The liberal firewall against Trump was, most of all, the belief that the Republican contender was too disorganized, outlandish, outré and lacking in nuance to run a proper political campaign. That view was only confirmed when Bannon, editor of the outlandish and outré Breitbart News Network, took over the campaign in August. Now Bannon is arguably the most powerful person on the new White House team, embodying more than anyone the liberals’ awful existential pain and fury: How did someone so wrong — not just wrong, but inappropriate, unfit and “loathsome,” according to The New York Times — get it so spot-on right?
.. “Darkness is good,” says Bannon, who amid the suits surrounding him at Trump Tower, looks like a graduate student in his T-shirt, open button-down and tatty blue blazer — albeit a 62-year-old graduate student. “Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power. It only helps us when they” — I believe by “they” he means liberals and the media, already promoting calls for his ouster — “get it wrong. When they’re blind to who we are and what we’re doing.”
.. If this is disarray, it’s a peculiarly focused and organized kind.
.. It’s the Bannon theme, the myopia of the media — that it tells only the story that confirms its own view, that in the end it was incapable of seeing an alternative outcome and of making a true risk assessment of the political variables — reaffirming the Hillary Clinton camp’s own political myopia. This defines the parallel realities in which liberals, in their view of themselves, represent a morally superior character and Bannon — immortalized on Twitter as a white nationalist, racist, anti-Semite thug — the ultimate depravity of Trumpism.
.. fiercely intelligent and yet reflexively drawn to the inverse of every liberal assumption and shibboleth. A working class kid, he enlists in the navy after high school, gets a degree from Virginia Tech, then Georgetown, then Harvard Business School.
Then it’s Goldman Sachs, then he’s a dealmaker and entrepreneur in Hollywood — where, in an unlikely and very lucky deal match-up, he gets a lucrative piece of Seinfeld royalties, ensuring his own small fortune
.. What he seems to have carried from a boyhood in a blue-collar, union and Democratic family in Norfolk, Va., and through his tour of the American establishment, is an unreconstructed sense of class awareness, or bitterness — or betrayal. The Democratic Party betrayed its workingman roots, just as Hillary Clinton betrayed the longtime Clinton connection — Bill Clinton’s connection — to the workingman. “The Clinton strength,” he says, “was to play to people without a college education. High school people. That’s how you win elections.” And, likewise, the Republican party would come to betray its workingman constituency forged under Reagan. In sum, the workingman was betrayed by the establishment, or what he dismisses as the “donor class.”
.. “ascendant America,” e.g. the elites, as well as “the metrosexual bubble” that encompasses cosmopolitan sensibilities to be found as far and wide as Shanghai, London’s Chelsea, Hollywood and the Upper West Side — as a world apart, is an understatement. In his view, there’s hardly a connection between this world and its opposite — fly-over America, left-behind America, downwardly mobile America — hardly a common language. This is partly why he regards the liberal characterization of himself as socially vile, as the politically incorrect devil incarnate
.. “The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia. The issue now is about Americans looking to not get f—ed over. If we deliver” — by “we” he means the Trump White House — “we’ll get 60 percent of the white vote, and 40 percent of the black and Hispanic vote and we’ll govern for 50 years. That’s what the Democrats missed. They were talking to these people with companies with a $9 billion market cap employing nine people. It’s not reality. They lost sight of what the world is about.”
.. “Like [Andrew] Jackson’s populism, we’re going to build an entirely new political movement,” he says. “It’s everything related to jobs. The conservatives are going to go crazy. I’m the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. With negative interest rates throughout the world, it’s the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Shipyards, ironworks, get them all jacked up. We’re just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution — conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.”
.. “The media bubble is the ultimate symbol of what’s wrong with this country,” he continues. “It’s just a circle of people talking to themselves who have no f—ing idea what’s going on. If The New York Times didn’t exist, CNN and MSNBC would be a test pattern. The Huffington Post and everything else is predicated on The New York Times. It’s a closed circle of information from which Hillary Clinton got all her information — and her confidence. That was our opening.”
.. Bannon feels he has triumphed over, but the conservative one too — not least of all Fox News and its owners, the Murdochs. “They got it more wrong than anybody,” he says. “Rupert is a globalist and never understood Trump. To him, Trump is a radical. Now they’ll go centrist and build the network around Megyn Kelly.” Bannon recounts, with no small irony, that when Breitbart attacked Kelly after her challenges to Trump in the initial Republican debate, Fox News chief Roger Ailes — whom Bannon describes as an important mentor, and whom Kelly’s accusations of sexual harassment would help topple in July — called to defend her. Bannon says he warned Ailes that Kelly would be out to get him too.
.. Trump — even after the leak of the grab-them-by-the-pussy audio — was speaking to ever-growing crowds of 35,000 or 40,000. “He gets it; he gets it intuitively,” says Bannon, perhaps still surprised he has found such an ideal vessel. “You have probably the greatest orator since William Jennings Bryan, coupled with an economic populist message and two political parties that are so owned by the donors that they don’t speak to their audience. But he speaks in a non-political vernacular, he communicates with these people in a very visceral way. Nobody in the Democratic party listened to his speeches, so they had no idea he was delivering such a compelling and powerful economic message. He shows up 3.5 hours late in Michigan at 1 in the morning and has 35,000 people waiting in the cold. When they got [Clinton] off the donor circuit she went to Temple University and they drew 300 or 400 kids.”
.. “I knew that she couldn’t close. They outspent us 10 to one, had 10 times more people and had all the media with them, but I kept saying it doesn’t matter, they got it all wrong, we’ve got this locked.”
.. “I am,” he says, with relish, “Thomas Cromwell in the court of the Tudors.”
In Twist, Trump Victory Could Defang Anti-Establishment G.O.P. Caucus
But in a twist that could alter the dynamics of the next Congress, these anti-establishment Republicans, known as the House Freedom Caucus, could find their influence crippled by the ascension of an anti-establishment figure to the White House.
.. “It has been roses and sunshine. It’s unbelievable,” said Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma. “It is just amazing what a difference the Trump victory has made.”
.. The earliest and most ardent backers of Mr. Trump, like Representatives Chris Collins and Lee Zeldin of New York, and Tom Marino and Lou Barletta of Pennsylvania, are not Freedom Caucus members. They come from the kind of Rust Belt districts that buoyed Mr. Trump to victory last week.
.. But legislation has never been the group’s primary focus. It has instead been united in what it sees as a Robin Hood-like mission to seize power from their party’s leaders on behalf of House members.
.. discussed whether to press for rules changes that would allow committee members to choose their own chairmen, an idea that the leadership would be certain to reject.
.. Mr. Trump’s victory defanged the Freedom Caucus’s most serious threat: a challenge to the speakership of Paul D. Ryanof Wisconsin, which could have been used as leverage toward other goals.
.. A sharply diminished House Republican majority would have empowered the Freedom Caucus
.. “Paul Ryan raised incredible sums of money to help our folks withstand a barrage coming from the other side,” Mr. Collins said in an interview with CNN.
.. But there is one force Republicans do not want to cross, Mr. Cole, who is not a member of the Freedom Caucus, said: their constituents, who supported Mr. Trump in large numbers.
Steve Bannon Will Lead Trump’s White House
“I’m a Leninist,” Steve Bannon told a writer for The Daily Beast, in late 2013. “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal, too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”*
.. Barack Obama made just one personnel announcement: that Congressman Rahm Emanuel would be his chief of staff. Every staff member in the Obama White House reported to Emanuel, including political advisers such as David Axelrod. Even in the George W. Bush White House, which at first had a weak chief of staff, Andy Card, and a powerful political adviser, Karl Rove, everyone, including Rove, formally reported to Card.
.. The key to influence in any White House is simply to establish oneself as the President’s most important adviser. This seems to be the role that Bannon has created for himself.
.. In 2008, he became fascinated by Sarah Palin, the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate, and the crowds she attracted. He spent the next eight years making hagiographic films about Palin and other right-wing political figures
.. “When Sarah Palin was on the rise, he had found a way to become a part of that circle. When the Tea Party was on the rise, he seemed to be right there in that circle. When it was going to be Ted Cruz, he was there. When it was going to be Ben Carson for a hot second, he was there. He’s been someone who’s been in pursuit of that pipeline to power for a long time now.”
.. The turning point for Bannon, Breitbart, and the movement that would eventually coalesce around Trump was the 2013 debate over immigration reform. After Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama, in 2012, the Republican leadership, encouraged by the business wing of the G.O.P. and the Party’s consultant class, made comprehensive immigration reform a legislative priority. Fox News became sympathetic to the effort and Priebus, then the chairman of the R.N.C., issued a report declaring that passing immigration reform was necessary for the survival of the Party.
.. This was the opening that Bannon had been looking for.
.. He believed that Clinton was weaker with Hispanics, African-Americans, and white millennials than Obama was in 2012. And he believed that, with a surge of white working-class support, Trump could win Wisconsin and Michigan, which had voted Democratic since the nineteen-eighties. He was right about all of this.
.. Bannon sees those European movements as allies, and has cultivated ties with far-right parties in the U.K., France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy.
.. How will Bannon continue his crusade to defeat Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell and Priebus when he now needs them to pass Trump’s agenda? Despite Bannon’s hatred for Priebus, they worked closely together to elect Trump. Bannon believed it was an alliance of convenience, similar to Stalin and Churchill working together to defeat Hitler. I doubt Bannon will be as focussed on knocking off Republican leaders as he was when he was throwing rocks from the sidelines. You don’t actually have to destroy the establishment if you can force it to bend to your will.
Trump’s Hires Will Set Course of His Presidency
Rarely in the history of the American presidency has the exercise of choosing people to fill jobs had such a far-reaching impact on the nature and priorities of an incoming administration. Unlike most new presidents, Mr. Trump comes into office with no elective-office experience, no coherent political agenda and no bulging binder of policy proposals. And he has left a trail of inflammatory, often contradictory, statements on issues from immigration and race to terrorism and geopolitics.
In such a chaotic environment, serving a president who is in many ways a tabula rasa, the appointees to key White House jobs like chief of staff and cabinet posts like secretary of state, defense secretary and Treasury secretary could wield outsize influence. Their selection will help determine whether the Trump administration governs like the firebrand Mr. Trump was on the campaign trail or the pragmatist he often appears to be behind closed doors.
.. The two will have the kind of peer-to-peer relationship that only fellow presidents can have — something that administration officials hope will appeal to Mr. Trump’s pride, as well as his desire to succeed, and make him view Mr. Obama less as a rival.
.. Perhaps the deepest schism is between Stephen K. Bannon, the conservative provocateur and media entrepreneur who was Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman, and Reince Priebus, the Republican Party chairman who came to terms with Mr. Trump’s candidacy.
.. An anti-establishment verbal bomb thrower with ties to the alt-right movement, Mr. Bannon may have little interest in compromising with the Republican-controlled Congress under its current leadership.
.. Some former Republican officials held out hope that Mr. Trump would be receptive to moderating influences, but others worried that he would simply listen to the last person he spoke to.
.. Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, a retired career intelligence officer who is Mr. Trump’s closest foreign-policy adviser, is a candidate for national security adviser, according to an internal transition document obtained by the conservative news site The Daily Caller, as is Stephen J. Hadley, who served in that capacity for Mr. Bush.
.. Mr. Hadley, who might also be considered for defense secretary, pushed Mr. Bush to undertake the troop surge in Iraq and is closely identified with the military interventionism of that administration. A key figure in the Republican foreign-policy establishment, Mr. Hadley had a hand in Mr. Bush’s second inaugural address, in which he called for the United States to be an evangelist in spreading democracy — something Mr. Trump has flatly rejected.
.. Mr. Obama. For all their differences, and the bitter words they flung at each other during the campaign, the two share traits. Both won the presidency as outsiders, and both hold their party’s foreign-policy establishment in contempt.