9

MIDTERMS

In May, with six months to go before the November midterm elections, twenty-five House races were highlighted for the president during three different meetings. A briefing had been prepared for each race. All would be held in critical swing districts, and all—at least in the view of some advisers—should get a visit from the president. Another view, strongly advocated by Jared Kushner, with quite some support from the Republican leadership, was that the president ought to keep as far away as possible from the midterm campaign.

In a sense, it didn’t matter either way. Trump, in each of the three meetings, grew restive and inattentive within minutes. His behavior mirrored what happened in military presentations. Virtually innumerate, he was bored by both numbers and logistics—or, worse, they gave him something like brain freeze. He absorbed nothing.

There were too many members of the House. He couldn’t remember their names. He launched into dramatic eye-rolling when told where they were from. “Flyovers,” he said. “Men’s shop salesmen.”

It didn’t help that his advisers were communicating two contradictory messages. The first was that the midterm House races could represent Armageddon for the Trump presidency. The second was that midterms were midterms, and that what happened in November would be more or less business as usual.

The business-as-usual model was that midterms invariably go against the party holding the White House. Hurting the GOP’s prospects further was the fact that a precipitous number of Republicans—many simply giving up on Trump and Trump-age politics—were voluntarily leaving office. Add to this the painful results of several off-calendar elections in which Democratic turnout, traditionally unimpressive, had swamped Republicans. Now, with primaries wrapping up and the summer campaign season about to get under way, there were few pathways that would allow the Republicans to hold the House. Still, both Obama and Clinton had lost their majorities in their first midterm elections and yet both had served two terms.

In the Armageddon view, the current math suggested that Trump could be facing a two-year presidency. Now up by twenty-three seats, the Republicans would lose thirty, forty, fifty, or even sixty seats on November 6. At this polarized political moment, the country would likely be electing an impeachment Congress. And if the Senate fell to the Democrats, the country would likely be electing a conviction Congress.

True, the Republicans would probably hold the Senate. But Bannon, for one, had come to believe that the outcome of the House races was binary. If the Republicans held the House, Trump’s presidency and the Trump agenda would remain viable; the president could hold back the determined forces against him. But if the GOP lost the House, Trump would not be able to endure a hostile Congress, one that would relish taking a deep dive into all of his affairs. Worse, his inevitable reaction—Bannon promised that it would be “psycho”—would undermine even his support among Republicans in the Senate.

And if the House fell, it would be a seething Republican Party. Five thousand Republican staffers could lose their jobs. Republican lobbying firms could easily go from billing $10 million a year to billing $1.5 million. Catastrophe—a Trump-caused catastrophe—in the D.C. apparat.

In the business-as-usual view, the math was actually pretty much the same. But in this scenario, a thirty- to sixty-seat loss would be, with a little critical interpretation, a gift to Trump—at least assuming the Republicans held the Senate. Just as he had run against Washington in 2016, now he would be able to do so again in 2020. Trump was at his best with an enemy: he needed the Democrats as his rabid and hysterical opposition. And enemies did not get any better than Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House.

Picking on Pelosi gave Trump energy. Ridiculing her gave him a special pleasure—and it was a plus that she was a woman. Impeachment? Bring it on. Since he had a fail-safe in the Senate, it would all be for show—his show.

Mano a mano played to Trump. It helped rouse him from his constant distraction. Fighting Congress would be a noble cause, Kushner felt; he also felt, all in all, that it was better now to keep Trump out of the confused midterm fray. This was part of the standard business-as-usual math: if you have an unpopular president—and Trump’s numbers were about as low as any president’s had ever been at this point before the midterms—you don’t send him out to stump in iffy races.

And then there was Trump’s own view: he found it very hard to feel in any way concerned about other people’s political problems. The idea of party, of the president ultimately being a soldier in a larger effort, would never mean anything to him. Even the idea of giving a speech about someone else—praising someone else—was a large pill for him.

The minutiae of House districts presented yet another problem. All politics might be local, but local was noisome and small-time for Trump. Particularly irksome was the awkward dance of candidates who wanted his endorsement but simultaneously wanted to maintain their independence from him. He needed and demanded maximum deference and attention. But most of all he feared losers. All the enforced discussions about the midterm elections had focused on toss-up races, which meant that each of these candidates was a potential loser—and thus someone whose loser status might, malodorously, attach to him.

Mitch McConnell was not only telling people that the House was lost. He was turning it to his advantage, using the doomed House as the selling point to raise money for the Senate. He was sure the Senate Republican majority would be held—twenty-six Democratic seats were up, versus nine Republican seats. Further, he believed the Republicans might pick up two or even three seats. Trump would be safe in the Senate, assured McConnell. This is where to fall back and hold the line. McConnell, more and more cementing his reputation as the ultimate survivor, the one true political player of his generation, was already looking ahead to 2020, when the Senate might be considerably more difficult to defend.

Bannon believed that McConnell’s willingness to let the House go—a strategic decision he made in concert with a cabal of major party donors—fell just short of conspiracy. If the Democrats were in an open and mortal war with Trump, the Republican leadership, or at least McConnell and Ryan, were in a secret mortal war with the president. Theirs was a fight for control of the party.

McConnell’s contempt for Trump was boundless. He was not just the stupidest president McConnell had ever dealt with, he was the stupidest person McConnell had ever met in politics—and that was saying something. He and his wife, Elaine Chao, the secretary of transportation, regularly mocked and mimicked Trump, a set piece they would perform for friends.

Were the Republicans somehow able to hold the House in 2018, it would be, in Bannon’s do-over version, a repeat victory for Trump. The anomalous, wild-card election of 2016 would now be incontrovertible. Failing to gain control of the House would have a nuclear effect on the Democrats, but a successful defense of the GOP’s House majority would have a nearly equal effect on the Republicans. Even more than Trump’s victory in 2016, it would spell death to the Republican establishment.

But if calamity hit the House, if the House flipped to the Democrats, Mitch McConnell would then hold virtually all the cards. Trump, who, in his own set piece, regularly belittled and mocked McConnell, would be, without a Republican House, entirely beholden to the Senate majority leader.

This, in McConnell’s view, was the path to taking the party back from Trump. A Democratic House would mean that only McConnell would stand between Trump and his expulsion from office. Trump would be McConnell’s prisoner.

It was Bannon’s belief that McConnell had used this Machiavellian scenario to line up many of the party’s major donors. McConnell wanted the Republicans to lose the House. He was working to that end.

Trump, to say the least, was not a natural political tactician. His organizational sense was limited. He was virtually incapable of acknowledging other people’s purpose and talent. His political instincts were tone-deaf. And he dealt almost exclusively in visceral reactions.

In 2016, in make-or-break Florida, a political operative named Susie Wiles had helped Trump climb out of a steep deficit. But when, during the campaign, he met Wiles—whom he described as “looking like a refrigerator with a wig”—he demanded that she be fired. (She wasn’t, and Trump won Florida.)

Now, in the spring of 2018, with the White House effectively denuded of anyone who might tell him what he did not want to hear—among the many types of people he eschewed were political head counters—Trump was happily able to put off any focus on the make-or-break midterm races.

Kushner, eager to keep his father-in-law’s focus off the midterms, adopted the Trumpian “let’s do big things” approach. The House might be lost, but the new opening to North Korea was going to be big. From Kushner’s view, the more Trump focused on North Korea, the less he might make things worse in the midterm races.

At a moment when the White House should have been gearing up for the midterms, Trump’s three closest political advisers were all outside the White House: David Bossie, Corey Lewandowski, and Sean Hannity. Each had a clear sense of what a dismal November could mean to Trump. But all three understood that their relationship with Trump depended on reinforcing what he already believed. “It’s all about letting Trump be Trump,” explained Hannity. “Let him go where he’s going and encourage him to get there.”

What’s more, all three men saw the world as if from a bunker. They were fighters. They were martyrs. If the Republicans lost the House in November, they’d be in the place they knew best, defending Trump from the onslaught. They weren’t operatives, they were believers, which is what Trump wanted them to be.

As for the sensible thought that the White House comms staff should get behind a political theme that would unite the White House and the party in a common fight toward November, forget it. Beyond the comms talent and leadership shortage—and the ongoing turf war among Sanders, Conway, and Mercedes Schlapp—the comms staff’s job was not to be outward-looking; their mission was to look inward and please Trump by defending him in a way that met with his approval. This, of course, was impossible: they never pleased him. Consequently, the development of a coherent and considered piece of thinking about anything other than the boss’s need to be reassured—however much of a no-win game that might be—was never going to happen.

Outside the White House walls, the party had by now settled on a strategy of its own, one that had nothing to do with the supposed virtues of Donald Trump. The Republican National Committee, the Republican House and Senate election operatives, and indeed most of the entire Republican establishment, supported by Ryan and McConnell, decided to run on the virtues of the tax reform bill that had been passed in late 2017. “It’s tax reform, stupid,” McConnell had taken to saying, wanting to make it as clear as possible that tax reform was a congressional accomplishment managed with scant contributions from the Trump White House.

As the midterm races heated up, it was hard to tell if Bannon’s main mission was to frustrate McConnell or to save Trump. Equally, of course, he was trying to position himself. He was convinced that there was a movement beyond Trump—in which he could be kingmaker or, even, king—and that the key to it lay in taking on the Republican establishment. Hence, if his feelings about Trump were, to say the least, equivocal, he believed that on a sinking ship he had to be, in the eyes of the deplorables, the last man off the boat.

The Republican establishment, as well as many people in the White House, loathed Bannon as much as he loathed them. “Where does Steve’s money come from?” was an oft-asked question in 2018. The Mercers—Bob, the hedge fund billionaire, and his daughter, Rebekah—had long supported Bannon and Breitbart News. But this ended, or at least their public support ended, early in 2018, because of lacerating bad press and personal threats against the Mercers that, the family believed, came from their association with Trump, Bannon, and Breitbart.

After leaving the White House in August 2017, Bannon, like many other political entrepreneurs across the ideological spectrum, launched his own 501(c)(4) not-for-profit, which could raise money anonymously. In the months following his departure from the administration, Bannon had, with great discipline and attention, paid court to all of the top Trump donors.

This quiet campaign proved remarkably successful, provoking annoyance in the White House that some of the president’s donors might be supporting Bannon, even supporting Bannon at the expense of Trump. It was an easy bond: many of Trump’s big-money supporters admired most of Trump’s policies, but almost all disliked Trump himself. Bannon became the Trump ambivalence whisperer. Trump was not the point, he argued. Where Trump could lead was the point—the destination mattered, not the man who would take you there. Bannon’s pitch fell on sympathetic ears. There was a knowing rapport among people who found Trump ridiculous and yet necessary to support.

Still, Bannon needed an organizing premise, a sense of urgency. The urgency now was to save Trump from himself. So Bannon’s C4, with no seeming shortage of funds, would support an election operation that would, if not rival the White House operation, ignore it—and meanwhile upstage the Republican effort to claim the election as its own.

By May, Bannon had assembled a staff and begun coordinating its efforts with a daily morning conference call. Working out of the Embassy, he quickly developed a consistent message, a surrogates operation that booked people on daily cable and talk radio shows, and a polling process to triage the sixty or so toss-up races.

It wasn’t tax reform, stupid. It was Trump.

Bannon was convinced that Trump had to be on the ballot in each race. Politicians and operatives are often accused of always running the last race they had won, and for Bannon it was 2016 all over again. Only Trump could fire up the base with enough passion to turn the deplorables out for faceless congressional races. They needed to be voting for him.

The band was back together.

In came Sam Nunberg, David Bossie, Corey Lewandowski, Jason Miller, and several others—everybody whom Bannon had taken under his wing during the campaign.

The thing about Bannon’s band was that it really was his band, with only a secondary, and often problematic, loyalty to Trump. As it was for Bannon, it was for them: Trump was the unaccountable, confounding, vastly annoying, but all-important centerpiece of their lives. Trump was their obsession. He ate at them.

A considerable part of the daily Trump narrative, and not the positive one, flowed from this group, beginning with Bannon, but filled in on a constant basis, sotto voce and otherwise, by the rest. Trump the clown, Trump the idiot, Trump the nutter. I-don’t-give-a-shit Trump, What-me-worry Trump, Can’t-put-on-my-pants Trump. The comic opera of Trump came from this crew.

Even as Bannon’s bandmates worked to support Trump, they brought to this campaign mixed, if not tortured, feelings. In part this had to do with their proximity to Trump: they had all been embraced by Trump and burned by him. But it also had to do with the very nature of the people Trump pulled into his orbit. Each lived at quite some level of Trumpworld absurdity and emotional topsy-turvy; Trump was just part of their ongoing personal roller coaster.

Jason Miller, a long-suffering political operative and PR executive, had been brought into the Trump campaign by Ken Kurson, the editor of Kushner’s newspaper, the New York Observer. Miller had become an able Trump whisperer—his stoic forbearance helpful here—and he seemed destined to be appointed the White House communications director. (During the campaign, Miller was the first caller of the morning. It was his task to sweet-talk the overnight and early morning bad press for Trump.) Then came news of Miller’s relationship with another Trump campaign worker, a liaison that resulted in a pregnancy just as Miller’s wife became pregnant, too. This nixed the comms director job, which was bad enough. But worse was to come, for Miller’s campaign lover, A. J. Delgado—who moved in with her mother in Florida and went on to deliver and raise her and Miller’s child—commenced a legal and media war meant to bankrupt and disgrace him. Along the way, Miller became a paid Trump defender on CNN, causing Trump to remark, “I get the people who no one else wants.”

Corey Lewandowski, heretofore a lower-tier Republican political operative, got the campaign manager job because no one else wanted it. When Trump was casting around in 2015 for campaign staff, his calls were passed like hot potatoes even among operatives who undoubtedly needed the work. David Bossie, at the last minute declining to meet with Trump himself, passed the job off to Lewandowski. Lewandowski was known for a volatile temper, an attention-deficit problem, and his desperation for a job. Within a short time, he became wholly devoted to Trump. Corey, said Bannon, not necessarily as a compliment, would put his hand over an open flame and watch his fingers burn off before rolling on Trump.

For Trump, Lewandowski became “like my real son” (which, nevertheless, did not prevent Trump from mocking Lewandowski as an “ass kisser”). This caused seismic problems with Trump’s actual sons, opening an ongoing rift between the Trump family and Lewandowski, with Lewandowski forced out in June 2016 by Don Jr. and Kushner. Ever since, Lewandowski had tried, often successfully, to work himself back into Trump’s political family.

Bannon, who had worked in the past with David Bossie on a handful of right-wing agitprop films, brought Bossie into the campaign in September 2016. (Bossie had, in fact, first introduced Bannon to Trump in 2011, a meeting after which Bannon unequivocally dismissed Trump’s seriousness as a current or future political candidate.) Bossie was the one person on the team with actual political organizing talents. Bossie focused on developing a robust door-to-door operation, a new concept for the Trump campaign. But Trump didn’t fully trust him: Bossie looked “shifty—can’t look me in the eye.” Bossie, like Chris Christie, tended to get too close to Trump, physically crowding him. “They’re bulls, they’re bulls, they’re all over me,” complained Trump. Kushner regarded Bossie’s past right-wing work—as an anti-Clinton investigator in the Whitewater years and as one of the prime organizers of the Citizens United lawsuit that unleashed unlimited corporate campaign contributions—as “vast right-wing conspiracy stuff.” During the transition, Bossie was frozen out of a White House job.

Sam Nunberg, perhaps more than anyone, personified the peril and the absurdity of a relationship with Trump. Nunberg, a baby-faced thirty-six-year-old, was the son of prominent lawyers, and he had squeaked into a low-rent law degree of his own. With few prospects of a blue-chip legal career, he fell into volunteer political work and then into a position with Roger Stone, Trump’s friend and adviser. Stone was a long-out-of-date Reagan-era political operative; variously disgraced and yet still an indefatigable self-promoter, he was ridiculous to virtually everyone except Trump—and even Trump treated him rather like a dog who kept creeping back into the house. Through Stone, Nunberg came to work full-time for Trump.

Starting in 2011, Nunberg was Trump’s on-again, off-again political aide and adviser, loyal and dogged during the years when Trump was at best a political circus act. “There is no President Trump without Sam Nunberg,” declared Bannon. “To the extent that Trump becomes even a half-legitimate political narrative, Nunberg invented it.”

So, of course, Trump fired him. “He lives with his parents,” Trump complained.

Lewandowski was Nunberg’s replacement. During the campaign, Trump and Nunberg plunged into bitter litigation with each other, as though no one was watching.

Even after his firing, Nunberg never moved very far from the Trump orbit. This was partly because no other job, after Trump, was beckoning, but also because Nunberg—as a prime repository of institutional memory and the only person who really knew Trump—kept being pulled back into Trumpworld.

Nunberg was also a go-to, often astute, and always available source for almost every reporter covering Trump. Certainly Nunberg could be counted on to provide a confirmation of every negative story about Trump. When Trump criticized the media, he was in many instances criticizing Sam Nunberg.

Nunberg was frequently the connective tissue between Trump rumors and Trump news. Receiving a rumor, Nunberg in real time passed it off as breathless fact to one or more sources, ever increasing his own usefulness if not credibility. “I think of Maggie Haberman”—the New York Times reporter covering Trump—“the way I think of my grandmother,” said Nunberg. “I always go running to her.”

And yet, like others, he was wedded, no matter how bad the marriage, to Trump.

In late February, Nunberg was called to testify before the Mueller grand jury. Shortly before he was due to testify, he received word of some cutting remark Trump had made about him. Mightily hurt—once again mightily hurt—he took solace in a weekend of cocaine and prostitutes. On Monday morning, sleepless and high, he decided to refuse to show up for his grand jury appointment. He announced and reaffirmed his refusal—which he would reverse by the end of the day—on no fewer than eleven television and radio shows, one after the other, a real-time Trumpian melodrama and a train wreck of pain, recrimination, and substance abuse. It was also a media tour de force.

In 1998, Monica Lewinsky’s lawyer William H. Ginsburg appeared on all five of the Sunday morning talk shows on the same day. This became known as the “full Ginsburg.” The “full Nunberg” outdid Ginsburg’s feat by no small amount, and after a bender weekend, too.

“Everybody said, ‘You can’t hire this guy, he got all coked up and went on eleven shows,’” said Bannon. “But how could I not hire him? He spent the weekend doing blow off a bunch of girls’ asses and then got up and did eleven shows. It’s all in the quality of the fuck you, and this was pretty high-quality fuck you.”

You couldn’t miss the sense of codependence here. Trump’s key supporters worked for him because nobody else would have them.

For Bannon, bitter about many things, but now, at sixty-four, having the time of his life, electing Trump was the ultimate fuck you. Part of his mission was to elect Trump precisely to shock and outrage all of the people who so passionately didn’t want him elected. “What is the point of democracy if not of an upset?” he would ask. The fact that Trump was Trump was a separate issue; yes, he was an imperfect weapon, but he was the weapon at hand.

For Bannon, Trump’s campaign and his presidency were partly a dare. Stop me if you can—and if you can’t, then you deserve Trump. His contempt for Democrats was, in its way, not directed at Democrats per se, but at what he regarded as the mediocrities they produced, a set of placeholders who did not have the necessary political gifts. He would enumerate their names in one breath: Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand. “That’s who they’ve got? That’s who they’ve got? Stop! You’re killing me.”

Even so, holding Congress was something that could only happen in spite of Trump. This was the real point: Trump couldn’t manage or accomplish his own election. He couldn’t execute, to say the least. Trump was merely a symbol, though, as it happened, an extraordinarily powerful one. Hence, the necessity of Steve Bannon.

In the presidential campaign, the goal had not been to win, but to reduce the margin from 17 to 20 points to a more respectable 6 points. For Bannon, that would have been adequate proof of concept; it would have demonstrated the power of the populist cause. Then Trump actually won, producing a whole other, not unproblematic, dynamic.

Now, in the midterms, a close loss might work better for Bannon. A twenty-five-seat loss—two over the majority—would mean that Trump would need every friend he had, including Bannon. Perhaps most of all Bannon.

“I think it is actually possible we’ll pull this off and hold the House,” said Nunberg. “It’s possible—really. But, if not, it will be fun to watch Trump squirm. I’d pay for that.”