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By election eve, Steve Bannon had been on the road every day for five weeks. “If ever I thought I’d spend a night in Buffalo and a night in Staten Island…”
When he arrived in Buffalo, two weeks before the election, the local Republicans were set to charge $25 for a picture of a handshake with him at a campaign event.
It was a dismal gathering, men shuffling into a small, dim meeting hall and standing around the coffee urn. These were hardworking union guys—or they once were union guys. They were smokers. Veterans. In work shirts and work boots. They looked like America the way America looked in 1965, said Bannon, sentimental at the sight of his deplorables.
“I’m not going to have these people pay twenty-five bucks for my picture,” Bannon told the event organizers. “My parents would go nuts.” Instead, he said he would pay the local party organization $25 for each picture and handshake.
During that five-week sprint, Bannon had tried to hit many of the key swing districts in the country. He and Trump might not be speaking, but Bannon, at least in his own mind, remained the best soldier in Trump’s army. It was practically a meme—pictures of Bannon, in cargo pants and puffer vest, standing up in an endless series of desultory rooms speaking to a handful of people.
He had reduced the field of play to its existential essence. There were forty-three key House races: of those, twenty were hopeless; twenty others were nail-biters, and the Republicans could afford to lose only five of these; three others would likely flip from Democratic to Republican. If everything broke the GOP’s way, the Republicans would lose twenty-two seats and thus maintain a one-vote majority. That one vote provided safety for Trump, but if the GOP lost its majority by even one seat, Trump would be in constant peril. Losing thirty or more seats, however, would be the deluge—and, Bannon believed, the effective end of the Trump presidency.
At one point during the final weeks of the campaign, Bannon visited New York City to check in with an old Trump crony who closely monitored the president’s state of mind. What would happen, Bannon wondered, if the Republican loss was truly decisive and the new Democratic majority piled on with subpoenas, aggressive investigations, and constant, hostile oversight? Could Trump hold up under that, especially given that he had already fired or frightened away almost everyone who had once provided his support apparatus? “I think he’ll kill himself,” said Bannon, answering his own question.
“No, no,” said Trump’s old friend. “He’ll fake a heart attack.”
Yes, Bannon laughed, that would certainly be the Trump way out.
For Bannon the stakes were obvious: it would be a two-year presidency or a four-year presidency, an indomitable Trump or a vanquished Trump. In this ultimate battle, Bannon sometimes felt like he was a Republican Party—or a Trump Party, or a Bannon Party—of one. The Trump political operation, led by Kushner’s surrogate Brad Parscale, was shrugging off the midterms and, in rosy denial, looking toward 2020.
Significantly, almost nobody from the 2016 campaign remained on Trump’s political team except Parscale. A freelance web designer from San Antonio, Texas, Parscale had worked for the Trump Organization, designing on-the-cheap websites, for the better part of a decade before the campaign started. He built the campaign’s first website, was promoted to digital media director, and then, under Kushner, was given oversight of data targeting and the online fundraising strategy. (Bannon noted that one of Parscale’s initiatives during the run-up to the midterms was to commission a poll about whether Trump should use more inclusive language. “Hilarity ensued,” said Bannon.) With Parscale as his chief political strategist at one of the most challenging moments in modern political history, Trump had once again chosen lesser over greater expertise.
This left the White House both ill-prepared for the midterm campaign and, in many respects, indifferent if not hostile to it. In Bannon’s estimation, the White House was making almost no contribution to the midterm fight. Kelly said it wasn’t his job to help, and he was barely speaking to Trump anyway. Bill Shine, the communications director—and now a primary focus of Trump’s taunts and complaints—tried not to be seen. The rest of the White House comms shop was in its usual disarray, with Trump happily ignoring it anyway. Don Jr. and his girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle were stumping aggressively, but the one person whom Trumpers believed had a shot at holding female voters, Ivanka Trump, was absent and otherwise occupied.
To the extent that the Republican Party had a strategy, it was to spend vast amounts of media money and skip the more challenging ground game. Bannon believed that in tight races the tie was broken by one side’s greater passion and its devotion to manning phone banks, walking precincts, and knocking on doors—“he who grinds better wins,” in Bannonese. In this election cycle it was the Democrats who were calling and walking and knocking.
“There has never been an organized plan to save the House,” said Bannon. “The troops stayed home—there was never a fight, never engagement.” With two weeks to go, the Republican leadership’s most optimistic calculation was a loss of thirty-five seats.
Trump remained on the road, continuing to fill stadiums wherever the White House believed they could be filled. For Bannon, these rallies had become utterly routinized, already nostalgic, not so much rousing as familiar. But the rallies allowed Trump to stay inside his happy bubble, content with crowds that were ecstatic at the sight of him even as he ignored the polls.
“He has no idea what can happen, no fucking idea,” said Bannon. “Totally la-la. He thinks Nancy Pelosi is an annoying elderly lady rather than a steel-tipped bullet aimed directly at him.”
As Election Day approached, Bannon was glum, but he yet believed in the almost totemic power of the Democrats to fuck things up. And, indeed, just as the Democrats were trying to close their sale, their brightest lights were putting on a remarkable display of ego and avarice. Cory Booker and Kamala Harris had traveled to Iowa to kick off presidential campaigns. Bill and Hillary Clinton were on a moneymaking national tour (“a shake-down tour,” in Bannon’s words). And Elizabeth Warren had tried to prove she was at least a little bit of a Native American with a DNA test, which ultimately proved quite the opposite.
Even so, Bannon was awed by the Democrats’ almost flawless organizational game. Republican incumbents and candidates for open seats had, without urgency, raised the standard cost of a House seat campaign: a well-funded run would set you back $1.5 million, give or take. But vast amounts of money—large money and small money, a great green river of despair and hope—had poured into Democratic congressional races. In some tight races, Democratic challengers had raised as much as four times what Republican candidates had raised.
The midterm elections had produced two separate universes of spending and resources. One was business as usual for the Republicans, with most of the money coming from the typical deep pockets; the other was an explosion of Democratic cash, one that was big enough to neutralize incumbency, overcome the effects of gerrymandering, and introduce a large, energetic class of political unknowns.
In fact, the problem was not that the national Republicans didn’t have enough money; they had plenty. The problem was that they were spending it in the sky, not on the ground. They were spending it as though this were a normal midterm election campaign, not a uniquely Trump election. By Election Day, the National Republican Congressional Committee and the congressional PACs, along with other outside groups, would spend as much as half a billion dollars on TV ads, a blitz that paid off, Bannon believed, largely for the consultants who placed the ads. What’s more, they were spending a large portion of that money on races that were already lost.
“Sheldon,” said Bannon, meaning Sheldon Adelson, the casino and hotel owner and biggest contributor to the Republican Party, “should have taken all his money and just burned it in front of the Venetian,” his mega casino and resort on the Las Vegas strip.
On a rooftop just downwind from the Washington bureau of Fox News, with the Capitol dome in the background, the Bannon/Trump-or-no-Trump/Populist-Nationalist Party, as it were, was throwing its election night bash with hundreds of Dean & Deluca sandwiches and countless bottles of microbrewery beers—“and not a populist brand in sight,” noted Bannon.
Bannon’s idea was to use this party as a teaching opportunity. It would be both a social occasion and an election night war room, with Bannon, on a social media video feed, explaining election numbers and the mechanics of precinct-by-precinct mobilizing to his hoped-for audience of deplorables. For Bannon, this evening wasn’t just about the midterms: “After Donald Trump, be that tomorrow or several years from now, the movement still has to get out the vote.”
As darkness fell, and with the party now under way, Bannon was trying to sort out both technical and social challenges. He wanted clear video of the Capitol dome, but the camera would need to shoot it through the heavy plastic sheeting shielding the party from a rainy, windy night. What’s more, the feeds to the right-wing pundits and sites that would contribute commentary throughout the evening kept disappearing. Then, too, the curious members of the press—along with Bannon’s collection of alt-right partisans and far-right European representatives, not to mention friends and family—all wanted face time with Bannon and were disappointed to discover that, beginning at 6:30 p.m., he had taken to the social media air.
For the next six hours, Bannon would stay on his feet conducting something near a rolling monologue. Sam Nunberg took the chair at his side, feeding him numbers and commentary. “No opinions, please,” said Bannon as Nunberg kept trying to interject. “Just numbers.”
As the first election results began coming in, the mood turned hopeful. Almost immediately, it became apparent that in the night’s marquee Senate contest, the race in Texas between incumbent Ted Cruz and upstart Beto O’Rourke, the challenger was not going to pull off his upset, an upset that might well have shattered the Republican Party. The gubernatorial race in Georgia—featuring Stacey Abrams, a Democrat who would be Georgia’s first female and first African American governor—also looked good, and here, too, a loss would have badly shaken the party. And in Florida, the gubernatorial race and the Senate race, both of which had recently been leaning to the Democrats, were tilting back.
Earlier in the evening, Bannon had pronounced Barbara Comstock “the barometer of the night.” As Comstock in Virginia’s Tenth District went, so would go the party. Virginia 10, which takes in a great swatch of the southern D.C. suburbs, is almost 70 percent white and has a moderate Republican tilt. Since 1980, the district had sent a steady stream of Republicans to the House.
Comstock, a fifty-nine-year-old Middlebury and Georgetown Law graduate with three children, was a kind of ideal Yuppie Republican, business- and women-friendly. Living just outside the Beltway, she was, like so many of her constituents, a wholly inside-the-Beltway figure. Her work on Capitol Hill, as congressional aide, lawyer, and PR adviser, was solidly Republican, yet she knew how to partner with Democrats. Now finishing her second term in Congress, Comstock was well liked by her party, though the rap was that she might not be conservative enough. Overall, however, the party considered her a strong candidate in a swing district, and at the cycle’s outset her seat had been seen as safe.
In midsummer, however, as the first wave of worrisome polls began to alarm Republicans, Comstock was down by ten points. Her opponent Jennifer Wexton was, like Comstock, a lawyer and local political figure; the only real difference was that Wexton was a moderate Democrat instead of moderate Republican. For much of the campaign, Bannon thought the GOP should write Comstock off and put its resources into more promising battles. But she was a popular figure in the party, and the prevailing establishment view was that if there was a fight to be waged for swing votes, then as a moderate incumbent woman she ought to be waging it and the party ought to be supporting her.
By October, Virginia 10 had become one of the most expensive Republican House races in the country. But in the days before the election, internal polls had Comstock down by only 4 percent—what once seemed a lost race for the Republicans had become an extremely tight one. As November 6 approached, the Virginia 10 numbers were relayed to the president with the message that the party was doing significantly better with swing voters than anticipated. They were coming back, Trump was told.
“With Comstock at a four percent deficit or under, we hold the House,” said a high-spirited Bannon soon after his election night party started. “Done deal.”
But the Comstock race was one of the first clear House results of the night. The polls in the Tenth District closed at 7:00 p.m.; by 7:40, with 56 percent of votes tallied, including Comstock’s strong districts, she was sixteen points down.
Hearing this early result, Bannon turned to Nunberg. “What’s that number?” Still imagining that the night could bring spoils and glory, he was skeptical. “Can that be right?”
“Seems like.”
“Check.”
“I checked.”
Standing on the rooftop, the Capitol dome behind him, Bannon’s mood swung, as though in a single moment, from spirited to desolate.
Depressing Bannon almost as much as the Comstock numbers were the reports he was receiving about another party seven minutes away.
In the ceremonial East Room at the White House, the president’s staff had staged a mock Election Day barbecue with hamburgers and hot dogs. It was a big-donor event. Sheldon Adelson, worth $34 billion, was there, along with Harold Hamm, the shale oil mogul, worth $13 billion; Steve Schwarzman, the Blackstone CEO, worth $12 billion; Dan Gilbert, the founder of Quicken Loans and owner of several sports franchises, worth $6 billion; Michael Milken, the former Wall Street trader and junk bond king who went to jail in the early 1990s for insider trading, worth $4 billion; and Ron Cameron, an Arkansas poultry mogul, and Tom Barrack, the Trump friend and real estate mogul who had managed the president’s inauguration, each worth a billion. Also attending the party that night was Franklin Graham, the son of the evangelical preacher Billy Graham, who had been uncompromising in his support of Trump, and Betsy DeVos, the only cabinet secretary in attendance (and a billionaire herself). The vice president and his wife were circulating among the guests, and so was Brad Parscale, representing the 2020 campaign and the president’s political operation.
Bannon took the White House party almost as a personal slap. His weeks on the road had brought him back to some metaphysical considerations about the soul of America. As he saw it, almost everything was being taken, day by day, from the country’s working people—his deplorables—who yet formed some true heart of the nation. Bannon spoke about their “peasant honesty, peasant wisdom, and peasant loyalty,” sounding like Tolstoy speaking of the Russian people. After guiding Trump’s campaign to victory, Bannon had hoped to bring a new Jacksonian era to the White House; instead, a retinue of the Republican Party’s billionaire donor class was eating hamburgers and hot dogs in the East Room.
It was Trump’s tragic duality: he needed either the roar of the crowd or the stroking of billionaires. After they won in 2016, Bannon had met with the president-elect and Trump’s friend Tom Barrack to discuss the plan for the inauguration. Bannon argued that they ought to underspend by $1.00 the lowest amount ever spent in the modern age on an inauguration. This was a populist presidency, so a no-frills, homemade inauguration ought to be its first symbol. But Barrack spoke about how easy it would be to raise more money than had ever before been raised. Give him two weeks and he could raise $100 million. Give him four weeks and he could raise $400 million. The opportunity was unlimited.
Trump did not struggle very hard with his decision about what approach to take. Bannon, darkly, understood from what corners of the world that money would come.
“That meeting will be played back many times,” Bannon predicted. “It set us on the road to perdition. Nothing good could come out of it. You think you don’t know what Trump will do, that it’s going to be a head-smacking surprise—radical disruption. But, in fact, no. He does what he’s programmed to do.”
Bannon saw the midterm battle for the House as a winnable contest. Equally, he saw what was going on in the White House at that very moment, all the donors cheek-by-jowl in the East Room, as part of another fight. This was the most fundamental Trump battle, one that could also be won—but that, right then, might be lost.
For Bannon, China remained everything. It was the key, and the devil was in the details. And Trump got it: “China bad.”
Here was a totalitarian state with a government-run economy that through currency manipulation and public subsidies had reoriented the world’s supply chain, and, in just half a generation, turned its 1.4 billion citizens into the world’s fastest-growing market, bending the West’s capital markets and political class to its will. A dominant China, in Bannon’s world schematic, meant a declining United States, ever losing its manufacturing base. For people without a college education—many of them Trump voters—manufacturing jobs represented the single most reliable ticket to the middle class. China’s exploding middle class was created at the expense of our own by undermining and then transferring the U.S. manufacturing base.
This, Bannon believed, was the fundamental fight inside the Trump administration. If those who understood the Chinese threat won, or even held their own in this epic battle, that’s what would be remembered a hundred years from now.
But from the beginning, the first battle inside the administration had been for Trump’s limited and shallow attention span. As soon as the needle moved from “China bad” to “China very complicated,” Trump would always wander out of the room. Meanwhile, around him, the fight raged on: for Bannon, it was the populists versus the Wall Street crowd. It was a good day’s pay for a good day’s work versus global capital accumulation. It was fighting an economic war against a formidable economic adversary versus managing decline. Riding the China train to a new global order was quite a profitable activity for capital markets, but it was devastating for the job prospects of American workingmen and -women.
Yet on this battlefield, Bannon argued, they had succeeded. Here was the accomplishment of the past two years: a nation and a policy apparatus that formerly had been either unconcerned about China or resigned to having to accommodate it had turned fiercely on the country. More and more of the establishment now shared Bannon’s (and Trump’s) core belief: “China bad.”
Each Saturday when Bannon was in Washington, Peter Navarro—the anti-China economist Bannon had recruited to the White House in the fight against Kushner’s Wall Streeters—bicycled over to Bannon’s Embassy and went upstairs to the dining room. There the two men would spend half the day plotting against their free-trade global adversaries. Sitting at Bannon’s table, they had hatched the plan to use emergency measures to levy tariffs on steel, aluminum, and technology. And as they had predicted, an unbeatable China soon became an extremely worried China. In relatively short order, they had pushed their adversary back on its heels.
This crucial change of perspective was what the Trump White House had accomplished. Or, more accurately, this is what the small circle of China hawks battling the Trump circle of bankers and banker friends had accomplished.
Yet the battle was far from over. Schwarzman, whose Blackstone Group was heavily invested in Chinese growth—and whom Bannon and Navarro regarded as a virtual Chinese agent—had, because of his relationship with Kushner and because of his billions, enormous sway over Trump. With persuasion and distraction, Schwarzman could almost invariably swing Trump’s “China bad” resolve into something like a lack of interest.
“The two Steves,” Trump had once said half-jokingly, as though threatening each with the other.
As Bannon stood on his rooftop that night and watched the election map deteriorate, he knew a Democratic takeover of the House would not help his great cause. The Democrats were the party of Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs was the investment bank of China. And if Trump needed to save himself from a Democratic Congress, he would surely make a deal with the Chinese, one that would appease Goldman Sachs.
“He will do a huge deal with China,” Bannon said, during a break in his broadcast. “The stock market will go through the roof, Schwarzman will love it, and the media will say Trump succeeded. But it will be disaster in the real war that we’re fighting.”
The barbecue in the East Room had been under way for more than an hour by the time the president arrived. The early election results were still bringing enough good news to keep the room light and festive. Trump, one guest noted, always more salesman than politician, seemed to have the capacity to focus only on the good news. For the president, the night’s limited positive results wholly supplanted the obviously darkening trend.
To one guest, Trump said: “Great night. Fantastic. Wipe out. Crushed. Big majority. Big. Wave? What wave? Red wave. Total red wave.” The guest found himself running through a quick, bewildering progression, first thinking the president was serious, then thinking he was being sarcastic, finally realizing that this was his heartfelt conclusion.
In fact, not only did Trump appear determined to see the results the way he wanted to see them, he simply did not have enough information to make a serious evaluation. Distinguishing himself from almost all political professionals, he clearly wasn’t interested in the actual data. As usual, numbers bored him.
Even Brad Parscale, the president’s political eyes and ears, seemed only marginally more informed, and, hence, remained optimistic. Every other White House would have had better and quicker data than anyone else anywhere, but this White House seemed slow to collect and process the numbers, or uninterested in doing so. It wasn’t that Trump was off his game, one of his guests reflected, but rather that he seemed never to have been in it. The night’s success or failure would depend on a few dozen House races, but that was small-bore stuff, beyond his focus. He seemed incapable of understanding that this was a night when his presidency might be won or lost.
“No fucking way!” said Bannon to Sam Nunberg at 9:33 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.
At that bewildering instant Fox News was the first network to call the fight for control of the House of Representatives. The Democrats, said Fox, would win the majority, with all the subpoena, oversight, and investigative power that went with it.
“Stop,” said a genuinely perplexed Bannon. “You really got to be shitting me—they’re calling this now?”
The other news networks were taking their cues from the polling data company Edison Research. Fox was relying on the AP. The projection of a Democratic victory came at a moment when the news still seemed relatively good for the Republicans. It was just past 6:30 on the West Coast. The continuing belief that the GOP still had a fighting chance to win the House might yet encourage Republicans to cast their votes in a series of tight races in the western states.
Bannon ticked off the races in California and elsewhere that were still up for grabs. Of the twenty he had marked as winnable swing races, the polls were still open in twelve. In his estimation, some of these races could be decided by fewer than a thousand votes.
The decision to call the election with as many as ninety minutes of voting time left in some parts of the country had fallen to Lachlan Murdoch, the new CEO of Fox. The younger Murdoch, now trying to circumvent his more conservative father and exert his authority over the company, had approved the early call.
Bannon, standing at his makeshift broadcast desk and trying to calculate the damage that had been done, especially to the tight California races, was astounded. “The Murdochs,” he said, “just blew a rocket up Trump’s ass.”
Bannon saw Fox’s early call as a statement, another cautionary note for Trump’s future. The rock-ribbed Trump network wouldn’t have choked the remaining Rocky Mountain– and Pacific-time votes unless it wanted to.
For the next four hours, while broadcasting their social media feed, Bannon and Nunberg sorted numbers and precinct reports. Over the course of the evening, they watched most of Bannon’s twenty swing races fall to the Democrats.
The night’s emerging theme was about as bleak as could be. Any House race the Republicans could lose, they would lose. To hold a contested seat, they needed an absolute lock on a Republican majority. The undecided, the middle of the road, the ambivalent, anyone who did not feel enthusiastic about Donald Trump—by a substantial majority, they all voted for the Democrats, or against the Republicans. It was so bad that when it was all over the Republicans might lose the House by an 8 or 9 percent margin. Bannon sent Nunberg scurrying to find out what historic ceiling might be broken here.
As a measure of voter sentiment, the House results could hardly have been clearer. The electoral map had solidified. In a sense, little had changed from 2016: there was a Trump country and there was an anti-Trump country. Solid red voters were more intransigent, as were solid blues. Rural white voters were implacably for the president; Trump was consolidating his gains and his power in those regions. Urban and suburban voters, forging a new philosophic and political identity based on their passionate opposition to Trump, were expelling from office even holdover Republicans who sought a middle ground. To the extent that there had once been a middle ground, there might be none whatsoever now. But here was the headline fact: the Trump side, however dedicated, was smaller, by a landslide margin, than the anti-Trump side.
By the time election night was over, Bannon felt reasonably certain that the Republicans would gain two seats in the Senate, possibly even three. But this result cheered him not at all, and he waved it away. There was nothing positive here for Trump. Holding the Senate was not a victory but a grim outcome; it meant only that the exact details and timing of Trump’s unhappy fate, the precise portion of cruelty and humiliation that it would deliver, would be in Mitch McConnell’s hands.
But the House—holding the House had been life or death. Now Bannon was certain. It would be a two-year presidency.