For most of his long career as a corporate, entertainment and political provocateur, Bannon has accomplished his literary and personal shape-shifting without being noticed by the people he does not want to notice him. He likes to be underestimated. “Darkness is good,” says Bannon. “Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power. It only helps us when they [the enemies] get it wrong. When they’re blind to who we are and what we’re doing.”
Bannon’s remarkable intellectual and organizational skills, and his sly strategies, were always too bold to be understood by the tired mandarins who minded the infrastructure of a money-and-media industrial complex that was designed to maintain the elite status quo of the twentieth century into the twenty-first. The actual elites had little to fear from Bannon, who had spent a lifetime in their service and now proposed to cut their taxes and end the regulation of their business empires. But the bureaucrats, the managers, the commentators, the pundits, the consultants, the congressmen, the senators, the presidential candidates who for decades had made a nice living serving those elites had no idea what to make of the guy who proposed to kick them off the political playing field. So they ignored him, or ridiculed him, or condemned him. Bannon was embraced only by those desperate pretenders—fringe-hugging ideologues, socially awkward hedge fund managers, seemingly unelectable presidential candidates—who were willing to front for a modern Machiavelli who had no concern with titles, but a great interest in positioning himself as the new power behind the throne.
During the 2016 campaign, many commentators imagined that it was all a game for Bannon, and for Trump. This was the theory that launched a thousand speculative pieces by media writers who imagined that the haphazard race they ran after their billionaire mentors Robert and Rebekah Mercer put them together with Kellyanne Conway was part of some grand scheme by Bannon to jumpstart an alt-right challenger to Rupert Murdoch’s flailing Fox News network. But Bannon had already done that when he took over the late Andrew Breitbart’s bad-boy website and made it an even more politically incorrect battering ram—the online crazy uncle that told conservatives they should embrace their worst impulses and demanded that the Republican Party become precisely what it had been formed by Abraham Lincoln and John Fremont to oppose. Bannon, who burns through careers like smokers burn through cigarettes, was saying in 2014 that “quite frankly, we have a bigger global reach than even Fox.” He was finished with media manipulation and ideological disputation. He was ready to take charge. And Trump was his ticket.
Impossible? Hardly. Bannon knew his history.
“I am Thomas Cromwell in the court of the Tudors,” Bannon gleefully announced when writer Michael Wolff came to visit him at Trump Tower after the election. That was a telling reference, indeed, not merely to King Henry VIII’s conniving chief minister but to the historical revisionism that since the 1950s, with the encouragement of conservative historian Geoffrey Elton and the BBC docudrama team, has reimagined Cromwell’s conspiratorial power grabbing as a revolutionary grand plan for remaking the British monarchy. A conservative propagandist with “traditionalist” tendencies like Bannon would of course be attracted to the Cromwell myth, except of course for the part where Henry sours on Anne of Cleves and has Cromwell executed for treason and heresy.
An even more telling historical reference came a few weeks later, however, following what has come to be known as Trump’s “American Carnage” inaugural address in January 2017. While listeners were visibly shaken by what University of Michigan professor Juan Cole described as “a chain of falsehoods, saber-rattling and scary neo-fascist uber-nationalism,” Bannon was thrilled with the speech he had crafted with “you will obey” Trump loyalist Stephen Miller. The newly empowered White House “chief strategist” told the Washington Post’s Robert Costa that Trump’s address was “an unvarnished declaration of the basic principles of his populist and kind of nationalist movement. It was given, I think, in a very powerful way. I don’t think we’ve had a speech like that since Andrew Jackson came to the White House. But you could see it was very Jacksonian.”
Bannon was not just engaging in the presidential name-dropping that is common on inaugural days when new presidents and their aides attempt to associate their projects with the legacies of predecessors. He was advancing a long-term project to make Trump Jacksonian. During the Trump transition, a senior aide to the president-elect told the Daily Beast that Bannon would “encourage [Trump] to play up the comparison” and push the theory that “Trump’s campaign and message was a clear descendant of Jacksonian populism and anti-political elitism.” Bannon, the aide said, “is why Trump keeps equating himself with Andrew Jackson.”
Bannon and Miller have even, aides say, prepared Jacksonian reading lists for Trump. Unfortunately, by every account, Trump is having trouble keeping up. When Fox’s Tucker Carlson asked what he was reading in early March, the president replied: “Well, you know, I love to read. Actually, I’m looking at a book, I’m reading a book, I’m trying to get started. Every time I do about a half a page, I get a phone call that there’s some emergency, this or that. But we’re going to see the home of Andrew Jackson today in Tennessee and I’m reading a book on Andrew Jackson. I love to read. I don’t get to read very much, Tucker, because I’m working very hard on lots of different things, including getting costs down. The costs of our country are out of control. But we have a lot of great things happening, we have a lot of tremendous things happening.” Trump’s inability to focus on those Jackson biographies was confirmed in early May, when a Sirius XM radio interview revealed Trump ruminating about how, “had Andrew Jackson been a little later, you wouldn’t have had the Civil War. He was a very tough person, but he had a big heart. He was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War. He said, ‘There’s no reason for this.’ People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War—if you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question, but why was there a Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?” Jackson was a slaveholder who dispersed the abolitionist movement during his presidency, left the White House almost a quarter century before the Civil War began and died more than fifteen years before the first shots were fired.
So much for Trump the historian.
On the “Trump’s so Jacksonian” project, like so many others, it still falls to Bannon to fill in the blanks, as he has done since even before he formally signed on with the Trump campaign. “A year before Bannon joined Trump’s campaign staff, he described himself in the email as Trump’s de-facto ‘campaign manager,’ because of the positive coverage that Breitbart was giving Trump. That coverage had largely been underwritten by the Mercers,” noted a March 2017 Jane Mayer profile of Robert Mercer in the New Yorker titled “The Reclusive Hedge-Fund Manager Behind the Trump Presidency: How Robert Mercer exploited America’s populist insurgency.” In addition to providing “a public forum for previously shunned white-nationalist, sexist, and racist voices,” noted Mayer, “Breitbart enabled Bannon to promote anti-establishment politicians whom the mainstream media dismissed, including Trump.” Trump, in turn, learned the politics of anti-Obama “birtherism,” immigration scaremongering and, above all, Muslim-bashing from Bannon’s alt-right website.
Now that Trump is president, Bannon is teaching him what kind of president he should be. It’s a troublesome process. Much has been made of Bannon’s fascination with European neofascists and actual fascists, from the Italian philosopher Julius Evola, who thought Mussolini was soft but respected the style of German Nazis like SS head Heinrich Himmler, to French anti-Semitic author Jean Raspail, whose book The Camp of the Saints has been compared to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Then there’s Bannon’s own 2014 speech to a conservative Christian conference at the Vatican, where he mentioned Evola, decried “the immense secularization of the West,” declared that “we’re at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict” and announced that “we are in an outright war against jihadists, Islam, Islamic fascism.” Those comments,
when reexamined after Trump assumed the presidency, inspired headlines like “President Trump’s right-hand man Steve Bannon called for Christian holy war: Now he’s on the National Security Council.” (Bannon was eventually edged out of a formal National Security Council role, though not necessarily out of the orbit, as photos from the Situation Room at the time of the early-April Syrian bombing mission revealed.) Conservative pundit Glenn Beck, who calls Bannon “quite possibly the most dangerous guy in all of American politics,” compares the White House insider with Joseph Goebbels. John McCain’s veteran aide, John Weaver, says: “The racist, fascist extreme right is represented footsteps from the Oval Office.”
But the foreign ideological influences aren’t the only troubling ones. So, too, are the grabs for shards from America’s past, especially those that remain from when it has veered in racist, nativist and crudely nationalist directions.
The fact that Bannon is drawn to Andrew Jackson, of all presidents, ought to rattle Americans. There’s a reason why millions of Americans were thrilled with the 2016 announcement that Harriet Tubman would bump Jackson from the front of the $20 bill. Indian Country Today recognized the 250th anniversary of the seventh president’s birth with an article entitled “Indian-Killer Andrew Jackson Deserves Top Spot on List of Worst U.S. Presidents” and recalled that “in 1830, a year after he became president, Jackson signed a law that he had proposed—the Indian Removal Act—which legalized ethnic cleansing. Within seven years 46,000 indigenous people were removed from their homelands east of the Mississippi. Their removal gave 25 million acres of land ‘to white settlement and to slavery,’ according to PBS. The area was home to the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole nations. In the Trail of Tears alone, 4,000 Cherokee people died of cold, hunger, and disease on their way to the western lands.”
Describing Jackson as “a disaster of a human being on every possible level,” Vox’s Dylan Matthews correctly noted that, in addition to “Jackson’s role in American Indian removal—the forced, bloody transfer of tens of thousands of Native Americans from the South,” Jackson “owned hundreds of slaves, and in 1835 worked with his postmaster general to censor anti-slavery mailings from northern abolitionists” and that “Jackson’s small-government fetishism and crank monetary policy views stunted the attempts of better leaders like John Quincy Adams to invest in American infrastructure, and led to the Panic of 1837, a financial crisis that touched off a recession lasting seven years.”
Jackson has his defenders, like Andrew Jackson Foundation CEO Howard Kittell, who told USA Today that “we need to remember our history, and history is messy.” True. But John Quincy Adams, Jackson’s predecessor, opposed the expansion of slavery and showed respect for native peoples, so it’s fair to say that Jackson made things messy. And he did so with populist appeals that divided people against one another, attacked the free press, disregarded sound economic and scientific ideas, undermined the courts and diminished rather that strengthened democratic progress.
Donald Trump, who gripes about taking Jackson’s image off the $20, knows only the bare essentials of the Jackson story. But when he appeared at the Hermitage to honor the anniversary of Jackson’s birth in March 2017, the forty-fifth president was thrilled to make comparisons. Declaring that “he reclaimed the people’s government from an emerging aristocracy,” Trump said: “Jackson’s victory shook the establishment like an earthquake. Henry Clay, Secretary of State for the defeated President John Quincy Adams, called Jackson’s victory ‘mortifying and sickening.’ Oh, boy, does this sound familiar. Have we heard this?”
Trump argued that “the political class in Washington had good reason to fear Jackson’s great triumph. ‘The rich and powerful,’ Jackson said, ‘too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes.’ Jackson warned they had turned government into an ‘engine for the support of the few at the expense of the many.’”
Trump’s speech in Tennessee highlighted the extent to which his inaugural address, as penned by Bannon and Miller, echoed Jackson’s rhetoric. And how much the current president has, with prodding from Bannon (who helped to hang a Jackson portrait in the Oval Office), come to identify with his distant predecessor.
As the crowd laughed along with him, Trump mocked historical claims that Jackson’s election, like his own, was a “calamity.” But the thing is that, for millions of Americans, Jackson’s presidency was a great calamity that spread slavery, undermined abolitionism, displaced Native Americans, destroyed lives and created financial ruin. Jackson, who lost his initial run for the presidency in 1824, committed many of his most lawless and destructive acts for reasons of politics: to sustain a populist movement that supported him as a champion of a minority—angry white men who could vote—over a majority made up of women, African Americans, Native Americans and others who were denied the franchise.
Steve Bannon, Trump’s Jackson whisperer, does not speak of the dark side of “Jacksonian democracy.” But he does speak, a lot, about building a Jacksonian movement in contemporary America. “Like Jackson’s populism, we’re going to build an entirely new political movement,” he says, describing the rough mix of tax breaks and infrastructure-job promises that he thinks will work. Maybe. “We’re just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks,” says the strategist. “It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution—conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.”
What made the 1930s exciting was the determination of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his “New Deal” administration to take on the plutocrats in order to make work for everyone, build out a social-welfare system and develop a regulatory state to protect those who were most in need and most vulnerable. Bannon proposes the opposite with a narrower vision of “economic nationalism,” promises to “let our sovereignty come back to ourselves,” an apocalyptic vision of the threats facing the United States, visceral disdain for the “corporatist, globalist media” that he says really is “the enemy” and visceral excitement about “the deconstruction of the administrative state.”
Steve Bannon’s vision harkens back to the Democratic Party of the thirties. But it is not the 1930s and the Democratic Party of Franklin Roosevelt. It is the 1830s and the Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson.
— 3 —
THE SPINSTER
Kellyanne Conway
White House Counselor
Donald Trump was in trouble. It was a little over a month from election day and the Access Hollywood tape had finally gotten out. The Washington Post headline read: “Trump recorded having extremely lewd conversation about women in 2005.” Actually, “extremely lewd” was putting it mildly. Here was actual tape of the Republican nominee for president of the United States, speaking as a fifty-nine-year-old married man about his techniques for “moving on” women other than his wife (“I moved on her like a bitch…” “I did try and fuck her. She was married…” “Grab ’em by the pussy…”) The New York playboy who was trying desperately to reposition himself as a conservative-values candidate had gotten caught explaining in a hot-mic conversation that as a wealthy reality-TV star in America “you can do anything” to women.
It didn’t help that the Huffington Post did the math and reported that “Donald Trump Made Lewd Comments While Melania Was Pregnant.”
For top Republicans who had grudgingly gotten on board the Trump train, this looked like the last stop. Arizona senator John McCain said he could no longer support Trump, as did dozens of other top Republicans. House Speaker Paul Ryan said he could no longer defend Trump. Republican vice presidential nominee Mike Pence went into hiding and then finally announced that “as a husband and father, I was offended by the words and actions described by Donald Trump in the eleven-year-old video released yesterday. I do not condone his remarks and cannot defend them.” Pence said he was praying for Trump. Former Utah governor Jon Huntsman summed up sentiments inside the party rather well when he said: “In a campaign cycle that has been
nothing but a race to the bottom—at such a critical moment for our nation—and with so many who have tried to be respectful of a record primary vote, the time has come for Governor Pence to lead the ticket.” (As punishment for this apostasy, President Trump would later name Huntsman to the most unenviable position in his administration: ambassador to Russia.)
It seemed that Trump was finished. If he did not drop out, he would lose—horribly, devastatingly, overwhelmingly—to Hillary Clinton in an election finish that pundits predicted could doom Trump-aligned Republicans nationwide.
Then came Kellyanne Conway.
Conway was Trump’s campaign manager, and as such she was supposed to defend the guy. But she was also, as she often mentioned in TV interviews, the happily married mother of four young children. She had made her name as an up-and-coming pundit by ripping on Bill Clinton’s scandalous behavior with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, to such an extent that the Washington Post explained her rise as a conservative commentator as a side effect of the Republican attempt to impeach Clinton. “Then Monica happened,” explained the Post. “The Clinton-Lewinsky scandal created full employment for pundits of all stripes, with particular visibility to a subset of young, female conservatives—Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Barbara Olson, Kellyanne Fitzpatrick (soon to be Conway). The ‘pundettes,’ as they came to be known, filled a market need: a telegenic group of anti-Clinton women.”
Kellyanne’s future husband, George T. Conway III, established a reputation, of sorts, as a conservative lawyer who hounded Bill Clinton. “When Paula Jones sued Bill Clinton for sexual harassment, [George] Conway wrote the Supreme Court brief, though his name never appeared on it,” noted a New Yorker reflection on George, who aligned himself with the conservative Federalist Society that targeted the Clinton administration. “The Court, in a landmark decision, agreed with Jones’s argument that a sitting President could face a civil lawsuit. During depositions in the lawsuit, Clinton denied having a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky, which eventually led to his impeachment trial. George Conway became deeply involved in getting out information from the depositions. During that period, he reportedly emailed Matt Drudge an infamous scoop about the shape of Clinton’s penis.”