Politics
Is Steve
Bannon the Second Most Powerful Man in the World?
David Von
Drehle Feb. 2, 2017
https://time.com/magazine/us/4657637/february-13th-2017-vol-189-no-5-u-s/
Donald
Trump’s first steps had the feel of a documentary film made by his chief
strategist and alter ego Stephen K. Bannon, a director who deploys ravenous
sharks, shrieking tornadoes and mushroom clouds as reliably as John Ford shot
Monument Valley.
Act I of the
Trump presidency has been filled with disruption, as promised by Trump and
programmed by Bannon, with plenty of resistance in reply, from both inside and
outside the government. Perhaps this should not be surprising. Trump told
America many times in 2016 that his would be no ordinary Administration. Having
launched his campaign as a can-do chief executive, he came to see himself as
the leader of a movement–and no movement is complete without its commissar.
Bannon is the one who keeps the doctrine pure, the true believer, who is in it
not for money or position, but to change history. “What we are witnessing now
is the birth of a new political order,” Bannon wrote in an email to the
Washington Post.
This
forceful presence has already opened cracks in West Wing. The Administration
was barely a week old when, on the evening of Jan. 27–with little or no
explanation to agency heads, congressional leaders or the press–Trump shut down
America’s refugee program for 120 days (indefinitely in the case of Syrian
refugees), while barring travelers from seven majority-Muslim countries. Almost
immediately, U.S. customs and border agents began collaring airline passengers
covered by the order, including more than 100 people whose green cards or valid
visas would have been sufficient for entry if only they had taken an earlier
flight. Protesters grabbed markers and cardboard scraps and raced to airports
from coast to coast, where television cameras found them by the thousands.
As the storm
reached the gates of the White House on Saturday, many of the West Wing’s
senior staff had departed to attend the secretive Alfalfa Club annual dinner,
an off-the-record black-tie soiree where politicos drink and tell jokes with
billionaires. But Bannon avoided this gathering of the elites he believes to be
doomed, and remained at the White House to continue the shock and awe.
Having
already helped draft the dark and scathing Inaugural Address and impose the
refugee ban, Bannon proceeded to light the national-security apparatus on fire
by negotiating a standing invitation for himself to the National Security
Council. His fingerprints were suddenly everywhere: when Trump tweeted on Jan.
30 that the national media was his “opposition party,” he was echoing Bannon’s
comment a few days earlier to the New York Times.
There is
only one President at a time, and Donald Trump is not one to cede authority.
But in the early days at 1600 Pennsylvania, the portly and rumpled Bannon (the
only male aide who dared to visit Trump’s office without a suit and tie) has
the tools to become as influential as any staffer in memory. Colleagues have
dubbed him “the Encyclopedia” for the range of information he carries in his
head; but more than any of that, Bannon has a mind-meld with Trump. “They are
both really great storytellers,” says Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the
President, of their bond. “The President and Steve share an important trait of
absorbing information and weighing consequences.”
They share
the experience of being talkative and brash, pugnacious money magnets who never
quite fit among the elite. A Democrat by heritage and Republican by choice,
Bannon has come to see both parties as deeply corrupt, a belief that has shaped
his recent career as a polemical filmmaker and Internet bomb thrower. A party
guest recalled meeting him as a private citizen and Bannon telling him that he
was like Lenin, eager to “bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of
today’s Establishment.”
And by
different paths, he and Trump have found themselves at the same philosophical
destinations on issues of trade, immigration, public safety, the environment,
political decay and much more.
Yet Bannon’s
prominence in the first 10 days of the Administration–and the scenes of
confusion and disorder that are his disruptive hallmark–has rattled the West
Wing and perhaps even dismayed the President. According to senior
Administration officials, Trump hauled in some half-dozen of his key advisers
for a brisk dressing-down. Everything goes through chief of staff Reince
Priebus, he directed. Nothing flows that hasn’t been scheduled by his deputy
Katie Walsh. “You’re going to see probably a slower, more deliberative
process,” one official told TIME.
Still,
Bannon possesses that dearest of Washington currencies: walk-in privileges for
the Oval Office. And he is the one who has been most successful in focusing
Trump on a winning message. While other advisers have tried to change Trump,
Bannon has urged him to step on the gas.
Both of
these images, the orderly office and the glorious crusade, have genuine appeal
for the President. And they will likely continue to pull him in opposite
directions. By marking Trump’s first days so vividly, Bannon has put the accent
on Trump the disrupter. In that sense, as one veteran Republican said, “It’s
already over, and Bannon won.”
People who
have studied one of Donald Trump’s favorite books, The Art of the Deal, are
aware that he sees grandstanding, trash-talking, boasting and conflict as
useful ingredients in the quest for success. “My style of dealmaking is quite
simple and straightforward,” he declares in his opus. “I aim very high, and
then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after.”
Perhaps no
place in the U.S. is more adamantly resistant to pushing than Washington. But
Trump won the election in part by understanding that this is no ordinary time.
Technology has placed a communications revolution in nearly every American
palm. When mixed with the economic frustrations of a globalized economy, this
power unleashed a new populism. In the history of human beings, it has never
been easier to organize groups, for good or ill, or to communicate both truth
and lies, to question authority and to undermine the answers that authority
gives. Trump leveraged this growing power to bypass the traditional gatekeepers
of power–the media, the political parties, the elected and unelected bosses.
Bannon’s
background at Breitbart taught him the same lessons. Founded as an alternative
to mainstream media by the late Andrew Breitbart, the website was an immediate
disruptive force in U.S. politics. Ask Anthony Weiner. In 2011, the New York
Congressman was a darling of the Democratic grassroots with sky-high ambitions.
Then Breitbart published a screen grab from Weiner’s Twitter feed that opened a
door on his late-night sexting habits. Social media did the rest. The sudden
death of the founder in 2012 placed his friend Bannon in command. As the site
ramped up its video, radio and merchandising and opened several bureaus
overseas, Breitbart honed the art of the inflammatory headline and offered a
home to the bullyboys of the so-called alt right, including those determined to
elevate the abhorrent ideals of white nationalism.
The essence
of the place could be found in a viral video that made its debut around the
time of Bannon’s takeover of Breitbart. Over a piece of old nature footage, a
clever narrator commented on a single-minded beast known as a honey badger.
Through bee stings, snakebites and other degradations, the animal never stops
killing and eating. “Honey Badger don’t give a shit,” the narrator summed up.
Bannon adopted the phrase as a motto.
Official
Washington and its counterparts around the globe are struggling to understand
just how much the honey badgers are now running the show. There is no doubt the
badgers are starving for change and don’t care if they get stung by swarms of
pundits, incumbents, lobbyists and donors–not to mention foreign leaders and
denizens of Davos. In fact, they seem to like it.
The capital
was in a lather over the immigration order, with denunciations pouring in from
Republicans and Democrats alike. Rumors swirled of resignations from the Trump
White House, when Trump’s policy badger, Stephen Miller, a Bannon ally, calmly
stepped before the cameras. “Anytime you do anything hugely successful that
challenges a failed orthodoxy, you’re going to see protests,” he told CBS News.
“In fact, if nobody is disagreeing with what you’re doing, then you’re probably
not doing anything that really matters in the scheme of things.”
The
withering fire Trump has drawn from nearly every direction would normally have
a President backpedaling. Not the badgers. In Trump country, the vast red sea
of Middle America where the President won the election, many people welcomed
the squeals of the outraged elites. As one delighted Kansas City businessman
put it, “He’s upsetting all the right people.”
Bannon helps
Trump remember that he never made a priority of being a uniter, as George W.
Bush did, nor did he offer to heal our divisions in the manner of Barack Obama.
The new President has crafted himself as a defender of the “forgotten people,”
which places in his sight those with powerful names you already know. With new
goals came new thinking. “People tell us that things have always been done a
certain way,” said one trusted Trump aide. “We say, Yes, but look at the
results. It hasn’t worked. We’re trying a new way.”
On this
Trump and Bannon agree. What happens next is the mystery. Trump, in his long
past as a businessman, has always aimed his disruptions at the goal of an
eventual handshake: the deal. Bannon, in his films and radio shows, has shown a
more apocalyptic bent.
Sometime in
the early 2000s, Bannon was captivated by a book called The Fourth Turning by
generational theorists William Strauss and Neil Howe. The book argues that
American history can be described in a four-phase cycle, repeated again and
again, in which successive generations have fallen into crisis, embraced
institutions, rebelled against those institutions and forgotten the lessons of
the past–which invites the next crisis. These cycles of roughly 80 years each
took us from the revolution to the Civil War, and then to World War II, which
Bannon might point out was taking shape 80 years ago. During the fourth turning
of the phase, institutions are destroyed and rebuilt.
In an
interview with TIME, author Howe recalled that Bannon contacted him more than a
decade ago about making a film based on the book. That eventually led to
Generation Zero, released in 2010, in which Bannon cast the 2008 financial
crisis as a sign that the turning was upon us. Howe agrees with the analysis,
in part. In each cycle, the postcrisis generation, in this case the baby
boomers, eventually rises to “become the senior leaders who have no memory of
the last crisis, and they are always the ones who push us into the next one,”
Howe said.
But Bannon,
who once called himself the “patron saint of commoners,” seemed to relish the
opportunity to clean out the old order and build a new one in its place,
casting the political events of the nation as moments of extreme historical
urgency, pivot points for the world. Historian David Kaiser played a featured
role in Generation Zero, and he recalls his filmed interview with Bannon as an
engrossing and enjoyable experience.
And yet, he
told TIME, he was taken aback when Bannon began to argue that the current phase
of history foreshadowed a massive new war. “I remember him saying, ‘Well, look,
you have the American revolution, and then you have the Civil War, which was
bigger than the revolution. And you have the Second World War, which was bigger
than the Civil War,’” Kaiser said. “He even wanted me to say that on camera,
and I was not willing.”
Howe, too,
was struck by what he calls Bannon’s “rather severe outlook on what our nation
is going through.” Bannon noted repeatedly on his radio show that “we’re at
war” with radical jihadis in places around the world. This is “a global
existential war” that likely will become “a major shooting war in the Middle
East again.” War with China may also be looming, he has said. This conviction
is central to the Breitbart mission, he explained in November 2015: “Our big
belief, one of our central organizing principles at the site, is that we’re at
war.”
To
understand Steve Bannon, you have to understand what happened to his father. “I
come from a blue collar, Irish-Catholic, pro-Kennedy, pro-union family of
Democrats,” he once told Bloomberg Businessweek. Martin Bannon began his career
as an assistant splicer for a telephone company and toiled as a lineman. Rising
into management, the elder Bannon carved out a comfortable middle-class life
for his wife and five kids on his working man’s salary. Friends say Steve pays
frequent visits to his father, now 95 and widowed, at the old family home in
Richmond’s Ginter Park neighborhood.
The last
financial crisis put a huge dent in Martin’s life savings, according to two
people close to the family. Steve watched with fury as his former Wall Street
colleagues emerged virtually unscathed and scot-free–while America’s once great
middle class, the people like his father, absorbed the weight of the damage.
“The sharp
change came, I think, in 2008,” says Patrick McSweeney, a former chairman of
the Republican Party of Virginia and longtime family friend. Bannon saw it as a
matter of “fundamental unfairness”: the hardworking folks like his father got
stiffed. And the bankers got bailed out.
Until then,
Bannon had been, as he later put it, “as hard-nosed a capitalist as you get.”
Born in 1953, Bannon was Student Government Association president at Virginia
Tech, but as he explained in the 2015 interview with Bloomberg’s Joshua Green,
he wasn’t particularly interested in politics until he enlisted in the Navy. “I
wasn’t political until I got into the service and saw how badly Jimmy Carter
f-cked things up. I became a huge Reagan admirer,” he said. “But what turned me
against the whole Establishment was coming back from running companies in Asia
in 2008 and seeing that Bush had f-cked up as badly as Carter. The whole
country was a disaster.”
After seven
years as a Navy officer, Bannon had earned a master’s degree in
national-security studies from Georgetown, followed by an M.B.A. from Harvard.
From there he went to Goldman Sachs, where he says he watched as the staid
culture of a risk-averse partnership was transformed into a publicly traded
casino, with the gamblers risking other people’s money. He left the bank to
form his own boutique firm in Beverly Hills, specializing in entertainment
deals. At one point, he even dabbled in trading virtual goods for players of
the video game World of Warcraft. His partner Scot Vorse told TIME that he was
the nuts-and-bolts guy, while Bannon was the big outside-the-box thinker and
the driving force. “It’s all about aggressiveness,” Vorse says. “Steve’s not
willing to take no for an answer. He’s a sponge. He’s very bright. He listens.
And he’s a strategic thinker, about three or four steps down the road.”
The little
firm won major clients, including Samsung, MGM and Italy’s answer to Trump, the
billionaire and future Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Bannon’s biggest
score, though, was not immediately apparent. In 1993, cable-television mogul
Ted Turner bought Castle Rock Entertainment in a deal that Bannon helped
deliver, and as Bannon has told the tale, at the last moment Turner insisted
that the banker put some skin in the game. Instead of cash only, Bannon &
Co. received a piece of five Castle Rock television shows–including a
struggling sitcom called Seinfeld.
Meanwhile,
Bannon was gradually evolving from dealmaker to filmmaker, with an unusual
detour to manage a troubled experiment in the Arizona desert called Biosphere
2. In 1999, he served as co–executive producer of Titus, a star-studded
adaptation of a Shakespeare play that went nowhere. Turning to documentaries
that he wrote and directed himself, Bannon became a sort of Michael Moore of
the right, with films celebrating Ronald Reagan, Sarah Palin and Michele
Bachmann.
Bachmann, a
former member of Congress from Minnesota, says Bannon was able to see what the
mainstream media either could not or would not. There was a rising tide of
disgust in America, which the coastal elites dismissed in “a grotesque
caricature of what Donald Trump has called the forgotten man,” Bachmann says.
“He was simply trying to give voice, I think, and give a platform to people who
were not only being ignored but who were being lied about in the mainstream
media.”
Bannon’s
life became a crusade against political, financial and cultural elites of all
stripes. Bannon’s philosophical transformation showed in his clothes: no one
could look at his preferred uniform of T-shirts, cargo shorts and stubble and
think Goldman Sachs.
At
Breitbart, Bannon was a volcanic figure, according to a number of former staff
members who found themselves crossways with the boss. Republican consultant
John Pudner, a Bannon friend who briefly worked at Breitbart as the editor of a
sports section, recalls the time Bannon “reamed me out”–just hours before he
turned around and connected his friend with a plum new job. “He could hit you
with that level of intensity and at the same time be singing your praises,” he
said.
Not everyone
is charitable. “He is legitimately one of the worst people I’ve ever dealt
with,” former Breitbart editor Ben Shapiro told TIME last year. “He regularly
abuses people. He sees everything as a war. Every time he feels crossed, he
makes it his business to destroy his opponent.” The sentiment was echoed by
conservative commentator Dana Loesch, a former Breitbart employee. “One of the
worst people on God’s green earth,” she said on her radio show last year.
Bannon was charged with domestic violence after a dispute with his ex-wife in
1996, though she declined to testify against him and the case was dropped. She
later claimed in legal papers that Bannon had objected to a private school for
their daughters because there were a lot of Jewish students attending and he
didn’t like the way they are raised to be “whiny brats.” Bannon denied those
claims, and declined through a White House spokesperson a request from TIME to
comment for this story.
In Trump,
Bannon found his ultimate outsider. He frequently had the candidate on his
radio show, and former staffers say he ordered a steady stream of pro-Trump
stories. Now Bannon’s imprint can be seen on presidential decisions ranging
from the hiring of former Breitbart staffers to key White House positions to
the choice of Andrew Jackson’s portrait–a Bannon idol–for display near the
President’s desk.
“Where
Bannon is really having his instinct is on the policy front,” says a longtime
Trump ally. Which policies? “All of them. He’s Trump’s facilitator.” In a Trump
White House, this adviser says, you can only get–and keep–as much power as the
President wants you to have. But Trump and Bannon “sat down before the election
and made a list of things they wanted to do in office right away,” says this
adviser. Trump is the one deciding which items to tick off. “Bannon’s just
smart enough to give him the list.”
However much
the disruptive Trump may have welcomed the outrage of the ruling elites, the
slash-and-burn style has caused real internal tension at the White House.
Senior staff say Trump has instructed chief of staff Priebus to enforce more
orderly lines of authority and communication from now on. Presidential
counselor Conway has agreed to take an increased role in planning White House
messaging with the policy and legal shops.
The internal
tribulations of the past few weeks are a clear cause for worry. The decision to
rush the refugee order through a relatively secret process came after Bannon
and Miller noticed that documents circulated through the National Security
Council’s professional staff were leaking to the press, according to
Administration sources. Bannon and Miller moved to curtail access to
forthcoming memos and drafts. Members of Congress, and even some Cabinet
members, were cut out of the loop or had their access sharply limited.
As a result,
the sources said, after the controversial order was signed, confusion reigned.
An unknown number of holders of green cards and valid visas were en route to
the U.S. The initial White House guidance was that they should all be turned
back. But as immigration and civil-liberties lawyers rushed to federal court to
challenge the order, the White House reversed itself, saying green-card holders
would be granted waivers. Reporters had difficulty finding out even basic
facts, like the names of the countries from which travel was banned. Days
later, the President even intervened to amend the order that appointed Bannon
to a regular spot on the National Security Council. Trump wanted his CIA
director, Mike Pompeo, there too.
By Tuesday
night, four days after the order was issued, the White House was trying to
project a normal tableau. Trump orchestrated a prime-time announcement of his
first Supreme Court pick, conservative Colorado judge Neil Gorsuch. But if the
Administration had finally struck a note of steadiness, it surely didn’t mean
that Bannon had been banished.
The
President had, once again, provided a course correction. But his central
populist message and methods, the one brought to life in conversations with
Bannon, remained. In the fight for the forgotten people, disruption was not a
bad thing–it just needed to be done with more forethought and follow-through.
That push
and pull between demolishing the Establishment and leading it is likely to
continue as long as Trump is in office. It’s the contradiction facing every
outsider who wakes up inside. The entire presidential campaign had been
narrated by Trump as a clash between David and Goliath, notes one senior
Administration official. But now David has become king. “David shot Goliath
with a slingshot but didn’t hold a press conference or sign an Executive Order.
Not everything we do here has to move so quickly or be released so
spectacularly.”
–With
reporting by ALEX ALTMAN, ELIZABETH DIAS, MICHAEL DUFFY, PHILIP ELLIOTT, ZEKE
J. MILLER and MICHAEL SCHERER/WASHINGTON
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