I was recently going over notes from a ghostwriting
project that I worked at for nearly a decade. I was chief researcher and editor
and thus responsible for formulating a lot of the political ideas that the
client prompted me to consider in his writing. I was struck by how on point we
had been as far back as 2013-2014 regarding the wave of authoritarian thought
that was taking shape all over the West, but nowhere as much as in the United
States, where a man who had never been taken seriously before, an almost
ridiculous jet set playboy with a lousy comb-over and a series of insane business
projects, many of which were crashing failures became suddenly relevant. He was
a guy who was taken in the best of cases as a joke and in the worst as a
swindler whom former partners sought to avoid in the future. But suddenly, he was
becoming, against all odds, the face of the American ultra-right and,
incredibly, a serious contender for US president.
What’s stunning to me now—although I called it on a
hunch back then—isn’t so much the nefarious influence that this man, Donald
Trump, has had on the entire spectrum of American politics in the last seven or
so years. It was easy enough to see that coming if he managed to gain access to
the White House. What was chilling, in retrospect, was just how influential his
former chief adviser, Steve Bannon, had been in ushering Trump from the
play-by-ear politics of his early campaign for the presidency into a truly
pernicious political philosophy similar to the classic ideologies of some of
the most prominent dictators in history. I couldn’t help thinking that, without
Bannon—and to a somewhat lesser extent, Stephen Miller—while Trump surely would
have been a capricious, directionless, reactionary and recalcitrant executive,
as he always had been in his role as CEO of the Trump Organization where his
main “product” was the Trump Brand, he probably wouldn’t have been nearly as
focused as he has been on destroying the US representative democratic system as
we, born right after World War II, had known it up to the present. He would, I
reasoned, simply have bumbled through a four-year term like a bull in a china
shop, alienating everyone, probably even including his own base and the GOP,
with his aimless brand of populism and duplicity until he was voted out of
office and faded from the scene.
But Bannon, a well-studied ideologue with a warrior
mentality at the service of anti-establishment chaos, got Trump’s ear early on
and convinced him that he was the man called by destiny to burn it all down. It
was no coincidence that I referred back then to Bannon as “the American
Rasputin”, because he was no less nefariously influential on Trump than Grigori
Rasputin had been on Czar Nicholas of Russia. This was obvious from the outset,
when what had passed for “policy” in the Trump campaign and early presidency,
and that had all of the orientation of a weathervane in a hurricane, suddenly
became laser focused on issues that were sure to appeal to the most extreme
elements of the Republican far right. And, indeed, even beyond the traditional
far right to other political currents too extreme to be embraced even under
“the big tent” of Republicanism.
The arrival of Bannon and his “war room” in the West
Wing of the White House was, then, clear as day, in its extremist influence that
had Trump at war with the world, but a political war imbued with almost
military strategy, designed to isolate enemies, incorporate erstwhile rivals
where convenient, and destroy those who refused to climb on board. This was all
pure Bannon, not because Trump wasn’t interested in conquering absolute power,
but because he’d had no idea how to go about it in American politics until
Bannon provided him with the tools.
Out of those project notes of mine, the information
that jumped out at me regarded Steve Bannon’s stated philosophy in the years
prior to the Trump era when the alt-right strategist was still searching for a
protégé—courting potential candidates like Jeb Bush, Rick Santorum and Ted Cruz
unsuccessfully before finding a perfect fit in Trump, someone aggressive yet
malleable because he had never had a salient intellectual notion of his own.
Trump’s brain was, Bannon reasoned, fertile soil for his revolutionary
politics, a blank slate on which he could write his manifesto.
The notes in question had to do with an article that
writer Ronald Radosh had researched for The
Daily Beast in 2013. It was that year when he was invited to a book-signing
event and cocktail that Bannon, then CEO of the Breitbart far-right ideological
site, was holding at his posh digs in Washington DC. Radosh struck up a
conversation with Bannon about a picture in which his daughter, Maureen, a West
Point-graduate Army officer, was sitting in Saddam Hussein’s former throne with an
assault rifle across her lap. Bannon, the doting father, couldn’t contain his
pride for her.
One thing led to another and the chat became an
interview. In the course of it, Bannon suddenly said, apropos of nothing, “I’m
a Leninist.”
Radosh wasn’t sure he’d heard Bannon right. He knew
the political strategist to be a far-right-wing, Christian white supremacist,
“populist” and “nationalist”. Or at least, that was the pitch that he was
currently hawking.
So Radosh said something like, “A Leninist?” And
when Bannon confirmed it, he asked him to explain what he meant by the term.
“Lenin wanted to destroy the state,” Radosh quoted Bannon as saying. “And
that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all
of today’s establishment.” Asked to expand on that thought Bannon, according to
Radosh, told the writer that he was applying Lenin’s strategy to Tea Party
populist goals. Radosh said that Bannon wasn’t shy about telling him that the
institutions that he was focusing on were the Republican and Democratic Parties
and the traditional conservative press.
Several years later, when Bannon was picked to be
Trump’s chief strategist, Radosh contacted him again and told him that he
planned to reused parts of that 2013 interview in a new profile he was creating
for The Daily Beast and asked if the
strategist would like to add anything new. Bannon, knowing that those comments
weren’t going to fly in Republican far-right circles, claimed he didn’t recall
that conversation and said if Radosh used it, he would deny it ever took place.
In the wake of the Trump era, in which the GOP has
been usurped by the extreme right, and its moderates as well as true
conservatives have been marginalized, in which the two main parties are faced
off in a war in which Congress is shackled and stalled in a climate of non-negotiation,
and in which the unthinkable happened for the first time in history when the
extreme right tried to overthrow the established order and install an
autocratic regime after losing an election, and indeed in a current climate in
which an enormous cross-section of American politics no longer believes in the
integrity of the democratic election process, it’s not hard to see that
Bannon’s nihilist goals found an able enforcer in Donald Trump.
While it may seem positive for democracy that, in
this week’s general election process, observers have pointed to Trump and his
camp as the big losers in the race, Trump still has a large and fanatical
following. And the fact that big-money campaign donors are reportedly ready to
write Trump off, fades in importance in view of the fact that he is still
capable, among his most loyal supporters, of raising millions of campaign
dollars through donations of five to twenty dollars each. It is worthwhile
recalling that neither Trump nor his most implacable base—often evangelicals
who view him as a messiah sent by God—are simply not bound by long-standing
American ideals and traditions. And it is also important to remember that if
there is one thing we’ve learned about Donald Trump, it is that he often
resurges even when the most sacred of pundits pronounce him finished.
Anyone who has ever had an ounce of true patriotism,
anyone who cares at all about the future of American representative democracy,
should be bearing that in mind for 2024, when the presidential election process
is once again center stage.
