Siege_Trump Under Fire by Michael Wolff

Author:Michael Wolff [Wolff, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Politics, history
ISBN: 9781250253828
Google: b7N3xQEACAAJ
Amazon: B07PRLT6GG
Goodreads: 44425746
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2019-06-04T00:00:00+00:00

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While Trump was disrupting—or acting out at—the NATO summit, Bannon teamed up with Hannity to go to London, hoping to catch a ride on Hannity’s plane. Bannon knew that being close to Hannity was being close to Trump. Hannity’s daily radio show, which during the trip would be broadcast from Europe, was almost as good as speaking directly to the president. In a way it was better, because someone else could talk and Trump had to listen. Bannon’s voice, via Hannity’s show, would be in Trump’s head.

It was one of Bannon’s active sleights of hand, the level of conversations he was having with the president. When asked, he did not say he was talking to Trump, but he didn’t say he wasn’t, either. Or, if he did say he wasn’t, you might reasonably construe, given the parameters of confidentiality, that in fact he was. But even if he wasn’t talking directly to Trump, Bannon was confident that Trump was listening to absolutely everything he had to say. In this way, Bannon could reasonably represent, or deftly imply, to his clients that, truly, he had Trump’s ear.

What’s more, Bannon, in campaign mode, now believed that the trends for the midterms in November were turning positive. Bannon carried fifty or sixty congressional races in his head, with an almost real-time sense of the movement in swing districts. If he could get Trump to focus and pay attention—“I can hardly believe I said that,” Bannon chuckled—and get him into each key district one or more times in September and October, Republicans could hold the House.

In spite of his better instincts, Bannon had begun to think of himself in the White House again. There was something about the idea that seemed … destined. Except not.

Bannon understood that if the Republicans held the House in November, Trump could never have Bannon back as a reward for winning. That would mean Trump would have to acknowledge that Bannon had won the House for him. Nor could he have Bannon back if they lost the House, for that would be acknowledging his need for Bannon.

What’s more, Trump continued to blame Bannon for getting him to support “the child molester”—Roy Moore in Alabama, the failed Senate candidate whom Bannon had backed. (More precisely, in Trump’s locution, Bannon had persuaded him to support “the loser child molester.”) Moore was found to have cruised Alabama shopping malls in a quest for teenage girls, a revelation that sunk his candidacy.

So yes, there was really no scenario in which Bannon and Trump could equitably align. Nevertheless, Bannon continued to imagine scenarios in which he would be recognized as the master political tactician, the visionary of the worldwide nationalist-populist cause, the person who brought a begging Trump back to him.

In London, ensconced in a $4,500-a-night suite at Brown’s Hotel in Mayfair, Bannon played a cat-and-mouse game. Moving carefully through the scrum of reporters staking out his hotel, he calculated whom he should be seen with and whom he should avoid. In

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