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In its by now usual slapdash fashion, the White House, at Trump’s sudden insistence, added two legs to the long-planned July 11–12 NATO meeting in Brussels: a stop in Britain to meet the Queen, and then a quick summit in Helsinki with President Putin.
On the morning of July 10, he spoke for a moment to the media before boarding the plane for Brussels. “So I have NATO, I have the UK—that’s a situation with turmoil. And I have Putin. Frankly, Putin may be the easiest of all.”
It was the UK leg that most worried Bannon. He had used every available channel to send out the message that the stop had disaster written all over it. There could be a million people in the streets to jeer Trump. Even before the trip began, Trump was urged to mostly keep out of London because of expected protests. And the audience with the Queen, whom Trump was dying to meet, was clearly more of a cold shoulder: the rest of the royal family would be “out of town.” Jared and Ivanka, more sensitive to nuance than the president, understood a royal insult when they got one and bailed on the trip.
Trump, however, wanted to play golf, as well as meet the Queen. And he wanted to give Trump Aberdeen, his golf course in Scotland, a PR boost. Plus, the White House was constantly encouraging him to get out of town, preferably out of the country. “Far away and occupied,” said an emphatic John Kelly.
But Bannon thought he might blow. Trump could “crack wide open. You don’t want him walking into humiliation.” Bannon, who had spent several years in the 1990s traveling back and forth to London as an investment banker, knew something about British upper-class disdain, which might well find its ultimate expression in a snub of Donald Trump. Then, too, there was left-wing British rage, which could hardly have a juicier target than Trump.
Bannon had his own reasons for not wanting Trump to have a meltdown in Europe. In recent months Bannon had vastly expanded the reach of his populist ambitions, promoting Trump as the new standard-bearer for right-wing Europe. If Brussels was the symbol, though a none-too-vibrant one, of a united globalist Europe, Trump was the symbol of a cohesive new right-wing Europe. That, anyway, was Bannon’s message, or snake oil. What he had done for Trump he could do for the ever-lagging right-wing parties of Europe.
So Trump “losing his shit” on a European visit might not be the best thing for Bannon’s business. And thus far, Bannon’s business—exporting the Trump miracle, which provided proof positive that marginal right-wing parties could, with the help of Bannon’s populist consciousness, actually take control of the levers of power—was fantastic.
Bannon, arguably—or arguably in his view—was the secret sauce behind Brexit. Early in 2016, Bannon, looking for ways to help his friend Nigel Farage and Farage’s UKIP party, had launched a British Breitbart. UKIP and Brexit needed a platform, and “Farage will tell you,” declared Bannon, “that Breitbart was the difference.”
In the spring of 2018, Bannon became a string puller in Italy. The operative certainty in Italy was that its reliably factionalized electorate would ensure that some version of a compromised and ineffectual center coalition would always prevail. But Bannon had cozied up to Matteo Salvini, the leader of the right-wing nationalist League (its name recently changed from Northern League), and after a predictably divided result in the Italian election in March, Bannon parachuted in and helped negotiate a coalition deal between the League and the Five Star Movement (a left-wing populist party with some strong right-wing inclinations). Neither Salvini nor Five Star’s Luigi Di Maio, in Bannon’s formulation, would claim the prime minister spot, but together they could agree on a dupe to hold it. Here, for Bannon, was the perfect union of far right and far left.
Now, with the NATO trip looming, Bannon needed Trump to look the part of the American strongman, and not behave like a baby having a temper tantrum. That might spook Bannon’s European clients.
The president and the First Lady arrived in a cool Brussels on the evening of July 10. The next morning Trump was full of complaints: he was sleepless; someone had misplaced a shirt; the food was wrong. He and his wife did not seem to be talking at all.
He had breakfast that morning with NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg. Surrounded by his senior staff—Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Defense Secretary James Mattis, White House chief of staff John Kelly, U.S. ambassador to NATO Kay Bailey Hutchison—Trump made his first odd remarks, accusing the Germans of conspiring with the Russians. “I think it’s very sad when Germany makes a massive oil and gas deal with Russia … We’re supposed to be guarding against Russia and Germany goes out and pays billions and billions of dollars a year to Russia … Where you’re supposed to protect you against Russia but they’re paying billions of dollars to Russia and I think that’s very inappropriate … Germany is totally controlled by Russia.”
NATO, Trump kept repeating to various people accompanying him, “bores the shit out of me.” Indeed, NATO was a vast, complicated bureaucratic construct, a meticulous and uneven balance of interests. Trump’s urge to disrupt it might be as much about his resistance to small-bore details—white papers, data backgrounders, endless coalition politics—as about policy and operational matters. He needed to tilt the conversation from small to large. The small, the calibrated, the item-by-item approach infuriated him. He even saw it as a power play against him, suspecting that people knew he could not absorb details.
“They’re trying to get me to fall asleep in my soup,” he complained. “They want that picture.”
The other aspect of NATO summits he found irritating was that they were group meetings. He was almost invariably enthusiastic about one-on-one world leader meetings—no matter the subject, no matter the leader—and agitated about collective gatherings. He worried about being ganged up on; he suspected that plots had been laid to trick him.
His charm—or, really, sugary flattery—did not work on Angela Merkel, who was his closest leadership rival. (He didn’t think so, but others did.) In previous encounters, he had tried laying it on thick with her, but this had gotten him nothing except her evident distaste. So he reverted to his basic approach: if maximum flattery doesn’t work, if you can’t get to a deal that way, then “shit on them.” He practiced saying “Angela Merkel” correctly with a hard g, but in his version the g was mocking and mincing.
Trump did not like to share the stage with a group of so-called peers. But if he had to, he believed that such a situation required him to upstage everybody else. His standard method when distinguishing himself was negativity in utterance and body language. As he once said to a friend when explaining his strategy during the seventeen-candidate Republican presidential primary debates, “You want to make it seem that everyone else has a disgusting smell.”
His stated goal at the summit was to persuade NATO member states to raise their financial contribution. This was a longtime conservative gripe: alliances and foreign aid did little except ensure that the United States got cheated. It was Lou Dobbs 101, said Bannon. “Elementary school eloquence. It’s not complicated: he’s been watching Lou Dobbs for thirty years. It’s the only show he watches from beginning to end.”
Others saw something weirder and darker. Trump wanted to undermine NATO. Trump wanted to undermine Europe as a whole. In his mind, if not also in some covert understanding, Trump had realigned the power axis from Europe to Russia, and was now, in Russia’s interest if not at its behest, trying to weaken Europe.
Though Trump does not drink, there was a kind of drunkenness to his performance at the NATO summit: he canceled meetings with the leaders of Romania, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, and Georgia; he was late, without warning, for one of the key sessions; he delivered public as well as private rants, including a threat to unilaterally leave the sixty-nine-year-old alliance. With respect to policy, he could not get beyond his single point, the one element that overrode all others and stuck in his head: Europeans should pay more. His unhappiness with their resistance to this demand had seemed to harden into a deep enmity. He appeared to regard NATO as hostile territory: NATO, too clever by half, was the enemy.
In this, he had once more squared off against his own foreign policy advisers, most particularly his secretary of defense. Mattis, trying to act as the one U.S. voice of reassurance and reason at the summit, was telling his European counterparts that he was at the breaking point.
While Trump was disrupting—or acting out at—the NATO summit, Bannon teamed up with Hannity to go to London, hoping to catch a ride on Hannity’s plane. Bannon knew that being close to Hannity was being close to Trump. Hannity’s daily radio show, which during the trip would be broadcast from Europe, was almost as good as speaking directly to the president. In a way it was better, because someone else could talk and Trump had to listen. Bannon’s voice, via Hannity’s show, would be in Trump’s head.
It was one of Bannon’s active sleights of hand, the level of conversations he was having with the president. When asked, he did not say he was talking to Trump, but he didn’t say he wasn’t, either. Or, if he did say he wasn’t, you might reasonably construe, given the parameters of confidentiality, that in fact he was. But even if he wasn’t talking directly to Trump, Bannon was confident that Trump was listening to absolutely everything he had to say. In this way, Bannon could reasonably represent, or deftly imply, to his clients that, truly, he had Trump’s ear.
What’s more, Bannon, in campaign mode, now believed that the trends for the midterms in November were turning positive. Bannon carried fifty or sixty congressional races in his head, with an almost real-time sense of the movement in swing districts. If he could get Trump to focus and pay attention—“I can hardly believe I said that,” Bannon chuckled—and get him into each key district one or more times in September and October, Republicans could hold the House.
In spite of his better instincts, Bannon had begun to think of himself in the White House again. There was something about the idea that seemed … destined. Except not.
Bannon understood that if the Republicans held the House in November, Trump could never have Bannon back as a reward for winning. That would mean Trump would have to acknowledge that Bannon had won the House for him. Nor could he have Bannon back if they lost the House, for that would be acknowledging his need for Bannon.
What’s more, Trump continued to blame Bannon for getting him to support “the child molester”—Roy Moore in Alabama, the failed Senate candidate whom Bannon had backed. (More precisely, in Trump’s locution, Bannon had persuaded him to support “the loser child molester.”) Moore was found to have cruised Alabama shopping malls in a quest for teenage girls, a revelation that sunk his candidacy.
So yes, there was really no scenario in which Bannon and Trump could equitably align. Nevertheless, Bannon continued to imagine scenarios in which he would be recognized as the master political tactician, the visionary of the worldwide nationalist-populist cause, the person who brought a begging Trump back to him.
In London, ensconced in a $4,500-a-night suite at Brown’s Hotel in Mayfair, Bannon played a cat-and-mouse game. Moving carefully through the scrum of reporters staking out his hotel, he calculated whom he should be seen with and whom he should avoid. In particular, knowing that Trump was always monitoring his moves, he did not want to be spotted with anyone who might aggravate the president.
Bannon’s hotel suite was the locus that week of far right activity in Europe. His long-game plot was to storm the European Parliament elections in May 2019. The EU, resisted to a greater or lesser degree by all European right-wing parties, was controlled by the European Parliament. Hence, why not take over the EU and reform it—or break it—that way? Here was Bannon the political operative. Bannon knew that the European Parliament elections were always weakly subscribed: nobody came out to vote. The vote was therefore easy to sway. “The world’s most leverageable elections,” he declared, “with the lowest cost per vote.”
Still, if Bannon was rating Italy as his great success and seeing the grim figure of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, whose ear he had, as a rising power, this was only a start. Italy and Hungary were not exactly the historic leaders of Europe; he needed France.
Bannon had turned several additional rooms at Brown’s into a seminar venue for France’s Front National. Louis Aliot—the “husband-partner” of Marine Le Pen, who had inherited the Front from her Nazi-leaning father—had come to London with a delegation. In investment banker style, Bannon was now going through the Front’s financials line by line, as though getting ready to take the party public.
The problem was that the biggest investors in the Front were Russian gangsters likely fronting for Putin. For several years now, the Russians had been underwriting the Le Pens and their party. The optics, not to mention the unnerving political reality, were not good. If the Front were to help take over the European Parliament in 2019, that would mean Putin, or even worse Russians than Putin, would become a significant power in the internal politics of Europe.
In the shadowy world of purported efforts by the Russians to influence the West, here was a curiously naked fact: the Russians really were funding opposition parties. Many of the European right-wing parties had accepted Russian help. This support was only loosely hidden, and though there was nothing specifically illegal about it, the funding prompted an obvious question: If the Russians were supporting the Front National and almost every other right-wing party that came calling, why not support the Trump Party—which, in the figure of Steve Bannon, was itself supporting the Front National? It was a circle of Russia-inclined virtue.
Bannon’s position toward Russian collusion was simple: whatever had happened, it did not involve him. He—and sometimes he would intimate that only he—was never in touch with the Russians during the campaign or through the transition. Still, he was perfectly in sync with Russian goals of using the European right wing to undermine European hegemony. Even for Bannon, however, overt Russian involvement was, to say the least, “not a good look.”
His goal now was to pay the Russians back for their $13 million loan to the Front National (rebranded in mid-2018 as the National Rally) and replace the party’s debt holdings with a more acceptable supporter. (In this, curiously, he was looking to right-wing Jews and supporters of Israel—looking to have them own what had heretofore been a neo-Nazi party.) To accomplish this, he needed to understand the Front’s messy financials. The Front’s delegation seemed at best to have only a sketchy knowledge of its own operations, and of who was being paid for what and how.
“I need to know all inflows and outflows,” said Bannon the banker, met by largely unresponsive stares. “Really, we’ve got to go line by line on this.”
Bannon struggled to contain his frustration with his clients. And no wonder: as Bannon talked, these would-be ministers of a future far-right-wing France glanced at each other with apparent worry and incomprehension. If this was the future of Europe, it had a certain small-time, Ruritania-like quality.
Nigel Farage—also at Brown’s for a meeting with Bannon and currently looking for a morning gin—seemed to tax Bannon’s self-control as well. Bannon believed he had played a key role in expanding UKIP’s influence and promoting Farage, but after the Brexit victory Farage had largely washed his hands of the party, sending the support for UKIP back to single digits. (“What do you mean, you fucking quit?” an incredulous Bannon had railed. “This is just the beginning!”) The experience confirmed for Bannon the fundamental laziness of the European right—a result, he theorized, of the small material rewards provided by politics in Europe.
In Russia, joked Bannon, politics pays. Indeed, it pays even better than in the United States, which was why the Russians were taking over.
As Bannon predicted—and he was quick to remind everyone of his prediction—the Trump catastrophe in Britain unfolded.
Much noted by the media was a giant balloon that would shortly fly over London: Trump as an orange baby in diapers. The accusation that he behaved like a baby was a reliable Trump flash point, as well as a Trump refrain. “I’m not a baby! Do you think I’m a baby? You’re a baby, not me!”
Trump was coming to the UK carrying a pro-Brexit message with little or no sense of the knife edge on which Brexit had put the UK. Nor did he care: for Trump, the Brexit controversy prompted dismissive impatience. Obviously it was right. Obviously England—he did not make the distinction between England and the rest of the UK—wouldn’t want to be part of Europe. Here he defaulted to Churchill, World War II, and the “special relationship” between Britain and the United States. England, he announced, not necessarily as a joke, should become the fifty-first state.
On July 12, just before 2:00 p.m., Trump landed in London and was greeted by his old New York friend and crony Woody Johnson. Trump’s ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, Johnson was the Johnson & Johnson heir and owner of the New York Jets and much-mocked socialite and party boy in New York. (“Don’t get me started,” said Bannon. “In a long list of the unqualified, here you have the least qualified.”) As Trump arrived with Johnson at Winfield House, the ambassador’s residence on the edge of Regent’s Park, the Beatles’ “We Can Work It Out” was playing, competing with the jeers and chants of protesters.
Trump soon went directly into an interview with the Murdoch-owned tabloid the Sun. At Murdoch’s request, the conversation had been set up by Jared and Ivanka. The Sun had promised an interview with a positive spin, one that would avoid Brexit and lean heavily on the special relationship. But Trump’s mood, coming out of Brussels, was a Trumpian mix of combativeness, self-satisfaction, and sleeplessness.
Perhaps as much as any Trump interview ever—and there was lots of competition—this conversation with the Sun was heedless and unfiltered. He seemed genuinely pleased to put everything on the table. He was the devil-may-care boss who was perfectly comfortable with his unquestioned authority, the blowhard extraordinaire who was seldom on topic. He answered to no one.
Over the course of the interview, Trump blithely waded into the most volatile situation in British politics in recent memory. Each point he made was a quintessential, albeit shocking, Trump pearl:
If the UK does the Brexit deal favored by Theresa May’s government, well then, naw—here he seemed to shrug—no trade deal. Yup, that would end a major trade relationship with the United States.
He would have negotiated much differently with the EU than May had done. He told her, but she didn’t listen. He would have been prepared to walk away. “I did give her my views on what she should do and how she should negotiate. But she didn’t follow those views. That’s fine … but it’s too bad what’s going on.”
The Brexit deal that the prime minister was now proposing “was a much different deal than the people voted on. It was not the deal that was in the referendum.” (There was, in fact, no deal in the referendum, other than unspecified departure from the EU.) The deal, as now proposed, would “definitely affect trade with the United States—unfortunately in a negative way.”
He then heaped praise on one of May’s main Tory Party antagonists, Boris Johnson, who had just resigned from her cabinet as foreign minister over the May government’s more cautious Brexit plan. Commenting on the speculation that Johnson would shortly commence a leadership fight against May, Trump said: “I think he would make a great prime minister. I think he’s got what it takes.”
On British defense spending: it ought to be doubled.
Immigration to Europe was “a shame—it changed the fabric of Europe.” And “it was never going to be what it was—and I don’t mean that in a positive way … I think you’re losing your culture.”
On the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, the highest Muslim officeholder in the UK: “He’s done a terrible job. Take a long look at what’s going on in London. I think he’s done a terrible job … All of this immigration … all of the crime that’s being brought in.” And “he’s not been hospitable to a very important government.” So, he said, “When they make you feel unwelcome, why would I stay there?”
And: “You don’t hear the name England as much as you should. I miss the name England.”
Trump was not just absent any diplomatic filter. He might as well have been talking to himself, ticking off the kinds of grievances that, on a long and soulful list, might put him to sleep at night.
Getting all this off his chest—and thereby tossing a bomb into the UK’s relationship with the United States, as well as roiling Britain’s own internal politics—apparently seemed to Trump to be entirely disconnected from the event he would shortly be attending: Prime Minister Theresa May was hosting a black-tie dinner in his honor.
The president and the First Lady, riding in “The Beast,” the presidential limousine that had been flown in on the presidential cavalcade, soon arrived at Blenheim Palace, the ancestral home of the Churchill family and the birthplace of Winston. They were greeted on the red carpet by Mrs. May—in red gown and red heels—and her husband, while the Queen’s Guard, a uniformed band in red jackets and furry hats, played a medley including “Amazing Grace” on bagpipes.
It had been a difficult struggle for May and Downing Street to fill the room with top-level British politicians and businessmen, most, as it happened, skeptical about the advantages of close proximity to Trump. The interview in the Sun appeared during the three-hour dinner, and through the evening a rolling awareness of it spread to many of the guests. Trump himself appeared unconcerned or unaware; in an affable mood, he was perfectly convivial with the prime minister.
Taken through the interview on the way back from dinner, he seemed disbelieving, even shocked. And dismissive, too: the interview had nothing to do with what he said. Really, he told aides, this was fabricated. “Fake news,” he declared.
Murdoch, in New York, heard this comment and scoffed. “He’s mentally out of it.”
When the Sun, on Murdoch’s instructions, posted a videotape of the interview, confirming the validity of its report, Trump barely skipped a beat.
Fake. Untrue. All wrong. Totally made up.
From any point of view, this was bad. From the point of view of statecraft, it was calamitous. So calamitous, in fact—so inexplicable and off the wall—that the interview was already being discounted. You had to grin and bear Trump and then assume that his words had only minimal relationship to ultimate policies and actions.
Bannon believed this, certainly. He had long discounted Trump by a significant factor—the man was a storm line of tantrums that inevitably passed. While the outcome of Trump’s trip to Europe thus far would have called into question the competence and mental faculties of any other world leader, Bannon yet pushed to explain its usefulness.
Power, via expertise, had passed to a select group—the Davos gang. In Bannon’s view, this group self-dealt at a historic level of wealth appropriation. It controlled the intellectual, economic, and diplomatic establishment. Trump, whether he knew it or not, represented intellectual, economic, and diplomatic disorder, the opposite of expertise and establishment power—and, hence, inspiration for the populist cause.
Even so, as Bannon appreciated as much as anyone, this was Donald Trump. Crazy was a potent enemy against the establishment, but how to predict what a crazy man will do?
On the morning of July 13, Trump left for Sandhurst, the royal military academy, to observe a joint exercise of UK and U.S. Special Forces with the prime minister. Then, together, they went on to Chequers, the country retreat of British prime ministers, for lunch and their official meeting and a news conference. Trump and May traveled by helicopter, with aides observing that, fortunately, it would be too noisy to allow for much conversation.
Many observers wondered how Trump would navigate the aftermath of one of the most extraordinarily undiplomatic interviews in diplomatic history. But he seemed entirely upbeat, if not unmindful of his previous remarks: “We’re talking trade, we’re talking military, we just moved some incredible antiterrorism things,” Trump declared to reporters upon his arrival at Chequers. “The relationship is very, very strong … very, very good.”
During a news conference with May after the lunch and meeting, Trump attacked the media, again largely denying what he had said in the Sun interview.
I didn’t criticize the prime minister. I have a lot of respect for the prime minister. And, unfortunately, there was a story that was done, which was generally fine, but it didn’t put in what I said about the prime minister. And I said tremendous things. And, fortunately, we tend to record stories now, so we have it for your enjoyment, if you’d like it. But we record when we deal with reporters. It’s called fake news. You know, we solve a lot of problems with the good, old recording instrument.
Then he waved away any inference that he might have damaged the relationship between the United States and the UK. The prime minister looked on with excruciating forbearance. The scene in the movie Love Actually, where the prime minister—played by Hugh Grant—upbraids and humiliates a boorish U.S. president, instantly became a UK meme.
Then it was on to Windsor Castle and his meeting with the Queen.
Notably, the ninety-two-year-old Queen met with Trump alone. Her husband, Prince Philip, usually joined her in meetings with heads of state, but in this instance he was absent, as were all other royals.
The palace had deftly maneuvered around an official state visit by the U.S. president. Prince Charles, now in a careful campaign to burnish himself as the future king, did not want to be saddled with a lasting image of him with Donald Trump. His sons, the British princes, were even more appalled at the prospect of meeting with the president. No, leave it to the Queen. Even Donald Trump could not reduce her.
The president and the Queen performed a brief and awkward inspection of the grounds, reviewed the Honor Guard—largely minus any chitchat, with the president, averse to listening to instructions, bungling where he was supposed to stand—and then went into the castle for a quick tea.
All unremarkable, as it should be. But during the tea, in a seeming warning to the U.S. president and a calculated affront to the Russian president Trump would shortly be on his way to meet, Robert Mueller indicted twelve Russians for hacking the Democrats in 2016.