The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby Elvis » Sat Aug 19, 2017 2:03 am

Soon we'll be down to just generals. Billionaires and generals.


:jumping:
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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Aug 21, 2017 10:38 am

“Mr. Bannon’s physical appearance was crumbling, and his mood swings had become pronounced.”



Bannon Was Set for a Graceful Exit. Then Came Charlottesville.
By JEREMY W. PETERS and MAGGIE HABERMANAUG. 20, 2017

Stephen K. Bannon in the Oval Office earlier this year. He was forced from his job as the president’s chief strategist on Friday. Credit Eric Thayer for The New York Times
WASHINGTON — John F. Kelly, the new White House chief of staff, told Stephen K. Bannon in late July that he needed to go: No need for it to get messy, Mr. Kelly told Mr. Bannon, according to several people with firsthand knowledge of the exchange. The two worked out a mutually amicable departure date for mid-August, with President Trump’s blessing.

But as Mr. Trump struggled last week to contain a growing public furor over his response to a deadly, race-fueled melee in Virginia, Mr. Bannon clashed with Mr. Kelly over how the president should respond. Give no ground to your critics, Mr. Bannon urged the president, with characteristic truculence.

At the same time, New York real estate investor friends told Mr. Trump that the situation with Mr. Bannon was untenable: Steve Roth on Monday, Tom Barrack on Tuesday and Richard LeFrak on Wednesday.

By Thursday, after Mr. Bannon undercut American policy toward North Korea in an interview published by a left-leaning magazine, Mr. Trump himself had concluded that Mr. Bannon was too much of a liability.

By Friday, when he was forced from his job as Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, Mr. Bannon had found himself wholly isolated inside a White House where he once operated with such autonomy that he reported only to the president himself.

This account is based on interviews with a dozen White House aides, associates of the president’s and friends of Mr. Bannon’s.

A former Naval officer, Mr. Bannon speaks often in the language of combat — of escalating conflict to “nuclear” levels and driving his enemies “ballistic.” But in the end, he had lost the war against a list of enemies that included nearly everyone in the West Wing. They included not just the adversaries whose conflicts with Mr. Bannon were widely aired — Gary D. Cohn, the president’s chief economic adviser; Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, the national security adviser; Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter; and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law.

Also against him was Mr. Kelly, who was outraged by the indiscretion Mr. Bannon displayed in the interview with The American Prospect, according to three senior administration officials. And Mr. Bannon could no longer turn to Mr. Trump, whose confidence in him had eroded over a period of months, to ask for a reprieve.

Even the market tumbled on the prospect that Mr. Bannon could come out on top. Blue chip stocks slid last week after an erroneous report said that Mr. Cohn’s resignation was imminent because of his disgust with Mr. Trump’s failure to more forcefully denounce the racist Charlottesville, Va., demonstrators. Friends and former colleagues of Mr. Cohn’s said the economic adviser criticized Mr. Trump in such strong terms that at least one wondered how he could possibly remain in his position.

As soon as Mr. Bannon arrived at the White House on Inauguration Day, he seemed to realize that he would not be long for the job. He felt that Mr. Trump had treated him as a peer during the presidential campaign, but, he often complained to friends, “when I got to the White House, all of a sudden I was just a staffer.”

Opponents’ mythology around Mr. Bannon often held that he was the evil genius who pushed the president to make some of his more audacious decisions. And Mr. Bannon’s political opponents believe his departure has removed one of the biggest impediments to stability inside the White House.

But more likely, Mr. Bannon’s exit will clarify that only one person, Mr. Trump, for better or worse, has always been his own chief strategist. While several administration officials interviewed said they see Mr. Kelly as perhaps the last hope for fixing the fractured administration, they concede that only Mr. Trump can right his listing presidency.

“My view is that the president has his own mind,” said Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the American Conservative Union and a former White House political director under George W. Bush. “People make too much of the idea that he’s some kind of blank slate that advisers can push one way or the other.”

Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump's outgoing chief strategist, has been criticized as being emblematic of the far-right nationalism that turned violent in Virginia last weekend. By A.J. CHAVAR and CHRIS CIRILLO on Publish Date August 14, 2017. Photo by Al Drago/The New York Times. Watch in Times Video »
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Steve Schmidt, who helped manage Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign in 2008 and is a critic of the president, said: “We are seeing all of the personal qualities and character of the president on a daily basis. It’s not restrainable or controllable because he is who he is.”

Mr. Bannon’s opponents had long argued that he inflated his importance in White House debates and took more than his fair share of credit in plotting Mr. Trump’s victory. But he was someone with whom the president, for the most part, had long enjoyed spending time.

The two men, whose friendship was cemented during the two and a half months in which Mr. Bannon helped rescue Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign, reinforced each other’s rough-around-the-edges tendencies. Both could be gratuitously foul-mouthed, viciously cutting to their enemies and unapologetically politically incorrect. “Dude, he’s Archie Bunker,” Mr. Bannon would say with fondness when talking about Mr. Trump.

Mr. Bannon fed Mr. Trump’s paranoid streak and shared the president’s penchant for believing in conspiracies. He viewed not just intelligence agencies but most of government as stocked with a devious bureaucratic underbelly, the “deep state.” Mr. Trump, who has never worked in government, eagerly adopted that view.

Mr. Bannon was notorious for maintaining his own, shadowy presence within the White House. He would frequently skip meetings where policy was discussed, injecting his views into the process in other ways, according to two administration officials. He did not use a computer, preferring to have paper printed and handed to his assistant to stay outside the formal decision-making process.

Mr. Bannon favored a culture similar to the one Mr. Trump brought with him from the business world to the White House — a flat structure with blurred lines of responsibility and competing power centers. And early on Mr. Bannon benefited from that structure, sitting at the top, free to slip unvetted materials to the president without a gatekeeper to get past.

“Theoretically, a more coherent staff should produce a more coherent policy,” said David Axelrod, who was President Barack Obama’s senior adviser and the person in a comparable role to Mr. Bannon in the White House. “But that presupposes a president who embraces the process and the policy.”

With little process to speak of, tensions over policy swelled. Ideological differences devolved into caustic personality clashes. Perhaps nowhere was the mutual disgust thicker than between Mr. Bannon and Mr. Trump’s daughter and son-in-law.

Mr. Bannon openly complained to White House colleagues that he resented how Ms. Trump would try to undo some of the major policy initiatives that he and Mr. Trump agreed were important to the president’s economic nationalist agenda, like withdrawing from the Paris climate accords. In this sense, he was relieved when Mr. Kelly took over and put in place a structure that kept other aides from freelancing.

“Those days are over when Ivanka can run in and lay her head on the desk and cry,” he told multiple people.

Ms. Trump and Mr. Kushner, who had helped oust Mr. Kelly’s predecessor, whom they saw as ineffective, also told people that they wanted a new system for the same reason.

Mr. Bannon made little secret of the fact that he believed “Javanka,” as he referred to the couple behind their backs, had naïve political instincts and were going to alienate Mr. Trump’s core coalition of white working-class voters.

He told White House colleagues including the president that too many conservative Republicans in Congress would balk if Mr. Trump took their advice and showed more flexibility on immigration, particularly toward young undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children.

He also advised that ideological softening would buy the president no good will from Democrats or independent voters, whom Mr. Kushner and Ms. Trump believe Mr. Trump still has a chance of reaching.

“They hate the very mention of his name,” Mr. Bannon told them. “There is no constituency for this.”

His advice for the president: “You’ve got the base. And you grow the base by getting” things done.

Mr. Bannon’s disdain for General McMaster also accelerated his demise. The war veteran has never quite clicked with the president, but other West Wing staff members recoiled at a series of smears against General McMaster by internet allies of Mr. Bannon. The strategist denied involvement, but he also did not speak out against them.

By the time Charlottesville erupted, Mr. Kushner and Ms. Trump had a powerful ally in Mr. Kelly, who shared their belief that Mr. Trump’s first statement blaming “many sides” for the deadly violence needed to be amended.

Mr. Bannon vigorously objected. He told Mr. Kelly that if Mr. Trump delivered a second, more contrite statement it would do him no good, with either the public or the Washington press corps, which he denigrated as a “Pretorian guard” protecting the Democrats’ consensus that Mr. Trump is a race-baiting demagogue. Mr. Trump could grovel, beg for forgiveness, even get down on his knees; it would never work, Mr. Bannon maintained.

“They’re going to say two things: It’s too late and it’s not enough,” Mr. Bannon told Mr. Kelly.

In truth, long before Charlottesville, Mr. Trump had begun losing patience. The arrival of Mr. Kelly to play precisely the gatekeeping role that would stymie aides like Mr. Bannon hastened his departure.

The president believed that Mr. Bannon had been leaking unauthorized stories about infighting in the administration for months before he ultimately took action.

Mr. Trump was irritated by a book, “Devil’s Bargain,” that portrayed Mr. Bannon as a brilliant political Svengali but put Mr. Trump in a supporting role.

When one Trump ally noted to him recently that Mr. Bannon did help him at the end of the race, Mr. Trump interrupted, “You know, he came very late.”

The week of Aug. 7, Mr. Bannon suggested timing the departure to Aug. 14, which was a day after his one-year anniversary working for Mr. Trump on the campaign. It made sense to everyone.

Mr. Bannon’s physical appearance was crumbling, and his mood swings had become pronounced.

In late July, after a weekend with Robert Mercer, the hedge fund billionaire who finances some of his projects, Mr. Bannon told him, “I dread going back” to the White House.

But after Charlottesville, Mr. Bannon maintained that an Aug. 14 exit would look like part of the president’s response to the violence. He did not want that, and others were understanding. So they discussed moving the date to around Labor Day weekend, although two administration officials said Mr. Bannon sought to entirely renegotiate the terms of his departure.

Then came Mr. Bannon’s unguarded comments to The American Prospect, published on Wednesday evening. He denigrated some colleagues, specifically identified one that he was going to see fired and said of striking North Korea, “There’s no military solution here, they got us” — a direct contradiction to the message Mr. Trump had been sending. Mr. Bannon could buy no more time.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/20/us/p ... ml?mcubz=0


Steve Bannon’s Breitbart is already questioning Donald Trump’s mental health
By Bill Palmer
Updated: 10:33 pm EDT Sun Aug 20, 2017
Home » Politics

Well that escalated quickly. Donald Trump demonstrated just how afraid he was of Steve Bannon’s revenge when he spent yesterday tweeting platitudes about Bannon and his site Breitbart. This morning Bannon used Breitbart to harshly attack Trump’s National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, making clear that this divorce would be ugly. But now Breitbart is already going for the jugular, questioning Trump’s mental health.

That came in the form of a new article titled “CNN’s Stelter Questions Trump’s Mental Fitness — ‘Is He Suffering From Some Kind of Illness?’” Coming from Breitbart, one might expect the article to slam CNN for asking the question. But instead the article simply quotes Stelter’s on-air CNN segment at length, without offering any commentary or rebuttal of its own. In so doing, Breitbart is essentially using CNN as a prop for pushing the notion that Trump may have a mental illness.

It’s being done in once-removed fashion, and you won’t see it if you refuse to read between the lines, but it’s clearly there: Breitbart is questioning Donald Trump’s mental health. The dead giveaway is that 99% of the time, Breitbart is busy railing against networks like CNN for supposedly being “fake news” – yet in this instance, the Breitbart article didn’t demean or question CNN in any way. Considering that Breitbart is Bannon’s baby, and that he officially retook the reins the minute he was fired, there’s no way an article like this would be published on his site unless Bannon wanted it out there.

This comes just one day after Donald Trump had tweeted that Breitbart was real news and everyone else was fake news. Now Trump is stuck owning that, even as Breitbart pushes the premise that Trump might be mentally ill. Steve Bannon is wasting no time whatsoever in trying to turn Trump’s base against him. As per policy, we don’t like to Breitbart articles, but you’re free to google it.
http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/ba ... alth/4426/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Aug 22, 2017 7:56 am

OUTSIDE PISSING IN

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Steve Bannon’s Nationalism Is a Click-Scam Disguised as a Movement
Nationalists and populists rise from moments where the temptations to abandon principle, policy, and that harder work of ethical governance is too strong.

Rick Wilson
RICK WILSON
08.21.17 11:20 PM ET
Steve Bannon’s departure from the White House was marked by a sense of relief on the part official Washington for about 10 blissful seconds.
Then the realization that Bannon’s liver-spotted hands were back on the controls of Robert Mercer’s pet alt-right propaganda organ hit them, and that bliss turned to despair. Before the White House door could hit Bannon on the backside, he was gleefully capering like a crusty leprechaun that he “had his hands on his weapons” again, and that he’d soon turn his fire on the real enemies of nationalist populism—Republicans and the broadly defined Establishment.
In Bannonism, fights matter more than ideas or accomplishments. The Bannonites aren’t really looking to do anything. They’re looking to be something, and that something is the political equivalent of a surly resident of the local monkey cage, screeching, baring its teeth, and throwing its feces at passersby. The promises of nationalist populism that helped Trump win over disaffected voters are well-known—the swift construction of the wall, mass deportations, torn-up trade deals, and the re-emergence of the economy of the 1950s.

Those promises are increasingly remote, and it’s largely Trump’s fault, but it won’t stop Steve Bannon and his allies from waging a furious blamestorming war against the GOP.
The two dirty secrets of nationalist populism are increasingly obvious. First, it’s not conservative; not even a little. All the fantasies of Trump-Bannon nationalism require a vastly expanded state, with greater powers over the economy and society. Free-market capitalism doesn’t pick economic winners and losers based on the president’s economic nostalgia, and limited-government conservatism isn’t marked a top-down ideological conformity strictly enforced by state media organs.
Second, nationalist populism isn’t a political philosophy or a real governing framework. It’s a con targeting the furious and the febrile, a Facebook click scam disguised as a movement. It’s nothing more than grunting, economically ignorant revanchism against a catalog of imaginary, opera-buffa villains. It requires a constantly expanding catalog of people to blame for an economy that changed more due to technology than a sinister cabal of brown people from faraway lands.

Trump and Kelly dumped Bannon because he was a danger to the presidency. They took the chance that Bannon “outside the tent pissing in” would be less dangerous than allowing him to continue to roam the White House as a free agent, and they might have done so for a simple reason; Steve Bannon’s power was contingent on a conservative media ecosystem that tightly bound Breitbart, Bannon, Fox, Rush, and the other pilot fish of the clickservative media. Their full-throttle amplification of Bannon’s desire to ensure the dismissal of H.R. McMaster as national security adviser didn’t work. Bannon lost battle after battle on trade policy, national security, and immigration. Kelly fired him because the Axis of Adults knew they could, even if it would have only a limited effect, and that Trump would still keep Bannon in his orbit.

Bannon’s removal from the White House doesn’t change Trump. Trump still wakes up every day, an addict for adulation, praise, and worship. Bannon knows Trump’s deep, abiding paranoia and fear never recedes, and that the black hole of his desperate ego is never filled. He knows Trump’s behavior will always prevent him from finding the praise and adoration he needs from the American media and the vast majority of the public.
Bannon knows the drug Trump craves, and it’s a heady speedball of adulation and attention. So Breitbart will give Trump more than Fox and Friends and Sean Hannity can. Bannon will give him the lavish, absurdly overwrought praise about being a hero of the nationalist movement. Trump will never be the subject of their vitriol. He’ll be the damsel in distress, and Steve will be his white knight.
All it will cost Trump is the constant headache of having Breitbart and the constellation of alt-right-friendly news sites wage a never-ending war on Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Gary Cohn, H.R. McMaster, John Kelly, and anyone else in Trump’s orbit deemed insufficiently terrified of an imaginary tidal wave either Muslims, Mexicans—or, dear God don’t tell Alex Jones—Muslim Mexicans coming to rape our women, take our jobs, and operate dangerously appealing food trucks. All it will cost is a wink-and-a-nod: “I’m not saying globalist has to mean ‘Jew’ but ‘Goldman? Sachs?’...who are they kidding?”
At varying historical inflection points, nationalists and populists rise from economic depressions, post-war funks, and other moments where the temptations to abandon principle, policy, and that harder work of ethical governance is too strong. That’s when man meets mob, and the People’s Bully, the swaggering authority figure who promises “I am the only one who can fix this” finds people ready to take to the streets.
We’ve seen how the nationalism movie ends in Europe and beyond, particularly when it gets into the racial, ethnic, and religious division so favored by the president’s alt-right allies. It’s not just Europe; after the Rwandan genocide that cost the lives of more than a half-million members of the Tutsi minority group, the nation’s Truth and Reconciliation commission looked at how the Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) propaganda network was used to sow the seeds of the genocide.

Their report called the RTLM broadcasts, “... a drumbeat calling on listeners to take action against Tutsis. RTLM spread petrol throughout the country little by little, so that one day it would be able to set fire to the whole country.”
It’s not that Bannon is genocidal. It’s that populist movements and moments tend to devolve into a singular “us vs. them” equation. It’s that the people who are susceptible to the seductions of angry nationalism at the hands of men like Trump and Bannon move from disgruntled and disaffected to furious and fanatic more easily and dangerously than the propagandists driving them understand.http://www.thedailybeast.com/steve-bann ... ia=desktop



More from Brietbart: “America-First base unhappy with flip-flop Afghanistan speech.
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Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby Iamwhomiam » Fri Aug 25, 2017 10:48 pm

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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby conniption » Wed Sep 13, 2017 10:08 pm

60 Minutes: Steve Bannon's - The Full Interview - Steve Bannon's 9/10/2017

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5tsaN1Grhg
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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby 8bitagent » Thu Sep 14, 2017 5:51 am

Shouldn't this thread be called "The Festering Puss that is Steve Bannon's Face?" Seriously, wtf is wrong with his face? Also fucking hilarious he's using Breitbart to completely turn on Donald Trump.
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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby 8bitagent » Thu Sep 14, 2017 5:52 am

Watching Ann Coulter, Bannon and the alt right rats jumping Team Trump after he sold out to Pelosi and Schumer be like
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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Oct 05, 2017 6:19 pm

Really looking forward to seeing Milo's response on Twitter to the BuzzFeed article.

Oh. Wait.


Rick Wilson @TheRickWilson
The BuzzFeed article is important: very clear Mercer is the food source for all of the cancerous shit Steve Bannon vomits out, incl Milo.
5:56 PM · Oct 5, 2017


Here's How Breitbart And Milo Smuggled Nazi and White Nationalist Ideas Into The Mainstream
A cache of documents obtained by BuzzFeed News reveals the truth about Steve Bannon’s alt-right “killing machine.”

Posted on October 5, 2017, at 3:28 p.m.

Joseph Bernstein
BuzzFeed News Reporter

In August, after a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville ended in murder, Steve Bannon insisted that "there's no room in American society" for neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, and the KKK.

But an explosive cache of documents obtained by BuzzFeed News proves that there was plenty of room for those voices on his website.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, under Bannon’s leadership, Breitbart courted the alt-right — the insurgent, racist right-wing movement that helped sweep Donald Trump to power. The former White House chief strategist famously remarked that he wanted Breitbart to be “the platform for the alt-right.”
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Milo Yiannopoulos at the University of California, Berkeley, on September 24.
Josh Edelson / AFP / Getty Images
Milo Yiannopoulos at the University of California, Berkeley, on September 24.
The Breitbart employee closest to the alt-right was Milo Yiannopoulos, the site’s former tech editor known best for his outrageous public provocations, such as last year’s Dangerous Faggot speaking tour and September’s canceled Free Speech Week in Berkeley. For more than a year, Yiannopoulos led the site in a coy dance around the movement’s nastier edges, writing stories that minimized the role of neo-Nazis and white nationalists while giving its politer voices “a fair hearing.” In March, Breitbart editor Alex Marlow insisted “we’re not a hate site.” Breitbart’s media relations staff repeatedly threatened to sue outlets that described Yiannopoulos as racist. And after the violent white supremacist protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, Breitbart published an article explaining that when Bannon said the site welcomed the alt-right, he was merely referring to “computer gamers and blue-collar voters who hated the GOP brand.”

These new emails and documents, however, clearly show that Breitbart does more than tolerate the most hate-filled, racist voices of the alt-right. It thrives on them, fueling and being fueled by some of the most toxic beliefs on the political spectrum — and clearing the way for them to enter the American mainstream.

It’s a relationship illustrated most starkly by a previously unreleased April 2016 video in which Yiannopoulos sings “America the Beautiful” in a Dallas karaoke bar as admirers, including the white nationalist Richard Spencer, raise their arms in Nazi salutes.

These documents chart the Breitbart alt-right universe. They reveal how the website — and, in particular, Yiannopoulos — links the Mercer family, the billionaires who fund Breitbart, to underpaid trolls who fill it with provocative content, and to extremists striving to create a white ethnostate.

They capture what Bannon calls his “killing machine” in action, as it dredges up the resentments of people around the world, sifts through these grievances for ideas and content, and propels them from the unsavory parts of the internet up to TrumpWorld, collecting advertisers’ checks all along the way.

And the cache of emails — some of the most newsworthy of which BuzzFeed News is now making public — expose the extent to which this machine depended on Yiannopoulos, who channeled voices both inside and outside the establishment into a clear narrative about the threat liberal discourse posed to America. The emails tell the story of Steve Bannon’s grand plan for Yiannopoulos, whom the Breitbart executive chairman transformed from a charismatic young editor into a conservative media star capable of magnetizing a new generation of reactionary anger. Often, the documents reveal, this anger came from a legion of secret sympathizers in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, academia, suburbia, and everywhere in between.

"I have said in the past that I find humor in breaking taboos and laughing at things that people tell me are forbidden to joke about," Yiannopoulos wrote in a statement to BuzzFeed News. "But everyone who knows me also knows I'm not a racist. As someone of Jewish ancestry, I of course condemn racism in the strongest possible terms. I have stopped making jokes on these matters because I do not want any confusion on this subject. I disavow Richard Spencer and his entire sorry band of idiots. I have been and am a steadfast supporter of Jews and Israel. I disavow white nationalism and I disavow racism and I always have.”

He added that during his karaoke performance, his "severe myopia" made it impossible for him to see the Hitler salutes a few feet away.

Steve Bannon, the other Breitbart employees named in the story, and the Mercer family did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Like all the new media success stories, Breitbart’s alt-right platform depends on the participation of its audience. It combusts the often secret fury of those who reject liberal norms into news, and it doesn’t burn clean.

Now Bannon is back at the controls of the machine, which he has said he is “revving up.” The Mercers have funded Yiannopoulos's post-Breitbart venture. And these documents present the clearest look at what these people may have in store for America.
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Protesters at a white supremacist rally at the University of Virginia on August 11.
Nurphoto / Getty Images

A year and a half ago, Milo Yiannopoulos set himself a difficult task: to define the alt-right. It was five months before Hillary Clinton named the alt-right in a campaign speech, 10 months before the alt-right’s great hope became president, and 17 months before Charlottesville clinched the alt-right as a stalking horse for violent white nationalism. The movement had just begun its explosive emergence into the country’s politics and culture.

At the time, Yiannopoulos, who would later describe himself as a “fellow traveler” of the alt-right, was the tech editor of Breitbart. In summer 2015, after spending a year gathering momentum through GamerGate — the opening salvo of the new culture wars — he convinced Breitbart upper management to give him his own section. And for four months, he helped Bannon wage what the Breitbart boss called in emails to staff “#war.” It was a war, fought story by story, against the perceived forces of liberal activism on every conceivable battleground in American life.

Yiannopoulos was a useful soldier whose very public identity as a gay man (one who has now married a black man) helped defend him, his anti-political correctness crusade, and his employer from charges of bigotry.

But now Yiannopoulos had a more complicated fight on his hands. The left — and worse, some on the right — had started to condemn the new conservative energy as reactionary and racist. Yiannopoulos had to take back “alt-right,” to redefine for Breitbart’s audience a poorly understood, leaderless movement, parts of which had already started to resist the term itself.

So he reached out to key constituents, who included a neo-Nazi and a white nationalist.

“Finally doing my big feature on the alt right,” Yiannopoulos wrote in a March 9, 2016, email to Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer, a hacker who is the system administrator of the neo-Nazi hub the Daily Stormer, and who would later ask his followers to disrupt the funeral of Charlottesville victim Heather Heyer. “Fancy braindumping some thoughts for me.”

“It’s time for me to do my big definitive guide to the alt right,” Yiannopoulos wrote four hours later to Curtis Yarvin, a software engineer who under the nom de plume Mencius Moldbug helped create the “neoreactionary” movement, which holds that Enlightenment democracy has failed and that a return to feudalism and authoritarian rule is in order. “Which is my whorish way of asking if you have anything you’d like to make sure I include.”

“Alt r feature, figured you’d have some thoughts,” Yiannopoulos wrote the same day to Devin Saucier, who helps edit the online white nationalist magazine American Renaissance under the pseudonym Henry Wolff, and who wrote a story in June 2017 called “Why I Am (Among Other Things) a White Nationalist.”

The three responded at length: Weev about the Daily Stormer and a podcast called The Daily Shoah, Yarvin in characteristically sweeping world-historical assertions (“It’s no secret that North America contains many distinct cultural/ethnic communities. This is not optimal, but with a competent king it’s not a huge problem either”), and Saucier with a list of thinkers, politicians, journalists, films (Dune, Mad Max, The Dark Knight), and musical genres (folk metal, martial industrial, ’80s synthpop) important to the movement. Yiannopoulos forwarded it all, along with the Wikipedia entries for “Alternative Right” and the esoteric far-right Italian philosopher Julius Evola — a major influence on 20th-century Italian fascists and Richard Spencer alike — to Allum Bokhari, his deputy and frequent ghostwriter, whom he had met during GamerGate. “Include a bit of everything,” he instructed Bokhari.

“Bannon, as you probably know, is sympathetic to much of it.”
“I think you’ll like what I’m cooking up,” Yiannopoulos wrote to Saucier, the American Renaissance editor.

“I look forward to it,” Saucier replied. “Bannon, as you probably know, is sympathetic to much of it.”

Five days later Bokhari returned a 3,000-word draft, a taxonomy of the movement titled “ALT-RIGHT BEHEMOTH.” It included a little bit of everything: the brains and their influences (Yarvin and Evola, etc.), the “natural conservatives” (people who think different ethnic groups should stay separate for scientific reasons), the “Meme team” (4chan and 8chan), and the actual hatemongers. Of the last group, Bokhari wrote: “There’s just not very many of them, no-one really likes them, and they’re unlikely to achieve anything significant in the alt-right.”

“Magnificent start,” Yiannopoulos responded.
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Alamy; Getty Images (2); Gage Skidmore, Cardsplayer4life, Weev, BIM, Tracy White / Wikimedia; YouTube (2)
Over the next three days, Yiannopoulos passed the article back to Yarvin and the white nationalist Saucier, the latter of whom gave line-by-line annotations. He also sent it to Vox Day, a writer who was expelled from the board of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America for calling a black writer an “ignorant savage,” and to Alex Marlow, the editor of Breitbart.

“Solid, fair, and fairly comprehensive,” Vox Day responded, with a few suggestions.

“Most of it is great but I don’t want to rush a major long form piece like this,” Marlow wrote back. “A few people will need to weigh in since it deals heavily with race.”

“Truthfully management is very edgy on this one (They love it but it’s racially charged)”
Also, there was another sensitive issue to be raised: credit. “Allum did most of the work on this and wants joint [byline] but I want the glory here,” Yiannopoulos wrote back to Marlow. “I am telling him you said it’s sensitive and want my byline alone on it.”

Minutes later, Yiannopoulos emailed Bokhari. “I was going to have Marlow collude with me … about the byline on the alt right thing because I want to take it solo. Will you hate me too much if I do that? … Truthfully management is very edgy on this one (They love it but it’s racially charged) and they would prefer it.”

“Will management definitely say no if it’s both of us?” Bokhari responded. “I think it actually lowers the risk if someone with a brown-sounding name shares the BL.”

Five days later, March 22nd, Marlow returned with comments. He suggested that the story should show in more detail how Yiannopoulos and most of the alt-right rejected the actual neo-Nazis in the movement. And he added that Taki's Magazine and VDare, two publications Yiannopoulos and Bokhari identified as part of the alt-right, “are both racist. … We should disclaimer that or strike that part of the history from the article.” (The published story added, in the passive voice, “All of these websites have been accused of racism.”) Again the story went back to Bokhari, who on the 24th sent Yiannopoulos still another draft, with the subject head “ALT RIGHT, MEIN FUHRER.”

On the 27th, now co-bylined, the story was ready for upper management: Bannon and Larry Solov, Breitbart’s press-shy CEO. It was also ready, on a separate email chain, for another read and round of comments from the white nationalist Saucier, the feudalist Yarvin, the neo-Nazi Weev, and Vox Day.

“I need to go thru this tomorrow in depth…although I do appreciate any piece that mentions evola,” Bannon wrote. On the 29th, in an email titled “steve wants you to read this,” Marlow sent Yiannopoulos a list of edits and notes Bannon had solicited from James Pinkerton, a former Reagan and George H.W. Bush staffer and a contributing editor of the American Conservative. The 59-year-old Pinkerton was put off by a cartoon of Pepe the Frog conducting the Trump Train.

“I love art,” he wrote inline. “I think [Breitbart News Network] needs a lot more of it, but I don’t get the above. Frogs? Kermit? Am I missing something here?”

Later that day, Breitbart published “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right.” It quickly became a touchstone, cited in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker, CNN, and New York Magazine, among others. And its influence is still being felt. This past July, in a speech in Warsaw that was celebrated by the alt-right, President Trump echoed a line from the story — a story written by a “brown-sounding” amanuensis, all but line-edited by a white nationalist, laundered for racism by Breitbart’s editors, and supervised by the man who would in short order become the president’s chief strategist.

The machine had worked well.

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It hadn’t always been so easy.

The previous November, Yiannopoulos emailed Bannon with a bone to pick. Breitbart London reported that a London college student behind a popular social justice hashtag had threatened the anti-Islam activist Pamela Geller.

“The story is horseshit and we should never have published it,” Yiannopoulos wrote. “Reckless and stupid. … Strongly recommend we pull. it’s insanely defamatory. I spoke to pamela geller and even she said it was rubbish. We’re outright lying about this girl and surely we’re better than that. We can and should win by telling the truth.”

Six minutes later, Bannon wrote back to his tech editor in a fury. “Your [sic] full of shit. When I need your advice on anything I will ask. ... The tech site is a total clusterfuck---meaningless stories written by juveniles. You don’t have a clue how to build a company or what real content is. And you don’t have long to figure it out or your [sic] gone. … You are magenalia [sic].”

(Geller clarified to BuzzFeed News in a statement that she believed it was "rubbish" that the London university characterized the threats against her as "fake.")

"Dude—we r in a global existentialist war where our enemy EXISTS in social media and u r jerking yourself off w/ marginalia!!!!"
On December 8, the New York Times published a major story about the radicalization of American Muslims on Facebook. Yiannopoulos published a story called “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy.”

That afternoon, Bannon emailed Yiannopoulos and Marlow.

“Dude---we r in a global existentialist war where our enemy EXISTS in social media and u r jerking yourself off w/ marginalia!!!! U should be OWNING this conversation because u r everything they hate!!! Drop your toys, pick up your tools and go help save western civilization.”

“Message received,” Yiannopoulos wrote back. “I will do a Week of Islam next week.”

“U don’t need that,” Bannon responded. “Just get in the fight---ur Social Media and they have made it a powerful weapon of war. … There is no war correspondent in the west yet dude and u can own it and be remember for 3 generations--or sit around wasting your God-given talents jerking off to your fan base.”

Over the next several months, Yiannopoulos began to find the right targets. First it was a continued attack on Shaun King, the writer and Black Lives Matter activist whose ethnicity Yiannopoulos had called into question. Next it was then–Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who Bannon called in an email to Yiannopoulos the “poster child for the narcissistic ecosystem.”

And increasingly it was enemies of Donald Trump. In response to a Yiannopoulos pitch accusing a prominent Republican opponent of Trump of being a pill-popper, Bannon wrote: “Dude!!! LMAO! … Epic.” And Bannon signed off on an April story by Yiannopoulos imploring #NeverTrumpers to get on board with “Trump and the alt-right.” (Bannon did, however, veto making it the lead story on the site, writing to Yiannopoulos and Marlow, “Looks like we have our thumb on the scale.”)

Why was Bannon so concerned with the focus of his tech editor’s energies? In a February email exchange before Yiannopoulos appeared on Greg Gutfeld’s Sunday Fox News show, Bannon wrote, “Gutfeld should become an object lesson for u. Brilliant cultural commentator who really got pop culture, the hipster scene and advant [sic] garde….got on fox and tried to become a political pundit...lost all credibility. … You r one of the potential heirs to his cultural leadership so act according.” Bannon was grooming the younger man for something greater.

In May, Bannon invited Yiannopoulos to Cannes for a week for the film festival. “Want to discuss tv and film with u,” he wrote in an email. “U get to meet my partners, hang on the boat and discuss business.”

Phil Robertson at the 42nd annual Conservative Political Action Conference at the Gaylord National Resort Hotel and Convention Center on February 27, 2015, in National Harbor, Maryland.
Kris Connor / Getty Images
Phil Robertson at the 42nd annual Conservative Political Action Conference at the Gaylord National Resort Hotel and Convention Center on February 27, 2015, in National Harbor, Maryland.
The boat was the Sea Owl, a 200-foot yacht owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, who is a major funder of Breitbart and various other far-right enterprises. That week, Yiannopoulos shuttled back and forth from the Cannes Palace Hotel to the pier next to the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès and the green-sterned, “fantasy-inspired” vessel complete with a Dale Chihuly chandelier. The Mercers were in town to promote Clinton Cash, a film produced by Bannon and their production studio, Glittering Steel. On board, Yiannopoulos drank, mingled, and interviewed Phil Robertson, the lavishly bearded patriarch of Duck Dynasty, for his podcast.

“I know how lucky I am,” Yiannopoulos wrote to Bannon on May 20. “I’m going to work hard to make you some money -- and win the war! Thanks for having me this week and for the faith you’re placing in me chief. The left won’t know what hit them.”

“U just focus on being who u are-- we will put a top level team around u,” Bannon wrote back. “#war.”
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Getty Images (3); YouTube
On July 22, 2016, Rebekah Mercer — Robert’s powerful daughter — emailed Steve Bannon from her Stanford alumni account. She wanted the Breitbart executive chairman, whom she introduced as “one of the greatest living defenders of Liberty,” to meet an app developer she knew. Apple had rejected the man’s game (Capitol HillAwry, in which players delete emails à la Hillary Clinton) from the App Store, and the younger Mercer wondered “if we could put an article up detailing his 1st amendment political persecution.”

Bannon passed the request from Mercer to Yiannopoulos. Yiannopoulos passed it to Charlie Nash, an 18-year-old Englishman whom he had met at a conference of the populist right-wing UK Independence Party conference the previous year, and who started working as his intern immediately after. Like some bleach-blonde messiah of anti–political correctness, Yiannopoulos tended to draw in ideologically sympathetic young men at conferences, campus speeches, and on social media, accumulating more and more acolytes as he went along.

In June 2015 it was Ben Kew, who invited Yiannopoulos to speak at the University of Bristol, where he was a student; he’s now a staff writer for Breitbart. In September 2015 it was Tom Ciccotta, the treasurer of the class of 2017 at Bucknell University, who still writes for Breitbart. In February 2016 it was Hunter Swogger, a University of Michigan student and then the editor of the conservative Michigan Review, whom Yiannopoulos cultivated and brought on as a social media specialist during his Dangerous Faggot tour. Yiannopoulos called these young researchers his “trufflehounds.”

Nash, who had just been hired by Breitbart at $30,000 a year after months of lobbying by Yiannopoulos, dutifully fielded the request from the billionaire indirectly paying his salary and turned around a story about the rejected Capitol HillAwry app on the 25th — and a follow-up five days later after Apple reversed its decision.

“Huge victory,” Bannon emailed after the reversal. “Huge win.”

This was the usual way stories came in from the Mercers, according to a former Breitbart editor: with a request from Bannon referring to “our investors” or “our investing partners.”

After Cannes, as Bannon pushed Yiannopoulos to do more live events that presented expensive logistical challenges, the involvement of the investing partners became increasingly obvious. Following a May event at DePaul University in Chicago in which Black Lives Matter protesters stormed a Yiannopoulos speech, he wrote to Bannon, “I wouldn’t confess this to anyone publicly, of course, but I was worried ... last night that I was going to get punched or worse. ... I need one or two people of my own.”

“Btw they are ALL ‘factories of hate.’”
“Agree 100%,” Bannon wrote. “We want you to stir up more. Milo: for your eyes only we r going to use the mercers private security company.”

Copied on the email was Dan Fleuette, Bannon’s coproducer at Glittering Steel and the man who acted for months as the go-between for Yiannopoulos and the Mercers. As Yiannopoulos made the transition in summer 2016 from being a writer to becoming largely the star of a traveling stage show, Fleuette was enlisted to process and wrangle the legion of young assistants, managers, trainers, and other talent the Breitbart tech editor demanded be brought along for the ride.

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Getty Images (4); YouTube (6); Reuters
First came Tim Gionet, the former BuzzFeed social media strategist who goes by “Baked Alaska” on Twitter, whom Yiannopoulos pitched to Fleuette as a tour manager in late May. Gionet accompanied Yiannopoulos to Florida after the June 2016 Pulse nightclub killings in Orlando. The two planned a press conference outside a mosque attended by the shooter, Omar Mateen. (“Brilliant,” Bannon emailed. “Btw they are ALL ‘factories of hate.’”) But after some impertinent tweets and back talk from Gionet, Fleuette became Yiannopoulos’s managerial confidante.

“He needs to understand that ‘Baked Alaska’ is over,” Yiannopoulos wrote in one email to Fleuette. “He is not a friend he is an employee. … He is becoming a laughing stock and that reflects badly on me.” In another, “I think we need to replace Tim. … [He] has no news judgment or understanding of what’s dangerous (thinks tweets about Jews are just fine). … He seems more interested in his career as an obscure Twitter personality than my tour manager.”

At the Republican National Convention, Yiannopoulos deliberately chose a hotel for Gionet far from the convention center, writing to another Breitbart employee, “Exactly where I want him. … He needs the commute to remind him of his place.”

Gionet did not respond to multiple requests by BuzzFeed News for comment.

“He needs the commute to remind him of his place.”
But Gionet, who would go on to march with the alt-right in Charlottesville, was still useful to Yiannopoulos as a gateway to a group of young, hip, social media–savvy Trump supporters.

Yiannopoulos managed all of his assistants and ghostwriters under his own umbrella, using “yiannopoulos.net” emails and private Slack rooms. This structure insulated Breitbart’s upper management from the 4chan savants and GamerGate vets working for Yiannopoulos. And it gave Yiannopoulos a staff loyal to him above Breitbart. (Indeed, Yiannopoulos shopped a separate “Team Milo” section to Dow Jones, which publishes the Wall Street Journal, in July 2016.)

It also sometimes led to extraordinarily fraught organizational and personal dynamics. Take Allum Bokhari, the Oxford-educated former political consultant whom Yiannopoulos rewarded for his years of grunt work with a $100,000 ghostwriting contract for his book Dangerous.

But the men were spying on each other.

In April 2016, Yiannopoulos asked Bokhari for “a complete list of the email, social media, bank accounts, and any other system and services of mine you have been accessing, and how long you’ve had access.” Bokhari confessed to having logged into Yiannopoulos’s email and Slack, and had used Yiannopoulos’s credit card for an Airbnb, a confession Yiannopoulos quickly passed on to Larry Solov, the Breitbart CEO.

“My basic position is that he is not stable and needs to be far away from me,” Yiannopoulos wrote to Marlow and Solov.

Meanwhile, Yiannopoulos had compiled a transcript of what he called “a short section of 30 hours of recording down on paper,” which appeared to be of conversations between Bokhari and a friend.

The newcomers brought in by Gionet weren’t much better behaved. Yiannopoulos had to boot one prospective member of his “tour squad” for posting cocaine use on Snapchat. Mike Mahoney, a then–20-year-old from North Carolina, had to be monitored because of his propensity for racism and anti-Semitism on social media. (Mahoney was later banned from Twitter, but he’s relocated to Gab, a free speech uber alles social network where he is free to post messages such as “reminder: muslims are fags.”)

“Let me know if there’s anything specific that’s really bad eg any Jew stuff,” Yiannopoulos wrote of Mahoney in an email to another member of his staff. “His entire Twitter persona will have to change dramatically once he gets the job.” On September 11, 2016, Mahoney signed a $2,500-a-month contract with Glittering Steel.

As the Dangerous Faggot tour swung into gear, Yiannopoulos grew increasingly hostile toward Fleuette, whom he excoriated for late payments to his young crew, lack of support, and disorganization. “The entire tour staff is demanding money,” Yiannopoulos wrote in one email to Fleuette in October. “No one knows or cares who Glittering Steel is but this represents a significantly damaging risk to my reputation if it gets out.” And in another, “Your problem right now is keeping me happy."

Yet ultimately Fleuette was necessary — he connected Yiannopoulos’s madcap world and the massively rich people funding the machine.

“I think you know who the final decision belongs to,” Fleuette wrote to Yiannopoulos after one particularly frantic request for money. “I am in daily communication with them.”
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Yiannopoulos holds a press conference down the street from Orlando's Pulse Nightclub on June 15, 2016, two days after the shooting that killed 49 people and injured 53.
Drew Angerer / Getty Images
Yiannopoulos holds a press conference down the street from Orlando's Pulse Nightclub on June 15, 2016, two days after the shooting that killed 49 people and injured 53.
Yiannopoulos’s star rose throughout 2016 thanks to a succession of controversial public appearances, social media conflagrations, Breitbart radio spots, television hits, and magazine profiles. Bannon’s guidance, the Mercers’ patronage, and the creative energy of his young staff had come together at exactly the time Donald Trump turned offensive speech into a defining issue in American culture. And for thousands of people, Yiannopoulos, Breitbart’s poster child for offensive speech, became a secret champion.

Aggrieved by the encroachment of so-called cultural Marxism into American public life, and egged on by an endless stream of stories on Fox News about safe spaces and racially charged campus confrontations, a diverse group of Americans took to Yiannopoulos’s inbox to thank him and to confess their fears about the future of the country.

He heard from ancient veterans who “binge-watched” his speeches on YouTube; from “a 58 year old asian woman” concerned about her high school daughter’s progressive teachers; from boys asking how to win classroom arguments against feminists; from a former NASA employee who said he had been “laid off by my fat female boss” and was sad that the Jet Propulsion Lab had become “completely cucked”; from a man who had bought his 11-year-old son an AR-15 and named it “Milo”; from an Indiana lesbian who said she “despised liberals” and begged Yiannopoulos to “keep triggering the special snowflakes”; from a doctoral student in philosophy who said he had been threatened with dismissal from his program for sharing his low opinion of Islam; from a Charlotte police officer thanking Yiannopoulos for his “common sense Facebook posts” about the shooting of Keith Lamont Scott (“BLUE LIVES MATTER,” Yiannopoulos responded); from a New Jersey school teacher who feared his students would become “pawns for the left social justice campaign”; from a man who said he had returned from a deployment in “an Islamic country” to discover that his wife was transitioning and wanted a divorce (subject line “Regressivism stole my wife”); from a father terrified his daughter might attend Smith College; from fans who wanted to give him jokes to use about fat people, about gay people, about Muslims, about Hillary Clinton.

He also heard, with frequency, from accomplished people in predominantly liberal industries — entertainment, tech, academia, fashion, and media — who resented what they felt was a censorious coastal cultural orthodoxy. Taken together, they represent something like a network of sleeper James Damores, vexed but silent for fear of losing their jobs or friends, kvetching to Yiannopoulos as a pressure valve. For Yiannopoulos, these emails weren’t just validation, though they were obviously that. They sometimes became more ammunition for the culture war.

“I’m a relatively recent ex-lefty who received deep liberal indoctrination via elite private schools (Yale and Andover),” wrote one film editor who introduced herself as an “Undercover ‘pede in Hollywood." (“Centipede” is slang for an online Trump supporter.) “I’ve been deeply closeted thus far due to the severe personal and professional repercussions of not beating the progressive drum.”

In an email titled “Working for E! Is Hell,” a production manager at the cable network wrote Yiannopoulos that her employer was a “contributor to the fake news machine and my colleagues have become insufferable. … I … offer you my services … a partner in fighting globalism.”

And Adam Grandmaison, whom Rolling Stone described as “underground hip-hop’s major tastemaker,” reached out to Yiannopoulos to suggest he investigate a journalist who had accused her ex-boyfriend of physical abuse.

In an email to BuzzFeed News, Grandmaison wrote that he was merely voicing concern about a black man being judged by the media, and that "I didn't intend for [Milo] to write about it." (Grandmaison's email to Yiannopoulos began "first off i absolutely do not want credit for tipping you off to this.")

Even more tips came in from tech workers.

A Google employee sent Yiannopoulos a picture of a cartoon gingerbread man named “Gogy, the Googely Googler” that had been posted by a coffee machine to remind employees to tidy up. According to the Google employee, the sign had turned into an HR problem after employees were angered that Gogy was identified as male.

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A Google spokesperson told BuzzFeed News the company has no record of Gogy or any related HR complaint.

A Twitter software engineer who felt betrayed by the “moral company” he had worked for since 2012, when it “stood for free speech,” emailed to tell Yiannopoulos that the removal of his verification in early 2016 “was obviously politically motivated.”

And some of these disgruntled tech workers reached beyond the rank and file. Vivek Wadhwa, a prominent entrepreneur and academic, reached out repeatedly to Yiannopoulos with stories of what he considered out-of-control political correctness. First it was about a boycott campaign against a Kickstarter with connections to GamerGate. (“These people are truly crazy and destructive. … What horrible people,” wrote Wadwha of the campaigners.) Then it was about Y-Combinator cofounder Paul Graham; Wadwha felt Graham was being unfairly targeted for an essay he wrote about gender inequality in tech.

“Political correctness has gone too far,” Wadhwa wrote. “The alternative is communism — not equality. And that is a failed system…” Yiannopoulos passed Wadhwa’s email to Bokhari, who promptly ghostwrote a story for Breitbart, “Social Justice Warrior Knives Out For Startup Guru Paul Graham.”

Wadwha told BuzzFeed News that he no longer supports Yiannopoulos.

"No gays rule doesn’t apply to Thiel apparently."
Yiannopoulos also had a private relationship with the venture capitalist Peter Thiel, though he was more circumspect than some other correspondents. After turning down an appearance on Yiannopoulos’s podcast in May 2016 (Thiel: “Let’s just get coffee and take things from there”), Thiel invited the Breitbart tech editor for dinner at his Hollywood Hills home in June, a dinner Yiannopoulos boasted of the same night to Bannon: “You two should meet. … An obvious candidate for movie financing if we got external. … He has fucked [Gawker Media founder Nick] Denton & Gawker so many ways it brought a tear to my eye.” They made plans to meet during the July Republican National Convention. But much of Yiannopoulos’s knowledge of Thiel seemed to come secondhand from other right-wing activists, as well as Curtis Yarvin, the blogger who advocates the return of feudalism. In an email exchange shortly after the election, Yarvin told Yiannopoulos that he had been “coaching Thiel.”

“Peter needs guidance on politics for sure,” Yiannopoulos responded.

“Less than you might think!” Yarvin wrote back. “I watched the election at his house, I think my hangover lasted into Tuesday. He’s fully enlightened, just plays it very carefully.”

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Getty Images (2); BIL / Wikimedia
And Yiannopoulos vented privately after Thiel spoke at the RNC — an opportunity the younger man had craved. “No gays rule doesn’t apply to Thiel apparently,” he wrote to a prominent Republican operative in July 2016.

Thiel declined to comment for the story.

In addition to tech and entertainment, Yiannopoulos had hidden helpers in the liberal media against which he and Bannon fought so uncompromisingly. A long-running email group devoted to mocking stories about the social justice internet included, predictably, Yiannopoulos’s friend Ann Coulter, but also Mitchell Sunderland, a senior staff writer at Broadly, Vice’s women’s channel. According to its “About” page, Broadly “is devoted to representing the multiplicity of women's experiences. … we provide a sustained focus on the issues that matter most to women.”

“Please mock this fat feminist,” Sunderland wrote to Yiannopoulos in May 2016, along with a link to an article by the New York Times columnist Lindy West, who frequently writes about fat acceptance. And while Sunderland was Broadly’s managing editor, he sent a Broadly video about the Satanic Temple and abortion rights to Tim Gionet with instructions to “do whatever with this on Breitbart. It’s insane.” The next day, Breitbart published an article titled “‘Satanic Temple’ Joins Planned Parenthood in Pro-Abortion Crusade.”

In a statement to BuzzFeed News, a Vice spokesperson wrote, "We are shocked and disappointed by this highly inappropriate and unprofessional conduct. We just learned about this and have begun a formal review into the matter."

Dan Lyons, the veteran tech reporter and editor who also worked for nearly two years on HBO’s Silicon Valley, emailed Yiannopoulos (“my little troublemaker”) periodically to wonder about the birth sex of Zoë Quinn, another GamerGate target, and Amber Discko, the founder of the feminist website Femsplain, and to suggest a story about the public treatment of the venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, who had been accused of sexual assault in a lawsuit that the plaintiff eventually dropped.
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And the former Slate technology writer David Auerbach, who once began a column “Gamergate must end as soon as possible,” passed along on background information about the love life of Anita Sarkeesian, the GamerGate target; “the goods” about an allegedly racist friend of Arthur Chu, the Jeopardy champion and frequent advocate of social justice causes; and a “hot tip” about harsh anti-harassment tactics implemented by Wikipedia. Bokhari followed up with an article: “Wikipedia Can Now Ban You For What You Do On Other Websites.”

Reached by BuzzFeed News at the same email address, Auerbach said the suggestion that he had written the emails was "untrue."
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Meanwhile, a group of conservative thinkers associated with a variety of institutions — perhaps seeing in the Cambridge-educated, loquacious Yiannopoulos the ghosts of conservative public intellectuals past — struck up close correspondences with the young agitator. Rachel Fulton Brown, a University of Chicago medievalist, sent Yiannopoulos dozens of emails about the history of Christianity, the Crusades, and the righteousness of the West. When Brown posted a defense of Yiannopoulos on the university’s website, Breitbart wrote it up. Scott Walter, president of the conservative think tank the Capital Research Center, advised Yiannopoulos frequently on Republican politics and Catholicism. Yiannopoulos recommended one of his young assistants to Walter for a research project. And Ghaffar Hussain, then of the controversial counterextremism organization Quilliam, sent Yiannopoulos news that a lecturer at a British university had spoken ambivalently of female genital mutilation. The note immediately led to a story on Breitbart.

From this motley chorus of suburban parents, journalists, tech leaders, and conservative intellectuals, Yiannopoulos’s function within Breitbart and his value to Bannon becomes clear. He was a powerful magnet, able to attract the cultural resentment of an enormously diverse coalition and process it into an urgent narrative about the way liberals imperiled America. It was no wonder Bannon wanted to groom Yiannopoulos for media infamy: The bigger the magnet got, the more ammunition it attracted.

But Yiannopoulos had also drawn others into the machine, others to whom a message about Western culture under threat meant much darker things.

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Devin Saucier
For nearly a decade, Devin Saucier has been establishing himself as one of the bright young things in American white nationalism. In 2008, while at Vanderbilt University, Saucier founded a chapter of the defunct white nationalist student group Youth for Western Civilization, which counts among its alumni the white nationalist leader Matthew Heimbach. Richard Spencer called him a friend. He is associated with the Wolves of Vinland, a Virginia neo-pagan group that one reporter described as a “white power wolf cult,” one member of which pleaded guilty to setting fire to a historic black church. For the past several years, according to an observer of far-right movements, Saucier has worked as an assistant to Jared Taylor, possibly the most prominent white nationalist in America. According to emails obtained by BuzzFeed News, he edits and writes for Taylor’s magazine, American Renaissance, under a pseudonym.

In an October 2016 email, Milo Yiannopoulos described the 28-year-old Saucier as “my best friend.”

Yiannopoulos may have been exaggerating: He was asking his acquaintance the novelist Bret Easton Ellis for a signed copy of American Psycho as a gift for Saucier. But there’s no question the men were close. After a March 2016 dinner together in Georgetown, they kept up a steady correspondence, thrilling over Brexit, approvingly sharing headlines about a Finnish far-right group called “Soldiers of Odin,” and making plans to attend Wagner’s Ring Cycle at the Kennedy Center.

Saucier — who did not respond to numerous requests for comment — clearly illustrates the direct connection between open white nationalists and their fellow travelers at Breitbart. By spring 2016, Yiannopoulos had begun to use him as a sounding board, intellectual guide, and editor. On May 1, Yiannopoulos emailed Saucier asking for readings related to class-based affirmative action; Saucier responded with a half dozen links on the subject, which American Renaissance often covers. On May 3, Saucier sent Yiannopoulos an email titled “Article idea”: “How trolls could win the general for Trump.” Yiannopoulos forwarded the email to Bokhari and wrote, “Drop what you’re doing and draft this for me.” An article under Yiannopoulos’s byline appeared the next day. Also in early May, Saucier advised Yiannopoulos and put him in touch with a source for a story about the alt-right’s obsession with Taylor Swift.

Saucier also seems to have had enough clout with Yiannopoulos to get him to kill a story. On May 9, the Breitbart tech editor sent Saucier a full draft of the class-based affirmative action story. “This really isn’t good,” Saucier wrote back, along with a complex explanation of how “true class-based affirmative action” would cause “black enrollment at all decent colleges” to be “decimated.” The next day, Yiannopoulos wrote back, “I feel suitably admonished,” with another draft. In response, after speculating that Yiannopoulos was trying to “soft pedal” racial differences in intelligence, Saucier wrote, “I would honestly spike this piece.” The story never ran.

At other times, though, Yiannopoulos’s writing delighted the young white nationalist. On June 20, Yiannopoulos sent Saucier a link to his story “Milo On Why Britain Should Leave The EU — To Stop Muslim Immigration.” “Nice work,” Saucier responded. “I especially like the references to European identity and the Western greats.” On June 25, Yiannopoulos sent Saucier a copy of an analysis, “Brexit: Why The Globalists Lost.”

“Subtle truth bomb,” Saucier responded via email to the sentence “Britain, like Israel and other high-IQ, high-skilled economies, will thrive on its own.” (IQ differences among races are a fixation of American Renaissance.)

“I’m easing everyone in gently,” Yiannopoulos responded.

“Probably beats my ‘bite the pillow, I’m going in dry’ strategy,” Saucier wrote back.

On occasion Yiannopoulos didn’t ease his masters at Breitbart in gently enough. Frequently, Alex Marlow’s job editing him came down to rejecting anti-Semitic and racist ideas and jokes. In April 2016, Yiannopoulos tried to secure approval for the neo-Nazi hacker “Weev” Auernheimer, the system administrator for the Daily Stormer, to appear on his podcast.

“Great provocative guest,” Yiannopoulos wrote. “He’s one of the funniest, smartest and most interesting people I know. ... Very on brand for me.”

"Please don’t forward chains like that showing the sausage being made."
“Gotta think about it,” Marlow wrote back. “He’s a legit racist. … This is a major strategic decision for this company and as of now I’m leaning against it.” (Weev never appeared on the podcast.)

Editing a September 2016 Yiannopoulos speech, Marlow approved a joke about “shekels” but added that “you can’t even flirt with OKing gas chamber tweets,” asking for such a line to be removed. Marlow held a story about Twitter banning a prominent — frequently anti-Semitic and anti-black — alt-right account, “Ricky Vaughn.” And in August 2016, Bokhari sent Marlow a draft of a story titled “The Alt Right Isn’t White Supremacist, It’s Western Supremacist,” which Marlow held, explaining, “I don’t want to even flirt with okay-ing Nazi memes.”

“We have found his limit,” Yiannopoulos wrote back.

Indeed, a major part of Yiannopoulos’s role within Breitbart was aggressively testing limits around racial and anti-Semitic discourse. As far as this went, his opaque organization-with-an-organization structure and crowdsourced ideation and writing processes served Breitbart’s purposes perfectly: They offered upper management a veil of plausible deniability — as long as no one saw the emails BuzzFeed News obtained. In August 2016, a Yiannopoulos staffer sent a “Milo” story by Bokhari directly to Bannon and Marlow for approval.

“Please don’t forward chains like that showing the sausage being made,” Yiannopoulos wrote back. “Everyone knows; but they don’t have to be reminded every time.”

By Yiannopoulos’s own admission, maintaining a sufficiently believable distance from overt racists and white nationalists was crucial to the machine he had helped Bannon build. As his profile rose, he attracted hordes of blazingly racist social media followers — the kind of people who harassed the black Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones so severely on Twitter that the platform banned Yiannopoulos for encouraging them.

“Protip on handling the endless tide of 1488 scum,” Curtis Yarvin, the neoreactionary thinker, wrote to Yiannopoulos in November 2015. (“1488” is a ubiquitous white supremacist slogan; “88” stands for “Heil Hitler.”) “Deal with them the way some perfectly tailored high-communist NYT reporter handles a herd of greasy anarchist hippies. Patronizing contempt. Your heart is in the right place, young lady, now get a shower and shave those pits. The liberal doesn’t purge the communist because he hates communism, he purges the communist because the communist is a public embarrassment to him. … It’s not that he sees enemies to the left, just that he sees losers to the left, and losers rub off.”

"I need to stay, if not clean, then clean enough."
“Thanks re 1488,” Yiannopoulos responded. “I have been struggling with this. I need to stay, if not clean, then clean enough.”

He had help staying clean. It came in the form of a media relations apparatus that issued immediate and vehement threats of legal action against outlets that described Yiannopoulos as a racist or a white nationalist.

“Milo is NOT a white nationalist, nor a member of the alt right,” Jenny Kefauver, a senior account executive at CapitalHQ, Breitbart’s press shop, wrote to the Seattle CBS affiliate after a story following the shooting of an anti-Trump protester at a Yiannopoulos speech. “Milo has always denounced them and you offer no proof that he is associated with them. Please issue a correction before we explore additional options to correct this error immediately.”

Over 2016 and early 2017, CapitalHQ, and often Yiannopoulos personally, issued such demands against the Los Angeles Times, The Forward, Business Insider, Glamour, Fusion, USA Today, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, and CNN. The resulting retractions or corrections — or refusals — even spawned a new category of Breitbart story.

Of course, it’s unlikely that any of these journalists or editors could have known about Yiannopoulos’s relationship with Saucier, about his attempts to defend gas chamber jokes in Breitbart, or about how he tried to put Weev on his podcast.

Nor could they have known about the night of April 2, 2016, which Yiannopoulos spent at the One Nostalgia Tavern in Dallas, belting out a karaoke rendition of “America the Beautiful” in front of a crowd of “sieg heil”-ing admirers, including Richard Spencer.

Yiannopoulos singing "America the Beautiful"
Yiannopoulos singing "America the Beautiful"
Saucier can be seen in the video filming the performance. The same night, he and Spencer did a duet of Duran Duran’s “A View to a Kill” in front of a beaming Yiannopoulos.

And there was no way the journalists threatened with lawsuits for calling Yiannopoulos a racist could have known about his passwords.

In an April 6 email, Allum Bokhari mentioned having had access to an account of Yiannopoulos’s with “a password that began with the word Kristall.” Kristallnacht, an infamous 1938 riot against German Jews carried out by the SA — the paramilitary organization that helped Hitler rise to power — is sometimes considered the beginning of the Holocaust. In a June 2016 email to an assistant, Yiannopoulos shared the password to his email, which began “LongKnives1290.” The Night of the Long Knives was the Nazi purge of the leadership of the SA. The purge famously included Ernst Röhm, the SA’s gay leader. 1290 is the year King Edward I expelled the Jews from England.

Image
Getty Images (4)
Early in the morning of August 17, 2016, as news began to break that Steve Bannon would leave Breitbart to run the Trump campaign, Milo Yiannopoulos emailed the man who had turned him into a star.

“Congrats chief,” he wrote.

“u mean ‘condolences,’” Bannon wrote back.

“I admire your sense of duty (seriously).”

“u get it.”

In the month after the convention, Yiannopoulos and Bannon continued to work closely. Bannon and Marlow encouraged a barrage of stories about Yiannopoulos’s late July ban from Twitter. Bannon and Yiannopoulos worked to distance themselves from Charles Johnson’s plans to sue Twitter. (“Charles is PR poison,” Yiannopoulos wrote. “Charles is well intentioned--but he is wack,” Bannon responded.) And the two went back and forth over how hard to hit Paul Ryan in an August story defending the alt-right. (“Only the headline mocks him correct,” Bannon wrote. “We never actually say he is a cuck in the body of the piece?”)

But once Bannon left Breitbart, his email correspondence with Yiannopoulos dried up, with a few exceptions. On August 25, after Hillary Clinton’s alt-right speech, Yiannopoulos emailed Bannon, “I’ve never laughed so hard.”

“Dude: we r inside her fucking head,” Bannon wrote back.

And on September 15, Sebastian Gorka, then an adviser to the Trump campaign, sent Yiannopoulos, Bannon, and Michael Flynn Jr., the son of Trump’s future national security adviser, a meme “as found on Twitter.” Watermarked by a conservative satire site called the Patriot Retort, the image was titled “The Deplorables,” and had superimposed various TrumpWorld faces on top of the all-star action movie heroes of the 2010 Sylvester Stallone vehicle The Expendables.

“I presume you Gents approved of this,” Gorka wrote.

“THIS IS BRILLIANT. CC’ing LTG Flynn,” Flynn, Jr. wrote back, referring to his father.

“LOL!” Bannon responded.

“Yes. I’m jealous!!” Gorka replied.

Image
Still, as the campaign progressed into the fall, there were clues that Bannon continued to run aspects of Breitbart and guide the career of his burgeoning alt-right star. On September 1, Bannon forwarded Yiannopoulos a story about a new Rutgers speech code; Yiannopoulos forwarded it to Bokhari and asked for a story. On the 3rd, Bannon emailed to tell Yiannopoulos he was “trying to set up DJT interview.” (The interview with Trump never happened.) And on September 11, Bannon introduced Yiannopoulos over email to the digital strategist and Trump supporter Oz Sultan and instructed the men to meet.

Trump "used phrases extremely close to what I say — Bannon is feeding him."
There were also signs that Bannon was using his proximity to the Republican nominee to promote the culture war pet causes that he and Yiannopoulos shared. On October 13, Saucier emailed Yiannopoulos a tweet from the white nationalist leader Nathan Damigo, who went on to punch a woman in the face at a Berkeley rally in April of this year and led marchers in Charlottesville: “@realDonaldTrump just said he would protect free speech on college campus.”

“He used phrases extremely close to what I say — Bannon is feeding him,” Yiannopoulos responded.

Yet, by the early days of the Trump presidency — and as the harder and more explicitly bigoted elements within the alt-right fought to reclaim the term — Bannon had clearly established a formal distance from Yiannopoulos. On February 14, Yiannopoulos, who months earlier had worked hand in glove with Bannon, asked their mutual PR rep for help reaching him. “Here’s the book manuscript, to be kept confidential of course… still hoping for a Bannon or Don Jr or Ivanka endorsement!”

The next week, video appeared in which Yiannopoulos appeared to condone pedophilia. He resigned from Breitbart under pressure two days later, but not before his attorney beseeched Solov and Marlow to keep him.

“We implore you not to discard this rising star over a 13 month old video that we all know does not reflect his true views,” the lawyer wrote.

Bannon, ensconced in the chaotic Trump White House, didn’t comment, nor did he reach out to Yiannopoulos on his main email. But the machine wasn’t broken, just running quietly. And it wouldn’t jettison such a valuable component altogether, even after seeming to endorse pedophilia.

After firing Yiannopoulos, Marlow accompanied him to the Mercers’ Palm Beach home to discuss a new venture: MILO INC. On February 27, not quite two weeks after the scandal erupted, Yiannopoulos received an email from a woman who described herself as “Robert Mercer’s accountant.” “We will be sending a wire payment today,” she wrote. Later that day, in an email to the accountant and Robert Mercer, Yiannopoulos personally thanked his patron. And as Yiannopoulos prepared to publish his book, he stayed close enough to Rebekah Mercer to ask her by text for a recommendation when he needed a periodontist in New York.

Since Bannon left the White House, there have been signs that the two men may be collaborating again. On August 18, Yiannopoulos posted to Instagram a black-and-white photo of Bannon with the caption “Winter is Coming.” Though he ultimately didn’t show, Bannon was originally scheduled to speak at Yiannopoulos’s Free Speech Week at UC Berkeley. (The event, which was supposed to feature an all-star lineup of far-right personalities, was canceled last month, reportedly after the student group sponsoring it failed to fill out necessary paperwork.) And Yiannopoulos has told those close to him that he expects to be back at Breitbart soon.

Steve Bannon’s actions are often analyzed through the lens of his professed ideology, that of an anti-Islam, anti-immigrant, anti-“Globalist” crusader bent on destroying prevailing liberal ideas about immigration, diversity, and economics. To be sure, much of that comes through in the documents obtained by BuzzFeed News. The “Camp of the Saints” Bannon is there, demanding Yiannopoulos change “refugee” to “migrant” in a February 2016 story, speaking of the #war for the West.

Still, it is less often we think about Bannon simply as a media executive in charge of a private company. Any successful media executive produces content to expand audience size. The Breitbart alt-right machine, embodied by Milo Yiannopoulos, may read most clearly in this context. It was a brilliant audience expansion machine, financed by billionaires, designed to draw in people disgusted by some combination of identity politics, Muslim and Hispanic immigration, and the idea of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama in the White House. And if expanding that audience meant involving white nationalists and neo-Nazis, their participation could always be laundered to hide their contributions.

Yiannopoulos’s brand is his ego. Yet his role within the media ecosystem — building an audience around identity politics in the era of news organizations relying on social media for growth — makes him far less unique than he might believe. More and more outlets are firing writers and dumping resources into video. Given that trend, and particularly after Charlottesville, when the alt-right has proved a troublesome audience to court, it’s possible that Yiannopoulos’s use to Bannon has dwindled.

Or perhaps it hasn’t. For Bannon, of course, Yiannopoulos’s future was always in video, in spectacle. 2017 has provided plenty of spectacles that have gotten great ratings. Before it imploded, Free Speech Week had the potential to be the latest.

And the two men know the value of making a scene. In June 2016, Yiannopoulos, with Bannon’s enthusiastic support, planned to lead a gay pride march through a “Muslim ghetto” in Stockholm. Though Breitbart would later cancel the event over security concerns — Yiannopoulos expressed concern in private repeatedly — the Breitbart tech editor was in joking good spirits on June 26 when he wrote to Bannon of a “killer plan.”

“If I die doing this I expect a blackout on Breitbart.com for AT LEAST this afternoon,” Yiannopoulos wrote.

A few hours later, Bannon responded.

“And miss all the traffic in condolences?” ●
https://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstei ... .ncWZW53Wv
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Nov 01, 2017 8:12 pm

THIS IS A LIST OF ADVERTISERS WHO HAVE DROPPED BREITBART - 3408 ADVERTISERS
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... Q/htmlview




seemslikeadream » Thu Apr 06, 2017 9:23 am wrote:
Robert Mercer's Merciless Political Agenda

BILL BERKOWITZ FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

"The Mercers laid the groundwork for the Trump revolution. Irrefutably, when you look at donors during the past four years, they have had the single biggest impact of anybody, including the Kochs." -- Steve Bannon, Trump's chief strategist.

The publicity shy, Trump-supporting, secretive multi-billionaire hedge-fund tycoon Robert Mercer is a man you wouldn't recognize on the subway, in a supermarket check-out line, or be able to pick out of a line-up. Now, he is finally getting what he has avoided for years; the glare of the public spotlight. A rash of recent articles has unmasked the New York City-based hedge-fund phenomenon. And while Mercer is being reluctantly drawn out of the shadows, his daughter Rebekah, who chaired Mercer's super PAC, Make America Number 1, urged Trump to bring Bannon onto his campaign staff, and subsequently played an important role on Trump's transition team, may be getting over the family's aversion to the limelight.

In late February, The Guardian's Carole Cadwalladr pointed out in a piece titled "Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media," that not only was Mercer "Trump's single biggest donor" (although he apparently originally supported Ted Cruz), he is the money behind a host of major right-wing entities and operations.

Let's go back a bit: According to Cadwalladr, Mercer, a math genius and computer scientist, "started his career at IBM, where he made what the Association for Computational Linguistics called 'revolutionary' breakthroughs in language processing – a science that went on to be key in developing today's AI – and later became joint CEO of Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund that makes its money by using algorithms to model and trade on the financial markets."

Cadwalladr noted that Medallion, one of Mercer's funds, "which manages only its employees' money, is the most successful in the world – generating $55bn so far. And since 2010, Mercer has donated $45m to different political campaigns – all Republican – and another $50m to non-profits – all rightwing, ultra-conservative."

And while the multi-billionaire is rather generously spreading his wealth to numerous ultra-right and conservative organizations and institutions, he doesn't hedge on his own personal rewards, which includes a "series of yachts," and "a $2.9m model train set" for starters.

However, it is in the realm of political giving that Mercer has become the current king of the roost. In his attempt to reshape the landscape of American politics, Mercer has donated millions to L. Brent Bozell's Media Research Center, where its CNSNews site has been a pursuing a defang the "liberal" news media strategy for decades; is chief among donors to The Heartland Institute, one of the major climate change denial think tanks; and, gave $10 million to Steve Bannon to help get the Breitbart news site on solid financial footing. Mercer had also bankrolled some of Bannon's film projects.

According to Cadwalladr, Breitbart is "the 29th most popular site in America with 2 billion page views a year. It's bigger than its inspiration, the Huffington Post, bigger, even, than PornHub. It's the biggest political site on Facebook. The biggest on Twitter. "

What also drives Mercer is his apparent hatred for all things Clinton, both Bill and Hillary. According to piece by Nathan Reiff posted on Investopedia, Mercer had a key role in publishing "Clinton Cash," the best-selling book that "investigated various financial dealings made by Hillary Clinton and her family and inspired many of the attacks that Donald Trump issued in the presidential campaign season." Mercer gave $1.7 million of the $2.6 million needed by the Florida-based, Steve Bannon-founded Government Accountability Institute, to publish the book. "Clinton Cash" was written by Peter Schweizer, who is also the president of the Government Accountability Institute.

Mercer's Connection to Data Analytics

Cadwalladr's interest in Mercer also revolves around "his connection to Cambridge Analytica, a small data analytics company … .[in which] [h]e is reported to have a $10m stake… " The company "was spun out of a bigger British company called SCL Group, … [which] specializes in 'election management strategies' and 'messaging and information operations,' refined over 25 years in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. In military circles this is known as 'psyops' – psychological operations."

Cambridge Analytica, which worked for the campaign of Ted Cruz before switching to Trump, also worked the Leave side during the Brexit campaign. Late last year, Cadwalladr wrote about Cambridge Analytica while reporting "about how Google's search results on certain subjects were being dominated by rightwing and extremist sites. Jonathan Albright, a professor of communications at Elon University, North Carolina, who had mapped the news ecosystem and found millions of links between rightwing sites 'strangling' the mainstream media, told me that trackers from sites like Breitbart could also be used by companies like Cambridge Analytica to follow people around the web and then, via Facebook, target them with ads."

Mercer invested in Cambridge Analytica, the Washington Post reported, "driven in part by an assessment that the right was lacking sophisticated technology capabilities." According to "Democracy Now's" Nermeen Shaikh, "Cambridge Analytica, … claims it has psychological profiles of over 200 million American voters."

Mercer also has developed a close friendship with Nigel Farage, the anti-immigration, on-again-off-again leader of the UK Independence Party, and a major player in the Leave.eu campaign. Farage was the first foreign politician to meet president-elect Trump.

In a "Democracy Now" interview with Jane Mayer, author of a recent New Yorker piece titled "The Reclusive Hedge-Fund Tycoon Behind the Trump Presidency: How Robert Mercer exploited America's populist insurgency" it was pointed out that these days, it is said about Mercer and his daughter that they "out-Koched the Koch brothers in the 2016 election."

"Since the election," Democracy Now's Amy Goodman pointed out, "Rebekah Mercer joined the Trump transition team, and Robert Mercer threw a victory party of sorts at his Long Island estate. It was a hero and villain's costume party. Kellyanne Conway showed up as Superwoman. Donald Trump showed up as himself."
http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/comm ... cal-agenda



Mercer also has developed a close friendship with Nigel Farage, the anti-immigration, on-again-off-again leader of the UK Independence Party, and a major player in the Leave.eu campaign. Farage was the first foreign politician to meet president-elect Trump.



JEWS SHOULD CONCERN AMERICANS MORE THAN RUSSIAN INFLUENCE, NIGEL FARAGE SAYS
BY NICOLE GOODKIND ON 11/1/17 AT 1:57 PM
Image
President Donald Trump and Nigel Farage share a moment. Farage, the Trump ally and Brexit leader, says there’s something Americans should worry about more than Russian meddling: Jews.
REUTERS

Trump ally and Brexit leader Nigel Farage says there’s something Americans should worry about more than Russian meddling: Jews.

Farage in a Monday interview singled out the so-called “Jewish lobby” as an overwhelming power in America during a discussion about Russia’s interference in U.S. politics.

“There are other very powerful lobbies in the United States of America, and the Jewish lobby, with its links with the Israeli government, is one of those strong voices,” Farage said on his London-based radio show.

Keep Up With This Story And More By Subscribing Now

He turned the conversation to Jewish lobbies after a caller had suggested the pro-Israel lobby was as dangerous to the U.S. as the Kremlin.

“That’s a reasonable point,” Farage told the caller.

“There are about 6 million Jewish people living in America, so as a percentage it’s quite small, but in terms of influence it’s quite big.”


Farage's remarks perpetuate popular and false narratives about a singular “Jewish lobby” operating within the United States and American Jews uniformly lobbying on behalf of Israel.

Jewish civil rights groups immediately condemned his comments.

“Nigel Farage’s comments about the role of a powerful ‘Jewish lobby’ in America plays into deep-seated anti-Semitic tropes about supposed Jewish control of government,” Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan A. Greenblatt told Newsweek. “This is fuel for white supremacists who exploit and spread conspiracy theories about ‘evil, controlling Jews.’”

Conflating a Jewish and Israeli lobby is not only conspiratorial and false, said Greenblatt, but could “have the unintended consequence of encouraging anti-Semites and extremists to exploit them.”

The largest pro-Israel lobbying group in the United States is Christians United for Israel, which has a large Evangelical base and more than 1 million members overall. Opinion polls show the majority of Americans hold favorable views of Israel.


Farage befriended Donald Trump; the two ran similar populist campaigns in their respective countries last year. Farage was instrumental in promoting the successful Brexit vote, which largely relied on a blue-collar, working class base similar to Trump’s American supporters. Both campaigns catered heavily to anti-immigrant and xenophobic resentments.

Farage also has close ties with former Trump campaign manager and strategist Steve Bannon, who now runs Breitbart News.


Trump has also been accused of courting anti-Semitic support, starting when his campaign did little to wave off endorsements from neo-Nazi and white nationalist groups. This year, Trump has raised skepticism about an increase in hate crimes against Jews since his election, and he initially refused to condemn the neo-Nazis who marched at a violent Charlottesville, Virginia, hate rally. Memes from anti-Semitic accounts have also repeatedly ended up in his Twitter feed.

Trump has repeatedly denied all accusations of anti-Semitism.
http://www.newsweek.com/trump-russia-je ... xit-698486
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby norton ash » Wed Nov 15, 2017 7:39 pm

https://www.axios.com/bannon-not-backin ... 13886.html

There is "zero chance" Steve Bannon will back down from his support of Roy Moore, according to one source close to Bannon. A second source says Bannon believes Moore's denials which is why he's sticking with him.
Why this matters: Bannon has been out of the country and silent on the Moore situation as it spun out of control and other Republicans called for him to drop out of the race. Bannon's response, to triple-down on his support, will intensify his war with Republicans. As the source close to Bannon put it, Mitch McConnell should quit the Senate before Moore.
It's clear Bannon has been uncomfortable with the Moore situation. I've asked him multiple times, via text message, whether he's going to drop Moore given the mounting sexual allegations and the less-than-convincing responses from Moore himself. Under normal circumstances Bannon would respond immediately, telling me I don't get it, calling me a "Morning Joe" swamp creature, a member of the fake news "opposition party" etc. But he hasn't been doing that. He's been changing the subject and totally silent about Moore.
Back in D.C., Bannon's allies are struggling through the storm. Some of his friends and close allies are deeply uncomfortable about being the last on the island with Moore. The yearbook signature rattled almost everyone. When Sean Hannity effectively ditched Moore last night by giving him 24 hours to prove the allegations wrong, that made some of Bannon's allies even more uneasy about his exposure.
One Bannon ally said that if Moore can no longer defend himself in a credible fashion against these charges "it makes it very tough for supporters to continue backing his campaign."
But Bannon still has Matt Boyle, who is pushing Breitbart to stick totally behind Moore. Breitbart's Washington Editor — who was one of two reporters Bannon sent to Alabama to discredit the female accusers' stories — has told associates he's all in for Moore until Election Day. Bannon's nemesis Matt Drudge taunted Bannon today with a headline suggesting he was retreating on Moore. If anything, that's only likely to make Bannon more likely to stick with Moore.


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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Nov 18, 2017 9:46 pm

NEWS & POLITICS
Is Steve Bannon's Destruction of the GOP Just a Plot Against Karl Rove?

The Breitbart editor apparently considers Rove his main competition.

By Heather Digby Parton / Salon November 17, 2017, 10:34 AM GMT


It had been reported all week that President Trump wasn't going to comment personally on the underage dating and sexual assault scandal whirling around Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore because he knew it would raise the issue of his own sordid history. Trump refused to take questions about it from reporters and let his press secretary say only that the White House found the complaints "troubling" but planned to let the people of Alabama decide what to do about it.

But obviously he was watching Sean Hannity late at night, as he is wont to do, and his uncontrollable, juvenile compulsions finally won out. The need to insult Sen. Al Franken was too overwhelming and he had to take to Twitter to let it out:


Trump may not realize that the Alabama election isn't for another four weeks and he's likely to be grilled about his own "issues" every time he faces the press. And he has another little problem that he may not have counted on. The team at Breitbart News is not happy with the fact that the first daughter said that there was "a special place in hell" for people who do what Moore is accused of doing. This was Breitbart editor Alex Marlow on a talk radio program:

Caller: Well, when Donald was being accused of these things where there was definitely more proof and more opportunity, where was she then? But now she's all outraged by Roy Moore. I don't know why she just doesn't keep quiet.

Marlow: Right, especially when there's been so many allegations against President Trump, I don't know why the daughter of President Trump who has been accused by [attorney] Gloria Allred and some dozen, maybe two dozen, women over the years doing something inappropriate, and nothing's ever come of that. So why does Ivanka want to continue to pile on? I don't know. I think that she just loves getting her name out there in the headline and they can put more photos up. So that's her M.O.

Roy Moore is of course being backed by Breitbart's executive editor, the former Trump campaign manager and senior policy adviser Steve Bannon.

Has Bannon decided that MAGA belongs to him now? According to this fascinating piece in the New Yorker by Susan B. Glasser, Bannon's battle against the establishment is very personal and is not entirely motivated by his apocalyptic vision of impending chaos but something much more prosaic: a need to defeat the man who held his position in the previous Republican administration, Karl Rove.

I was unaware that Bannon was so competitive with Rove but according to Glasser's article there's so much bad blood there that Bannon decided to take on an incumbent Republican congressman in North Carolina solely because Rove knew the guy and gave a speech on his behalf. It's the only House race in which Bannon has endorsed a primary challenger.

Breitbart published a story in which it called the incumbent, Rep. Robert Pittenger, a tool of the “Karl Rove-backed elites” who had “sold out his district.” But Pittenger is actually a hardcore Trump supporter who's voted with the president 96 percent of the time. He told Glasser, “I’ve never met Steve Bannon, but it seems to be a game. There’s all kinds of games up there in Washington.” Pittenger and Rove both said that they'd known each other for a long time and that Rove was simply doing a solid for a friend.

One can understand why Bannon wouldn't like Rove, who has been very critical of both Bannon and Trump in his Wall Street Journal columns and told Glasser that they knew nothing about electoral strategy and had no idea how to win races around the country, much less upend the establishment, as Bannon has vowed to do. Rove is probably right about that. The Trump operation, both inside and outside the White House, is a mess.

Until 2016, Steve Bannon was running his upstart web site, and that no doubt burns Rove, a political junkie who has spent a lifetime studying political history and the minutiae of electoral strategy, and worked in the political trenches for decades before he made it to the White House. Of course, that's exactly what Bannon loathes about Rove, believing that he's a dinosaur with nothing to offer the revolutionary new politics he and Donald Trump have created.

It's interesting, however, how much the two men actually have in common. Both are autodidacts who think of themselves as strategic and tactical geniuses. Rove may seem like a staid elder statesman compared to Bannon, a self-styled "Leninist" and agent of chaos, but Rove was just as grandiose in his thinking when he came to Washington 17 years ago. He believes in realignment theory and thought that Bush's hanging-chad victory in the 2000 election was the beginning of a major shift, led by him, to GOP dominance for the foreseeable future.

Bannon believes in a bizarre prophecy of "four turnings," in which world events unfold in predictable cycles of roughly 80 years each that can be divided into four chapters, or turnings: growth, maturation, entropy and destruction. Under this nutbar theory, it's been 80 years since fall came, in the form of the Great Depression and World War II, and now winter is upon us.
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-polit ... -karl-rove
Both of these guys have way too much faith in their own insights and abilities. This article by Joshua Green in the Atlantic about Rove at the end of Bush's second term should serve as a cautionary tale for Bannon. The arrogant, "go-it-alone" strategy in which the White House and its allies don't bother with politics and simply depend on dominance didn't work for Bush, who ended his disastrous reign having diminished the Republican Party to such a degree that it enabled the man whom he holds in total contempt to become its leader. All the mistakes that Trump and Bannon are making today were first made, if in less crude and obvious fashion, by the Bush administration.

Rove should be a bit more humble and Bannon should be a bit less smug. Neither one of them is nearly as smart as they think they are. And both of the men who employed them are even worse. Bush left the Middle East in ruins and presided over an epic financial crisis. Trump is busy finishing the job in the rest of the world and is turning the United States into a banana republic. Spare us any more of these "geniuses." They're killing us.
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-polit ... -karl-rove


Karl Rove Has Seen the Enemy and He Is Steve Bannon

Inside the feud between two men battling for the soul of the G.O.P.

Susan B. Glasser

“I don’t know Steve Bannon, don’t think I’ve ever met him,” Karl Rove says. “But, for him, it’s all personal.”
Illustration by Justin Renteria; Source Photographs by Brynn Anderson / AP (Bannon), Fred Prouser / Reuters (Rove)
To readers of Breitbart News these days, Karl Rove is a familiar, sinister presence. The Republican strategist who twice helped George W. Bush win the Presidency is now, according to Breitbart, “the voice of the hapless Republican establishment,” “out of touch,” and “wrong in nearly every prognostication for the past ten years.” In one article this summer, Breitbart’s Washington political editor, Matthew Boyle, called Rove President Trump’s “arch-nemesis.” Invariably, the voluminous coverage of Rove on the conservative Web site, which is run by Trump’s former chief strategist Stephen Bannon, notes that the President himself has labelled Rove “such a dishonorable guy,” “a total incompetent jerk,” and a “proven loser.”
So when Rove went to North Carolina this fall to headline a fund-raiser for a Republican congressman, Breitbart quickly responded. The congressman, a back-bencher from Charlotte named Robert Pittenger, was dubbed a tool of the “Karl Rove-backed elites” who had “sold out his district.” A story on the site announced that Bannon was making the race a key front in what Breitbart calls Bannon’s “war against establishment Republicans.” From here on, the article warned, Bannon would be supporting Pittenger’s opponent in the Republican primary, a fiery minister named Mark Harris.
I reached Pittenger by phone the other day, and he professed bewilderment at the furor. “When you look at the rankings, I’ve voted with Trump ninety-six per cent of the time. I’m endorsed by the American Conservative Union, the National Right to Life, the N.R.A., and a host of other organizations,” he told me. “I’ve never met Steve Bannon, but it seems to be a game. There’s all kinds of games up there in Washington.” As for Rove, “I’ve known him a long time, and I appreciated him coming,” Pittenger said. “I have all sorts of people coming to help me.”
Rove was more forthcoming when we met for a couple of hours last Friday, at his office in Austin, Texas. This wasn’t about Robert Pittenger, he said, it was about Karl Rove—and Steve Bannon. This summer, Rove had publicly celebrated Trump’s firing of Bannon, cheering “good riddance to Steve Bannon” in his weekly column for the Wall Street Journal and skewering Bannon’s “grandiose” and “destructive” plans to meddle in Party primaries. Rove followed that up a few weeks ago with another scathing attack on Bannon in the Journal, lambasting his “jihad” against Republican incumbents who support the Party’s congressional leadership and mocking his choice of candidates, including the convicted felon Michael Grimm for a New York House seat. That was on October 18th. The following day, Breitbart published its piece attacking Pittenger.
In our meeting, Rove pointed out that Pittenger’s is the only House race that Bannon appears to be targeting currently, along with a long list of Senate races. “Why?” Rove asked. “Because I appeared at a fund-raiser for Pittenger. The congressman is a loyal Trumpista who just happens to have been a Bush supporter in 2000, who became a personal friend of mine. And now he’s the enemy.” At least, he’s the enemy according to Bannon, “the chief Leninist,” as Rove called him, of his own self-styled Trump Revolution.
For his part, Bannon was travelling in Japan and not available to respond to Rove’s comments, though he has made clear in numerous interviews the low regard in which he holds Rove and the President he served, having called Bush “the single most destructive president in U.S. history, and I include James Buchanan in that.”
“I don’t know Steve Bannon, don’t think I’ve ever met him,” Rove told me. “But, for him, it’s all personal.”
Politics has always been Karl Rove’s personal obsession. In 1973, during the Nixon era, he famously and divisively got himself elected the national chairman of the College Republicans after a hard-fought campaign which not incidentally pitted him against Terry Dolan, the friend of the future Trump adviser Roger Stone, whose campaign was managed by the future Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort. Decades later, in a memo to Trump asking for a role in his 2016 race, Manafort would refer to Rove as his “blood enemy in politics,” going all the way back to that College Republicans contest.
Rove, of course, went on to become a successful Texas political consultant, and, since he helped the then Texas Governor George W. Bush win the Presidency, in 2000, he has been a force to be reckoned with in the national Republican Party. Throughout most of Bush’s tenure in Washington, Rove was by his side in the White House, feared and loathed by Democrats and celebrated by Republicans. He was known as “Bush’s brain,” as the title of a book about him put it; the President’s cynical, sophisticated envoy to the hard right and the “architect” who masterminded Bush’s two Presidential elections with hardball tactics and shameless pandering to base prejudice where necessary. John Dickerson, writing in Slate, called him the Bush White House’s irreplaceable man, an adviser “in the middle of every important West Wing decision,” and a Party builder who dreamed of a “Republican revolution that would keep the GOP in power for a generation.”
By the time the revolution sputtered and Barack Obama turned Republicans out of the White House, in 2008, Rove seemed destined for the quieter life of a party elder. He had returned to Austin, Texas, where he had met Bush in the first place, and started writing the Wall Street Journal column and appearing on Fox News as a paid pundit. Rove helped found American Crossroads, a big-money PAC to support Republican candidates, after the Supreme Court opened up the floodgates to unlimited gifts from mega-donors, and he published both a memoir of his Bush years and a historical account of the 1896 Presidential campaign, a longtime labor of love he had talked about for years.
And then along came Trump, a Bush basher of long standing who had been a Democrat for most of his life. Trump’s ascendance was definitely not the Republican revolution that Rove had intended. Their loathing was immediate—and very much mutual.
In May of 2016, once it was clear that Trump had locked up the Republican nomination with a primal scream of a campaign against Party gatekeepers like Rove, a mutual friend tried to make peace between them. Steve Wynn, the casino magnate and a big donor to Rove’s political interests, brought Rove and Trump together for what Rove told me was a three-and-a-half-hour meeting, just the three of them, at Wynn’s Manhattan home. It didn’t go well, as far as Rove was concerned, and he came away believing that Trump was unaware of even basic political realities. Rove said he walked Trump through the battleground states only to have the candidate interrupt him repeatedly to insist he could win solidly Democratic bastions such as California, New York, and Oregon. “Politically, he had no idea what he was doing,” Rove told me.
There may be no bigger sin in Rove’s book than such political ignorance. Even today, a year and a half after his conversation with Trump, Rove seemed amazed and infuriated at the bad politics being practiced by the President and his team. “Trump is bereft of any of the knowledge that people pick up from being involved in politics,” Rove told me at one point in our conversation in his cluttered office, a stone’s throw away from the Texas State Capitol building and next door to the Fox News studio from which he does his regular TV hits. It was a Friday afternoon in a dressed-down part of the world, but Rove wore a bright yellow tie with elephants all over it.
A year after Trump won the White House, Rove clearly was not yet ready to concede the Trump takeover of the Party that Rove has spent his career building. Democrats had just clobbered the Republicans in two off-year gubernatorial races, in Virginia and New Jersey, and Rove had gone on TV to affix blame squarely on the President himself. The voters, he said on the Fox show hosted by his former Bush White House colleague Dana Perino, were motivated by one thing: “They didn’t approve of President Trump.” When I mentioned that line to him, Rove said the disaffection with Trump wasn’t just in those states voting last week. “As I travel, people come up to me and say, ‘Oh, I’m so enthusiastic about Trump,’ and then two seconds later it’s ‘but I wish he’d stop tweeting’ or ‘I voted for him and I hoped he would do better but he’s not.’ ”
In Washington these days, Republicans are robustly debating how to categorize Trump: Is he a one-off, an outsider who just happened to win a once-in-a-lifetime upset? Or does Trump’s victory say something more about the Party itself? Is the renegade President a symptom, in other words, of a Party that has moved on, with or without its leadership, from the old orthodoxies of its Reagan-Bush past? I’ve talked with several younger Republicans who believe that is the real explanation for Trump (“Our failure led to this demagogue,” one prominent conservative told me), but Rove believes that the Party as he knows it will endure. “Trump is sui generis: nobody else soon will be able to pull off his act,” Rove told me, and even the populist fervor that Trump rode to office “has a very good chance of dissipating if answered by constructive policies.”
When I pressed Rove on whether Trump was changing the G.O.P., pulling its ideological moorings away from the free-trade internationalism that he and Bush championed, he responded no, or, at least not yet. Trump, he said, is neither “an ideological figure nor a great communicator of a philosophical mind-set. He’s got slogans, not a philosophy; impulses, not habits. To reinvent a party permanently, you need a consistent, well-informed, well-organized philosophy.”
To the extent that Trump has a philosophy, it’s Steve Bannon who has defined it for him, so much so that during last year’s campaign, and through the early months of Trump’s Presidency, many were eager to label Bannon Rove’s West Wing successor in power and influence. As Bannon’s White House clout soared, an aide to the Democratic congressional leadership, Drew Hammill, told Politico in February that Steve Bannon was now “Karl Rove on steroids.”
But Bannon post-White House seems more focussed on destroying Rove than succeeding him, and he talks much less about Trump’s ideology than about the Party purge he is avidly pursuing. A key early test of Bannon’s crusade against Party elders came in late September, when Roy Moore, a Bible-thumping activist who had twice been ousted as Alabama’s chief justice, beat the establishment’s choice, Luther Strange, in a hotly contested Republican primary to fill the empty U.S. Senate seat vacated by Trump’s Attorney General, Jeff Sessions. Rove and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell campaigned and raised money for Strange, and Bannon’s enemies in the White House even got Trump to endorse him. Moore’s win, it seemed, showed that Bannon was the one more in touch with the Party’s new center of gravity.
In an appearance at the Values Voters Summit a couple of weeks later, a jubilant Bannon blamed Rove and McConnell by name for starting a war with Bannon that they couldn’t win. “It’s not my war. This is our war, and y’all didn’t start it, the establishment started it,” Bannon told the audience, according to a lengthy account of his speech published by Breitbart.
To Rove, this was classic Bannon-as-Bolshevik stuff. “Well,” Rove said, “he’s a Leninist, and like all good Leninists he always puts his attacks in vivid terms. So what do you do if you’re a Leninist? Go back to Saul Alinsky’s ‘Rules for Radicals’ . . . Pick a highly visible target and personalize it.” In 2016, Rove noted, the target was the Republican Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, but the Bannon-backed primary candidate who challenged Ryan got only sixteen per cent of the vote. Now he’s fixating on Rove and McConnell instead. “Bannon says, ‘Look, I’m taking your donors, Mitch McConnell. ’ Well, we’ve had our best non-election fund-raising year for American Crossroads/Senate Leadership Fund ever, closing in on forty per cent either banked or pledged for our 2018 budget,” Rove said. “I don’t see hordes of our donors defecting to Bannon or his candidates.” And, indeed, just this week came news that Sheldon Adelson, another casino magnate and Republican mega-donor, had decided to stick with Rove and McConnell despite a recent meeting with Bannon.
Yet Bannon, clearly, has gotten under Rove’s skin. Rove ticked off a list of candidates whom he said showed Bannon’s amazing “bad judgment” and constituted what, to his mind, amounts to a parade of horribles: Grimm, that “convicted felon” from New York; the “despicable” Tom Tancredo for governor in Colorado; the “hapless” Danny Tarkanian, a five-time failed candidate running against Senator Dean Heller in Nevada. “These are the people he’s backing and thinks can both win and then govern?”
Rove also cited Moore in Alabama, who is looking less and less like a brilliant victory for Bannon and more like a pressing political liability in the wake of reports by the Washington Post that Moore sexually abused teen-age girls. While Breitbart defended Moore and other Republicans equivocated, Rove, in our Friday interview, praised the reporting as “stunning” and “compelling” with “validation and corroboration.” Still, Rove allowed, Moore might yet win in a heavily Republican state like Alabama. “There’ll be a lot of Alabamians saying, ‘lying Washington Post, people are out to get him.’ ”
Rove never mentioned Bannon in his answer, but neither did he have to. The Republican war is on, and Rove is quite clear on just who is the enemy.
“Bannon is a side show,” Rove replied after one too many questions about the strategist trying to claim his mantle. “Trump is the real issue.”
An earlier version of this post misidentified the Democratic aide who called Steve Bannon “Karl Rove on steroids.”

Susan B. Glasser is a contributing writer for newyorker.com, where she writes a twice-monthly column on life in Trump’s Washington. She is Politico’s chief international-affairs columnist and the host of its weekly podcast, “The Global Politico.”
https://www.newyorker.com/sections/news ... eve-bannon


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Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Thu Dec 21, 2017 6:34 pm

The Festering Darkness has a Fever Dream:

“I Have Power”: Is Steve Bannon Running for President?

On a whirlwind tour around the globe, Trump’s former aide and alter ego reveals what really went down in the White House, his unfettered thoughts on Javanka, his complicated relationship with his erstwhile boss—and his own political ambitions.

by Gabriel Sherman
December 21, 2017 2:15 pm

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Around the time Donald Trump took off from the Philippines aboard Air Force One at the end of his 12-day Asia tour, Stephen K. Bannon touched down at Tokyo International Airport. It was the evening of November 14, and the president’s former chief strategist flew to Japan to deliver a hard-edged anti-China speech at a conference for human-rights activists. “I’m not really a human-rights guy,” he told me as we boarded the plane in New York. “But this is a chance to talk to them about populism.”

A polite airline representative whisked Bannon and his entourage through the terminal. Tej Gill, a goateed ex-Navy SEAL security guard with tattoo-sleeved arms, stuck close by Bannon’s side. “I’ve had a couple assassination plots,” Bannon told me, “I got it from an intelligence source.” They were trailed by a short, barrel-chested ex-SEAL in a knit beanie cap, by a videographer named Dan Fleuette who co-wrote Bannon’s documentary Clinton Cash, and a redheaded body man, Bannon’s 26-year-old nephew, Sean. In moments we were escorted through a V.I.P. immigration lane and into an elevator that descends to an underground garage, where a motorcade awaited. Bannon climbed into the back seat of a black BMW 7 Series and sped off towards the Peninsula hotel to catch a few hours of sleep. The rest of the staff followed in a pair of minivans.

The next morning, Bannon was pacing in front of a packed auditorium in a squat building on the grounds of the Olympic Village built for the ‘64 Tokyo Summer Games. “I feel like I’m at a Trump rally!” he said, pointing out a young woman sporting a Make America Great Again hat. For the next hour, Bannon held court, microphone in hand. “The elites in our country have been under a very false premise that as China became more prosperous and economically developed that there would be an underlying increase in democracy,” he said. “What we found out over the last decade is the exact opposite has happened.” He speculated that dark unseen forces are at work. “The question has to be asked: Are the elites in the United States that stupid? Did people actually sit there year after year after year and not understand what was going on? Or was something else going on? Were these elites either bought off or did they just look the other way? That question is going to have to be answered.”

Bannon’s core message—a clueless, corrupt ruling class (many of whom, of course, reside in blue states) has sold out American workers to a hegemonic China, and it’s up to a vanguard to take our country back before the world tips toward cataclysm—is the same, whether he’s speaking to Alabamian Roy Moore voters or Chinese dissidents. But he adjusts his vocabulary to fit his audience—here in Tokyo, he was in full prophetic mode.

Bannon is a voracious reader, who sometimes stays up until dawn powering through books, obscure journals, and news articles, scrawling notes in a pocket-size green diary as he goes (during our trip he used downtime to read a Robespierre biography). This was evident as he freestyled about Hillary Clinton, the opposition party media, artificial intelligence, Thucydides, Hollywood, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, the opioid crisis, Boeing jets, Brown University, Brexit, the Cloud, the Civil War, the Peloponnesian War, the American Revolution, the Great Depression, Churchill, Napoleon, Hitler, and J.D. Vance. “It’s not going to be O.K.,” he concluded ominously. “The world is on a knife’s edge. We have what I call a long, dark valley ahead of us, like the 1930s.”

The message is that the world needs saving—but who’s going to save it? Looking around, it’s not hard to see Steve Bannon’s best answer. Four months ago, Bannon was a supporting player, with a whiteboard and telephone. Now he’s made himself the star—not only the chief strategist but in many ways the candidate, the frontman of his own movement. With his motorcade, retinue of advisers, and security men, his Asia trip was a mirror of President Trump’s.

When he left the White House in August, Bannon said, “the Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over.” In private, Bannon told people he was disillusioned with Trump’s shambolic governing style. Trump, in turn, sees Bannon as a self-promoter. “The president views Steve as just a guy who works for him,” a White House official said.

While the two men harbor contempt for each other that can ignite into rage, they can’t quit each other, either. Since Bannon left the West Wing, he’s had five phone calls with Trump, most initiated by the president, according to the White House official. “The few conversations Steve and the president have had since he was fired this summer have primarily been opportunities for Steve to beg for his job back,” said the White House official. A Bannon spokesperson countered, “anyone around Steve since he left the White House can see he is very happy now out of the White House!”

Bannon insists that his real opponent is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. “The G.O.P. establishment, as personified by Mitch McConnell, has not done a good job supporting the president’s agenda,” Bannon told me. During a recent speech he declared a “season of war” on the G.O.P. and he is drafting insurgent candidates to challenge seven of eight G.O.P. senators up for election in 2018. Bannon’s war is just ramping up. Through his nonprofit, Government Accountability Institute, he’s planning to release a Clinton Cash-style book that takes aim at the G.O.P. establishment in general and McConnell in particular.

The primary insurgents Bannon has tried to recruit, dubbed “The League of Extraordinary Candidates” by Breitbart, is a ragtag band including former Arizona State Senator Kelli Ward; Blackwater founder Erik Prince; mega-donor Foster Friess; and Danny Tarkanian, son of U.N.L.V. basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian, all of whom inarguably fall far short of Bannon’s stated populist principles.

And now Roy Moore’s Alabama Senate candidacy was threatening to implode. When I met Bannon at John F. Kennedy Airport, an hour before boarding the Tokyo flight, he’d turned the first-class lounge into a makeshift war room. A few days earlier, The Washington Post published allegations that Moore had pursued romantic and sexual relationships with teenagers in the 1970s while he was an assistant district attorney. One woman told the paper he molested her when she was 14—and he was 32. Moore’s initial response had been a disaster. He came across as evasive during a radio interview with Sean Hannity. A chorus of Senate Republicans, led by McConnell, were calling on Moore to end his campaign; the Republican National Committee severed all fund-raising ties. Most worrisome for Bannon, the White House put out a statement that Moore should leave the race if the allegations were true.

The situation, and the various arrayed forces for and against Moore, closely resembled two earlier crises Bannon had weathered with Trump: the release of the Billy Bush tape and the aftermath of the white nationalist march in Charlottesville. In both, Trump ultimately followed Bannon’s tactical playbook—doubling down at all costs—with large success in the first instance and a highly questionable result in the second.

Bannon huddled over his BlackBerry firing off e-mails to Breitbart reporters he’d dispatched to Alabama to discredit the Post story. “I got my two best guys down there,” he said while waiting for Moore campaign chairman Bill Armistead to call. Bannon’s orders: deny, deny, deny. “One of the things I realized during the campaign is that, like in the military, it all comes down to one or two decisions in the heat of battle,” he said. “You have to double down.” In Moore, he knew he had a less capable candidate. (His first choice had been Alabama congressman Mo Brooks.) “I’m gonna tell Judge Moore to do his thing,” Bannon said. “They’re not cut out for this, though.”

Bannon let the White House know that he wanted Trump to back Moore. But Trump seemed reluctant at first. White House political director Bill Stepien reportedly told Trump to stay out of the race. The conventional wisdom was becoming that Moore was done, and that Bannon was wrong this time.

Bannon’s frenetic pace is part of his strategy. “I realized if you’re not out there for the hobbits, you’re not in their lives,” Bannon said, using his affectionate moniker for Trump voters. During the week I traveled with him from New York to Tokyo to South Florida, for what was Bannon’s first major profile since leaving the White House, he made a half dozen speeches to conservative groups, hosted Breitbart’s talk-radio show, and helped market a new biography Bannon: Always the Rebel. Inside the right-wing echo chamber, Bannon is lionized as a conquering folk hero. Well-wishers flock to snap selfies, press the flesh. At one event I chatted with an elderly man waiting his turn on the receiving line. “If I could ask him one question, it would be, why aren’t you president?’”

That has at least been a passing thought. In October, Bannon called an adviser and said he would consider running for president if Trump doesn’t run for re-election in 2020. Which Bannon has told people is a realistic possibility. In private conversations since leaving the White House, Bannon said Trump only has a 30 percent chance of serving out his term, whether he’s impeached or removed by the Cabinet invoking the 25th amendment. That prospect seemed to become more likely in early December when special counsel Robert Mueller secured a plea deal from former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Bannon has also remarked on the toll the office has taken on Trump, telling advisers his former boss has “lost a step.” “He’s like an 11-year-old child,” Bannon joked to a friend in November.

While Bannon praised Trump during our conversations—he said he’s the best orator since William Jennings Bryan—he doesn’t deny he was unhappy in the White House. “It was always a job,” he said. “I realize in hindsight I was just a staffer, and I’m not a good staffer. I had influence, I had a lot of influence, but just influence.” He told me he now feels liberated. “I have power. I can actually drive things in a certain direction.”

Not surprisingly, the idea of Bannon as a political figure, let alone a presidential candidate, inspires ridicule and venom from the Republican establishment. The Wall Street Journal editorial page called Bannon’s roster of candidates a bunch of “cranks and outliers.” Former McConnell chief of staff Josh Holmes said Bannon is a “white supremacist.” Stuart Stevens, a veteran of five Republican presidential campaigns, told me that Bannon is “an odd, strangely repulsive figure who is trying to use the political process to work through personal issues of anger and frustration.” He added, “like many people in their first campaign, he confused his candidate winning with the fantasy voters supported him.”

A prominent Republican described Bannon’s crusade as a vanity exercise doomed to fail. “I think there was a lot of rage when he was in the White House,” the Republican said. “Steve had to subsume his ego to Donald, who Steve thinks is dumb and crazy. With Steve, it’s not about building new things—it’s about destroying the old. I’m not sure he knows what he wants.” As evidence, he pointed out the recent Virginia governor’s race, where Republican Ed Gillespie got crushed by nine points running on a Bannon-esque platform defending Confederate monuments and inciting fear over illegal immigrant crime. “The issues didn’t just fail, they failed miserably,” the Republican said.

Bannon’s response to all this criticism is a variation on his personal motto: Honey badger don’t give a shit. “I don’t give a fuck,” he told me when I visited him one morning at the Bryant Park Hotel. “You can call me anything you want. Do you think I give a shit? I literally don’t care.”

A few hours after the Tokyo speech, Bannon’s security chief Tej Gill escorted me and a group of Japanese television journalists up to Bannon’s suite. Bannon was padding around the room in a black blazer over two collared shirts, quaffing a can of Pocari Sweat, a popular Japanese energy drink. “Dude, the biggest story out there has got to be Alwaleed and Murdoch. It’s a monster story,” he said, referring to the billionaire Saudi financier, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who’d been arrested on orders from Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Until a few years ago, Alwaleed was the largest non-Murdoch voting shareholder of News Corp. “Uhhh, note to self: Alwaleed’s like the 25th richest guy in the world, and he’s going to have his head on the end of the scimitar! Rupert Murdoch does not exist unless this guy was stroking him checks in the 90s.”

Bannon’s nephew Sean cradled a phone asking room service to send up cans of Red Bull, but was informed the hotel doesn’t have any. He asked for Cokes and coffee instead. “We have to get him revved,” he told me.

Bannon was revved already. “The Bush presidency is the most destructive presidency in history. James Buchanan included. It’s not even close,” Bannon said when I brought up the Bushes. “And by the way,” he continued unprompted, “I haven’t even gotten to 9/11. I mean, 9/11! Think about if 9/11 had happened on Trump’s watch. We would have gotten 100 percent of the blame by the Bush guys. And they said, well, we just got here. What do you mean you just got here? That’s what gets me about them coming after Trump. I really detest them. I mean, the old man is a pervert. He’s a pervert. Grabbing these girls and grabbing their asses?”

A few minutes later, the Japanese crew was ready to start taping, but Bannon didn’t like the camera position. “I got the most stunning shot in Japan right here and you want to shoot a wall?” he said, pointing at the postcard view of the Imperial Palace out the window. The cameraman struggled in broken English to explain that shooting in that direction wasn’t possible because of the lighting. “Then why don’t we just go to a Marriott,” Bannon grumbled.

The producers began moving the cameras. Since we arrived in Tokyo, Roy Moore’s prospects had worsened. News outlets reported overnight that Moore had been banned from a shopping mall in the 80s because he cruised for teens. “He’s denied it,” Bannon said. He pulled out his BlackBerry and showed me an e-mail from Breitbart reporter Aaron Klein. “Klein’s on something big,” he said. I catch a glimpse of the e-mail, it said something about the stepson of one of Moore’s accusers claiming she’d made up the allegations for money.

Despite the new headlines, Bannon was confident that his strategy was working. He sensed he had a deep understanding of the electorate. “This is Alabama,” he explained. “The age of consent is 16 for a reason.”

Bannon’s conviction was forged from surviving the darkest moments of the 2016 campaign. “This is exactly like Billy Bush weekend,” he said. “So I’ve heard it all and seen it all.” During our conversations, Bannon proudly told me multiple times how he counseled Trump not to back down after the Access Hollywood tape leaked. He recalled how then-R.N.C. Chairman Reince Priebus told Trump he would lose in a historic landslide if he stayed on the ticket. “It was such an overreaction! I’ve seen the same cast of characters all run for the exits, right? You gotta remember, on Saturday morning of Billy Bush weekend, he tried to pitch Trump to get off the ticket. I’m like, are you insane?”

A producer motioned that it was time to start the interview. Bannon was pleased the camera was positioned as he requested. He excused himself and sat down with a fresh cup of black coffee.

Billy Bush Weekend cemented Bannon’s bond with Trump. But when Trump became Mr. President-Elect, on another plane, the relationship became much more complicated. Trump was deeply galled that the media portrayed Bannon as the wizard behind the curtain. “I like Steve, but you have to remember he was not involved in my campaign until very late,” Trump told the New York Post. “I had already beaten all the senators and all the governors, and I didn’t know Steve. I’m my own strategist.” (In fact, Trump had known Bannon since 2011). In July, Bloomberg Businessweek journalist Joshua Green published a best-selling book, Devil’s Bargain, that gave a substantial amount of credit for Trump’s win and overall vision to Bannon. Trump tweeted in response: “I love reading about all of the ‘geniuses’ who were so instrumental in my election success. Problem is, most don’t exist. #Fake News! MAGA . . .”

Meanwhile, Trumpworld, which had been unified by the shared goal of defeating Hillary Clinton, cleaved into warring factions within hours of Trump’s unexpected win. On election night, Bannon said he disagreed with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump over the content of Trump’s victory speech. Kushner and Ivanka wanted it to strike a tone of unity, whereas Bannon wanted to keep up the attack. “I didn’t think it was the right time to talk about uniting,” he said. “I think some of that stuff comes off as phony.”

The battle intensified in the White House. On one side was a group of advisers Bannon dismissively dubbed “the Democrats,” comprising Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Gary Cohn, and Dina Powell. On the other were the nationalists: Bannon, Jeff Sessions, Stephen Miller, Sebastian Gorka, and Peter Navarro (Kushner’s camp called them “the crazies” or “Breitbart”).

The nationalists prevailed in the early days of the administration, as Trump signed a flurry of executive orders on trade and regulations from a list of campaign promises Bannon had scrawled on a whiteboard in his West Wing office. “You had to be a disruptor and keep people on their back heels. That’s why we were doing three E.O.s a day,” Bannon explained. “I told Reince that if you slow down, they’ll pick us apart with the palace intrigue stuff, which is what they really want to write.”

On the afternoon of Friday, January 27, the White House announced a travel ban barring immigrants from eight Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States, including all Syrian refugees. It sparked protests at airports nationwide. Bannon explained this was by design. “Why did we drop the travel ban on a Friday evening? Because the resistance is our friend,” he told me. “Our thing is to throw gasoline on the resistance. I love it. When they”—the Democrats—“talk about identity politics, they’re playing into our hands. Because you can’t win [elections] on that.” I asked Bannon about the charges he’s cultivated white supremacist groups. “These guys are beyond clowns,” he said. “It’s the left media that makes them relevant because 25 of them show up, and it’s like a hundred cameras. They’re losers.”

The backlash to the travel ban proved to be a political and legal disaster for the White House and Bannon’s standing in it. As courts blocked the ban and Trump’s poll numbers sank to historic lows, Bannon’s enemies, led by Kushner, moved to marginalize him. (Bannon aided Kushner’s cause by installing himself on the National Security Council, which infuriated Trump, the White House official said.) To Bannon, a former Naval officer who worked his way into Harvard Business School and Goldman Sachs, Kushner was a callow elitist in way over his head. “He doesn’t know anything about the hobbits or the deplorables,” Bannon said. “The railhead of all bad decisions is the same railhead: Javanka.” According to a person close to Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law viewed Bannon as a leaker at best, and a racist at worst.

Any chance of Bannon and Kushner salvaging a working relationship collapsed over Kushner’s role in the decision that many see as the possible linchpin of Trump’s downfall. In early May, Bannon and Kushner tangled over Trump’s plan to fire F.B.I. director James Comey.

Over the weekend of May 6 and 7, Bannon was in Washington when Kushner, Ivanka, and Stephen Miller accompanied Trump to his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, where the decision to fire Comey was finalized. The White House announced Comey’s dismissal on the afternoon of Tuesday, May 9. Bannon was furious when he found out. “It’s the dumbest political decision in modern political history, bar none. A self-inflicted wound of massive proportions,” he later said. “Especially in light of recent news, for the country, the president’s best decision was firing James Comey. His second best decision was firing Steve Bannon, bar none,” a White House official said.

Bannon believed the Russia collusion case was meritless, but he blamed Kushner for taking meetings during the campaign that gave the appearance the Trump team sought Putin’s help. “He’s taking meetings with Russians to get additional stuff. This tells you everything about Jared,” Bannon told me. “They were looking for the picture of Hillary Clinton taking the bag of cash from Putin. That’s his maturity level.”

“Steve Bannon may regret not being in the White House anymore, but that is not an excuse for him peddling false stories about Jared or anyone else,” said Kushner’s attorney Abbe Lowell.

The blowback pitched the West Wing into another crisis. On Wednesday, Bannon was meeting with chief of staff Priebus in Priebus’s office when Kushner walked in.

“We have a communications problem,” Kushner said.

“No we don’t,” Bannon shot back. “We have a decision-making problem. We make a lot of bad decisions, and the bad decisions have to do with you.”

“It got uglier from there,” Bannon later recalled.

“As stated a dozen times, after Jared was told of the decision that had been made to fire director Comey, he supported it,” Lowell said.

Comey’s firing triggered the outcome Bannon was worried about: the appointment of a special counsel. Bannon threw himself into setting up a war room to contain Robert Mueller’s investigation. “Goldman Sachs teaches one thing: don’t invent shit. Take something that works and make it better,” Bannon said, explaining how he consulted with Bill Clinton’s former lawyer Lanny Davis about how the Clintons responded to Ken Starr’s probe. “We were so disciplined. You guys don’t have that,” Bannon recalls Davis advising him. “That always haunted me when he said that,” Bannon told me. Bannon said he grew increasingly disillusioned that Trump wasn’t taking the investigation seriously. He told Trump the establishment was trying to nullify the election and he was in danger of being impeached.

The relationship between Kushner and Bannon worsened through the spring. At one point, Bannon said, Trump called an Oval Office meeting to broker peace. Attending were Bannon, Kushner, and Ivanka Trump. She blamed Bannon for the leaks.

“She’s the queen of leaks,” Bannon argued back.

“You’re a fucking liar!” Ivanka said.

Trump tried to adjudicate, but the meeting did little to diffuse tensions.

Bannon was also fighting to save one of his closest allies in the administration. Since March, Trump had been irate at Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia investigation. On the morning of Monday, July 24, hours before Kushner was scheduled to testify in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Trump called Sessions “beleaguered” in a tweet about his failure to investigate Hillary Clinton. “He hung Sessions out to dry to cover Jared, and the media never covered Jared, and they covered Sessions,” Bannon later said. (A White House official denied this.)

The next day, Bannon said he called Sessions into a meeting. He knew Sessions had already tried to resign once. “Look, I have a question for you,” Bannon said. “Is there any doubt in your mind that it was Divine Providence, the Hand of God that got us this victory?”

“No doubt,” Sessions replied.

“You’re sure?” Bannon continued.

“There’s no doubt.”

“Then where’s your commitment here?”

“I will never leave,” Sessions assured him. “I may get fired, but I’ll never leave.” (A Justice Department spokesperson did not comment.)

By this point it was Bannon who was on the way out. In late July, Trump replaced Priebus with John Kelly and gave the retired four-star Marine general a stated mandate to bring the warring West Wing factions to heel. Among Kelly’s first orders of business was firing communications director Anthony Scaramucci. Another, according to White House officials: telling Bannon he needed to go. Bannon told me he always planned to leave by the one-year anniversary of joining Trump’s campaign, and he told Kelly on August 7 he wanted to resign.

Whatever the case, Bannon said he knew Trump might try to control the narrative of his departure, so he told Kelly not to tell Trump. But later that night, Bannon said Trump called him after learning of the decision from White House lawyer John Dowd. Bannon said he told Trump he wanted to attack his G.O.P. detractors from the outside. “I said the establishment is trying to nullify your election,” he recalls. “Forget the Democrats. We got our own thing with the three committees” investigating Russia collusion. According to Bannon, Trump was reluctant at first to let him leave. And the threat of Bannon turning Breitbart loose on Trump and his family loomed. “He was very nervous about it,” Bannon said. “He just fuckin’ knows I’m a junkyard dog, and I was pissed at the time.” Bannon said Trump told him he needed to think about it.

Trump’s instinct to stoke racial conflict delayed Bannon’s departure. During the weekend of August 12, neo-Nazis marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting “Jews will not replace us” to protest the removal of Confederate monuments. During clashes with counter-protesters, a white supremacist rammed his car into a crowd killing a 32-year-old woman named Heather Heyer and wounding dozens. Trump fanned outrage by blaming the violence on “many sides.” Kushner and Ivanka implored him to apologize, and other members of the administration contemplated resigning. Bannon told the president on a phone call that apologizing would never satisfy the critics. “I said it’s not enough and it’s too late. Nothing you can say could be good enough.”

As the uproar over Charlottesville grew louder, Bannon quietly plotted his next move. White House officials say Bannon tried calling Trump and lobbied members of Congress to pressure Trump to change his mind. On Thursday, August 17, he held a five-hour strategy meeting with billionaire mega-donor Robert Mercer at his Long Island estate. That same day, The American Prospect published a remarkable score-settling interview Bannon had given to its editor Robert Kuttner. The fact that Bannon spoke to a magazine aligned with the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party got people’s attention. But what likely got Bannon fired were his comments that there was no military solution to the North Korean nuclear crisis. The remark sent the stock market tanking. If Trump understands one thing, it’s money, and he approved Bannon’s dismissal. That night, Bannon left his office for the last time, taking nothing with him.

When news of Bannon’s exit broke on the afternoon of Friday, August 18, he was already back to work at Breitbart’s Washington headquarters, a stately row house blocks from the Capitol known as the Breitbart Embassy. Staffers showered him with a hero’s welcome. “I don’t think Trump understands how dangerous Steve is. He just runs in and conquers shit, like Charlemagne,” a Breitbart journalist told me at the time.

That night, Bannon signaled to Trump he was going to continue the wars he waged in the West Wing from the outside. “Now I’m free. I’ve got my hands back on my weapons,” he boasted to the Weekly Standard.

Bannon’s campaign role model may surprise you. “It’s the Obama model,” he told me. He wants to bring together a new coalition of evangelicals, libertarians, pro-gun activists, and union members. “Remember when Rudy Giuliani came up on that stage in 2008 and starting mocking Obama and said, ‘What’s a community organizer’? And the whole place roared in laughter. Well, we now know—it’s somebody that can kick your ass.”

But Bannon’s campaign against McConnell complicated his already complicated relationship with Trump. In early September, 60 Minutes asked the White House to book Trump for an interview for the season premiere, but after Bannon did an interview with Charlie Rose, sources said Trump didn’t agree to do it, in part because he didn’t want to follow in Bannon’s footsteps. Breitbart attacked Trump for cutting a deal with Democrats to raise the debt ceiling. In the Alabama Senate primary, Bannon backed Moore while Trump supported Luther Strange. During a phone call in October, according to a source, Bannon and Trump debated for 15 minutes about who should get credit for Arizona Senator Jeff Flake’s decision to retire. The following month, perhaps as an act of trolling, Bannon reportedly encouraged Trump’s nemesis, billionaire Mark Cuban, to run for president—as a Democrat.

Bannon’s own transformation from political adviser to a quasi-politician has also transformed Breitbart; it’s become a site that promotes his campaign. On the day of Bannon’s Tokyo speech, his name appeared in seven different headlines on the homepage. In December, Bannon signed a deal to host Breitbart’s daily satellite radio show. His message, however, isn’t quarantined inside the right-wing media bubble. That’s because Bannon has a canny ability to cultivate mainstream journalists. My own experience with him illustrates how he operates.

In August 2015, I received an e-mail from Kurt Bardella, who at the time handled Breitbart’s public relations. “Thought I’d reach out and just say that if you ever wanted to talk with Bannon on background, I think he’d def be willing to touch base with you,” Bardella wrote. I was shocked by his note—and also intrigued. For the previous three years, Bannon had tried to destroy my professional reputation. During this time I was researching a biography of the late Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes. A legendary paranoiac, Ailes waged an elaborate campaign to discredit my book that included having me followed by private detectives and commissioning a 400-page dossier about my life. Bannon and Breitbart played a crucial role in the effort. He worked out of Fox News headquarters strategizing with Ailes about how to attack my book. Breitbart published many thousands of words about me, at turns calling me a “Soros-backed attack dog,” “harasser,” “stalker,” and “Jayson Blair on steroids,” a reference to the former New York Times fabulist. After one Breitbart article, my wife and I received a threatening phone call at home. We called the police.

A few days after Bardella e-mailed, I met Bannon for lunch at the Bryant Park Grill in Midtown Manhattan. I found him at an outdoor table, wearing an untucked shirt and cargo shorts. His hair was a tangled nest of platinum gray and it looked like he hadn’t shaved in days. If I didn’t know him I’d have thought he just rolled off a bus at the Port Authority. Bannon shook my hand graciously. He told me he enjoyed my book on Ailes. What about all the hit pieces he published? “Ha! Those were love taps, dude. Just business.” We proceeded to have a highly entertaining lunch swapping media and political gossip.

As much as I wanted to loathe Bannon—the Breitbart attacks were genuinely terrifying—I found myself liking him. He was strange and charismatic and slightly unhinged, and he possessed a sophisticated and encyclopedic knowledge of the modern political-media landscape. He personally knew the players, from the on-air talent and programming executives to the candidates and billionaire donors. And he was a gifted talker. He exaggerated but didn’t quite lie (at least most of the time). And during conversations he fired off laser-accurate descriptions of famous people that would make the best insult comics proud. In that way, he was like another New York blowhard: Trump.

“Later Nazi! Have fun at your Klan rally!”

A kid in a green hoodie was heckling Bannon as he led his entourage through baggage claim at John F. Kennedy Airport after touching down from Tokyo.

“That’s what I call a New York good morning,” Bannon said, flashing a satisfied grin.

The siege on Roy Moore’s campaign continued. The previous day, Ivanka Trump told the Associated Press “there’s a special place in hell for people who prey on children.” Bannon was incredulous she’d make the comment. “What about the allegations about her dad and that 13-year-old?” he said, referring to the California woman who alleged Trump raped her when she was a teen (the suit has since been dropped.) “Ivanka was a fount of bad advice during the campaign.”

Bannon was eager to get Trump on the phone. He told me Trump’s presidency was at stake. His theory was that, if McConnell succeeded in forcing Moore out, it would open Trump up to having every sexual harassment and assault allegation against him relitigated in the court of public opinion. “It’s a firebreak,” he later said.

Bannon’s eyes were circled with dark rings and his ruddy nose was approaching Rudolph-level red. But on his campaign schedule there was no time to slow down. We climbed into a pair of black Suburbans and rolled out.

An hour later Bannon boarded a Hawker 850 private jet at Teterboro Airport bound for Florida. He was due in Palm Beach to deliver a keynote speech at Restoration Weekend, the annual gathering of right-wingers hosted by former New-Leftist-turned-conservative provocateur David Horowitz. “The thing about Restoration Weekend,” Bannon had told me earlier, “is you got a lot of Jewish Palm Beach matrons who used to be superhot. They were all left-wing in the 60s. That was before they locked down successful Palm Beach business guys. Now they’re hardcore. You half expect them to throw their panties at Horowitz. They’re all Trump people.”

A pilot climbed aboard and sealed up the door. “We got a planeload of patriots,” he said.

The engines whirred, and as we taxied towards the runway, Bannon explained why, despite his competition with Trump, he needs to defend him at all costs. “Trump’s at war with the permanent political class in D.C. I have this whole theory about the nullification of the 2016 election by the Democrats, the opposition party and the Republican establishment,” he said. “Can you believe they had that Senate committee meeting that talked about the president’s ability to use nuclear weapons? It’s unreal!”

Once we’re airborne I asked Bannon how the presidency had changed Trump. “He’s much more moderate,” Bannon said, sipping a Fiji water. “He’s an accommodationist. Trump’s tendency is to always get Maggie Haberman in there. He reads The New York Times. To him that’s the paper of record.” For a presidency defined by Twitter, Bannon said Trump has a limited grasp of new media. “He doesn’t go online. That’s a huge thing. I mean Orrin Hatch”—who’s 83—“goes online! Trump reads printouts.”

Bannon paused and looked out the window. “I was born down there,” he said, pointing at the hazy Virginia coastline below.

Bannon’s blue-collar upbringing and conservative Catholic faith undergird his populist ideas. He argues that his platform of economic nationalism has been misrepresented by critics that label it racist. Cutting immigration and erecting trade barriers will help people of color by tightening the labor market, thereby raising wages. In the White House, he argued to increase tax rates on the wealthy and has problems with the G.O.P. tax plan (although he ultimately supports it). Bannon also argued to end the country’s decades-long entanglement in Afghanistan and spend the money at home. “You could rebuild America! Do you understand what Baltimore and St. Louis and these places would look like?” And he told me he thinks the government should regulate Google and Facebook like public utilities. “They’re too powerful. I want to make sure their data is a public trust. The stocks would drop two-thirds in value.”

Raheem Kassam, a former adviser to Nigel Farage who now edits Breitbart London and travels in Bannon’s entourage, told me, “I wouldn’t be surprised to see Bannon and Bernie campaigning together in a couple years.”

There’s not much evidence that that notion is more than a fantasy. Not only because of Bannon’s pariah status on the left, but also because it’s difficult to reconcile Bannon’s homilies about helping minorities with a worldview that America is a Western European, Judeo-Christian culture that must close its borders and build a wall at a time when the immigrants are brown-skinned people. “My theory, our philosophy, is that we’re more than an economy. It’s one of the reasons the Republicans and the Paul Ryans of the world and Paul Singers got off track with this Ayn Rand Austrian economics where everything’s about the economy. Well, it’s not the economy. We’re a civic society with borders and values.”

When he’s talking up the virtues of strengthening civic bonds he sounds like Robert Putnam. But Bannon’s Breitbart mobilizes its readers by taunting the left, and can often seem to be the entirety of his program. Rage-stoking is not populism, and politicians Bannon has backed mainly seem interested in pissing off liberals, rather than passing legislation that fundamentally makes America a more equitable society. After all, before Bannon found Trump, there was Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann.

Bannon said his candidates aren’t wing nuts, they’re just regular people. “They’re not blow-dries,” he said. “I don’t want the Marco Rubios that have been in the R.N.C. since they were 9 years old with a briefcase. It’s all bullshit. Our guys can be a little rough around the edges. They’re gonna say some crazy shit, O.K. You know why? Because people are going to identify this guy’s real and he’s a fighter.”

Bannon had been on the radio for nearly two hours when I walked into his Breakers hotel suite in Palm Beach. The room had been turned into a makeshift studio. A soundboard sat on a side table while CNN played on mute. During a commercial break, Bannon sipped black coffee and scanned e-mails on his BlackBerry. Then he was back. “It’s November 17 in the year of our Lord, two thousand and seventeen, as dawn breaks over the greatest country in mankind’s history,” he boomed into a headset. “It is a blistering news day, a lot of news out of Alabama.”

Breitbart’s SiriusXM show gives Bannon a powerful megaphone. And all morning, he was using it to push a narrative that Moore was the victim of an establishment plot to stop his populist campaign.

He had no evidence that Moore’s accusers were politically motivated—in fact, several of them are Trump voters. But it didn’t matter. At that moment, it seemed that Bannon’s tactic was working—as Moore denounced his accusers, his poll numbers went up. After conversations with the White House, Trump came around to endorsing Moore, forcing the Republican Party to reverse itself and support him. In the days leading up to the December 12 election, it looked like Moore would defeat Doug Jones.

Bannon flew to Alabama to celebrate the victory. But when he saw the exit polls, he told me he knew the night wouldn’t go his way. “The percentage of write-ins was at 1.5 percent. I looked at the pollster right there and I said he’s going to lose this,” Bannon recalled. He blamed McConnell for orchestrating Alabama’s senior Senator Richard Shelby to announce on CNN on the Sunday before the election he didn’t vote for Moore. “That was the inflection point,” Bannon said.

Moore’s loss further damaged Bannon’s standing with Trump. “The president was annoyed Steve lost the Alabama seat to a Democrat because Steve thought he was a big shot,” a White House official told me. Meanwhile, Bannon’s critics gleefully framed Alabama as proof that Bannon’s political acumen has been vastly overstated. “Mr. Bannon is for losers,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote. Steven Law, the head of the McConnell-aligned Senate Leadership Fund, released a statement: “Not only did Steve Bannon cost us a critical Senate seat in one of the most Republican states in the country, but he also dragged the president of the United States into his fiasco.”

Two days after Moore’s defeat, I met Bannon for breakfast in New York before he headed back to Tokyo to give another anti-China speech. A bearded bodyguard sat nearby with a pistol tucked into his waistband. Despite the setback, Bannon was in high spirits. “Dude you don’t know the firestorm that’s coming,” he said, picking over a crumb muffin and sipping coffee. “The civil war will go to an even higher, more intense level.” Bannon said McConnell, in his machinations against Moore, revealed that G.O.P. elites are aligned with Democrats against the deplorables. “The G.O.P. establishment would rather have control and give up seats to the radical progressive left.”

He insisted his Senate candidates in 2018 will be fully vetted to avoid another Moore. He pointed out Montana State Auditor Matt Rosendale, West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, and Kevin Nicholson, an Iraq combat veteran with degrees from Dartmouth and Harvard Business School, who’s running in Wisconsin. As we talked, news broke that Paul Ryan is possibly not going to run for re-election in 2018. Bannon saw this as another victory, a sign that the field was tilting in his favor. Bannon said his allies in the House Freedom Caucus will have “a huge role” in picking the next speaker.

And Trump, having flirted with the establishment, has come home. Since Charlottesville, Trump has governed almost exclusively for Bannon’s base. For all the tsuris Bannon causes the president, the two need each other. “He momentarily has lapses when he’s convinced by people around him in the White House to do ridiculous things like support Big Luther Strange, another genius move by Jared,” Bannon said. “But look at how many things he approved right after Alabama to get us back on board. I think the establishment has to understand something. Their day of running the Republican Party is over.”

Moore’s defeat could well be the Waterloo of Bannon’s movement, though it’s far too soon to tell. In his view of history, it’s always 1933, but he projects an unrelenting optimism about his own future and those of his projects. It’s a salesman’s gift, one he shares with Trump. Create enough chaos, and the world will re-align. Or it won’t.

As the White House sinks deeper into scandal, along with Roy Moore’s crushing defeat, it’s hard not to see Trump and Bannon as survivors huddled together on a shrinking spit of dry land. Meanwhile, with 2018 looming, even Bannon recognizes the Democrats’ growing strength. “The reason the Democrats did so well in Virginia is because they’re angry. Anger gets people to do things. I admire that,” he said.

During one conversation this fall, Bannon seemed to accept that his campaign might not succeed. But he said people are mistaken if they equate losing elections with failure. “I’m not a political operative,” he said, “I’m a revolutionary.”
"Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security."
-Jim Garrison 1967
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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby Rory » Thu Dec 21, 2017 6:38 pm

If he can manifest the secret lore of dermatological science between now and then, he's in with a shot
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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Dec 21, 2017 6:41 pm

Steve Bannon blames Jared Kushner for Trump's Russia problems: 'This tells you everything about Jared'

Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist, blames White House senior adviser Jared Kushner for President Donald Trump's Russia problems.
Bannon's comments on the matter were highlighted in a Thursday profile in Vanity Fair.
"He’s taking meetings with Russians to get additional stuff," Bannon said. "This tells you everything about Jared. They were looking for the picture of Hillary Clinton taking the bag of cash from Putin. That’s his maturity level."

Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon blames White House senior adviser Jared Kushner for the appearance that President Donald Trump's campaign in any way colluded with Russian officials, he said as part of a Vanity Fair profile published Thursday.

Bannon blamed Kushner for taking meetings during the campaign with Russians that made it appear as if Trump wanted help from Russian President Vladimir Putin.

"He’s taking meetings with Russians to get additional stuff," Bannon told Vanity Fair's Gabriel Sherman. "This tells you everything about Jared. They were looking for the picture of Hillary Clinton taking the bag of cash from Putin. That’s his maturity level."

Kushner's attorney, Abbe Lowell, fired back at Bannon.

"Steve Bannon may regret not being in the White House anymore, but that is not an excuse for him peddling false stories about Jared or anyone else," he said.


Though the two were not the closest of Trump's inner circle during the latter months of the campaign and early portion of Trump's first year in office, their relationship bottomed out after the two butted heads over the firing of FBI Director James Comey in May.

Kushner had advocated for Comey's firing. Bannon considered it "the dumbest political decision in modern political history, bar none. A self-inflicted wound of massive proportions," since it quickly led to the appointment of the special counsel Robert Mueller.

In a White House meeting the following day, Bannon told Kushner that the administration has "a decision-making problem."

"We make a lot of bad decisions, and the bad decisions have to do with you," he said,

Lowell said Kushner "was told of the decision that had been made to fire director Comey" and "he supported it."

As it became clear the investigation would become more intense with Comey's firing and Mueller's appointment, Bannon sought out the advice of former President Bill Clinton's lawyer during the Ken Starr probe, Lanny Davis.

Bannon said Davis told him, "We were so disciplined. You guys don’t have that."

"That always haunted me when he said that," said Bannon, who now is back at the helm of Breitbart News.
http://www.businessinsider.com/bannon-k ... ia-2017-12
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jan 03, 2018 11:52 am

Image



Donald Trump Didn’t Want to Win – and Neither Did His Campaign

One year ago: the plan to lose, and the administration’s shocked first days.

Michael Wolff 11:53 am
On the afternoon of November 8, 2016, Kellyanne Conway settled into her glass office at Trump Tower. Right up until the last weeks of the race, the campaign headquarters had remained a listless place. All that seemed to distinguish it from a corporate back office were a few posters with right-wing slogans.

Conway, the campaign’s manager, was in a remarkably buoyant mood, considering she was about to experience a resounding, if not cataclysmic, defeat. Donald Trump would lose the election — of this she was sure — but he would quite possibly hold the defeat to under six points. That was a substantial victory. As for the looming defeat itself, she shrugged it off: It was Reince Priebus’s fault, not hers.

She had spent a good part of the day calling friends and allies in the political world and blaming Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee. Now she briefed some of the television producers and anchors whom she had been carefully courting since joining the Trump campaign — and with whom she had been actively interviewing in the last few weeks, hoping to land a permanent on-air job after the election.

Even though the numbers in a few key states had appeared to be changing to Trump’s advantage, neither Conway nor Trump himself nor his son-in-law, Jared Kushner — the effective head of the campaign — ­wavered in their certainty: Their unexpected adventure would soon be over. Not only would Trump not be president, almost everyone in the campaign agreed, he should probably not be. Conveniently, the former conviction meant nobody had to deal with the latter issue.

As the campaign came to an end, Trump himself was sanguine. His ultimate goal, after all, had never been to win. “I can be the most famous man in the world,” he had told his aide Sam Nunberg at the outset of the race. His longtime friend Roger Ailes, the former head of Fox News, liked to say that if you want a career in television, first run for president. Now Trump, encouraged by Ailes, was floating rumors about a Trump network. It was a great future. He would come out of this campaign, Trump assured Ailes, with a far more powerful brand and untold opportunities.

“This is bigger than I ever dreamed of,” he told Ailes a week before the election. “I don’t think about losing, because it isn’t losing. We’ve totally won.”

From the start, the leitmotif for Trump about his own campaign was how crappy it was, and how everybody involved in it was a loser. In August, when he was trailing Hillary Clinton by more than 12 points, he couldn’t conjure even a far-fetched scenario for achieving an electoral victory. He was baffled when the right-wing billionaire Robert Mercer, a Ted Cruz backer whom Trump barely knew, offered Trump’s campaign an infusion of $5 million. Trump didn’t turn down the help—he just expressed vast incomprehension about why anyone would want to do that. “This thing,” he told Mercer, “is so fucked up.”

Steve Bannon, who became chief executive of Trump’s team in mid-August, called it “the broke-dick campaign.” Almost immediately, he saw that it was hampered by an even deeper structural flaw: The candidate who billed himself as a billionaire — ten times over — refused to invest his own money in it. Bannon told Kushner that, after the first debate in September, they would need another $50 million to cover them until Election Day.

“No way we’ll get 50 million unless we can guarantee him victory,” said a clear-eyed Kushner.

“Twenty-five million?” prodded Bannon.

“If we can say victory is more than likely.”

In the end, the best Trump would do is to loan the campaign
$10 million, provided he got it back as soon as they could raise other money. Steve Mnuchin, the campaign’s finance chairman, came to collect the loan with the wire instructions ready to go so Trump couldn’t conveniently forget to send the money.

Most presidential candidates spend their entire careers, if not their lives from adolescence, preparing for the role. They rise up the ladder of elected offices, perfect a public face, and prepare themselves to win and to govern. The Trump calculation, quite a conscious one, was different. The candidate and his top lieutenants believed they could get all the benefits of almost becoming president without having to change their behavior or their worldview one whit. Almost everybody on the Trump team, in fact, came with the kind of messy conflicts bound to bite a president once he was in office. Michael Flynn, the retired general who served as Trump’s opening act at campaign rallies, had been told by his friends that it had not been a good idea to take $45,000 from the Russians for a speech. “Well, it would only be a problem if we won,” ­Flynn assured them.

Not only did Trump disregard the potential conflicts of his own business deals and real-estate holdings, he audaciously refused to release his tax returns. Why should he? Once he lost, Trump would be both insanely famous and a martyr to Crooked Hillary. His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared would be international celebrities. Steve Bannon would become the de facto head of the tea-party movement. Kellyanne Conway would be a cable-news star. Melania Trump, who had been assured by her husband that he wouldn’t become president, could return to inconspicuously lunching. Losing would work out for everybody. Losing was winning.

Shortly after 8 p.m. on Election Night, when the unexpected trend — Trump might actually win — seemed confirmed, Don Jr. told a friend that his father, or DJT, as he calls him, looked as if he had seen a ghost. Melania was in tears—and not of joy.

There was, in the space of little more than an hour, in Steve Bannon’s not unamused observation, a befuddled Trump morphing into a disbelieving Trump and then into a horrified Trump. But still to come was the final transformation: Suddenly, Donald Trump became a man who believed that he deserved to be, and was wholly capable of being, the president of the United States.

From the moment of victory, the Trump administration became a looking-glass presidency: Every inverse assumption about how to assemble and run a White House was enacted and compounded, many times over. The decisions that Trump and his top advisers made in those first few months — from the slapdash transition to the disarray in the West Wing — set the stage for the chaos and dysfunction that have persisted throughout his first year in office. This was a real-life version of Mel Brooks’s The Producers, where the mistaken outcome trusted by everyone in Trump’s inner circle — that they would lose the election — wound up exposing them for who they really were.

On the Saturday after the election, Trump received a small group of well-­wishers in his triplex apartment in Trump Tower. Even his close friends were still shocked and bewildered, and there was a dazed quality to the gathering. But Trump himself was mostly looking at the clock. Rupert Murdoch, who had promised to pay a call on the president-elect, was running late. When some of the guests made a move to leave, an increasingly agitated Trump assured them that Rupert was on his way. “He’s one of the greats, the last of the greats,” Trump said. “You have to stay to see him.” Not grasping that he was now the most powerful man in the world, Trump was still trying mightily to curry favor with a media mogul who had long disdained him as a charlatan and fool.

Few people who knew Trump had illusions about him. That was his appeal: He was what he was. Twinkle in his eye, larceny in his soul. Everybody in his rich-guy social circle knew about his wide-ranging ignorance. Early in the campaign, Sam Nunberg was sent to explain the Constitution to the candidate. “I got as far as the Fourth Amendment,” Nunberg recalled, “before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head.”

The day after the election, the bare-bones transition team that had been set up during the campaign hurriedly shifted from Washington to Trump Tower. The building — now the headquarters of a populist revolution —­ suddenly seemed like an alien spaceship on Fifth Avenue. But its otherworldly air helped obscure the fact that few in Trump’s inner circle, with their overnight responsibility for assembling a government, had any relevant experience.

Ailes, a veteran of the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush 41 administrations, tried to impress on Trump the need to create a White House structure that could serve and protect him. “You need a son of a bitch as your chief of staff,” he told Trump. “And you need a son of a bitch who knows Washington. You’ll want to be your own son of a bitch, but you don’t know Washington.” Ailes had a suggestion: John Boehner, who had stepped down as Speaker of the House only a year earlier.

“Who’s that?” asked Trump.

As much as the president himself, the chief of staff determines how the Executive branch — which employs 4 million people — will run. The job has been construed as deputy president, or even prime minister. But Trump had no interest in appointing a strong chief of staff with a deep knowledge of Washington. Among his early choices for the job was Kushner — a man with no political experience beyond his role as a calm and flattering body man to Trump during the campaign.

It was Ann Coulter who finally took the president-elect aside. “Nobody is apparently telling you this,” she told him. “But you can’t. You just can’t hire your children.”

Bowing to pressure, Trump floated the idea of giving the job to Steve Bannon, only to have the notion soundly ridiculed. Murdoch told Trump that Bannon would be a dangerous choice. Joe Scarborough, the former congressman and co-host of ­MSNBC’s Morning Joe, told the president-elect that “Washington will go up in flames” if Bannon became chief of staff.

So Trump turned to Reince Priebus, the RNC chairman, who had became the subject of intense lobbying by House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. If congressional leaders were going to have to deal with an alien like Donald Trump, then best they do it with the help of one of their own kind.

Jim Baker, chief of staff for both Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and almost everybody’s model for managing the West Wing, advised Priebus not to take the job. Priebus had his own reservations: He had come out of his first long meeting with Trump thinking it had been a disconcertingly weird experience. Trump talked nonstop and constantly repeated himself.

“Here’s the deal,” a close Trump associate told Priebus. “In an hour meeting with him, you’re going to hear 54 minutes of stories, and they’re going to be the same stories over and over again. So you have to have one point to make, and you pepper it in whenever you can.”

But the Priebus appointment, announced in mid-November, put Bannon on a co-equal level to the new chief of staff. Even with the top job, Priebus would be a weak figure, in the traditional mold of most Trump lieutenants over the years. There would be one chief of staff in name — the unimportant one — and ­others like Bannon and Kushner, more important in practice, ensuring both chaos and Trump’s independence.

Priebus demonstrated no ability to keep Trump from talking to anyone who wanted his ear. The president-elect enjoyed being courted. On December 14, a high-level delegation from Silicon Valley came to Trump Tower to meet him. Later that afternoon, according to a source privy to details of the conversation, Trump called Rupert Murdoch, who asked him how the meeting had gone.

“Oh, great, just great,” said Trump. “These guys really need my help. Obama was not very favorable to them, too much regulation. This is really an opportunity for me to help them.”

“Donald,” said Murdoch, “for eight years these guys had Obama in their pocket. They practically ran the administration. They don’t need your help.”

“Take this H-1B visa issue. They really need these H-1B visas.”

Murdoch suggested that taking a liberal approach to H-1B visas, which open America’s doors to select immigrants, might be hard to square with his promises to build a wall and close the borders. But Trump seemed unconcerned, assuring Murdoch, “We’ll figure it out.”

“What a fucking idiot,” said Murdoch, shrugging, as he got off the phone.

Steve Bannon, suddenly among the world’s most powerful men, was running late. It was the evening of January 3, 2017 — a little more than two weeks before Trump’s inauguration — and Bannon had promised to come to a small dinner arranged by mutual friends in a Greenwich Village townhouse to see Roger Ailes.

Snow was threatening, and for a while the dinner appeared doubtful. But the 76-year-old Ailes, who was as dumbfounded by his old friend Donald Trump’s victory as everyone else, understood that he was passing the right-wing torch to Bannon. Ailes’s Fox News, with its $1.5 billion in annual profits, had dominated Republican politics for two decades. Now Bannon’s Breit­bart News, with its mere $1.5 million in annual profits, was claiming that role. For 30 years, Ailes — until recently the single most powerful person in conservative ­politics — had humored and tolerated Trump, but in the end Bannon and Breitbart had elected him.

At 9:30, having extricated himself from Trump Tower, Bannon finally arrived at the dinner, three hours late. Wearing a disheveled blazer, his signature pairing of two shirts, and military fatigues, the unshaven, overweight 63-year-old immediately dived into an urgent download of information about the world he was about to take over.

“We’re going to flood the zone so we have every Cabinet member for the next seven days through their confirmation hearings,” he said of the business-and-military, 1950s-type Cabinet choices. “Tillerson is two days, Sessions is two days, Mattis is two days …”

“In fact,” said Bannon, “I could use your help here.” He then spent several minutes trying to recruit Ailes to help kneecap Murdoch.
Bannon veered from James “Mad Dog” ­Mattis — the retired four-star general whom Trump had nominated as secretary of Defense — to the looming appointment of Michael Flynn as national-security adviser. “He’s fine. He’s not Jim Mattis and he’s not John Kelly … but he’s fine. He just needs the right staff around him.” Still, Bannon averred: “When you take out all the Never Trump guys who signed all those letters and all the neocons who got us in all these wars … it’s not a deep bench.” Bannon said he’d tried to push John Bolton, the famously hawkish diplomat, for the job as national-security adviser. Bolton was an Ailes favorite, too.

“He’s a bomb thrower,” said Ailes. “And a strange little fucker. But you need him. Who else is good on Israel? Flynn is a little nutty on Iran. Tillerson just knows oil.”

“Bolton’s mustache is a problem,” snorted Bannon. “Trump doesn’t think he looks the part. You know Bolton is an acquired taste.”

“Well, he got in trouble because he got in a fight in a hotel one night and chased some woman.”

“If I told Trump that,” Bannon said slyly, “he might have the job.”

Bannon was curiously able to embrace Trump while at the same time suggesting he did not take him entirely seriously. Great numbers of people, he believed, were suddenly receptive to a new message — the world needs borders — and Trump had become the platform for that message.

“Does he get it?” asked Ailes suddenly, looking intently at Bannon. Did Trump get where history had put him?

Bannon took a sip of water. “He gets it,” he said, after hesitating for perhaps a beat too long. “Or he gets what he gets.”

Pivoting from Trump himself, Bannon plunged on with the Trump agenda. “Day one we’re moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. Netanyahu’s all-in. Sheldon” — Adelson, the casino billionaire and far-right Israel defender — “is all-in. We know where we’re heading on this … Let Jordan take the West Bank, let Egypt take Gaza. Let them deal with it. Or sink trying.”

“Where’s Donald on this?” asked Ailes, the clear implication being that Bannon was far out ahead of his benefactor.

“He’s totally onboard.”

“I wouldn’t give Donald too much to think about,” said an amused Ailes.

Bannon snorted. “Too much, too little — doesn’t necessarily change things.”

“What has he gotten himself into with the Russians?” pressed Ailes.

“Mostly,” said Bannon, “he went to Russia and he thought he was going to meet Putin. But Putin couldn’t give a shit about him. So he’s kept trying.”

Again, as though setting the issue of Trump aside — merely a large and peculiar presence to both be thankful for and to have to abide — Bannon, in the role he had conceived for himself, the auteur of the Trump presidency, charged forward. The real enemy, he said, was China. China was the first front in a new Cold War.

“China’s everything. Nothing else matters. We don’t get China right, we don’t get anything right. This whole thing is very simple. China is where Nazi Germany was in 1929 to 1930. The Chinese, like the Germans, are the most rational people in the world, until they’re not. And they’re gonna flip like Germany in the ’30s. You’re going to have a hypernationalist state, and once that happens, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.”

“Donald might not be Nixon in China,” said Ailes, deadpan.

Bannon smiled. “Bannon in China,” he said, with both remarkable grandiosity and wry self-deprecation.

“How’s the kid?” asked Ailes, referring to Kushner.

“He’s my partner,” said Bannon, his tone suggesting that if he felt otherwise, he was nevertheless determined to stay on message.

“He’s had a lot of lunches with Rupert,” said a dubious Ailes.

“In fact,” said Bannon, “I could use your help here.” He then spent several minutes trying to recruit Ailes to help kneecap Murdoch. Since his ouster from Fox over allegations of sexual harassment, Ailes had become only more bitter toward Murdoch. Now Murdoch was frequently jawboning the president-elect and encouraging him toward Establishment moderation. Bannon wanted Ailes to suggest to Trump, a man whose many neuroses included a horror of senility, that Murdoch might be losing it.

“I’ll call him,” said Ailes. “But Trump would jump through hoops for Rupert. Like for Putin. Sucks up and shits down. I just worry about who’s jerking whose chain.”


Trump holed up in his White House bedroom in February 2017. Illustration: Jeffrey Smith
Trump did not enjoy his own inauguration. He was angry that A-level stars had snubbed the event, disgruntled with the accommodations at Blair House, and visibly fighting with his wife, who seemed on the verge of tears. Throughout the day, he wore what some around him had taken to calling his golf face: angry and pissed off, shoulders hunched, arms swinging, brow furled, lips pursed.

The first senior staffer to enter the White House that day was Bannon. On the inauguration march, he had grabbed 32-year-old Katie Walsh, the newly appointed deputy chief of staff, and together they had peeled off to inspect the now-vacant West Wing. The carpet had been shampooed, but little else had changed. It was a warren of tiny offices in need of paint, the décor something like an admissions office at a public university. Bannon claimed the non­descript office across from the much grander chief of staff’s suite and immediately requisitioned the whiteboards on which he intended to chart the first 100 days of the Trump administration. He also began moving furniture out. The point was to leave no room for anyone to sit. Limit discussion. Limit debate. This was war.

Those who had worked on the campaign noticed the sudden change. Within the first week, Bannon seemed to have put away the camaraderie of Trump Tower and become far more remote, if not unreachable. “What’s up with Steve?” Kushner began to ask. “I don’t understand. We were so close.” Now that Trump had been elected, Bannon was already focused on his next goal: capturing the soul of the Trump White House.

He began by going after his enemies. Few fueled his rancor toward the standard-issue Republican world as much as Rupert ­Murdoch — not least because Murdoch had Trump’s ear. It was one of the key elements of Bannon’s understanding of Trump: The last person the president spoke to ended up with enormous influence. Trump would brag that Murdoch was always calling him; Murdoch, for his part, would complain that he couldn’t get Trump off the phone.

“He doesn’t know anything about American politics, and has no feel for the American people,” Bannon told Trump, always eager to point out that Murdoch wasn’t an American. Yet in one regard, Murdoch’s message was useful to Bannon. Having known every president since Harry ­Truman — as Murdoch took frequent opportunities to point out — the media mogul warned Trump that a president has only six months, max, to set his agenda and make an impact. After that, it was just putting out fires and battling the opposition.

This was the message whose urgency Bannon had been trying to impress on an often distracted Trump, who was already trying to limit his hours in the office and keep to his normal golf habits. Bannon’s strategic view of government was shock and awe. In his head, he carried a set of decisive actions that would not just mark the new administration’s opening days but make it clear that nothing ever again would be the same. He had quietly assembled a list of more than 200 executive orders to issue in the first 100 days. The very first EO, in his view, had to be a crackdown on immigration. After all, it was one of Trump’s core campaign promises. Plus, Bannon knew, it was an issue that made liberals batshit mad.

Bannon could push through his agenda for a simple reason: because nobody in the administration really had a job. Priebus, as chief of staff, had to organize meetings, hire staff, and oversee the individual offices in the Executive-branch departments. But Bannon, Kushner, and Ivanka Trump had no specific responsibilities — they did what they wanted. And for Bannon, the will to get big things done was how big things got done. “Chaos was Steve’s strategy,” said Walsh.

On Friday, January 27 — only his eighth day in office — Trump signed an executive order issuing a sweeping exclusion of many Muslims from the United States. In his mania to seize the day, with almost no one in the federal government having seen it or even been aware of it, Bannon had succeeded in pushing through an executive order that overhauled U.S. immigration policy while bypassing the very agencies and personnel responsible for enforcing it.

The result was an emotional outpouring of horror and indignation from liberal media, terror in immigrant communities, tumultuous protests at major airports, confusion throughout the government, and, in the White House, an inundation of opprobrium from friends and family. What have you done? You have to undo this! You’re finished before you even start! But Bannon was satisfied. He could not have hoped to draw a more vivid line between Trump’s America and that of liberals. Almost the entire White House staff demanded to know: Why did we do this on a Friday, when it would hit the airports hardest and bring out the most protesters?

“Errr … that’s why,” said Bannon. “So the snowflakes would show up at the airports and riot.” That was the way to crush the liberals: Make them crazy and drag them to the left.

On the Sunday after the immigration order was issued, Joe Scarborough and his Morning Joe co-host, Mika Brzezinski, arrived for lunch at the White House. Trump proudly showed them into the Oval Office. “So how do you think the first week has gone?” he asked the couple, in a buoyant mood, seeking flattery. When Scarborough ventured his opinion that the immigration order might have been handled better, Trump turned defensive and derisive, plunging into a long monologue about how well things had gone. “I could have invited Hannity!” he told Scarborough.

After Jared and Ivanka joined them for lunch, Trump continued to cast for positive impressions of his first week. Scarborough praised the president for having invited leaders of the steel unions to the White House. At which point Jared interjected that reaching out to unions, a Democratic constituency, was Bannon’s doing, that this was “the Bannon way.”

“Bannon?” said the president, jumping on his son-in-law. “That wasn’t Bannon’s idea. That was my idea. It’s the Trump way, not the Bannon way.”

Kushner, going concave, retreated from the discussion.

Trump, changing the topic, said to Scarborough and Brzezinski, “So what about you guys? What’s going on?” He was referencing their not-so-secret secret relationship. The couple said it was still complicated, but good.

“You guys should just get married,” prodded Trump.

“I can marry you! I’m an internet Unitarian minister,” Kushner, otherwise an Orthodox Jew, said suddenly.

“What?” said the president. “What are you talking about? Why would they want you to marry them when I could marry them? When they could be married by the president! At Mar-a-Lago!”

The First Children couple were having to navigate Trump’s volatile nature just like everyone else in the White House. And they were willing to do it for the same reason as everyone else — in the hope that Trump’s unexpected victory would catapult them into a heretofore unimagined big time. Balancing risk against reward, both Jared and Ivanka decided to accept roles in the West Wing over the advice of almost everyone they knew. It was a joint decision by the couple, and, in some sense, a joint job. Between themselves, the two had made an earnest deal: If sometime in the future the opportunity arose, she’d be the one to run for president. The first woman president, Ivanka entertained, would not be Hillary Clinton; it would be Ivanka Trump.

Bannon, who had coined the term “Jarvanka” that was now in ever greater use in the White House, was horrified when the couple’s deal was reported to him. “They didn’t say that?” he said. “Stop. Oh, come on. They didn’t actually say that? Please don’t tell me that. Oh my God.”

The truth was, Ivanka and Jared were as much the chief of staff as Priebus or Bannon, all of them reporting directly to the president. The couple had opted for formal jobs in the West Wing, in part because they knew that influencing Trump required you to be all-in. From phone call to phone call — and his day, beyond organized meetings, was almost entirely phone calls — you could lose him. He could not really converse, not in the sense of sharing information, or of a balanced back-and-forth conversation. He neither particularly listened to what was said to him nor particularly considered what he said in response. He demanded you pay him attention, then decided you were weak for groveling. In a sense, he was like an instinctive, pampered, and hugely successful actor. Everybody was either a lackey who did his bidding or a high-ranking film functionary trying to coax out his performance — without making him angry or petulant.

Jared offered to marry Joe and Mika. “Why would they want you,” Trump said, “when I could marry them?”
Ivanka maintained a relationship with her father that was in no way conventional. She was a helper not just in his business dealings, but in his marital realignments. If it wasn’t pure opportunism, it was certainly transactional. For Ivanka, it was all business — building the Trump brand, the presidential campaign, and now the White House. She treated her father with a degree of detachment, even irony, going so far as to make fun of his comb-over to others. She often described the mechanics behind it to friends: an absolutely clean pate — a contained island after scalp-reduction ­surgery — surrounded by a furry circle of hair around the sides and front, from which all ends are drawn up to meet in the center and then swept back and secured by a stiffening spray. The color, she would point out to comical effect, was from a product called Just for Men — the longer it was left on, the darker it got. Impatience resulted in Trump’s orange-blond hair color.

Kushner, for his part, had little to no success at trying to restrain his father-in-law. Ever since the transition, Jared had been negotiating to arrange a meeting at the White House with Enrique Peña Nieto, the Mexican president whom Trump had threatened and insulted throughout the campaign. On the Wednesday after the inauguration, a high-level Mexican delegation — the first visit by any foreign leaders to the Trump White House — met with Kushner and Reince Priebus. That afternoon, Kushner triumphantly told his father-in-law that Peña Nieto had signed on to a White House meeting and planning for the visit could go forward.

The next day, on Twitter, Trump blasted Mexico for stealing American jobs. “If Mexico is unwilling to pay for the badly needed wall,” the president declared, “then it would be better to cancel the upcoming meeting.” At which point Peña Nieto did just that, leaving Kushner’s negotiation and statecraft as so much scrap on the floor.

Nothing contributed to the chaos and dysfunction of the White House as much as Trump’s own behavior. The big deal of being president was just not apparent to him. Most victorious candidates, arriving in the White House from ordinary political life, could not help but be reminded of their transformed circumstances by their sudden elevation to a mansion with palacelike servants and security, a plane at constant readiness, and downstairs a retinue of courtiers and advisers. But this wasn’t that different from Trump’s former life in Trump Tower, which was actually more commodious and to his taste than the White House.

Trump, in fact, found the White House to be vexing and even a little scary. He retreated to his own bedroom — the first time since the Kennedy White House that a presidential couple had maintained separate rooms. In the first days, he ordered two television screens in addition to the one already there, and a lock on the door, precipitating a brief standoff with the Secret Service, who insisted they have access to the room. He ­reprimanded the housekeeping staff for picking up his shirt from the floor: “If my shirt is on the floor, it’s because I want it on the floor.” Then he imposed a set of new rules: Nobody touch anything, especially not his toothbrush. (He had a longtime fear of being poisoned, one reason why he liked to eat at McDonald’s — nobody knew he was coming and the food was safely premade.) Also, he would let housekeeping know when he wanted his sheets done, and he would strip his own bed.

If he was not having his 6:30 dinner with Steve Bannon, then, more to his liking, he was in bed by that time with a cheeseburger, watching his three screens and making phone calls — the phone was his true contact point with the world — to a small group of friends, who charted his rising and falling levels of agitation through the evening and then compared notes with one another.

As details of Trump’s personal life leaked out, he became obsessed with identifying the leaker. The source of all the gossip, however, may well have been Trump himself. In his calls throughout the day and at night from his bed, he often spoke to people who had no reason to keep his confidences. He was a river of grievances, which recipients of his calls promptly spread to the ever-attentive media.

On February 6, in one of his seething, self-pitying, and unsolicited phone calls to a casual acquaintance, Trump detailed his bent-out-of-shape feelings about the relentless contempt of the media and the disloyalty of his staff. The initial subject of his ire was the New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, whom he called “a nut job.” Gail Collins, who had written a Times column unfavorably comparing Trump to Vice-President Mike Pence, was “a moron.” Then, continuing under the rubric of media he hated, he veered to CNN and the deep disloyalty of its chief, Jeff Zucker.

“If my shirt is on the floor, it’s because I want it on the floor,” Trump told the housekeeping staff.
Zucker, who as the head of entertainment at NBC had commissioned The Apprentice, had been “made by Trump,” Trump said of himself in the third person. He had “personally” gotten Zucker his job at CNN. “Yes, yes, I did,” said the president, launching into a favorite story about how he had once talked Zucker up at a dinner with a high-ranking executive from CNN’s parent company. “I probably shouldn’t have, because Zucker is not that smart,” Trump lamented, “but I like to show I can do that sort of thing.” Then Zucker had returned the favor by airing the “unbelievably disgusting” story about the Russian “dossier” and the “golden shower” — the practice CNN had accused him of being party to in a Moscow hotel suite with assorted prostitutes.

Having dispensed with Zucker, the president of the United States went on to speculate on what was involved with a golden shower. And how this was all just part of a media campaign that would never succeed in driving him from the White House. Because they were sore losers and hated him for winning, they spread total lies, 100 percent made-up things, totally untrue, for instance, the cover that week of Time magazine — which, Trump reminded his listener, he had been on more than anyone in ­history — that showed Steve Bannon, a good guy, saying he was the real president. “How much influence do you think Steve Bannon has over me?” Trump demanded. He repeated the question, then repeated the answer: “Zero! Zero!” And that went for his son-in-law, too, who had a lot to learn.

The media was not only hurting him, he said — he was not looking for any agreement or even any response — but hurting his negotiating capabilities, which hurt the nation. And that went for Saturday Night Live, which might think it was very funny but was actually hurting everybody in the country. And while he understood that SNL was there to be mean to him, they were being very, very mean. It was “fake comedy.” He had reviewed the treatment of all other presidents in the media, and there was nothing like this ever, even of Nixon, who was treated very unfairly. “Kellyanne, who is very fair, has this all documented. You can look at it.”

The point is, he said, that that very day, he had saved $700 million a year in jobs that were going to Mexico, but the media was talking about him wandering around the White House in his bathrobe, which “I don’t have because I’ve never worn a bathrobe. And would never wear one, because I’m not that kind of guy.” And what the media was doing was undermining this very dignified house, and “dignity is so important.” But Murdoch, “who had never called me, never once,” was now calling all the time. So that should tell people something.

The call went on for 26 minutes.

Without a strong chief of staff at the White House, there was no real up-and-down structure in the administration—merely a figure at the top and everyone else scrambling for his attention. It wasn’t task-based so much as response-oriented — whatever captured the boss’s attention focused everybody’s attention. Priebus and Bannon and Kushner were all fighting to be the power behind the Trump throne. And in these crosshairs was Katie Walsh, the deputy chief of staff.

Walsh, who came to the White House from the RNC, represented a certain Republican ideal: clean, brisk, orderly, efficient. A righteous bureaucrat with a permanently grim expression, she was a fine example of the many political professionals in whom competence and organizational skills transcend ideology. To Walsh, it became clear almost immediately that “the three gentlemen running things,” as she came to characterize them, had each found his own way to appeal to the president. Bannon offered a rousing fuck-you show of force; Priebus offered flattery from the congressional leadership; Kushner offered the approval of blue-chip businessmen. Each appeal was exactly what Trump wanted from the presidency, and he didn’t understand why he couldn’t have them all. He wanted to break things, he wanted Congress to give him bills to sign, and he wanted the love and respect of New York machers and socialites.

As soon as the campaign team had stepped into the White House, Walsh saw, it had gone from managing Trump to the expectation of being managed by him. Yet the president, while proposing the most radical departure from governing and policy norms in several generations, had few specific ideas about how to turn his themes and vitriol into policy. And making suggestions to him was deeply complicated. Here, arguably, was the central issue of the Trump presidency, informing every aspect of Trumpian policy and leadership: He didn’t process information in any conventional sense. He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-­literate. He trusted his own expertise ­— no matter how paltry or irrelevant — more than anyone else’s. He was often confident, but he was just as often paralyzed, less a savant than a figure of sputtering and dangerous insecurities, whose instinctive response was to lash out and behave as if his gut, however confused, was in fact in some clear and forceful way telling him what to do. It was, said Walsh, “like trying to figure out what a child wants.”

By the end of the second week following the immigration EO, the three advisers were in open conflict with one another. For Walsh, it was a daily process of managing an impossible task: Almost as soon as she received direction from one of the three men, it would be countermanded by one or another of them.

“I take a conversation at face value and move forward with it,” she said. “I put what was decided on the schedule and bring in comms and build a press plan around it … And then Jared says, ‘Why did you do that?’ And I say, ‘Because we had a meeting three days ago with you and Reince and Steve where you agreed to do this.’ And he says, ‘But that didn’t mean I wanted it on the schedule …’ It almost doesn’t matter what anyone says: Jared will agree, and then it will get sabotaged, and then Jared goes to the president and says, see, that was Reince’s idea or Steve’s idea.”

If Bannon, Priebus, and Kushner were now fighting a daily war with one another, it was exacerbated by the running disinformation campaign about them that was being prosecuted by the president himself. When he got on the phone after dinner, he’d speculate on the flaws and weaknesses of each member of his staff. Bannon was disloyal (not to mention he always looks like shit). Priebus was weak (not to mention he was short — a midget). Kushner was a suck-up. Sean Spicer was stupid (and looks terrible too). Conway was a crybaby. Jared and Ivanka should never have come to Washington.

During that first month, Walsh’s disbelief and even fear about what was happening in the White House moved her to think about quitting. Every day after that became a countdown toward the moment she knew she wouldn’t be able to take it anymore. To Walsh, the proud political pro, the chaos, the rivalries, and the president’s own lack of focus were simply incomprehensible. In early March, not long before she left, she confronted Kushner with a simple request. “Just give me the three things the president wants to focus on,” she demanded. “What are the three priorities of this White House?”

It was the most basic question imaginable — one that any qualified presidential candidate would have answered long before he took up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Six weeks into Trump’s presidency, Kushner was wholly without an answer.

“Yes,” he said to Walsh. “We should probably have that conversation.”

How He Got the Story


This story is adapted from Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, to be published by Henry Holt & Co. on January 9. Wolff, who chronicles the administration from Election Day to this past October, conducted conversations and interviews over a period of 18 months with the president, most members of his senior staff, and many people to whom they in turn spoke. Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, Wolff says, he was able to take up “something like a semi-permanent seat on a couch in the West Wing” — an idea encouraged by the president himself. Because no one was in a position to either officially approve or formally deny such access, Wolff became “more a constant interloper than an invited guest.” There were no ground rules placed on his access, and he was required to make no promises about how he would report on what he witnessed.

Since then, he conducted more than 200 interviews. In true Trumpian fashion, the administration’s lack of experience and disdain for political norms made for a hodgepodge of journalistic challenges. Information would be provided off-the-record or on deep background, then casually put on the record. Sources would fail to set any parameters on the use of a conversation, or would provide accounts in confidence, only to subsequently share their views widely. And the president’s own views, private as well as public, were constantly shared by others. The adaptation presented here offers a front-row view of Trump’s presidency, from his improvised transition to his first months in the Oval Office.

*Excerpted from Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff (Henry Holt and Co., January 9, 2018). This article appears in the January 8, 2018, issue of New York Magazine.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/20 ... trump.html





Malcolm Nance
25m25 minutes ago

2. This is Bannon’s way of dominating Trump in a Putin-like way. Trump Jr & Kushner to be sacrificed to bring Trump back into Alt-Right line. If I were Muller I’d get Bannon in a room & see if he lies or turns on Trump.




Trump Tower meeting with Russians 'treasonous', Steve Bannon says in explosive book

David Smith
First published on Wed 3 Jan ‘18 08.07 EST

Steve Bannon exits an elevator in the lobby of Trump Tower on 11 November 2016 in New York City. Other Trump campaign officials met with Russians there in June 2016. Photograph: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon has described the Trump Tower meeting between the president’s son and a group of Russians during the 2016 election campaign as “treasonous” and “unpatriotic”, according to an explosive new book seen by the Guardian.

Bannon, speaking to author Michael Wolff, warned that the investigation into alleged collusion with the Kremlin will focus on money laundering and predicted: “They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV.”

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, reportedly based on more than 200 interviews with the president, his inner circle and players in and around the administration, is one of the most eagerly awaited political books of the year. In it, Wolff lifts the lid on a White House lurching from crisis to crisis amid internecine warfare, with even some of Trump’s closest allies expressing contempt for him.

Bannon, who was chief executive of the Trump campaign in its final three months, then White House chief strategist for seven months before returning to the rightwing Breitbart News, is a central figure in the nasty, cutthroat drama, quoted extensively, often in salty language.

He is particularly scathing about a June 2016 meeting involving Trump’s son Donald Jr, son-in-law Jared Kushner, then campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower in New York. A trusted intermediary had promised documents that would “incriminate” rival Hillary Clinton but instead of alerting the FBI to a potential assault on American democracy by a foreign power, Trump Jr replied in an email: “I love it.”

The meeting was revealed by the New York Times in July last year, prompting Trump Jr to say no consequential material was produced. Soon after, Wolff writes, Bannon remarked mockingly: “The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor – with no lawyers. They didn’t have any lawyers.

“Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately.”

Bannon went on, Wolff writes, to say that if any such meeting had to take place, it should have been set up “in a Holiday Inn in Manchester, New Hampshire, with your lawyers who meet with these people”. Any information, he said, could then be “dump[ed] … down to Breitbart or something like that, or maybe some other more legitimate publication”.

Bannon added: “You never see it, you never know it, because you don’t need to … But that’s the brain trust that they had.”

Special counsel Robert Mueller was appointed last May, following Trump’s dismissal of FBI director James Comey, to investigate Russian meddling in the 2016 election. This has led to the indictments of four members of Trump’s inner circle, including Manafort and former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Manafort has pleaded not guilty to money laundering charges; Flynn has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. In recent weeks Bannon’s Breitbart News and other conservative outlets have accused Mueller’s team of bias against the president.

Trump predicted in an interview with the New York Times last week that the special counsel was “going to be fair”, though he also said the investigation “makes the country look very bad”. The president and his allies deny any collusion with Russia and the Kremlin has denied interfering.

Bannon has criticised Trump’s decision to fire Comey. In Wolff’s book, obtained by the Guardian ahead of publication from a bookseller in New England, he suggests White House hopes for a quick end to the Mueller investigation are gravely misplaced.

“You realise where this is going,” he is quoted as saying. “This is all about money laundering. Mueller chose [senior prosecutor Andrew] Weissmann first and he is a money-laundering guy. Their path to fucking Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr and Jared Kushner … It’s as plain as a hair on your face.”

Last month it was reported that federal prosecutors had subpoenaed records from Deutsche Bank, the German financial institution that has lent hundreds of millions of dollars to the Kushner property empire. Bannon continues: “It goes through Deutsche Bank and all the Kushner shit. The Kushner shit is greasy. They’re going to go right through that. They’re going to roll those two guys up and say play me or trade me.”

Scorning apparent White House insouciance, Bannon reaches for a hurricane metaphor: “They’re sitting on a beach trying to stop a Category Five.”

He insists that he knows no Russians, will not be a witness, will not hire a lawyer and will not appear on national television answering questions.

Fire and Fury will be published next week. Wolff is a prominent media critic and columnist who has written for the Guardian and is a biographer of Rupert Murdoch. He previously conducted interviews for the Hollywood Reporter with Trump in June 2016 and Bannon a few months later.

He told the Guardian in November that to research the book, he showed up at the White House with no agenda but wanting to “find out what the insiders were really thinking and feeling”. He enjoyed extraordinary access to Trump and senior officials and advisers, he said, sometimes at critical moments of the fledgling presidency.

The rancour between Bannon and “Javanka” – Kushner and his wife Ivanka Trump – is a recurring theme of the book. Kushner and Ivanka are Jewish. Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state, is quoted as saying: “It is a war between the Jews and the non-Jews.”

Trump is not spared. Wolff writes that Thomas Barrack Jr, a billionaire who is one of the president’s oldest associates, allegedly told a friend: “He’s not only crazy, he’s stupid.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... hael-wolff



Bannon: 2016 Trump Tower meeting was 'treasonous'

Fact checking Trump Tower meeting explanations
(CNN)Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon called the 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Trump campaign officials and a Russian lawyer purportedly offering damaging information about Hillary Clinton "treasonous," according to a new book obtained by The Guardian.

The book, "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House" by Michael Wolff, is based on hundreds of interviews, including ones with President Donald Trump and his inner circle. According to the Guardian, Bannon addressed the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Donald Trump Jr., then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner and Russian operatives that was arranged when Trump Jr. agreed to meet a "Russian government attorney" after receiving an email offering him "very high level and sensitive information" that would "incriminate" Clinton.

"The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor -- with no lawyers. They didn't have any lawyers," Bannon continued, according to the Guardian. "Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad s***, and I happen to think it's all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately."

NYT: Former Trump campaign adviser told Australian diplomat Russia had dirt on Clinton
Bannon also reportedly told Wolff: "They're going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV."

The White House declined to comment Wednesday about Bannon's reported assertions.

Bannon also reportedly told Wolff that special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into the Trump campaign's potential ties to Russia is centered on money laundering, saying that the White House is "sitting on a beach trying to stop a Category Five" hurricane.

The ups and downs of the Bannon insurgency
The ups and downs of the Bannon insurgency 01:21

"You realize where this is going ... This is all about money laundering. Mueller chose (senior prosecutor Andrew) Weissmann first and he is a money-laundering guy," Bannon reportedly said. "Their path to f***ing Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr., and Jared Kushner ... It's as plain as a hair on your face."

Bannon said he believes Kushner, the White House senior adviser and the President's son-in-law, could be convinced to cooperate if Mueller probes his financial records.


"They're going to go right through that. They're going to roll those two guys up and say play me or trade me," Bannon is reported as saying, apparently referring to Trump Jr. and Kushner.

The Trump Tower meeting has been of intense interest to the congressional Russia investigators as well as Mueller.

Trump Jr. testified before House investigators last month but would not say what he and his father discussed after reports surfaced about the meeting, citing attorney-client privilege.
http://www.cnn.com/2018/01/03/politics/ ... index.html



Bannon Says Trump Tower Meeting Was ‘Treasonous’ And ‘Unpatriotic’

Brynn Anderson/AP
By CAITLIN MACNEAL Published JANUARY 3, 2018 9:44 AM
At least one member of President Donald Trump’s inner circle believes Donald Trump Jr. was wrong to set up the June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower with a Kremlin-linked lawyer promising dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Steve Bannon told author Michael Wolff that the meeting was “treasonous” and “unpatriotic,” according to The Guardian. Wolff spoke to Bannon for a book out next week titled “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” which The Guardian obtained early.

“Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately,” Bannon told Wolff in reference to the Trump Tower meeting, per The Guardian.

Bannon did not officially join the Trump campaign until about two months after that meeting.

He told Wolff that if the Trump campaign wanted to set up such a meeting, it should take place “in a Holiday Inn in Manchester, New Hampshire, with your lawyers who meet with these people.”

Bannon also predicted that special counsel Robert Mueller would focus on money laundering and would snag Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr.

“They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV,” he told Wolff, according to The Guardian.

“This is all about money laundering. Mueller chose [senior prosecutor Andrew] Weissmann first and he is a money-laundering guy. Their path to fucking Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr and Jared Kushner,” he added, per The Guardian. “It’s as plain as a hair on your face.”
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/b ... treasonous




:P
Bannon is dangerous - hell hath no fury like a scorned bloated alcoholic meth addict with apocalyptic ambitions...


Scott Dworkin

Multiple people told me this morning Trump is infuriated beyond belief at Steve Bannon’s comments about Don Junior. Saying that Trump thinks Bannon is the traitor. They’ve never seen Trump this angry. The sound of their voices? Absolutely terrified. Expect an unhinged response.



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Image
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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