How Steve Bannon and Donald Trump Rode the Honey Badger Into the White House – New York Times
Green reminds us that it wasnt long ago that both men were looked at as political jokes, and not even bad ones. When Ivanka Trump told Rupert Murdoch over lunch that her father intended to run for president, the media baron replied, without even looking up from his soup: Hes not running for president.
As for Bannon, when Green first met him in 2011 he came across as a political grifter seeking to profit from the latest trend. Later, as Bannon took the reins of the Trump campaign, he was seen by Beltway Republicans as an Internet-era update of the Slim Pickens character in Dr. Strangelove who rides the bomb like a rodeo bull, whoopin and hollerin all the way to nuclear annihilation.
But whatever the pair lacked in conventional political experience, they made up for with other gifts. Both understood showmanship: slogans, narrative, put-downs and especially conflict. They knew the value of rage and outrage alike the first as fuel for a movement; the second as the indispensable foil for that movement.
They also grasped that much that was supposed to matter in politics no longer did detailed policy papers, for instance, or personal decorum. Trump, Green writes, figured out that the norms forbidding such behavior were not inviolable rules that carried a harsh penalty but rather sentiments of a nobler, bygone era, gossamer-thin and needlessly adhered to by politicians who lacked his willingness to defy them.
Thats why Trumps birtherism the support he gave to the lie that Barack Obama was born abroad never disqualified his candidacy, even as it helped him forge a powerful connection with party activists. Its a tactic he would repeat straight through the end of the campaign, when he took to denouncing international banks in terms that shaded into anti-Semitism.
Darkness is good, was Bannons advice for dealing with criticism from groups such as the Anti-Defamation League. Dont let up. At another moment, when the campaign feared House Speaker Paul Ryan would try to steal the G.O.P. nomination from Trump, Bannon threatened to rally Breitbarts army. Pepes gonna stomp their ass, he said Pepe the Frog being the alt-rights white-supremacist cartoon mascot on Twitter.
Green is consistently interesting on the subject of Trump. But the real value of Devils Bargain is the story it tells about Bannon, some of which has been previously reported (not least by Green himself) but never so well synthesized or explained as it is here. The product of a working-class family and a Catholic military high school in Richmond, Va., he was taught from an early age that the defining moment in Western civilization occurred in 1492 not with Columbuss discovery of the New World, mind, but with Ferdinand and Isabellas Reconquista from the Moors of the Iberian Peninsula.
The lesson was, heres where Muslims could have taken over the world, recalled one of Bannons classmates. And here was the great stand where they were stopped.
If that was an early hint of Bannons political vision (and now a staple of Trumps foreign policy speeches), other lessons suggested the means he would employ to achieve that vision. On Wall Street in the mid-1980s, he came to admire Michael Milken, the so-called junk bond king, who showed how a band of outsiders could set about laying siege to a comfortable, fattened and vulnerable establishment.
Later, while running an Internet business in Hong Kong, Bannon discovered the underworld of online gamers; intense young men who disappeared for days or even weeks at a time in alternate realities. One of those alternate realities was World of Warcraft, in which millions of people were digitally transformed into secret soldiers waging titanic battles in unseen worlds against mythical enemies.
Bannon seemed to intuit that this digital world could be recreated for his political purposes, by designing an apocalyptic narrative of righteous warriors waging an end-of-days battle by all necessary means against assorted enemies: jihadists, progressives, Acela-corridor Republicans, the Clintons. Republican political operatives had spent the Obama years wondering about the missing white voters who had failed to show up for John McCain and Mitt Romney. Turns out, they (or others like them) were online, and Bannon whose own fantasies were suggested by a portrait he had of himself in his office, dressed as Napoleon was proposing to supply this army with the necessary ammunition.
Much of it would come from the bile factory at Breitbart News. Another part would be supplied by the Government Accountability Institute, a Tallahassee, Fla.-based nonprofit that mined the deep Web and dug up the dirt on the Clinton Foundation for Peter Schweizers 2015 blockbuster Clinton Cash. There was also a data-analytics firm, Cambridge Analytica, an offshoot of a British company that advised foreign governments and militaries on influencing elections and public opinion using the tools of psychological warfare.
What all of this added up to was a kind of alt-G.O.P. agile and indifferent to norms and boundaries that could supply the Trump campaign with everything it needed to win. Bannon has described himself as a Leninist for wanting to destroy the state. Whether he will achieve that is doubtful, but he seems to share Lenins genius for building a secret party with radical designs, ready to pounce at the historically opportune time.
Now it has succeeded. To what end? As an electoral gambit, the honey badger approach was a good bet: Trump is president not in spite of the wretched things he said about Mexicans, women, John McCain, Megyn Kelly and so on, but because he said them. He sold his shamelessness as fearlessness and his charlatanism as charisma, and people believed. Lord save us when Democrats alight on a similar candidate.
As a governing principle, however, honeybadgerism has been less of a success. As an article in Mental Floss noted, honey badgers may be smart, resilient and incredibly tough, but theyre also lazy about housekeeping, mean and skunk-like, meaning they possess an anal gland that releases a suffocating smell when in distress.
Readers can draw their own parallels, but thats usually not a formula for political success. Bannon and his acolytes should beware: Sooner or later, theyll outstay their welcome.
Bret Stephens is an Op-Ed columnist for The Times.
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How Steve Bannon and Donald Trump Rode the Honey Badger Into the White House - New York Times