THE BANNON FACTOR

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.