Help
Quote
Bannon thinks the U.S. is in decline and the people perched on top don’t particularly care. “The elites of both parties are comfortable with America being in decline,” he says. “They manage on the way down, and they make even more wealth.” He sees his job as finding ways to organize the masses against the elites. Trump was never an end in himself but the means to it -- and Bannon clearly finds some of what Trump has done since taking office, like the tax cuts, as, at best, beside the point. He also finds distasteful some of the people Trump brought into his inner circle -- some of the generals who have, in Bannon’s view, wasted trillions of dollars and American lives; plus the financiers. Bannon thinks Goldman Sachs’s shareholders should have been wiped out in 2008, and that its president, Gary Cohn, should have lost his job. Instead Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has survived, and Cohn, who paid himself hundreds of millions of dollars, now gets to swan around as Trump’s economic adviser.
Bannon has a favorite line: If I had to choose who will run the country, 100 Goldman Sachs partners or the first 100 people who walk into a Trump rally, I’d choose the people at the Trump rally. I have my own version of this line: If I had to choose a president, Donald Trump or anyone else I’ve ever known, I’d choose anyone else I’ve ever known. Among the revelations of Wolff’s book was just how many of the people in and around Trump’s White House feel more or less as I do. “Insulting Donald Trump’s intelligence was both the thing you could not do and the thing that everybody was guilty of,” Wolff writes. “Everyone, in his or her own way, struggled to express the baldly obvious fact that the president did not know enough, did not know what he didn’t know, and did not particularly care.” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Trump “a ***** moron.” Treasury Secretary Mnuchin and ex-Chief of Staff Reince Priebus preferred to describe Trump as “an idiot.” National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster called him a “dope.” Cohn called Trump “dumb as *****.”
Bannon had done something even less forgivable, in Trump World, than question Trump’s intelligence. He’d allowed himself to be given credit for the one thing that Trump could point to as a sign of his genius: winning the election. Time magazine ran a cover with Bannon’s face on it with the headline “The Great Manipulator.” It sits in a frame on his floor right now.
But the more we learn about Trump, the more stupendous Bannon’s achievement appears. It’s as if he took the Cleveland Browns to the Super Bowl and then, in the off-season, turned the football players into Olympic athletes, and won gold in curling.
“I want you to do an exercise with me,” I say, inching close to the reason I’ve come.
He eyes me, but not with hostility.
“If you can get Trump elected president, you can get anyone elected president. And so I want you to tell me the steps I’d need to take to get elected. What do we need to do?”
He shakes his head quickly. The question doesn’t offend him. He just thinks I’m missing the point. “What was needed was a blunt force instrument, and Trump was a blunt force instrument,” he says. Trump may be a barbarian. He may be in many senses stupid. But in Bannon’s view, Trump has several truly peculiar strengths. The first is his stamina. “I give a talk to a room with 50 people and I’m drained afterward,” Bannon says. “This guy got up five and six times a day in front of 10,000 people, day in and day out. He’s 70! Hillary Clinton couldn’t do that. She could do one.” The public events were not trivial occasions, in Bannon’s view. They whipped up the emotion that got Trump elected: anger. “We got elected on Drain the Swamp, Lock Her Up, Build a Wall,” he says. “This was pure anger. Anger and fear is what gets people to the polls.”
The ability to tap anger in others was another of Trump’s gifts, and made him, uniquely in the field of Republican candidates, suited to what Bannon saw as the task at hand: Trump was himself angry. The deepest parts of him are angry and dark, Bannon told Wolff. Exactly what Trump has to be angry about was unclear. He’s had all of life’s advantages. Yet he acts like a man who has been cheated once too often, and is justifiably outraged. What Bannon loved was the way Trump sounded when he was angry. He’d gone to the best schools, but he had somehow emerged from them with the grammar and diction of an uneducated person. “The vernacular,” Bannon called Trump’s odd way of putting things. Other angry people, some of whom actually had been cheated by life, thrilled to its sound.
Bannon has a favorite line: If I had to choose who will run the country, 100 Goldman Sachs partners or the first 100 people who walk into a Trump rally, I’d choose the people at the Trump rally. I have my own version of this line: If I had to choose a president, Donald Trump or anyone else I’ve ever known, I’d choose anyone else I’ve ever known. Among the revelations of Wolff’s book was just how many of the people in and around Trump’s White House feel more or less as I do. “Insulting Donald Trump’s intelligence was both the thing you could not do and the thing that everybody was guilty of,” Wolff writes. “Everyone, in his or her own way, struggled to express the baldly obvious fact that the president did not know enough, did not know what he didn’t know, and did not particularly care.” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Trump “a ***** moron.” Treasury Secretary Mnuchin and ex-Chief of Staff Reince Priebus preferred to describe Trump as “an idiot.” National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster called him a “dope.” Cohn called Trump “dumb as *****.”
Bannon had done something even less forgivable, in Trump World, than question Trump’s intelligence. He’d allowed himself to be given credit for the one thing that Trump could point to as a sign of his genius: winning the election. Time magazine ran a cover with Bannon’s face on it with the headline “The Great Manipulator.” It sits in a frame on his floor right now.
But the more we learn about Trump, the more stupendous Bannon’s achievement appears. It’s as if he took the Cleveland Browns to the Super Bowl and then, in the off-season, turned the football players into Olympic athletes, and won gold in curling.
“I want you to do an exercise with me,” I say, inching close to the reason I’ve come.
He eyes me, but not with hostility.
“If you can get Trump elected president, you can get anyone elected president. And so I want you to tell me the steps I’d need to take to get elected. What do we need to do?”
He shakes his head quickly. The question doesn’t offend him. He just thinks I’m missing the point. “What was needed was a blunt force instrument, and Trump was a blunt force instrument,” he says. Trump may be a barbarian. He may be in many senses stupid. But in Bannon’s view, Trump has several truly peculiar strengths. The first is his stamina. “I give a talk to a room with 50 people and I’m drained afterward,” Bannon says. “This guy got up five and six times a day in front of 10,000 people, day in and day out. He’s 70! Hillary Clinton couldn’t do that. She could do one.” The public events were not trivial occasions, in Bannon’s view. They whipped up the emotion that got Trump elected: anger. “We got elected on Drain the Swamp, Lock Her Up, Build a Wall,” he says. “This was pure anger. Anger and fear is what gets people to the polls.”
The ability to tap anger in others was another of Trump’s gifts, and made him, uniquely in the field of Republican candidates, suited to what Bannon saw as the task at hand: Trump was himself angry. The deepest parts of him are angry and dark, Bannon told Wolff. Exactly what Trump has to be angry about was unclear. He’s had all of life’s advantages. Yet he acts like a man who has been cheated once too often, and is justifiably outraged. What Bannon loved was the way Trump sounded when he was angry. He’d gone to the best schools, but he had somehow emerged from them with the grammar and diction of an uneducated person. “The vernacular,” Bannon called Trump’s odd way of putting things. Other angry people, some of whom actually had been cheated by life, thrilled to its sound.
Quote
Steve Bannon reminded me of someone, but it’s not until I’m back in my hotel room that I realize who. He was a character from “The Big Short.” He saw the world differently from virtually everyone in his profession, and it led a lot of people to think that he was insane. But he was right and they were wrong, and the rest of the world has yet to come to terms with why.
Steve Bannon reminds Lewis of Michael Burry, the guy who made north of $2.5 billion by betting against mortgage-backed securities in 2008? Ha! Bannon is a smart guy, a non-conformist and masterful when it comes to tapping into and ramping up hate but he has no idea what to do with it, he has let it infect his own judgment and the monster he helped put in the White House is hurting the people he says he wants to help most whereas Burry comes across as Spock-like emotion-wise in The Big Short and as someone who knew exactly what he wanted to accomplish on behalf of his constituents -- his investors -- and did.
