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On Friday afternoon, October 7, 2016, on the twenty-fifth floor of Trump Tower, Priebus was playing the moderator to prepare Trump for the second presidential debate. New Jersey governor Chris Christie was playing Hillary. Everyone in Trump World was watching.
One by one, aides began leaving the conference room to huddle outside the glass doors to the room.
“What the hell is going on out there?” Trump asked Priebus and Christie. Hope Hicks, Trump’s campaign press secretary who would be named White House communications director, entered the conference room, her head down. As tears welled up in Ivanka Trump’s eyes, Hicks handed Trump a packet that contained a transcript that the Washington Post was about to run of Trump’s lascivious comments in 2005 to Billy Bush, an anchor on NBC’s show Access Hollywood.
Trump slid the packet across the conference table to Priebus, then-chairman of the Republican National Committee, and Christie. Priebus and the RNC had provided the ground game for the campaign.
“Oh, my gosh, this is really bad,” Priebus said to Trump.
Jared Kushner came in and tried to make light of it, saying it was no big deal.
“What are you talking about?” Priebus asked. “This is bad stuff.”
Trump claimed the transcript of the audio recording, which included Trump bragging about grabbing women’s private parts, did not sound like his remarks. But then the Post sent the audio recording itself. Everyone was in despair. That evening and the next day, Republican members of Congress called Priebus and members of the Republican National Committee to urge Trump to drop out of the race.
“Well, I wasn’t going to do that,” Priebus tells me.
The next morning, Priebus met with Trump again.
“What are people saying?” Trump asked him.
“It’s bad. This is as bad as I’ve ever seen,” Priebus said. “People are saying you should drop out. People are saying that you’re going to lose in the biggest way that anyone has ever lost before. You can either get out of the race, or you can lose in a huge landslide.”
Priebus felt some aides weren’t being blunt enough and honest with Trump about the gravity of the situation. Priebus wanted to make sure Trump understood what a blow this was. No one in the room challenged Priebus.
“I had people from the RNC telling me nonstop that we should just not even move forward with him as our candidate, that we should deem the candidacy vacant and figure out another way to get around it and declare the position vacant,” Priebus says. “Call an emergency meeting of delegates, do something.” Priebus considered the advice legally and ethically questionable, and he was not going to go along with it in any case.
The effect on the party became public when Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, uninvited Trump from an event in Wisconsin. Priebus suggested to Trump that the general sentiment that he should drop out was correct. But Priebus continued to support him and transfer money to his effort while continuing debate preparation with him the next day.
As Republican National Committee chairman, “I supported Trump a hundred percent. I was the one spending all the money on the race,” Priebus says. “We were paying for some of the ads. We were paying for most of the ground staff. We spent more money and devoted more resources on this presidential race than any other in the history of the party. If I didn’t believe in Trump, I would have just diverted the money to the Senate, which is what many in leadership wanted me to do.”
Priebus has a Columbo-like, self-deprecating manner. While he seems nonchalant, he is actually sizing you up, quizzing you, and finding out everything you know. He’s personable and open, with relaxed shoulders, soft dark brown eyes, and an easy smile, a trustworthy appearance.
When wearing a suit, Priebus often sports an oversize flag pin, very shiny, on his lapel. He has even worn it on a tuxedo. When speaking, with his thumb and forefinger, he makes a gesture that typically means “an inch” or “this much.” But Priebus holds an idea he is expressing there. For instance, when he speaks of “putting a wall on the southern border,” he seems to be holding the wall between his thumb and forefinger.
Priebus grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and from the University of Miami School of Law in 1998. He met his wife, Sally, at a high school youth group. Their first date was a Lincoln Day conservative dinner.
As Priebus likes to tell you, his first name Reince rhymes with pints, as in pints of his favorite beer, Miller High Life from Wisconsin.
“I’ve got a bizarre name, but I’m about as normal as they come,” Priebus tells me. “I always tell people it’s what happens when you have a Greek and a German who get married. It’s a bit of a disaster.”
“As a little guy, the one thing that I remember is that my grandfather in Athens loved America,” Priebus says. “It didn’t matter what it was about America, but he loved it.”
In 2007, Priebus was elected chairman of the Wisconsin Republican Party. He then served as general counsel of the Republican National Committee under Michael Steele before becoming chairman of the RNC in January 2011. After taking over, Priebus sat down with his financial people and got grim news: The once-mighty RNC was broke. It didn’t have the money to meet its payroll and other financial obligations the following week.
To cut spending, Priebus reduced staff by 40 percent. While Steele emphasized raising money from small donors, thereby increasing costs, Priebus pushed targeting big potential donors along with expanding the number of small donors and focusing on developing data on voters.
Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, applauded what he called the “turnaround” that Priebus engineered at the RNC.
“Priebus has righted a ship that was sinking,” Brad Blakeman, a Republican strategist and Fox News contributor who is a former Bush White House aide, told me after Priebus took over the RNC. “With Priebus, it’s not about him and getting on TV. It’s about the party.”
The second debate in St. Louis was to take place two days after the Access Hollywood tape came out. Appalled at hearing Trump’s comments, Christie did not show up for the next day’s debate preparation, when he was supposed to play the part of Hillary Clinton. Nor did Christie attend the actual debate. Priebus ended up playing both the moderator and Hillary.
As it turned out, “Trump killed it in the second debate,” Priebus says. “He was focused like a laser beam on the material and the information for that second debate like I had never seen him before. The second debate was a new beginning for Donald Trump. He dealt with Access Hollywood head-on, he made all his pivot points on Hillary Clinton, and he looked confident. It created an entirely new narrative on Monday morning. If it wasn’t for that performance in the second debate, I don’t think that he’d be president.”
Priebus’s candor with Trump during the Access Hollywood episode demonstrated that, rather than being a yes-man, he would tell Trump the truth as he saw it. But while Trump called him up on the stage when he gave his victory speech and named him to the coveted position of White House chief of staff, Trump never forgave Priebus for advising him to drop out or lose. Later when complaining to aides about Priebus as weak, he would cite Priebus’s advice.
Once in the White House, Priebus soon recognized that he was the chief of staff in name only.
“It was a structure set up from day one that ensured failure,” Spicer says. “You can’t have multiple people reporting to the president and pursuing their own agendas. You either have a chief of staff or you don’t.”
Trump was used to running his operation as a one-man show and was not willing to transfer any of his power to a chief of staff. On top of that, he brought in his daughter and son-in-law as commissioned officers, giving them more power than the chief of staff had by virtue of their family ties. But Priebus felt he would rather have some influence in the White House than none at all. While Trump made Bannon a coequal and the two White House aides differed on key policy questions such as maintaining troops in Afghanistan, Priebus figured they were both Republicans and could manage to operate effectively.
A powerhouse who headed Breitbart News, Bannon decided to join the campaign after reading an August 13, 2016, New York Times story about Trump’s falling poll numbers and erratic behavior.
“Advisers who once hoped a Pygmalion-like transformation would refashion a crudely effective political showman into a plausible American president now increasingly concede that Mr. Trump may be beyond coaching,” the story by Alexander Burns and Maggie Haberman said. “He has ignored their pleas and counsel as his poll numbers have dropped, boasting to friends about the size of his crowds and maintaining that he can read surveys better than the professionals.”
Having pushed a hard-right agenda as the head of Breitbart News, Bannon was up for a challenge. Born in Norfolk, Virginia, Bannon was an officer in the United States Navy for seven years in the late 1970s and early 1980s and became a special assistant to the chief of Naval Operations. He never forgot his experience in the Navy of being on a mission to help rescue fifty-two U.S. Embassy hostages held in Tehran. President Carter had ordered the rescue attempt after six months of frustration over Iran’s refusal to release the hostages.
It was just after midnight on March 21, 1980, when the Navy destroyer navigated by Bannon met with the supercarrier USS Nimitz in the Gulf of Oman. The convoy headed near the Iranian coast, where a secret mission would be launched a month later to rescue the hostages. Bannon’s ship, the USS Paul F. Foster, trailed the Nimitz, which carried helicopters for retrieving the hostages. Yet before the mission launched, Bannon’s ship was suddenly ordered to sail to Pearl Harbor. He learned while at sea that the rescue had failed due to the mechanical failure of three helicopters. Eight U.S. soldiers had been killed during departure when another helicopter collided with a transport plane.
In retrospect, the plan for the April 25, 1980, mission, called Operation Eagle Claw, was overly complex and amateurish. Nor did the planners envision the possibility of a sandstorm that clogged the engines of two of the helicopters. Writing in the Air & Space Power Journal, war gaming professor Charles Tustin Kamps observed that “the things which did cause the mission to abort were probably merciful compared to the greater catastrophe which might have taken place if the scenario had progressed further….”
“I have the perfect word” for how the crew felt upon learning that the mission had failed, Andrew Green, one of Bannon’s shipmates, said. “Defeated. We felt defeated.”
Bannon has called the failed hostage rescue one of the defining moments of his life, providing a searing example of failed military and presidential leadership. He concluded that then-president Jimmy Carter had undercut the Navy and was responsible for blowing the rescue mission.
“I wasn’t political until I got into the service and saw how badly Jimmy Carter f—ed things up. I became a Reagan admirer,” Bannon told Bloomberg Businessweek in 2015.
If Bannon never got over that sense of betrayal, he also never forgave Wall Street for the loss of his father’s savings. On October 7, 2008, in the cramped TV room of his modest home in Richmond, Virginia, his father Marty Bannon watched with alarm as plunging stock markets dragged down his shares of AT&T, the nest egg he had accumulated during a fifty-year career at the telephone company.
Steve Bannon and his four siblings would joke that their devout father, a product of the Great Depression, would sooner leave the Catholic Church than sell those shares. The stock symbolized his deep trust in the company and had doubled as life insurance for his children. As Marty Bannon switched between TV stations, financial analysts warned of economic collapse, and politicians in Washington seemed to mirror his own confusion. So he sold his AT&T shares.
Marty Bannon still regrets the decision and seethes over Washington’s response to the economic crisis. He says he lost more than $100,000 because he sold the shares for less than he paid for them. The shares subsequently regained much of their value.
Steve Bannon says the scary moment crystallized his own antiestablishment outlook and helped trigger his desire to rectify what he saw as more failed national leadership.
“The only net worth my father had besides his tiny little house was that AT&T stock. And nobody is held accountable?” Steve Bannon told the Wall Street Journal. “All these firms get bailed out. There’s no equity taken from anybody. There’s no one in jail. These companies are all over-leveraged, and everyone looked the other way.”
Bannon graduated from Virginia Tech, Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, and Harvard Business School. He then joined Goldman Sachs in Los Angeles for two years where he became a vice president, then left to become a deal maker and entrepreneur in Hollywood. Under the terms of his sale of his firm, he continues to receive a cut of Seinfeld residuals, according to Bannon.
Having immersed himself in politics at Breitbart, Bannon was reading the paper and drinking coffee at seven a.m. in Bryant Park near his New York City apartment when he was drawn to the New York Times story that triggered his decision to join the Trump campaign. The story was “a complete takedown of Trump and his campaign,” Bannon tells me. “Total disorganization—it’s over, guys.”
Back in his apartment, he checked and learned Trump was down sixteen points in the polls compared with rival Hillary Clinton.
“I made some calls,” Bannon says. “All the donors were bailing.”
Bannon talked with Rebekah Mercer, a friend and major Republican fund-raiser and donor, along with her father, the billionaire hedge-fund manager Robert Mercer.
“Rebekah is like apoplectic because they’re writing big checks now, and it’s a horrible story. It’s just brutal,” Bannon says.
“What do you think can be done?” she asked.
Bannon had long admired Kellyanne Conway, a Republican pollster.
“What I ought to do is step in there and make Kellyanne Conway the campaign manager, put her on TV nonstop,” Bannon said. “I’ll run the thing. I know we can win this, or worst case, we’ll lose by three points and hold the House and the Senate.”
The Mercers, who had supported Senator Ted Cruz in the primary campaign, switched to supporting Trump after he was nominated. They supported Bannon becoming Trump’s campaign chairman. While Trump later chafed at the publicity Bannon received, Bannon provided a philosophy and strategy that undergirded the campaign.
“When I stepped in, there wasn’t a campaign,” Bannon says. “They would have Education Week, then Women’s and Parents’ Week, all ideas of Ivanka and Jared. There was nothing.”
Instead, the campaign would portray Hillary Clinton as “the corrupt, incompetent status quo,” Bannon says. He would tell Trump, “You are the agent of change, of real change. And all we have to do is give people permission to vote for you. They don’t need to think you’re a good guy. They don’t need to think you’re a great man. They don’t need to think you’re even their cup of tea. They just have to give themselves permission to vote for a true agent of change because the voters wanted this economic nationalism, populism, anti-establishment, lock her up, drain the swamp, and the media’s the enemy approach.”
In contrast to any other White House aide, Bannon cultivated a scary, bad boy persona, saying “darkness is good” and wearing a beat-up green leather Orvis combat jacket every day. Bannon looks a little rough, like he hasn’t had enough sleep, and he hasn’t been eating well, and he has a lot on his mind that is pissing him off. His eyes are puffy and red-rimmed, as though he just got off the red-eye. His skin is splotchy with sun damage on his forehead and he has rosacea, a common skin condition, on and around his nose. But Bannon has been blessed with generous hair, a salt-and-pepper pompadour whitening at the temples. Think Johnny Cash.
Bannon has a determined mouth, clenched lips. He rarely smiles, if you could even call it that. When speaking and wanting to convey a point, he pushes around an imaginary weight with his hands, chopping and pounding, stirring the air in the room. Whenever he mentions the media, he holds his palms out as in No Way.
Because of his weight, Bannon’s habit of wearing several layers of clothing works for him. Lately, with the help of a dietician, Bannon has been taking off weight and looks a little more like the Goldman Sachs banker he once was. He typically wears a dark blazer over a black shirt with Ivy League collar over a black T-shirt. When he and Priebus were being interviewed at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Priebus was asked, What do you like most about Bannon? Priebus eyed Bannon for an instant and replied, “I love how many collars he wears, interesting look.”
Asked what “darkness is good” means, Bannon responds that he uses the expression “in the spirit of fun.”
Critics claimed that Bannon was anti-Semitic, but Andrew Breitbart, who brought Bannon into the enterprise, was Jewish. Bannon made it clear he had no use for the Klan or other Far Right hate groups.
In person, Bannon was the opposite of the image he projected. He was polite, genuinely interested in countervailing arguments, and erudite. He owns ten thousand books and claims to have read them all.
“Unlike what you see on TV, Bannon was pretty reasonable when I worked with him,” Priebus says. “In the White House at least he was not reckless. In fact, in the White House I would say he was risk averse.”
As Bannon sees it, Trump personifies the populist revolution that has been building for many years. “We’re only at the beginning of this anti-elite, anti-establishment revolt,” he says.
It was Bannon who introduced Trump to the idea that he is a President Andrew Jackson figure, lending legitimacy to Trump’s convention-shattering style. Trump’s personality bears a striking resemblance to that of Jackson, a populist who, despite his own great wealth, championed the common man against what Jackson called “the aristocracy of the few”—the established elite of the East Coast cities.
When President Jackson was dining with friends at the White House, someone whispered to him that the Senate had rejected the nomination of Martin Van Buren as minister to England. Jackson jumped to his feet and exclaimed, “By the Eternal! I’ll smash them!” And that is what he did: His favorite, Martin Van Buren, became vice president and succeeded to the presidency when “Old Hickory” left the White House.
Jackson was “combative, thin-skinned, quick-tempered,” Jon Meacham wrote in American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House. Meacham said of the seventh U.S. president, “To friends, he was considerate and generous. He was a good listener, Van Buren said. To enemies, mean-spirited and spiteful. He would explode in anger, but it was believed he never really lost his temper. Rather, he launched into tirades purposely to intimidate the opposition or to end debate that dragged on too long.”
While George Washington saw swagger as a moral failure, Jackson saw it as a virtue. With his charisma and willingness to challenge established conventions and exercise executive authority, Jackson created the modern presidency as a national force or, as President John F. Kennedy called it, “the vital center of action.” Unlike previous presidents, Jackson did not defer to Congress in policy-making but used the power of the veto and his party leadership to assume command. Jackson was the embodiment of a populism that venerated and served “the people,” promoting American nationalism.
The political class in Washington feared 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.”
Along with Bannon, Senior Policy Adviser Stephen Miller gave Trump articles about Jackson, and Trump hung a portrait of Jackson in the Oval Office. It was Miller who drafted Trump’s inaugural address with contributions from Bannon and Trump himself.
Miller grew up in a liberal Jewish family in California. He became a committed conservative after reading Guns, Crime, and Freedom, a book by National Rifle Association chief executive officer Wayne LaPierre. While attending Santa Monica High School, Miller began appearing on conservative talk radio. Miller was shocked by the reaction of his high school classmates to the 9/11 attacks and the loss of almost three thousand American lives.
“During that dreadful time of national tragedy, anti-Americanism had spread all over the school like a rash,” he said in a column. “The co-principal broadcasted his doubts about the morality of the air strikes against the Taliban to the entire school via the PA system. One teacher even dragged the American flag across the floor as we were sending off brave young men to risk their lives for it.” In another column, Miller concluded, “Osama Bin Laden would feel very welcome at Santa Monica High School.”
At Duke University, Miller came to the defense of the lacrosse players who were accused of rape by a black stripper. In several columns, he alleged that the media’s overwhelming condemnation of the white lacrosse players was a result of the radical left’s prejudice against whites. Eventually, charges against the lacrosse players were dropped, and North Carolina attorney general Roy Cooper announced that “we believe that these three individuals are innocent of these charges.”
After graduating from college, Miller worked as a press secretary for Congresswoman Michele Bachmann and Congressman John Shadegg, both members of the Republican Party. In 2009, he started working for Alabama senator and future attorney general Jeff Sessions. In January 2016, Miller joined Trump’s campaign.
In contrast to Miller, who is reserved, Bannon mirrored Trump. He was brash, opinionated, boastful, and smart. Like Trump, he viewed China with suspicion, seeing it as sucking jobs from America because of its low wages and manipulation of its currency. Like Trump, he was infuriated by U.S. immigration policies that treated illegal immigrants the same as U.S. citizens, encouraging more illegal immigrants to enter the United States and flout American laws. And like Trump, Bannon had no use for political correctness and the hate-America scourge that was overtaking colleges and the left wing of the Democratic Party.
At the same time, “I have a problem with these extremists on both sides—the Klan, the Neo-Confederates, the white nationalist group, the white supremacy groups—coming and looking for a fight,” Bannon says. “Those guys should all be shut down immediately, as with Antifa and Black Lives Matter.”
As a populist, Bannon’s main issues coincided with Trump’s views, but in other ways, he adopted the views of liberal Democrats. He was against intervening militarily overseas and continuing the war in Afghanistan. He also floated the idea of a top income-tax rate of 44 percent for Americans earning more than five million dollars a year.
But as Trump liked to point out, he was his own strategist. Trump was sitting in his office on the twenty-sixth floor of Trump Tower on November 7, 2012, the day after Mitt Romney lost what had been presumed to be a winnable race against President Obama, when he decided to trademark the winning slogan “Make America Great Again.”