Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency by Joshua Green

Author:Joshua Green
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-07-18T04:00:00+00:00

EIGHT

“THE TRAFFIC IS ABSOLUTELY FILTHY!”

Trump is a beast!” Bannon was cackling, practically giddy over what he had just witnessed. He still couldn’t believe it. It was June 16, 2015. Trump had just glided down the Trump Tower escalator with Melania in tow, announced his entry into the presidential race—and then proceeded to unload a mind-bending, mostly improvised, forty-five-minute rant during which he casually referred to Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and criminals.

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” Trump said, standing at a lectern and pointing to members of the audience. “They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

To Republican Party leaders, Trump’s performance was a horror show, the very antithesis of the message they yearned to project of a more welcoming, inclusive GOP than the one Mitt Romney had led to defeat in 2012. After that loss, RNC chairman Reince Priebus had commissioned a rigorous postmortem of all that had gone wrong and what the party could do to fix it. The report, which became known as the “Republican autopsy,” concluded that the GOP was committing demographic suicide by insulting and antagonizing the fast-growing population of Hispanic voters, who didn’t take kindly to Romney’s suggestion that illegal immigrants would resort to “self-deportation” if only their lives were made unpleasant enough. The autopsy’s urgent recommendation was to reverse this approach—and fast: “If Hispanic Americans perceive that a GOP nominee or candidate does not want them in the United States (i.e., self-deportation), they will not pay attention to our next sentence.” It continued: “We must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform. If we do not, our Party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only.”

News of Trump’s announcement speech instantly went viral, rocketing across cable television and Twitter. But while party leaders winced, Trump’s small coterie of advisers (with the exception of his daughter, Ivanka) wasn’t panicking over the “rapists” charge, as any normal campaign would have, but was in fact relieved and excited that his presidential announcement had broken through. A few days earlier, Trump and some aides had offered the exclusive story of his upcoming entrance into the race to Maggie Haberman, a star reporter at The New York Times—and had been rebuffed. Trump’s long history of self-promotional flirtations with running had left most insiders skeptical that he would ever follow through. Fearing that Trump might be ignored, his aides had pushed back his announcement date. “We were originally trying to do it on June fourteenth, which happens to be Flag Day and Mr. Trump’s birthday,” said Corey Lewandowski, his first campaign manager. “But it fell on a Sunday, and we knew that we wanted to announce on a Tuesday or a Wednesday to get as much attention as we could,” ideally enough to carry through into the Sunday shows.

Trump’s attacks on Mexican immigrants and his vow to “build a great wall” at the U.

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