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.”
Stephen Bannon’s nationalist call to arms, annotated
President Trump, when he was running, he made a — and this is the other thing that the — the mainstream media or opposition party never caught is that if you want to see the Trump agenda it’s very simple.
It was all in the speeches. He went around to these rallies, but those speeches had a tremendous amount of content in them, right? I happen to believe, and I think many others do, he’s probably the great public speaker in those large arenas since William Jennings Bryan. This was galvanized.
.. And remember, we didn’t have money. Hillary Clinton and these guys had over $2 billion. We had a couple hundred million dollars. It was those rallies and those speeches, all he’s doing right now is, he’s laid out an agenda with those speeches for the promises he made. And our job every day is just to execute on that. It’s to simply get a path to how those get executed.
.. And the mainstream media better understand something, all of those promises are going to be implemented.
.. Whether, you know — and you look at the our — the world — our world order and — and some of the things that are going on that I think are — will be dealt with soon, but the first thing I think is Neil Gorsuch, for a couple things.
Number one, we’re not talking about a change over a four-year period. We’re talking about a change of potentially 40 years of law, number one. But more important than that — more important to that, it established trust. It established that President Trump is a man of his word.
.. President Trump signed an order that puts in place a constant deregulatory form within the federal government. And what it says is, for every regulation presented for passage that Cabinet secretary has to identify two that person would eliminate. And that’s a big deal.
.. And then lastly, immigration: protecting the sovereignty of the United States, putting a wall on the southern border, making sure that criminals are not part of our process. These are all things that 80 percent of Americans agree with, and these are all things that President Trump is doing within 30 days.
.. People are starting to think through a whole raft of amazing and innovative, bilateral relationships — bilateral trading relationships with people that will reposition America in the world as a — as a fair trading nation and start to bring jobs. High-value-added manufacturing jobs back to the United States of America.
.. you’re gonna start to see I think with the defense budget we’re going to talk about next week when we bring the budget out and also with certain things about the plan on ISIS
.. And he brought up the fact that we’re promulgating more laws and regulations that we ever had before. And most of that are from these independent agencies that are just on autopilot.
.. the country was hungry for something far more — far bigger than one story or on-off issue. It was something that people wanted in this country, that was real, something that was going to change the direction that we were heading. And it was President Trump that was the answer.
.. here’s why it’s going to get worse: Because he’s going to continue to press his agenda. And as economic conditions get better, as more jobs get better, they’re going to continue to fight. If you think they’re going to give you your country back without a fight, you are sadly mistaken. Every day — every day, it is going to be a fight. And that is what I’m proudest about Donald Trump. All the opportunities he had to waver off this; all the people who have come to him and said, “oh, you’ve got to moderate.”
.. The American Conservative Union, which puts on CPAC, was created after Barry Goldwater lost in 1964, in an effort to take all different kinds of voices from the right in the conservative movement and bring them together.
So there is this question. There are those folks that consider themselves, you know, classical liberals or conservatives or Reagan conservatives. There are other folks that consider themselves libertarians. There are other folks that are part of this new Trump movement. And Trump brought a lot of new people. There’s probably in this — people in this crowd that wouldn’t have been in this crowd before.
So there’s a lot of diversity here. We all know it when we’re at the bar at the end of the day. And can this Trump movement be combined with what’s happening at CPAC and other conservative movements for 50 years? Can this be brought together? And is — this is going to save the country?
.. Peace through strength, deregulation. You think about the economy, the economic boom that was created. And some of it is going to take a little time, I mean, to get the jobs back; to get more money in people’s pockets. Those things are going to happen.
.. You know, I’ve said that there’s a new political order that’s being formed out of this.
.. But I think we — the center core of what we believe, that we’re a nation with an economy, not an economy just in some global marketplace with open borders, but we are a nation with a culture and a — and a reason for being.
And I think that is what unites us and I think that is what is going to unite this movement going forward.
.. but also and more importantly, hold us accountable. Hold us accountable to what we promised, hold us accountable for delivering on what we promised.
.. we’re different, but where we’re very similar is that I think that he is very dogged in making sure that every day the promises that President Trump has made are the promises that we’re working on every day, number one.
Number two, he’s incredibly loyal. And number three, which I think is a really important quality as we were working together to see to it that President Trump’s vision is enacted is that, he’s extremely consistent.
.. Different things that come to the president that want to move him off of his agenda and Steve is very consistent and very loyal to the agenda and is a presence that I think is very important to have in the White House
.. But his job is, by far, one of the toughest jobs I’ve ever seen in my life. To make it run every day, and to make the trains, and you only see the surface. What’s going on underneath it, planning what’s three weeks down the road to the — to the degree that we’re planning it, of all these E.O.s and legislation and — you know, whether it’s the tax reform bill, Reince is indefatigable in saying, we’ve got to drive this forward, we’ve got to drive this forward.
.. back in August when we had this campaign where we were outgunned, outmanned, you know, outspent. And it was because President Trump had a message, he had this charisma
Steve Bannon’s not-so-subtle threat to the media
It’s no secret that Stephen K. Bannon, the past chairman of Breitbart News and now a senior strategist to the president, is behind much of Trump’s anti-media rhetoric. The idea of the media as the “opposition party” or the “enemy” — two phrases Trump has used of late to describe those who cover him — is pure Bannon.
.. But, even by Bannon’s standards, he seemed to ramp up his attacks on the media and offer a very clear message to political journalists: You think this is bad? Just wait.
.. “It’s going to get worse every day for the media,” Bannon said, insisting that the “corporatist” media would continue to see Trump pursue exactly the sort of economic nationalism that journalism allegedly despises. Then he added this call to arms: “If you think they are giving you your country back without a fight, you are sadly mistaken.”
.. The message from Bannon was unmistakable: The enemy of Donald Trump and those who think like him is not, really, Democrats but, in actuality, the media. And the only way to combat the media is to fight like hell against them on everything and anything.
.. As I’ve noted before, presidents (and their staffs) always have an adversarial relationship with the press.
.. But what Bannon and, by extension, Trump are up to is something very different than simply an adversarial working relationship with the media. Bannon doesn’t want to change the media. He wants to totally dismantle the media. He wants to break its back and leave it for dead by the side of the road. And he’s not afraid of telling the media to their faces about that plan.
.. That was the message Bannon wanted to get across at CPAC. That Trump — and he — would never back down. That the perceived scorn of the so-called “mainstream media” only made him more convinced that the course Trump is taking is right. And that things are going to get plenty worse for the media over the next four years.
It’s a remarkable declaration of all-out war on the media from one of the most powerful people in the Trump White House.
Bannon: Trump administration is in unending battle for ‘deconstruction of the administrative state’
“They’re going to continue to fight,” Bannon said of the media, which he repeatedly described as “the opposition party,” and other forces he sees as standing in the president’s way. “If you think they are giving you your country back without a fight, you are sadly mistaken.”
Atop Trump’s agenda, Bannon said, was the “deconstruction of the administrative state” — meaning a system of taxes, regulations and trade pacts that the president and his advisers believe stymie economic growth and infringe upon one’s sovereignty.
“If you look at these Cabinet nominees, they were selected for a reason, and that is deconstruction,” Bannon said. He posited that Trump’s announcement withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership was “one of the most pivotal moments in modern American history.”
.. “They’re corporatist, globalist media that are adamantly opposed to an economic nationalist agenda like Donald Trump has.”
.. Bannon added, “Just like they were dead wrong on the chaos of the campaign and just like they were dead wrong on the chaos of the transition, they are absolutely dead wrong on what they’re reporting today.” He said “all” of Trump’s campaign promises would be implemented in short order.
.. Bannon is “very dogged” and “incredibly loyal” — and called him “a very dear friend.”.. Bannon commended Priebus on being a “steady” force inside the West Wing.“I can run a little hot on occasions, but Reince is indefatigable,” Bannon said.