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| DATE | 2016-11-27 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout-NYLXS] Bannon Bio
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/27/us/politics/steve-bannon-white-house.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us®ion=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront
Politics
Combative, Populist Steve Bannon Found His Man in Donald Trump
By SCOTT SHANENOV. 27, 2016
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Photo
Stephen K. Bannon at a campaign rally for Donald J. Trump on Oct. 28 in
Manchester, N.H. Mr. Bannon views former President Ronald Reagan as a
political hero, and “Trump,” a colleague of his said, “is Steve’s
Reagan.” Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
When Julia Jones arrived at her office in Santa Monica at 8 a.m. — by
Hollywood screenwriter standards, the crack of dawn — she found Stephen
K. Bannon already at his desk, which was cluttered with takeout coffees.
They were co-writers on a Ronald Reagan documentary, but Mr. Bannon had
pretty much taken it over. He had been at work for hours, he told her,
writing feverishly about his political hero.
Today, with Donald J. Trump, whose election Mr. Bannon helped engineer,
on the threshold of power, the 2004 film “In the Face of Evil” has a
prophetic ring. Its trailer has an over-the-top, apocalyptic feel: lurid
footage of bombs dropping on cities alternating with grainy clips of
Reagan speeches, as a choir provides a soaring soundtrack. The message:
Only one man was up to the challenge posed by looming domestic and
global threats.
“A man with a vision,” the trailer says. “An outsider, a radical with
extreme views.”
The Reagan presidency has been a recurring touchstone for Mr. Bannon
since 1980, when as a 26-year-old Navy officer he talked his way into
Mr. Reagan’s election night celebration. It was at an early screening of
“In the Face of Evil” that he met fellow Reagan admirer Andrew
Breitbart, the budding conservative media provocateur.
Breitbart.com’s scorn for Muslims, immigrants and black activists drew a
fervent following on the alt-right, an extremist fringe of message
boards and online magazines popular with white supremacists, and after
Mr. Bannon took control of the website in 2012, he built a raucous
coalition of the discontented.
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More quietly, Mr. Bannon systematically courted a series of politicians,
especially those who share his dark, populist worldview: at home, a
corrupt ruling class preying on working Americans; globally, “the
Judeo-Christian West” in a “war against Islamic fascism.” They were
views that placed him closer to the European right than to the
Republican mainstream.
He made flattering films about Michele Bachmann, the former
congresswoman from Minnesota, and Sarah Palin, the former Alaska
governor and vice-presidential candidate; repeatedly pressed the
television host Lou Dobbs to run for office; and flirted with a range of
Republican presidential hopefuls, including Rick Santorum, Ben Carson
and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. Finally, in Mr. Trump, Mr. Bannon found
his man.
Mr. Bannon told a colleague in multiple conversations during the
presidential campaign that he knew Mr. Trump was an “imperfect vessel”
for the revolution he had in mind. But the upstart candidate and the
media entrepreneur bonded anyway.
In August 2015, Mr. Bannon told Ms. Jones in an email that he had turned
Breitbart, where employees called certain political stories “Bannon
Specials,” into “Trump Central” and joked that he was the candidate’s
hidden “campaign manager.” He hosted Mr. Trump for friendly radio
interviews and offered tactful coaching. This August, with the Trump
campaign foundering, Mr. Bannon took over as chief executive.
Like Reagan, Mr. Trump addressed the people he called “the forgotten men
and women of our country” — the white working and middle class. He vowed
to take on Islamic radicalism, as Reagan had faced off against
communism. Echoing the sole-savior theme of “In the Face of Evil,” Mr.
Trump declared of the nation’s predicament, “Only I can fix it.”
Ms. Jones, for one, had no trouble seeing the parallels. “Trump,” she
said, “is Steve’s Reagan.”
Trailer of the 2004 documentary “In the Face of Evil,” which Mr. Bannon
helped write. YouTube
Mr. Trump, of course, is not Mr. Bannon’s creation, and the
president-elect would not take kindly to any such implication. (Asked on
Tuesday by New York Times journalists about Mr. Bannon, Mr. Trump
praised him but said, pointedly, “I’m the one who makes the decisions.”)
But Mr. Bannon understood better than any other 2016 campaign strategist
how many voters were seeking dramatic change, said Patrick Caddell, a
veteran pollster, who all but predicted a Trump victory on election eve
as most pundits were calling the race for Hillary Clinton. “He’s been
the forerunner intellectually of this moment,” Mr. Caddell said. “His
ideology is that of the outsider and the insurgent.”
To understand what to expect from the Trump administration means in part
to fathom the driven, contradictory character of Mr. Bannon, whom the
president-elect has named senior counselor and chief White House
strategist. Rarely has there been so incendiary a figure at the side of
a president-elect, thrilling Mr. Trump’s more extreme supporters while
unnerving ethnic and religious minorities and many other Americans.
How did this son of Richmond, Va., who attended Harvard Business School,
spent years at Goldman Sachs and became wealthy working at the
intersection of entertainment and finance come to view the political and
financial elites as his archenemy? Why does a man who calls himself a
“hard-nosed capitalist” rail against “globalists” of “the party of
Davos” and attack the Republican establishment with special glee?
As a filmmaker, Mr. Bannon, 63, has cited both the Nazi propagandist
Leni Riefenstahl and the left-wing documentarian Michael Moore as
models. In top physical shape as a young Navy officer, and for years
wearing the banker’s uniform of expensive suits, Mr. Bannon has in
recent years sported flannel shirts and cargo pants. With a paunch and a
sometimes scraggly beard, Mr. Bannon has a rugged look that Stephen
Colbert described as “Robert Redford dredged from a river.”
He is an avid reader of history, fond of citing Plutarch and Plato, and
his career reflects a restless, eclectic mind. He has conceived a rap
musical based on Shakespeare’s “Coriolanus” (never completed); overseen
the troubled Biosphere 2 project, an experiment in the Arizona desert
meant to mimic the earth’s ecosystem; acquired partial rights to
“Seinfeld” before it became a megahit; moved to Shanghai to run a
company marshaling Chinese computer gamers to earn points for Western
players; and produced films on Washington corruption, Occupy Wall Street
and Phil Robertson of “Duck Dynasty.”
Vociferous critics of his appointment, a diverse group that includes the
conservative talk-show host Glenn Beck and Senator Bernie Sanders of
Vermont, who challenged Mrs. Clinton for the Democratic presidential
nomination, have variously called Mr. Bannon a racist, a sexist, an
anti-Semite and an Islamophobe. Interviews with two dozen people who
know him well, however, portray a man not easily labeled, capable of
surprising both friends and enemies, with unshakable self-confidence and
striking intensity. (Mr. Bannon turned down a request for an interview,
saying he was too busy with the presidential transition.)
Fans and foes agree that he is a “screamer,” a volcanic personality who
sometimes resorts to offensive or hyperbolic language. One of his three
former wives claimed in court papers that he had said he did not want
their twin daughters to go to school with Jews who raise their children
to be “whiny brats,” a claim Mr. Bannon denies. In a 2011 radio
interview, he dismissed liberal women as “a bunch of dykes that came
from the Seven Sisters schools.”
Photo
At a rally on Nov. 16 in Los Angeles, people protested the appointment
of Mr. Bannon as the chief strategist of the White House. Rarely has
there been so incendiary a figure at the side of a president-elect,
thrilling Mr. Trump’s more extreme supporters while unnerving ethnic and
religious minorities. Credit David McNew/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
In a radio interview last year with Mr. Trump, Mr. Bannon complained,
inaccurately, that “two-thirds or three-quarters of the C.E.O.s in
Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia.” He has sometimes
portrayed a grave threat to civilization not just from violent jihadists
but from “Islam.” He once suggested to a colleague that perhaps only
property owners should be allowed to vote. In an email to a Breitbart
colleague in 2014, he dismissed Republican congressional leaders with an
epithet and added, “Let the grass roots turn on the hate.”
“No one has called him nice,” said Patrick McSweeney, a former chairman
of the Virginia Republican Party and a Bannon admirer who has known his
family for years. “He is the least politically correct person I know.
His overriding concern is getting the mission accomplished.”
Mr. Bannon encouraged clickbait incitement on Breitbart.com, and links
to Breitbart articles are often spread on Twitter and Facebook alongside
Nazi rhetoric and racial slurs. Saying he is an economic nationalist and
not a white nationalist, Mr. Bannon has dismissed such devotees as the
kind of marginal characters who turn up in every political movement, but
he has only mildly denounced the bigots among his admirers.
Some longtime associates said they had never heard him express bigoted
views. “In the 14 years I’ve known him, I’ve never heard him utter a
racist or anti-Semitic comment,” said Peter Schweizer, a conservative
author and the president of the Government Accountability Institute,
where Mr. Bannon was a founder and the executive chairman.
Mr. Bannon’s backers note that several of Breitbart’s top editors and
managers are Jewish — as was Mr. Breitbart himself — and the site is
staunchly pro-Israel. They also point out that Mr. Bannon’s longtime
assistant, Wendy Colbert, is African-American; so are Sonnie Johnson, a
conservative writer he promoted on Breitbart, and a former Goldman
colleague who has been a close friend for three decades and considers
Mr. Bannon family, but who asked not to be named to avoid a flood of
media attention.
Mary Beth Meredith, Mr. Bannon’s sister, said accusations of personal
bigotry against him were “absolutely absurd.” “We have interfaith
marriages in our own family,” she said. “We have interracial marriages —
our family is a microcosm of the U.S.”
Where some perceive racism and nativism, others see a different -ism:
opportunism. Whatever may be in his heart, they say, Mr. Bannon was
happy to draw a white nationalist following to Breitbart, while denying
that was his intent.
Ben Shapiro, a former Breitbart editor who has been sharply critical of
Mr. Bannon, called him “a manipulator” who had “mainstreamed” far-right
extremists for cynical political purposes.
Ms. Jones, Mr. Bannon’s former film collaborator, who describes herself
as very liberal, said, “Steve’s not a racist.”
But, she added, “he’s using the alt-right — using them for power.”
Photo
Mr. Bannon in 1975, when he ran successfully for student body president
at Virginia Tech. An opponent, Gary Clisham, told the student newspaper
that Mr. Bannon had “immense charisma” but predicted that he would get
nothing done.
‘Son of the South’
Robin Mickle, a fellow Navy officer of Mr. Bannon’s aboard the destroyer
Paul F. Foster, remembers that he and some of his idealistic mates were
struck by something Mr. Bannon told them in 1978.
“He said he joined the Navy so it would look good on his résumé because
he wanted to go into politics someday,” said Mr. Mickle, a retired
defense contractor.
Another officer, Sonny Masso, who would stay in the Navy and eventually
make admiral, recalls a devoted reader of The Wall Street Journal who
picked stocks to buy through a San Diego broker and had an astonishing
ability to retain information.
He was fit, too. “He’d run five miles at lunch and he had a 32-inch
waist,” Mr. Masso said. “Very preppy when we were out of uniform — polo
shirts with alligators on them, and penny loafers with no socks.”
Mr. Bannon was the middle child of five in an Irish Catholic family from
a leafy North Richmond neighborhood. His father, Martin, 95, to whom he
remains very close, was a telephone lineman who had worked his way into
middle management at the phone company.
Photo
Mr. Bannon with his father, Martin Bannon, at the family’s home in
Richmond, Va. Credit Via Julia Jones
Steve and his two brothers went to Benedictine High School, an all-male
Catholic military school in Richmond where the boys wore uniforms, kept
their hair short and were called cadets. “It was a very conservative
world,” said John Pudner, a Benedictine graduate who knows Mr. Bannon
and runs Take Back Our Republic, an advocacy group based in Alabama.
Steve was bit of a brawler as a boy, said his older brother Mike Bannon.
“He was a fighter. He was a guy that believed what he believed.” On
occasion, Steve summoned Mike to the neighborhood pool for
reinforcement. “He’d get in little scrapes and come back and get me, and
I’d say, ‘I wished it wasn’t eight guys we were fighting. If it was two
or three, I wouldn’t mind.’”
Mike Bannon, eager to rebut charges of racism against his brother, said
the boys took two buses to get to Benedictine, and their parents
instructed them to give up their seats if a woman boarded: “It didn’t
make any difference if they were black or white or Indian or Jewish or
anything else,” he said.
Their mother, Doris, who died many years ago, loved to tell them about
sneaking Jewish friends into her neighborhood pool in Baltimore — past a
sign that said “No Jews Allowed.” She later worked on campaigns for
Douglas Wilder, a Democrat who became the first African-American
governor of Virginia.
For Mike Bannon, his brother Steve is “a son of the South” who has never
shifted his principles or his character. “He knew who he was in fourth
grade and he’s never changed much over the years,” he said. “He’s very
comfortable in his own skin.”
At Virginia Tech, Steve Bannon got his first taste of politics, winning
the Student Government Association presidency in a 1975 race that grew
quite heated after he challenged the status quo. An opponent, Gary
Clisham, told the student newspaper that Mr. Bannon had “immense
charisma” but predicted that he would get nothing done.
Photo
A campaign button for Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign, which employed
almost the same slogan that Mr. Trump would use in his presidential
campaign. Credit Fotosearch/Getty Images
After graduation, Mr. Bannon joined the Navy, attended Officer Candidate
School and served two deployments aboard the Foster, a guided-missile
destroyer that took him all over Asia and into the Persian Gulf. His
basketball style — running the length of the court without passing —
earned him a sarcastic nickname, Coast-to-Coast, said Mr. Masso, his
shipmate. Still, he said, Mr. Bannon was popular with the sailors he led
in the engineering department, nearly 50 men, the majority of them
African-American, Hispanic or Asian.
Though his family had Democratic roots, Mr. Bannon, like most of his
fellow officers, was scornful of President Jimmy Carter and entranced by
Ronald Reagan. At Mr. Masso’s condo, while they watched the two
candidates’ debate on television in 1980, Mr. Bannon could hardly
contain his excitement.
“He was pacing my living room, and whenever there was a
point-counterpoint, he’d say, ‘Yeah!’ like we were watching a boxing
match,” Mr. Masso said. When Mr. Bannon heard later that the Reagan
election night party was planned for a Los Angeles hotel, the Century
Plaza, he worked the phones to try for tickets.
When he got the brushoff, Mr. Masso said, Mr. Bannon said, “Hey, listen
pal, we just got back from the Persian Gulf.” Soon, he had Reagan aide
Lyn Nofziger on the phone saying, “The governor would be honored to have
you there.” It was 4 a.m. when their group left the victory celebration
to return to the ship, Mr. Masso said.
Both men went on to take Pentagon jobs, and Mr. Bannon earned a master’s
degree in international relations at Georgetown at the same time. Mr.
Masso thought his friend might try to get into politics, but he was
accepted at Harvard Business School, and he left the Navy in 1983 to
begin a new life.
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Photo
Mr. Bannon with employees of Breitbart.com in the Washington offices of
Breitbart News. He took over as executive chairman of Breitbart News in
2012 after Andrew Breitbart died. Credit Jeremy Liebman
‘Working 100 Hours a Week’
Friends at Harvard and later at Goldman Sachs were aware of Mr. Bannon’s
conservative views, but politics was rarely discussed. “He was in
mergers and acquisitions, I was in corporate finance, and we were both
working 100 hours a week,” said Scot Vorse, who met Mr. Bannon on their
first day at Harvard and joined Goldman at the same time.
After less than four years, Mr. Bannon left Goldman to start his own
firm, Bannon & Co., which Mr. Vorse soon joined. As head of a scrappy
start-up going up against financial behemoths to get Hollywood deals,
Mr. Bannon showed the fierce competitiveness that would later drive his
politics.
Journalism that matters.
More essential than ever.
“We were the underdog,” Mr. Vorse said. “We were competing for the
business of the biggest entertainment companies in the world, and we did
well.” Mr. Vorse said Bannon & Co. represented the Saudi businessman
Prince Alwaleed bin Talal; the Italian media tycoon and later the prime
minister Silvio Berlusconi; Samsung; Westinghouse; and other big players.
Mr. Vorse was the detail man, he said. Mr. Bannon “was the visionary,
seeing things before anyone else. He was the rainmaker. He was a leader.”
Even as they became successful, Mr. Bannon was not a lavish spender. “He
was driving an eight-year-old Celica convertible,” he said.
In fact, Mr. Bannon appears to have gone through some lean moments in
the 1990s — court records show five federal and four state tax liens for
amounts from $10,993 to $136,610. Ms. Jones, his film collaborator, said
that when Mr. Bannon and his second wife, Mary Louise Piccard,
separated, he lived for a time in a spare room at the home of his first
wife, Cathleen Houff Jordan. Ms. Piccard had accused Mr. Bannon of
grabbing her wrist and neck during an argument, an allegation he denied.
But in 1993, as part of the sale of Castle Rock Entertainment to Turner
Broadcasting System, he acquired a share of the royalties from
“Seinfeld,” a move that would prove extremely lucrative as the show
became a cultural force.
In 1998, Bannon & Co. was acquired by Société Générale, and Mr. Bannon
ran a series of companies working at the intersection of entertainment
and finance.
“Very intense, very passionate,” said Trevor Drinkwater, who worked with
him in film distribution from 2004 to 2010. “I was impressed that while
he was very right wing, he had a lot of liberal friends.” He saw Mr.
Bannon’s dress evolve toward the casual, “the flannel shirt over the
polo shirt.”
Through films, Mr. Bannon was turning his attention back to politics.
Tim Watkins, his co-director on the Reagan documentary, said Mr. Bannon
worked from 7 a.m. to 2 a.m. “I’ve never known him to, say, go to a
ballgame,” he said. But Mr. Watkins found his collaborator’s
combativeness wearying.
“Steve thinks everything has to be a fight,” he said. Once, an argument
broke out when he told Mr. Bannon that the rough cut of the film, at two
hours and 10 minutes, should be trimmed further. Angry, Mr. Bannon
“actually flipped over the table,” Mr. Watkins said.
At first, he recalled, before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks,
they intended to make a standard biopic. But the attacks “changed the
film radically,” Mr. Watkins said. Mr. Reagan’s Cold War battles merged
with the coda, which showed the hijacked airliners hitting the World
Trade Center and people jumping to their deaths.
“Steve crafted a lot of the big ideas,” Mr. Watkins said, notably that
“life is a battle of good and evil, and history repeats itself.”
Lou Cannon, a Reagan biographer, rejects comparisons of Mr. Reagan and
Mr. Trump. He notes that Mr. Reagan had been governor of California
before becoming president, never demonized opponents and signed a law
giving amnesty to three million undocumented immigrants. Nonetheless,
Mr. Watkins sees striking similarities and is sure Mr. Bannon does, too.
In the Reagan memorabilia he accumulated while working on the film, Mr.
Watkins said, he recently found some lapel stickers.
“Let’s Make America Great Again,” they read.
Photo
Mr. Bannon in 2010 at the Virginia Tea Party convention in Richmond. He
told a Tea Party gathering that year in New York that the party was
backed by “the people who fight our wars, pay our taxes, run our civic
organizations, who build our cities and who hold our neighborhoods
together.” Credit Tina Fultz/ZUMApress.com
Anger at the Elite
When his eldest child, Maureen, got into West Point, Mr. Bannon was
thrilled and joked about switching his allegiance to Army from Navy. He
never missed her volleyball games, and he was at Fort Campbell, Ky., in
2011 when she returned from a deployment to Iraq. “That was one of the
greatest feelings I’ve had, seeing my dad when I walked off the plane,”
she said.
But through his daughter’s service, he saw an inequity that fueled his
anger at the privileged Americans among whom he had long worked.
At West Point, “he saw a complete, utter lack of people from the upper
economic levels of American society,” said Mr. Schweizer, the
conservative writer. “He thought it was appalling, especially because
the elite set so many policies that sent these kids into war.”
Mr. Bannon was put off by the George W. Bush administration’s creation
in 2003 of the Medicare prescription drug benefit, which he saw as a
blatant giveaway to the pharmaceutical companies. The financial collapse
of 2008 and the bailouts that followed infuriated him, including the
devastating effect of the stock market collapse on the retirement
accounts of men like his father, a phone company retiree.
Mr. Bannon often spoke to friends about his father’s “honest work,”
contrasting it with the paper-pushing he had seen on Wall Street. “We
consider ourselves middle class, and we think the middle class has been
shafted,” Mike Bannon said. “Black, Hispanic, white, everybody. The
political class has given them happy talk but delivered nothing. I think
that’s what Steve’s talking about.”
In 2010, Mr. Bannon spoke at Tea Party gathering in New York City. YouTube
By the time of a Tea Party gathering in 2010 in New York, Steve Bannon
had fully embraced a class-based diagnosis of the country’s woes: “In
the last 20 years, our financial elites and the political class have
taken care of themselves and led our country to the brink of ruin,” he
said. By contrast, he said, the Tea Party was backed by “the people who
fight our wars, pay our taxes, run our civic organizations, who build
our cities and who hold our neighborhoods together.”
Mr. Bannon honed his message as he reached out to politicians, beginning
with his films about Mrs. Bachmann and Ms. Palin. He criticized the
conservative elite, including some of his former business colleagues.
“The reason I made these films is my buddies on Wall Street said, ‘These
women are a bunch of bimbos,’” he told a 2011 gathering. “I said, ‘I
know Governor Palin and Congresswoman Bachmann — they’re every bit as
tough and smart as you guys are.’”
At times, Mr. Bannon’s rants against the ruling class — in which he is
at least as unsparing of Republicans as of Democrats — strikingly echo
populists on the left. In a revealing 2014 talk via Skype to a Vatican
conference, some of his words might have come from Senator Elizabeth
Warren of Massachusetts or Mr. Sanders of Vermont.
“Not one criminal charge has ever been brought to any bank executive
associated with the 2008 crisis,” Mr. Bannon fumed. “And in fact, it
gets worse. No bonuses and none of their equity was taken.”
But if his scathing economic analysis sometimes seemed to dabble in
Marxism, on other subjects, including race and religion, he made no
concessions to political sensitivities. After Mr. Bannon met Mr.
Breitbart at the 2004 screening of “In the Face of Evil,” the two men
hit it off, bonding over their similar views and a common irreverent streak.
Ms. Jones, the film colleague, said that in their years working
together, Mr. Bannon occasionally talked about the genetic superiority
of some people and once mused about the desirability of limiting the
vote to property owners.
“I said, ‘That would exclude a lot of African-Americans,’” Ms. Jones
recalled. “He said, ‘Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.’ I said, ‘But
what about Wendy?’” referring to Mr. Bannon’s executive assistant. “He
said, ‘She’s different. She’s family.’”
Mr. Bannon’s African-American friend from his Goldman years said that he
had been at pains to defend him in recent years to mutual acquaintances
put off first by Breitbart’s reputation and now by Mr. Bannon’s
association with Mr. Trump. Most Christmas seasons over the past two
decades, he said, Mr. Bannon was “my only token white guy,” or one of
two or three, invited to an annual dinner at a New York City club for
nearly a score of African-American friends who work or worked in finance.
“Now I’m getting a lot of, ‘What happened to Steve?’” from concerned
black acquaintances, the friend said. He said he hoped Mr. Bannon — and
more important, Mr. Trump — would more forthrightly denounce the bigots
who have cheered them on. Still, he said, he completely rejects the
accusations against Mr. Bannon.
“Hell, no, he’s not a white nationalist,” the friend said.
Mr. Bannon took over as executive chairman of Breitbart News in 2012
after Mr. Breitbart died, playing a hands-on role in assigning,
approving and sometimes dictating changes to articles, according to
several former Breitbart employees. Staff members grew polarized for or
against him. Most of them spoke on the condition of anonymity because
they had signed a nondisclosure agreement.
They describe a decentralized operation overseen by Mr. Bannon in two
conference calls a day. Employees rarely had any idea where their
peripatetic boss was because he seemed to be constantly moving between
homes, offices or borrowed premises in Florida, Washington, New York and
occasionally Los Angeles or London.
Mr. Bannon’s critics assert that he sometimes put his political
preferences ahead of fairness or even of the facts, directing that
stories be rewritten to his specifications and shrugging off protests
that his changes might make them inaccurate. While Breitbart did not
traffic in outright racial slurs, it specialized in inflammatory
coverage of police shootings, immigration and Islam in ways intended to
prick liberal pieties.
Alex Marlow, the editor in chief of Breitbart, denied that Mr. Bannon
ever deliberately permitted an inaccurate story to run on the site.
“Breitbart represents certain values, like conservatism, populism and
nationalism, and Steve Bannon wanted our content to reflect that,” Mr.
Marlow said. He said the site has 45 million readers and should not be
judged by “a couple thousand people on Twitter” who express offensive views.
Photo
Mr. Trump and Mr. Bannon in October in Gettysburg, Pa. Mr. Bannon said
during the presidential campaign that he knew Mr. Trump was an
“imperfect vessel” for the revolution he had in mind. But the upstart
candidate and the media entrepreneur bonded anyway. Credit Damon
Winter/The New York Times
In 2011, as Mr. Trump pondered a 2012 presidential run, David Bossie, a
conservative activist who headed Citizens United, took Mr. Bannon to
Trump Tower in New York to meet him. “They definitely hit it off,” said
Mr. Bossie, who has collaborated with Mr. Bannon on a series of films.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Bannon had in common a willingness to defy some
small-government conservative notions — for instance, by pushing for a
large, costly infrastructure plan to create jobs.
Mr. Bannon was deeply impressed in 2014 when an insurgent Virginia
Republican, David Brat, managed an unexpected primary race upset of
Representative Eric Cantor, the House majority leader. “He began casting
around for other unconventional candidates to support — people that were
not a part of the establishment and would run populist campaigns,” Mr.
Schweizer said.
As Mr. Bannon became a steadily more obvious supporter of Mr. Trump,
some Breitbart editors and reporters thought he was turning a news site
into a propaganda platform — though other staff members approved. Mr.
Shapiro was the most outspoken critic, saying that Mr. Bannon had
“betrayed” Mr. Breitbart’s mission of “fighting the bullies.”
“In my opinion, Steve Bannon is a bully, and has sold out Andrew’s
mission in order to back another bully, Donald Trump,” Mr. Shapiro wrote
in a statement when he quit Breitbart in March in support of Michelle
Fields, a Breitbart reporter who had been roughly grabbed by Corey
Lewandowski, then Mr. Trump’s campaign manager. “He has shaped the
company into Trump’s personal Pravda.”
If the criticism bothered Mr. Bannon, he did not show it. He was already
deeply involved in advising Mr. Trump, and he believed, unlike most
pollsters and pundits, that the chaotic, low-budget campaign had a chance.
One warm evening in August, after Mr. Trump called on Mr. Bannon to take
charge of the campaign, Mr. Caddell, the pollster, met with him at a New
York hotel, sitting outside on a veranda.
Mr. Bannon said he knew the campaign needed discipline, with Mr. Trump
more consistently presenting himself as a populist outsider, Mr. Caddell
recalled. “He said, ‘Believe me, I’m going to bring this home. I know
what needs to be done, and I’m going to do it,’” Mr. Caddell said.
Graphic
Donald Trump Is Choosing His Cabinet. Here’s the Latest Shortlist.
A list of possibilities for key posts in the new administration.
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Whatever Reagan scholars like Mr. Cannon might say, Mr. Bossie, who also
joined the Trump campaign, said that he and Mr. Bannon discussed Reagan
parallels as they saw huge crowds waiting for hours to hear Mr. Trump.
Mr. Reagan had run when many voters felt the country was threatened at
home and abroad, Mr. Bossie said. “You can see the same things today
with Donald Trump — that America has lost its way and it’s lost its
strength, and Americans are looking for leadership,” he said.
Kellyanne Conway, who took the job of campaign manager when Mr. Bannon
became chief executive, would later call him “the general” who made many
critical decisions. He pushed for Mr. Trump to visit Flint, Mich., where
the water supply was contaminated with lead, and to appear at a black
church. Mr. Bannon also hugely accelerated the tempo of what he thought
had been a 9-to-5 campaign.
After a devastating recording surfaced of Mr. Trump bragging about
sexually assaulting women, it was Mr. Bannon’s idea to “race to the
bottom” by inviting women who had accused former President Bill Clinton
of sexual abuse to attend a presidential debate, according to another
campaign official. Mr. Bannon believed airing the competing accusations
would allow the campaign to return more quickly to the core issues of
American nationalism and a suffering middle class, the official said,
speaking on the condition of anonymity about internal discussions.
In the final weeks of the campaign, Mr. Bannon was sure the polls
pointing to a Clinton victory were wrong, other campaign officials said.
His family, including all four siblings and his 95-year-old father, made
the trip to New York City for election night.
For Mr. Bannon, the long night at the New York Hilton was his second
presidential campaign victory gathering, coming 36 years after the
first. At 4:30 a.m., Mr. Vorse, his former colleague, reached him to
offer congratulations. He was reminded of their Hollywood days, when “we
would have victories and Steve would celebrate for two seconds, and then
it was on to the next thing.”
“He said, ‘I got to go because we have a meeting in three hours. I got
to hop.’”
--
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that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
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DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
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Being so tracked is for FARM ANIMALS and and extermination camps,
but incompatible with living as a free human being. -RI Safir 2013
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