Brothers in harm
In Steve Bannon, Donald Trump found an ally who realised that the old norms of US politics – policy detail and decorum – were no match for internet fueled rage and outrage.
Mellivora capensis – better known as the honey badger – is a thick-skinned and sharp-toothed little creature that in 2011 became a Youtube sensation thanks to a short video called “The Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger.” In the clip, a honey badger chases off jackals, raids a beehive, survives a cobra bite and eats venomous snakes head first. Meanwhile, a narrator extols the animal’s core virtue: “Honey badger don’t give a ...” – well, a darn.
The video has been viewed more than 83 million times.
Most people who watch it probably find it fairly amusing – and gross. But for Stephen Bannon, Donald Trump’s chief strategist and leading impresario of the alt-right, the video and its furry hero were something else: inspiration. The animal is the mascot of Breitbart News, the truthoptional publication Bannon took over following Andrew Breitbart’s sudden death in 2012 and with which he can maintain communication thanks to a White House waiver. After Trump made allegations about Bill Clinton’s sexual history in a debate last year with Hillary Clinton, Bannon exulted over his boss’s brazen but effective performance: “Classic honey badger,” he called it.
If there’s a lesson to draw from Devil’s Bargain, Joshua Green’s compulsively readable account of Bannon’s fateful political partnership with Trump, it is not to underestimate the honey badger. “If I didn’t come along, the Republican Party had zero chance of winning the presidency,” Trump told Green, a senior national correspondent for Bloomberg Businessweek, in May 2016, and he was probably right. Only someone with his and Bannon’s transgressive instincts, along with their seeming incapacity for moral and intellectual embarrassment, could have defeated
Trump sold his shamelessness as fearlessness and his charlatanism as charisma, and people believed
the well-oiled if soulless machine that was Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.
Green reminds us that it wasn’t long ago that both men were looked at as political jokes. 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: “He’s 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 behaviour 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.”
That’s why Trump’s 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.” It’s 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 Bannon’s advice for dealing with criticism from groups such as the Anti-defamation League. “Don’t let up.”
Green is consistently interesting on the subject of Trump. But the real value of Devil’s Bargain is the story it tells about Bannon.
The product of a working-class family and a Catholic military high school in Richmond, Virginia, he was taught from an early age that the defining moment in Western civilisation occurred in 1492 – not with Columbus’s discovery of the New World, but with Ferdinand and Isabella’s Reconquista from the Moors of the Iberian Peninsula.
“The lesson was, here’s where Muslims could have taken over the world,” recalled one of Bannon’s classmates. “And here was the great stand where they were stopped.”
If that was an early hint of Bannon’s political vision (and now a staple of Trump’s 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 soldiers waging 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, 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 Florida-based nonprofit that mined the “deep web” and dug up the dirt on the Clinton Foundation for Peter Schweizer’s 2015 blockbuster Clinton Cash. There was also a dataanalytics 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-gop – 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 Lenin’s genius for building a secret party with radical designs, ready to pounce at the 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 they’re also “lazy about housekeeping,” “mean” and “skunklike,” meaning they possess an anal gland that releases a suffocating smell when in distress.
Readers can draw their own parallels, but that’s usually not a formula for political success. Bannon and his acolytes should beware: sooner or later, they’ll outstay their welcome. ■ © New York Times 2017