the man many credit with helping Donald Trump become president: Steve Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News. During the early days of the Trump presidency, many suggested Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, was pulling many of the strings in the Oval Office. Time magazine put Bannon on its cover in February with the headline “The Great Manipulator.”
Joshua Green talking:
I think that the best way to understand this election, to understand what happened and how a guy like Trump wound up in the White House, and really to understand the forces that are roiling our politics and producing such extreme and unusual things, as we see literally every day now in the Trump administration—to understand that, you have to understand Steve Bannon. To me, he is the narrative thread that runs through not just the rise of Trump, but the rise of this whole right-wing populist, nationalist politics that he has been espousing ever since I first met him in 2011.
And the story I tell in the book, basically, is the intertwined story of the rise of Steve Bannon and Donald Trump. But Bannon, I met back in 2011, when he was working on a documentary film about Sarah Palin, who he hoped would run for president in 2012. And he was trying to fill her head with the same ideas and the same policies that you heard from Donald Trump. It took him a while to find his candidate. But he was brought into Trump’s orbit in 2010. He began advising him, kind of tutoring him on politics informally, at a time when everybody else–and certainly I—didn’t take Trump seriously as a politician. I thought he was going to goose his ratings.
But Bannon was able to take his nationalist politics—and, in particular, the idea that there is political power in taking a hard line on immigration, on demonizing immigrants as marauders and killers, that Trump seemed to have intuitively sensed would resonate among Republican grassroots voters. And the combination of birtherism, which Trump pioneered on his own, and this anti-immigrant sentiment kind of mixed together to produce the candidate who upset the entire Republican field.
Bannon had been this kind of minor figure in Trump’s life since 2010, when a veteran anti-Clinton activist named David Bossie brought him along on a trip to Trump Tower just to tutor Trump about politics. But he didn’t enter most people’s political awareness until he took over the campaign dramatically, in August, mid-August of 2016, at a time when Trump looked like he was floundering and almost certainly headed toward a blowout loss.
And I have a scene in the book that begins with the daughter of a right-wing—very secretive right-wing billionaire named Robert Mercer, who is the co-CEO of Renaissance Technology. It’s a fabulously successful hedge fund.
It’s based in Stony Brook, Long Island. Mercer and his daughter, I call them in the book kind of the alt-Koch brothers. You know, the Koch brothers tend to be more mainstream. The Mercers have much more unusual and different beliefs. And they are essentially, or have been, Steve Bannon’s benefactors over the last couple years, pouring money into Breitbart News, but also into a movie production company; Cambridge Analytica, a data sciences firm that Trump relied on; and, most importantly, a nonprofit research entity down in Tallahassee, Florida, called the Government Accountability Institute, which produced the Clinton Cash book that came out on the eve of the election and sort of tarnished Hillary Clinton’s image by documenting her ties to some of these shady foreign donors.
Well, the Mercers were big backers of Trump. They were originally behind Cruz, but once he fell, they got behind Trump right away, in a way that a lot of other wealthy Republicans were loath to do, giving him money, setting up a super PAC. But Rebekah Mercer, the daughter, who is very aggressive in getting involved in the candidates and causes she backs—I have a scene in the book where she flies out to a Trump fundraiser in Long Island, demands a meeting with Trump—and you can do that if you’ve given him millions and millions of dollars, as the Mercers have—and says, “Look, you’re losing. You’re going to lose this election unless you make a change.” And Trump says, “Well, yeah, things aren’t going real well, but…” And she says, “No, you’re losing. And the only way you’re going to win is if you have a radical change. I have a team of people that I think ought to take over your campaign”—Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway and, later, David Bossie, all of them veteran Clinton activists. And Trump, who was frustrated with his current campaign manager, Paul Manafort, agrees and says, “OK, let’s put them in charge. We need somebody who can hit harder.”
Bannon is this famously aggressive Breitbart News publisher who would not be held back, has the same instincts as Trump. And people didn’t know it at the time, but Trump had known Bannon for a long time. And lo and behold, we wake up, I think on a Wednesday morning, to this announcement that Steve Bannon, despised by just about everybody in Washington, is now in charge of Trump’s presidential campaign.
Paul Manafort wasn’t out, originally. And what Trump did was he hired Bannon, I think on a Sunday night, without telling Paul Manafort or anybody else. And there’s a scene in the book, where it’s on a Sunday, and Trump tells Bannon, “OK, you’re in. Drive out to my country club in Bedminster, New Jersey, tomorrow. We’re going to have a senior staff meeting,” with Giuliani and Chris Christie and Manafort and all the kind of campaign brain trust. Kushner actually wasn’t there, because he was off yachting in Croatia with David Geffen, so he wasn’t present for that meeting. But at the meeting, Manafort, who still thinks he’s in charge of the campaign, walks into a room and sees Steve Bannon there. And Bannon says, “Hey, I’m kind of joining the campaign.”
And Trump is in a very bad mood, because The New York Times has just run this embarrassing story saying that Trump’s own advisers feel they can’t talk to him, and so they have to go on cable news in order to send a message to Trump. And Trump, who’s been made to look like a fool, explodes at Manafort. There’s a scene I have in the book where he says, “You know, am I a baby, Paul? Do you treat me like a baby? You have to go on TV?” and curses him, in language we probably can’t use on the air here. A couple days later, decides that Manafort has to go. But Trump, despite the public image, doesn’t like to fire people, so he deputizes his son-in-law, back from his yachting trip with David Geffen, at a breakfast, to get rid of Manafort, who resists.
Because, he says, “You’re going to make it look like I’m guilty on the Russia stuff.” He doesn’t want to do it, because he’ll look like he’s guilty of taking money from this pro-Russian Ukrainian political party. And he resists, and Kushner says, basically, “You’re going. We have a press release coming out saying that you’ve resigned, and that goes online at 9:00 a.m., and that’ in 30 seconds.” And that was the end of Paul Manafort and the beginning of the successful Steve Bannon era of the campaign.
the newspaper bio synopsis of Steve Bannon is that he comes from a blue-collar, Irish, Democratic, Catholic, Navy family in Richmond, Virginia—dad was a telephone linesman—and went to Virginia Tech, got into Harvard Business School, was in the Navy, later Goldman Sachs, and wound up in Hollywood, first as a film financier, an investment banker, and, later, once he had made some money, he moved over to the creative side and began making conservative documentaries.
the interesting, weird little detail in Bannon’s life is that while he was an investment banker, he brokered a deal between Castle Rock Pictures, which owned Seinfeld, which was in its infancy at the time, and Ted Turner, who wanted to buy the shows. And as Bannon tells me the story in the book, you know, when they sat down on the table, Turner was short of cash. And so, rather than let the deal fall apart, Bannon took—in lieu of his ordinary advisory fee, he took a basket of residuals from five television shows, including Seinfeld. As we all know, Seinfeld went on to become, I think, the most popular sitcom in television history and throw off an awful lot of money. Bannon and his partner own a very small part of that, but enough that they’ve made millions and millions of dollars from it. So, once Bannon got to that point, he decided he wanted to give a kind of a full airing to his hard-right conservative politics, which I think he had kept hidden as he traveled through the worlds of Harvard and Goldman Sachs and Hollywood, where you’d—
Bannon was at Goldman Sachs as an investment banker in the mid-1980s, at the height of the leveraged takeover boom. If you’ve ever read Barbarians at the Gate or some of these books, you know that there were these outsiders who were kind of storming the fortress and taking over sort of fattened corporations that were vulnerable to these outsiders. Bannon, I think, to his frustration, worked for Goldman Sachs, which would never align itself with a corporate raider, as it always did defense. But he recognized in Michael Milken a guy who was kind of his spirit animal: “Here’s an outsider, you know, storming the fortresses, and he’s winning. And these establishment banks, like the ones that I’m working for, really don’t get it, and they’re losing.” I think that lodged in his mind. And Bannon, later on, when he got to Breitbart News, portrays himself in a political sense very much like Michael Milken portrayed himself in a financial sense back in the ’80s.
not a minor footnote in Milken’s story. He was busted for insider trading and went to jail for a number of years. But I think Bannon liked the dark, outsider narrative that Milken told. And Milken kind of cultivated his own image, before he went to jail, as this guy who was storming the fortresses and was taking on the fattened, lazy, corrupt establishment, and thereby was doing something good. Bannon did the same thing at Breitbart News. The way he would talk about what he was doing was: “We’re taking on the establishments of both parties, the crony capitalists.” So I think he learned a bit from Milken.
so, we just talked about kind of the newspaper bio of Steve Bannon and the blue-collar background. But the most interesting line of research for this book is Bannon’s religious and intellectual biography. And this is a story that hasn’t been told, that I go into some detail in in the book.
But in the course of my reporting, I asked Steve Bannon—I said, “You know, when you were at that Vatican conference”—and this wasn’t just a Vatican conference, this was a group of far-far-right conservative Traditionalist Catholics. Bannon name-checked a man named Julius Evola, who was an Italian intellectual and Benito Mussolini’s fascist ideologist at the beginning of World War II. And I said, “Steve, if you’re not an anti-Semite and a Nazi and a white supremacist, as you’re often charged with being, but you say you’re not, why is it that you are familiar with people like Evola?” And he said, “Oh, you know, when I developed my ideas about nationalism, I went back and was looking for an intellectual edifice to kind of inform these ideas. And to find nationalist thinkers, you really have to go back to the 1930s and the 1940s, when those ideas were ascendant. But the real guy who influenced me,” Bannon told me, “was an man named René Guénon, who was Evola’s intellectual godfather.”
Guénon has a fascinating biography. He was born in France in the late 19th century to a Roman Catholic family, practiced occultism, Freemasonry, and later converted to Sufi Islam and observed the Sharia, which is a very unusual guru, it seemed to me, for a guy like Steve Bannon, who is so virulently Islamophobic. But Guénon was the founder of a religion, a kind of religious philosophy, known as primordial Traditionalism. That’s capital-T Traditionalism. And primordial Traditionalism holds that there is common spiritual truths, unifying spiritual truths, at the heart of ancient religions, like the Hindu Vedanta, Sufism, medieval Catholicism, even paganism. And these are original spiritual truths that were revealed to mankind in the earliest ages of the world but had been lost in the West by the rise of secular modernity.
So, Bannon, who was raised in a very traditional Catholic family, who went to a right-wing Catholic military high school and has been steeped in this right-wing, Western sieve curriculum, believes, as Guénon does, that we are entering a dark age, that the rise of the Enlightenment in the 1500s has led us toward apocalypse, and that if he can’t prop up traditional values and do what Guénon had hoped to do, which was to, quote, “restore to the West a traditional civilization,” then mankind is going to be destroyed. And that is his animating belief.
– Julius Evola, in his own words, the monarchist and racial theorist who struck an alliance with Benito Mussolini. His ideas became the basis of fascist racial theory. This is Julius Evola speaking with a French filmmaker in 1971 about what he considered the positive aspects of fascism and, in particular, national socialism, Nazism. “There are positive and valuable aspects. Those which I could value are the reconstruction of the authority of the state and the idea of overcoming class conflict toward a hierarchical and corporative formation, to some extent, of a military and disciplined style within the nation, in addition to some of their anti-bourgeois proposals. To me, all of that is positive.”
So, the unifying thread here is that Evola also looked to Guénon for inspiration. Guénon was the godfather of this capital-T Traditionalist movement. Now, Guénon believed that the way to spiritual transcendence was to basically indoctrinate small groups of important people all over the world, what we would today call influencers. And he was very—he believed that if you could—if you could push spiritual change, then political change would follow.
Evola is the black sheep of the Traditionalist family and had a different view. He said, “No, we can’t just sit back and try and change people’s spirituality. We need to go out and change society.” So Evola went out and struck an alliance with Benito Mussolini to try and exert power in the Italian government, which he had. He was, as you said, the chief racial theorist for Mussolini. They had a falling out, and Evola later moved on to Hitler in Nazi Germany.
What all three of these men have, though, in common is the belief in—at the heart of Guénon’s religion was the belief in the Hindu concept of cyclical time, the idea that the world passes through set stages. And Evola believed, as Bannon does, as Guénon does, that we are in what the Hindus call the Kali Yuga, a 6,000-year-long dark age in which man’s connection to God and the transcendent is wholly forgotten. So, Evola brought these ideas to interwar Europe, to Italy, and tried to change society that way to fight back against it. Bannon has come to this through a kind of populist, hard-right politics, where, through Breitbart and some of these affiliated organizations, he’s tried to not only take over American politics, but look at what he’s doing in places like the European Union. He’s trying to destroy what he would call these globalist edifices, which he believes is a manifestation of the rise of modernity and something that needs to be destroyed to pull us back to a pre-Enlightenment era.
another thing I got asked about a lot as a political reporter was: Where did this idea of the alt-right come from? Who are these people? How did they infect our politics in the way that they had? And Bannon, oddly enough, is a critical figure in the rise of the alt-right, many of whose members, I should just add as a side note, read and admire Julius Evola and his thinking.
But back in 2007, after Bannon had done Hollywood and filmmaking, he wound up, for about a year and a half, as the CEO of a video game company in Hong Kong, which did not actually make video games that you play. It pioneered something called gold farming, which I had never heard of. But what gold farming is, is the process of going into these massive multiplayer games, like World of Warcraft, and winning armor and prizes and gold, which allow you to advance in the game, but then turning around and selling them to people in the real world. So Bannon’s company would hire teams of low-wage Chinese workers to play these games in 24-hour rotating cycles, win all this stuff, and then sell it to wealthier gamers offline, which was considered a serious enough business that Goldman Sachs actually invested money in Bannon’s company.
But what happened was, the gamers—most of the people who played the games considered this cheating, and they got very angry. You know, kids would spend hours and weeks and months absorbed in these games, and didn’t like the fact that there was this shortcut. And so, the gamers themselves organized on message boards. There are special message boards devoted to these multiplayer games. And they organized themselves and said, “Hey, we’re going to put pressure on these video games and make them shut down the practice of gold farming.” And they did. And it destroyed—it bankrupted Bannon’s business.
But the lesson he took away from this was that there are millions and millions of young, white—mostly white—men who spend their entire lives in these online alternate realities, and that—4chan, exactly, Reddit—and that if they are motived to do so, they could be a very powerful political force: “They bankrupted my company. I want to see if I can channel them into politics.” And when Bannon got to Breitbart News, he hired a notorious internet troll named Milo Yiannopoulos to be Breitbart’s tech editor and to essentially entice these legions of angry online gamers into the world of populist right-wing politics. And eventually Bannon was able to turn them on to Trump.
But when you saw the CPAC clip that you showed him deconstructing the administrative state, that is a signal that is operating on two levels. If you are a ordinary, traditional movement Republican—you don’t like government, you want government to shrink—you hear what Bannon said as “We’re going to shrink government.”
But on another level, and this gets back to Guénon and the Traditionalists, Bannon is using coded language there, which says deconstructing the administrative state—one of Guénon’s beliefs was that there were two pivotal moments in world history that brought us away from God and the transcendent. One was the destruction of the Order of Knights Templar in 1312, which cut off Western connection to esoteric knowledge. And the other was the Peace of Westphalia, which gave rise to the modern nation-state. That is what Bannon wants to destroy.
And so I tell the story in the book. Bannon, for all his complaints about the media, is a very savvy guy who understands how to manipulate the mainstream media. One of the things I thought he did so brilliantly, and I write about in the book, was find a way to get his stories into The New York Times. And so, he funded two years’ worth of research, produced the book Clinton Cash by Peter Schweizer, which documented all this stuff, all these financial connections, and then brought the book to reporters in mainstream outlets like the Times, like the Post, who took these stories, published them in their papers and spread his anti-Clinton message in the mainstream media, dissuading and discouraging a lot of Clinton’s own voters. And in the end, that proved to be a very effective tactic.
he also went after Fox News because Bannon believes that there is a—there was a split between populist Republicans and what he would call Fox News establishment Republicans. There’s a scene in the book of Bannon screaming profanely at Roger Ailes. Eventually Bannon won that war, broke the back of Fox News, and now they’ve become the most pro-Trump station you can find anywhere on the cable dial.
I did go to college with Sean Spicer. I went to Connecticut College, a very PC liberal arts school. He was one of about 10 openly Republican kids on campus, very loud about it. His nickname in college was Sean Sphincter, so that gives you an idea of his popularity. But it was surprising to see where he’s wound up, but I certainly recognize the guy that I went to college with.
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Joshua Green
senior national correspondent for Bloomberg Businessweek. His new book is titled Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency.
— source democracynow.org 2017-07-26