Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

Joshua Green, “Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency,” Penguin Press, 2017, 242 pp.

The honey badger is a thick-skinned and sharp-toothed little creature that in 2011 became a YouTube sensation thanks to a short video called “The Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger.” In the clip, a honey badger chases off jackals, raids a beehive, survives a cobra bite and eats venomous snakes head first. Steve Bannon, the subject of this book, considers himself and those he admires (Trump) as Honey Badger’s who just don’t give a s**t.  The animal is the mascot of Breitbart News, the truth-optional publication Bannon took over following Andrew Breitbart’s sudden death in 2012 and which he has now returned after a short hiatus in the White House. 

Trump claimed, “If I didn’t come along, the Republican Party had zero chance of winning the presidency,” Trump proclaimed to Bloomberg Businessweek, in May 2016, and he was probably right. Only someone with his and Bannon’s seeming incapacity for moral and intellectual embarrassment, could have defeated the well-oiled machine that was Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.

When Bannon took the reins of the Trump campaign, he was seen by Beltway Republicans as “an Internet-era update of the Slim Pickens character in ‘Dr. Strangelove’ who rides the bomb like a rodeo bull, whoopin’ and hollerin’ all the way to nuclear annihilation.”  But whatever the pair lacked in conventional political experience, they made up for with other gifts. Both understood showmanship: slogans, narrative, put-downs and especially conflict which apparently appeals to a growing segment of the population.

Most importantly, they grasped that much that was supposed to matter in politics no longer did — detailed policy papers, for instance, or personal decorum. Trump, states the author of this book, “figured out that the norms forbidding such behavior were not inviolable rules that carried a harsh penalty but rather sentiments of a nobler, bygone era, gossamer-thin and needlessly adhered to by politicians who lacked his willingness to defy them.”

That’s why Trump’s birtherism — the support he gave to the lie that Barack Obama was born abroad — never disqualified his candidacy, even as it helped him “forge a powerful connection with party activists.

Bannon is the product of a working-class family and a Catholic military high school in Richmond, Va., he was taught from an early age that the defining moment in Western civilization occurred in 1492 — not with Columbus’s discovery of the New World, mind, but with Ferdinand and Isabella’s Reconquista from the Moors of the Iberian Peninsula.  “The lesson was, here’s where Muslims could have taken over the world,” recalled one of Bannon’s classmates. “And here was the great stand where they were stopped.”  (This appears to now be a staple of Trump’s foreign policy—at least in his speeches.)

Bannon, in the mid-1980s while he was on Wall Street, came to admire Michael Milken, the so-called junk bond king, who showed how a “band of outsiders” could set about “laying siege to a comfortable, fattened and vulnerable establishment.”  Milken’s target was corporations, Bannon’s was and is the Republican Party.  His ammunition would come from Breitbart News. Another part would be supplied by the Government Accountability Institute, a Tallahassee, Fla.-based nonprofit that dug up the dirt on the Clinton Foundation for Peter Schweizer’s 2015 blockbuster “Clinton Cash.”  Now Trump is president not in spite of the wretched things he said about Mexicans, women, John McCain, etc., but because he said them. He sold his shamelessness as fearlessness and his charlatanism as charisma, and many people believed.

My Notes:

Pg. 4:  On August 17, 2016 the surprise elevation of Steve Bannon, executive chairman of Breitbart News, to head Trump’s campaign surprised both Democrats and Republicans as he was despised by both because of his eagerness to attack them both.  Incidentally, Bannon had never before worked on a campaign.

Pg. 39:  As far back as 2011, Trump continually questioned Obama’s birthplace and religion (Muslim?) and thus his legitimacy as a candidate and then as President. 

Pg. 46:  Bannon provided Trump with a fully formed, internally coherent worldview that accommodated Trump’s own feeling about trade and foreign threats, what Trump eventually dubbed ‘America first’ nationalism  Bannon’s emphasis on the menace of illegal immigration was something Trump would use to galvanize his supporters.  The second service Bannon provided Trump was to conceive and create over several years an infrastructure of conservative organizations that together would work, sometime in tandem with mainstream media outlets, to stop the woman everyone believed would become the 2016 Democratic nominee: Hillary Clinton.  This was the right-wing conspiracy that Clinton had been mocked for in 1998—now it was real.

Bannon took over the right-wing populist website Breitbart News after the death of its founder, Andrew Breitbart, in 2012.  Breitbart’s fixation on race, crime, immigration, radical Islam, and the excesses of political correctness—as well as the site’s dark and inflammatory style—did much to shape Trump’s populist inclinations and inform his political vocabulary.  (Breitbart is far and away Trump’s primary source of news and in August 2017 Bannon returned to run it).  Bannon has been described as a Falstaff in flip-flops.

Pg. 67:  Bannon graduated from Harvard Business School in 1985 and began working at Goldman Sach’s. 

Pg. 72:  If you took Michael Milken and Drexel’s attack on corporations with junk bonds in 1985 and teleported them from Wall Street to Washington, D.C., in 2015, what you’d wind up with would look a lot like Stephen Bannon and Breitbart News: a band of outsiders laying siege to a comfortable, fattened, and vulnerable establishment.

Pg. 86:  Politics is downstream from culture, Breitbart liked to say.  ‘I want to change the cultural narrative.’  He meant he was less interested in trying to influence Washington directly than he was in going after the institutions (and the methods they employed, like ‘political correctness’) that he believed shaped this narrative.

Pg. 95:  The success of The Apprentice in the mid-2000s gave Trump attention and contributed to building his national profile, a profile dramatically different from any other major Republican figure, then or since.  Trump was extremely popular with minority audiences, pulling in a high proportion of African American and Hispanic viewers to his program.  (I never saw this program.)

Pg. 128: From Wikipedia: Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich is a 2015 New York Times bestselling book by Peter Schweitzer in which he investigates donations made to the Clinton Foundation by foreign entities, paid speeches made by Bill and Hillary Clinton, and the state of the Clintons' finances since leaving the White House in 2001. It was published by Broadside Books, a division of HarperCollins. Research for the book was conducted by the Government Accountability Institute, a conservative nonprofit investigative research organization founded by Peter Schweitzer and Steve Bannon. It has been adapted into both a film and a graphic novel. (I reported on this book)

The first attempts at language translation were dominated by linguists.  They tried to teach computers the rules of syntax and grammar—it failed.  Mercer and Brown took an entirely different approach, chucking any concern about grammar and instead relying on a tool called an ‘expectation maximization algorithm’—a tool code breakers would use to find patterns.  This statistical machine translation technique worked and is what is used by Google today.  Mercer’s resulting billions financed Breitbart and, later, Bannon.

Pg. 158:  Hillary Clinton’s tone-deaf response to Clinton Cash* revelations paid a large part in her failure to emerge as the overwhelming front-runner everyone had expected, weighed down by stories on Clinton Foundation ‘buckraking’ and the revelation that she had kept a private e-mail server as secretary of state and destroyed much of her correspondence.  She also refused to release transcripts of highly paid speeches she’d delivered to Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms.  In August, e-mails surfaced showing that Bill Clinton, through the foundation, had sought State Department permission to accept speaking fees in repressive countries such as North Korea and the Republic of the Congo  A poll the same day found that the word voters associated most with his wife was ‘liar.’  Clinton Cash, unlike previous attacks was not filled with outlandish rumors and blind quotes, rather it contained documentable facts that reporters could check out for themselves.  To Bannon’s delight, many did.

Pg. 186:  On March 3, 2016, two days after Senator Sessions endorsed him, Trump rolled up victories all across the South, winning the primary in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, & Tennessee.  Texas eluded him, going to native son, Ted Cruz. 

Pg. 190:  While overshadowed by his feuds and insults, Trump had intuited that standard Republican dogma no longer appealed to large swaths of the party base.  Trump drew record numbers of Republican primary voters, even though his positions frequently cut against right-wing orthodoxy: protect Social Security and Medicare benefits, defend Planned Parenthood, restrict free trade, avoid foreign entanglements, deport illegal immigrants, and build a wall.  Trump arrived at these heterodox views by doing exactly what politicians were supposed to do: listening to voters.  Having absorbed the shortcomings of the Republican message, Trump had developed a better one: ‘America first” 

Pg. 194:  On the eve of the Republican convention, Clinton had raised $264 million to Trump’s $89 million. 

Pg. 196:  The GOP Convention was a fiasco.  Any attempt to unify the party was doomed by Ted Cruz’s public refusal to endorse Trump, prompting the crowd to boo him off the stage during prime time.  Trump then, in his acceptance speech, laid out a portrait of carnage, citing homicide rates and describing individual murders.  Declaring ‘the attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life,’ he warned.  By mid-August, Clinton’s lead over Trump was nearing double digits in many national polls.  This is when Bannon replaced Manafort.

Pg. 210:  Within two days of Bannon replacing Manafort, Trump put out a statement intending to reframe the race by emphasizing the Clinton Foundation as the ‘most corrupt enterprise in political history.’  In the days that followed, the campaign flooded reporters and followers with dozens of press releases focused on the Clinton Foundation and the charge that Hillary was corrupt.

Pg. 214:  On October 7 the Washington Post was leaked outtake footage from a 2005 Trump Appearance on the NBC show Access Hollywood.  In the tape, the recently married Trump is heard bragging in lewd and graphic detail to Billy Bush about kissing, groping, and trying to bed women.  (That Trump could survive this convinces me he had much more solid support than I ever believed before as well as the countries antipathy towards Clinton was very great.)  Interesting that Trump responded with a rare apology by stating he had said some foolish things but Bill Clinton ‘has actually abused women, and Hillary has bullied, attacked, shamed, and intimidated his victims.’ (Bannon was convinced that Bill Clinton’s womanizing and Hillary’s complicity in covering it up had more political salience then conventional wisdom allowed.)

Pg. 228:  On October 28, James Comey, the director of the FBI, sent a letter to Congress announcing that new evidence had emerged in the case relating to Hillary Clinton’s e-mails (the Weiner laptop issue).  [Hillary’s e-mails had been an issue ever since the NYT in 2015 had revealed that she had a private e-mail server which risked exposure of classified state department information.]

Pg. 237:  Within days of his inauguration, Trump’s White House was plunged into chaos and scandal from which it has not recovered—and may never.  The executive order, sprung a week after his inauguration, banning immigrants from seven majority-Muslim countries; his firing two weeks later of national security director Michael Flynn for contacts with the Russians; the collapse of the bill to repeal Obamacare; his firing of FBI director James Comey; and the swift descent of the West Wing into a vipers nest of backstabbing and leaks.  Bannon, whose wild gambits in the campaign had invariably paid off, seemed to run out of magic tricks once Hillary was no longer a target.  (In fact Bannon as of this book report is out of the White House; however, he is still in communication with Trump and still influential.)