conservative, because of the way Jimmy Carter dealt with the Iran hostage
crisis. A military-history buff, he took night classes at Georgetown and
earned a master’s degree in national-security studies, in 1983, and then
a degree from Harvard Business School, in 1985. In the nineties, he was
deeply entrenched in New York finance, as a Goldman Sachs
mergers-and-acquisitions executive, and then in Hollywood, as a somewhat
marginal producer who tried, and failed, to move from the deal-making
side of the business to the creative side.
In 2008, at the dawn of the Tea Party, Bannon was in Shanghai working on
one of his numerous side projects, creating a virtual market inside the
popular online game World of Warcraft. He persuaded Goldman to invest
sixty million dollars in the effort, but it tanked, and Bannon was
looking for his next reinvention. “I came back right before the 2008
election and saw this phenomenon called Sarah Palin,” he told me last
year. The neo-populist movement that Trump eventually rode to victory
was being born in the waning days of that campaign. Bannon thought that
Republicans, who had become the party of tax cuts and free-market
libertarian philosophy, exemplified by people like Paul Ryan, didn’t yet
have the right vocabulary to speak to its own base. “The Republicans
would not talk about anything related to reality,” he told me. “There
was all this fucking Austrian school of economic theory.”
Bannon started making what are essentially crude propaganda films about
people and issues on the new populist right, including ones about Palin,
Ronald Reagan, Michele Bachmann, Phyllis Schlafly, and the Tea Party. He
became a fixture on the conservative-conference circuit and befriended
Andrew Breitbart, a former blogger and then a new-media entrepreneur who
was the hidden talent behind the success of both the Drudge Report and
the Huffington Post. Bannon helped Breitbart raise money for Breitbart
News Network, including a ten-million-dollar investment from the Mercer
family, which during this period emerged as a crucial patron for the
populist right. When Breitbart died, in March, 2012, Bannon took over
editorial control as well. Traffic exploded, from eleven million page
views per month to two hundred million. “Frankly that’s why, when
Breitbart puts its fucking gun sights on you, your life changes,” Bannon
bragged to me once.
His main target became the Republican establishment. After Obama’s
reëlection, when the G.O.P. started to organize itself around
immigration reform, Bannon was desperate to find someone who could
become the face of the populist resistance. He was hoping it would be
Sessions. Meanwhile, Sessions and Miller, his top aide, were desperate
to find a conservative media platform that would help them oppose
immigration reform. They were all running out of time. The Republican
National Committee itself, then led by Priebus, was about to release a
formal report calling on the Party to adopt comprehensive immigration
reform.
The Sessions-Bannon-Miller dinner in Washington in early 2013 lasted
five hours. Bannon tried to convince Sessions to run for President in
2016. “You’re not going to win the Presidency, and you’re not going to
win the Republican primary,” Bannon recalled telling him. “But we are
going to be able to get these ideas into the mainstream. Trade is the
No. 100 issue right now. We’ll make immigration the No. 1 issue, and
we’ll make trade the No. 2 issue.” Sessions told Bannon and Miller that
he didn’t want to run.
In the following months, during the debate over immigration, Breitbart
became a crucial platform for anti-reform efforts, and Miller fed the
site a steady stream of leaks from the Senate. It was also when the site
started to attract white nationalists who saw restrictionist immigration
policies as a weapon to keep nonwhites out of America. The site used a
tag called “black crime” for some stories and brought in Milo
Yiannopoulos, who wrote an infamous essay celebrating the alt-right, for
which Bannon later bragged Breitbart had become “the platform.”
Miller and Bannon teamed up again, in 2014, when Eric Cantor, then the
second-highest-ranking Republican in the House, faced an unexpectedly
strong primary challenge from David Brat, a politically conservative
Virginia professor. The immigration bill had passed the Senate, and
Cantor was considered a champion of the legislation in the House. It was
the last chance to stop it. Miller worked as an adviser to Brat in his
spare time, offering him attack lines against Cantor. Miller’s favorite
quote was a comment that Cantor had made about children who had been
brought to the United States. “One of the great founding principles of
our country was that children would not be punished for the mistakes of
their parents,” Cantor had said. Brat turned the comment into a cudgel
about Cantor’s weakness on immigration, and Breitbart highlighted the
quote in stories. Cantor thought that he was on safe ground
highlighting one of the most popular aspects of immigration reform. Brat
won, and immigration reform in Congress was now dead.
Now Bannon and Miller just needed to find a Presidential candidate for
2016. After Sessions declined to run, they backed Trump.
In one of his first acts as President, Trump hung a famous portrait of
Andrew Jackson, elected in 1828, on the wall behind the desk in the Oval
Office. Jackson, the seventh President and a Tennessean, was the first
who hadn’t been born in Virginia or Massachusetts. He was a war hero
and, at least for his era, had radical views about democracy. Having
lost the Presidency in 1824, when the vote was thrown to the House of
Representatives, Jackson favored using the popular vote to decide the
Presidency. Scholars once treated Jackson’s victory as a fluke—he was
elected by a “mob of malcontents,” one historian wrote. But Arthur
Schlesinger’s Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the era, “The Age of
Jackson,” published in 1945, resuscitated the former President, and the
movement that helped him upend the Eastern establishment, as one of
ideas rather than just impulses.
Bannon was enormously proud of restoring the Jackson portrait to the
Oval Office. Franklin Roosevelt was the first President to hang it, and
his successor, Harry Truman, kept it there for most of his Presidency.
Lyndon Johnson restored it, but Richard Nixon removed it. Carter put it
back, and it remained through the Presidencies of Reagan, George H. W.
Bush, and Bill Clinton, before being removed by George W. Bush. By the
time Obama became President, Jackson’s legacy as a working-class hero
who fought the New York banks had become less relevant to liberals than
the fact that he owned slaves and pursued a near-genocidal policy
against Native Americans. Before Trump, sixteen years had passed without
Jackson’s portrait hanging in the Oval Office. “It’s just like
Schlesinger,” Bannon liked to say. “They named it the Age of Jackson.
This is gonna be the Age of Trump.”
Like Schlesinger, Bannon saw it as his role to infuse Trump’s victory
with more meaning than the random result of the rise of a mob of
malcontents. During the campaign last year, Trump would frequently ask
Bannon and Miller, now Trump’s top policy adviser in the White House,
for quotes from the Founding Fathers or nineteenth-century Presidents
that link them to Trump’s policies. Aside from Jackson, they frequently
leaned on Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln.
Bannon reveres Lincoln as an economic nationalist, and likes to remind
people that, aside from saving the Union and freeing the slaves,
Lincoln’s great accomplishments were the Transcontinental Railroad and
the Homestead Act.
When Republicans cite Lincoln, the Party’s first and greatest President,
they usually draw on his well-known speeches from when he was trying to
preserve the Union. In February, when Miller was writing Trump’s address
to Congress, he pored over Lincoln speeches to find something that would
connect Lincoln with Bannon and Miller’s views on economic nationalism.
Miller found what is surely one of the least-quoted Lincoln lines in
speech-writing history, and Trump picked a spot in his speech to add it.
“This will be the first time Lincoln is ever referred to in the service
of a nationalist economic agenda and not slavery,” Bannon told Trump.
“The first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln,” Trump said in the
address to Congress, on February 28th, “warned that the ‘abandonment of
the protective policy by the American government . . . will produce want
and ruin among our people.’ Lincoln was right—and it’s time we heeded
his advice and his words.” Republican members of Congress, who generally
disagree with and disparage the idea of protectionism, applauded the
line. It was a small victory for Bannon and Miller in forcing Trumpism
on the President’s adopted party.
Other Bannon rhetorical flourishes backfired. Trump’s most controversial
campaign speeches, the ones that caught the attention of the
Anti-Defamation League, were laced with anti-“globalist” rhetoric. Earlier
this year, when the papers were filled with stories about infighting
between the two camps, the Wall Street Journal asked Trump which one
he was. He replied, “I’m a nationalist and a globalist. I’m both.”
Voices on the nationalist right now fear that, with Bannon gone, Trump
will be guided by the globalists. After the news of Bannon’s sacking
became public, an editor at Breitbart tweeted, “#WAR.” I’m skeptical
that Bannon’s exit will mean much. His policy legacy is mixed. He and
Trump have mostly stamped out the immigration-reform wing of the G.O.P.,
though the business class and important leaders, like Paul Ryan, are
still sympathetic.
But on economic policy, such as trade, and his recent attempt to push
Republicans to raise taxes on the super-wealthy, Bannon made no progress
to win allies in Congress. He failed to secure Trump’s repeal of
Obamacare, and the nationalist trade agenda, including Bannon’s effort
to pull out of NAFTA, has been stymied. The travel ban is still tied up
in the courts. Trump’s recent attacks on the Republican senators Mitch
McConnell, John McCain, Jeff Flake, and Lindsey Graham have made the
Senate more hostile to any Presidential proposals and more interested in
driving its own traditional Republican agenda. Trump’s remarks on
Charlottesville further eroded any influence he has, both in Congress
and with Americans outside his shrunken base.
The lasting legacy of Bannonism is the xenophobia and hostility to
nonwhites that emanates from the White House and has remained a
political fire that this Administration is constantly fanning. But, as
we learned this week, Trump doesn’t need Bannon to keep those flames
alive.
Ryan Lizza is the Washington correspondent for The New Yorker, and also an on-air contributor for CNN.
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