—VICE PRESIDENT HENRY WALLACE, 1944
The American presidency has never been at the whims of an authoritarian personality like Donald Trump. He is going to test our democracy as it has never been tested.
—JOHN DEAN, 2017
Donald Trump claims that he was elected with “a massive landslide victory,” that he prevailed with “one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history,” that his Democratic rivals “suffered one of the greatest defeats in the history of politics in this country.”
House Speaker Paul Ryan says Trump “earned a mandate” for a “go big, go bold” agenda, while Trump “counselor” Kellyanne Conway does not just claim a mandate but gripes that critics of the billionaire are “attempting to foment a permanent opposition that is corrosive to our constitutional democracy.”
“The left is trying to delegitimize his election,” cries Conway. “They’re trying to deny him what he just earned.” Now, that’s disciplined messaging.
So disciplined that Trump appears to believe it. When he was corrected on his electoral math by NBC reporter Peter Alexander during the first press conference of his presidency, Trump seemed genuinely surprised. “Well I don’t know, I was given that information. Actually I’ve seen that information around,” Trump said. “But it was a very substantial victory, do you agree with that?”
Alexander was gracious. “You’re the president,” he said.
Trump should not have been surprised. The facts of this president’s electoral malaise have, since November, been as plain as numbers on paper. Trump received 2.8 million fewer votes than his Democratic rival. He secured just 46.1 percent of the popular vote, a significantly lower percentage than “loser” Mitt Romney won in 2012. Only a narrow Electoral College advantage, based on razor-thin margins in a handful of states—Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin—made Trump the president.
But even if Trump’s ego can’t be wrapped around reality, his aides and allies know the truth they are up against. Ryan is a political careerist with more than a quarter century of in-the-trenches experience on Capitol Hill. Conway is not just a political animal; she’s been a pollster and partisan pundit for two decades. These people know Donald Trump did not earn a mandate from the voters. They know that questions about his dubious legitimacy are rooted in entirely legitimate concerns about a mangled election that was narrowly decided after a race characterized by voter suppression, hacking and charges of manipulation from abroad.
Yet Trump’s team stays on message. He won. He won big. He has the support of the American people. “Period!”
That’s what White House press secretary Sean Spicer says when he wants to end a line of questioning that is about to get interesting. Spicer says “period” a lot with regard to the president’s alleged “mandate.” But the press secretary always spices his claim with something more than talk of election numbers. When he’s challenged on some new policy move that’s clearly unpopular, Spicer says something like, “I get what the press wants, but the American people have understood exactly what they’re getting and they voted overwhelmingly for him. He has been very clear about what he owns, the role of his family and everything else since he announced that he was running for president, and they overwhelmingly elected him with all of that on the table.”
White House chief strategist Steve Bannon does the same thing. Bannon claims with his very straight face that Trump, the former “New York values” donor to Democratic campaigns who talked up single-payer health care and infrastructure spending as he was winning over the Republican base, the thrice-married playboy who made himself the champion of evangelical Christianity, the billionaire son of privilege who claimed to be taking on the elites and then stuffed his cabinet with Goldman Sachs alumni, is… consistent. Bannon tells us that Trump’s rambling campaign speeches were packed with “a tremendous amount of content” and that Trump “laid out an agenda with those speeches” and that he won a mandate to get that agenda “executed.”
Bannon also claims that Trump is “probably the greatest public speaker in those large arenas since William Jennings Bryan.” Bannon knows that is a ridiculous statement. But Bannon does not care. His purpose is not to get the history right. His purpose is to rewrite history in order to perpetuate the fantasy that Trump is making America great again.
What Americans witnessed in the first months of the Trump presidency was a classic bait and switch. Trump ran an erratic, chaotic, at times incoherent campaign that was consistent only in its appeals to the base instincts of a minority of Americans: xenophobia, sexism, racism and generalized fear of the future. As Evan McMullin, the former Central Intelligence (CIA) operations officer and Republican congressional aide who mounted an honorable if quixotic independent conservative presidential bid in 2016, explains it, Trump’s campaign message was a toxic brew of authoritarian schemes that often disrespected democracy itself. “He had questioned judicial independence, threatened the freedom of the press, called for violating Muslims’ equal protection under the law, promised the use of torture and attacked Americans based on their gender, race and religion,” argues McMullin. “He had also undermined critical democratic norms including peaceful debate and transitions of power, commitment to truth, freedom from foreign interference and abstention from the use of executive power for political retribution.”
All true. And Bannon, who is at once very smart and very calculating, knows this. He understands how very at odds the Trump presidency is with the American experiment. That is why he is so desperate to cloak it in the “legitimacy” of history and the false claim of consistency. Bannon, the Breitbart News boss who proudly announced that he made the incendiary conservative website into a “platform for the alt-right,” and used that platform to inform and inflame Trump’s candidacy even before assuming his successive roles as “campaign CEO” and “chief strategist,” did much to insert authoritarian politics into the campaign. And he still does with his aggressive reference to a free and independent press as “the enemy.” Yet, for public consumption, Bannon claims that Trump was elected on an agenda that involves whatever program Trump happens to be advancing on any given day.
This is wicked messaging. It reverses every equation and claims that a president who was elected to “take on the elites” is carrying out his campaign promises when he packs his cabinet with billionaires, bankers and lobbyists. It seeks to distract us from the fact that the president who patted himself on the back for recognizing the mistakes made in the Iraq War has begun his tenure by sending more troops to the Middle East, launching unauthorized bombing missions against Syria and generally dismissing the Congress as he inflames tensions around the world. It tells us that there is nothing wrong with a president who is supposed to be on the side of working people gutting the Department of Labor, and a president who promised to provide more and better health care pushing an agenda that would leave tens of millions of Americans without insurance.
This is the big lie, as told and told again by the Trump team. When it comes from Trump, himself, it is merely a mask for his own inexperience and insecurity. As former Nixon White House aide John Dean warns with regard to this president: “Not only does he not understand the job, he has been pushed to the hard right during the transition because he is a man with no firm political beliefs of his own.” But those who work with Trump have beliefs. And among the messengers, spokespeople and strategists he has surrounded himself with and empowered, there is a great desire to advance those beliefs—to make of Trumpism something that extends less from Trump than from themselves. People like Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway realized early on that “Trump was an empty vessel into which they deposited ideas, which explains how some of his conflicting stances developed,” notes Dean. And he adds: “Bannon and Conway are fronts for billionaire hedge fund operator Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, who have strong beliefs.”
“Trump’s authoritarian personality is,” John Dean warns, “very troubling.” The authoritarian tendencies of the w
icked messengers who have surrounded Trump are even more troubling. And the combination gives Dean nightmares because, he explains: “Authoritarianism does not work well in a democracy.”
— 1 —
THE INVESTORS
Robert and Rebekah Mercer
A month after the November 2016 election, the people who had guided that year’s campaign to the most unlikely of finishes—the finish they desired—gathered to celebrate at Owl’s Nest, the sprawling estate on Long Island’s North Shore where billionaire Robert Mercer makes his home. The “Heroes and Villains” costume party invited guests to appear as favorite film stars. But Kellyanne Conway, who would be taking a break from the presidential transition to attend as Supergirl, said: “I predict there will be an abundance of Hillary and Trump finery. We can’t get enough of this victory.”
The best Trump “costume” was not a costume at all. President-elect Trump arrived as himself to personally thank Mercer (who dressed as the hypnotic Mandrake the Magician) and his middle daughter, Rebekah (who wore a Black Widow costume), for “bringing some organization” to his campaign. It was a surprise appearance. When the man who was perhaps even himself surprised with his victory entered the lavish estate, the crowd chanted: “Trump won! Trump won!” But, of course, Trump was not the only winner in the room. One guest told the New Yorker: “I was looking around the room, and I thought, No doubt about it—the people whom the Mercers invested in, my comrades, are now in charge.”
The funny thing was that Robert Mercer had not even wanted this president, at least not at first. His chosen contender in the 2016 Republican presidential race, the man who had attended the previous year’s World War II–themed bash at the Mercer mansion in Winston Churchill drag, was Texas senator Ted Cruz.
“Robert Mercer hasn’t invested in Donald Trump because he believes in Trump’s campaign platform. He preferred Ted Cruz during the campaign, and Ted Cruz was clearly no fan of Donald Trump. Looking at Mercer’s historical political giving patterns, Cruz is far more aligned with Mercer’s worldview than is Trump,” explained David Magerman, an employee of Renaissance Technologies, the investment management firm (currently managing $36 billion) where Robert Mercer serves as co-CEO. “So, what did Mercer’s investment in Trump amount to? He was effectively buying shares in the candidate, and Robert Mercer now owns a sizeable share of the United States Presidency.”
Trump’s appearance at the party confirmed his appreciation of the investment by the Mercers, who backed his candidacy when many of the other billionaire masters of the GOP universe, including brothers David and Charles Koch, kept the obnoxious reality-TV star at arm’s length. Another confirmation came when Rebekah Mercer got a place on the sixteen-member executive committee in Trump’s transition team. But the real measure came when, at the party, Trump named the people the Mercers had assigned to his campaign: Kellyanne Conway, Steve Bannon and David Bossie, the president of Citizens United (yes, that Citizens United) and former deputy campaign manager for Trump’s campaign.
As David Magerman explained: “Stephen Bannon came from Breitbart News, of which Mercer owns a significant percentage, and Kellyanne Conway came from Mercer’s circle of political foundations. And, of course, Mercer’s daughter Rebekah represents his interests and his worldview with her presence on the transition committee and her close relationship with Bannon and Conway. Mercer also has insisted that Trump use his company Cambridge Analytica, which uses its statistical models of voter psychology to get unpopular initiatives (like electing Donald Trump) through the electorate.” The bottom line is undebatable: The Mercers have surrounded our president with his people, and his people have an outsized influence over the running of our country, simply because the Mercers paid for seats at that table.
The Mercers paid so much for so many seats that they may have run afoul of campaign-finance law. The Campaign Legal Center alleges that the Mercer-funded “Make America Number One” super PAC illegally compensated Steve Bannon’s work as Donald Trump’s campaign CEO. “The evidence suggests a Mercer-backed super PAC secretly subsidized Steve Bannon’s work for the Trump campaign by funneling $280,000 in payments to a firm described as a ‘front’ for Bannon,” says Brendan Fischer, associate counsel at the Campaign Legal Center. “Once Bannon was taken on as CEO of Trump’s campaign and continued to be paid by Mercer’s entities, this became an issue,” said Larry Noble, general counsel at the Campaign Legal Center. “It is especially concerning now that Bannon is White House chief strategist. Bannon’s compensation shows the pervasive influence of the Mercer family of donors in the Trump orbit.”
Pervasive influence? Yes, says John Dean, who knows a thing or two about how White Houses operate.
“The Mercer agenda is radical right-wing,” argued the former Nixon counsel who has decried the GOP’s lurch toward far-right authoritarianism. “It is not difficult to trace Donald Trump’s sudden turn to the hard-right, which occurred during his transition. Rebekah Mercer is a direct link to the Heritage Foundation, the Koch brothers, Betsy DeVos and her family’s foundation, along with countless other conservative causes. The Mercers’ fingerprints can probably be found on nominations who want to abolish departments and agencies like EPA, the SEC, Department of Energy, Department of Housing, and the like. Because Trump has no strong feelings about any of these matters, and he needed all the help he could get during the transition, he has given those who came to his assistance at the end of his campaign to help him win a free hand in organizing his administration.”
So why doesn’t everyone in America know everything about Robert Mercer? And Rebekah Mercer? Why aren’t they cues to start booing at Democratic rallies, like the Koch brothers? Or punch lines for politically inclined comics, like Sheldon Adelson? It is not that they don’t have the kooky views that are required of right-wing billionaire campaign donors. When Steve Bannon starts raging about the “deconstruction of the regulatory state,” he is in perfect harmony with Robert Mercer, a brilliant computer programmer who shares the Ayn Rand–influenced libertarian leanings of many in his field. It makes sense that Mercer and Bannon are singing in harmony. Bannon has worked for Mercer for years, as a paid political advisor and manager of a network of operations that now includes the West Wing of the Trump White House and various cabinet agencies. The concession is so extensive, and Bannon’s managerial role is so consequential, that, when the strategist was supposedly frustrated with White House palace intrigues in early April, Politico reported that “Republican megadonor Rebekah Mercer, a longtime Bannon confidante who became a prominent Trump supporter during the campaign, urged Bannon not to resign. ‘Rebekah Mercer prevailed upon him to stay,’ said one person familiar with the situation.”
The Mercers are owners of Breitbart, and major investors in Bannon projects such as the Government Accountability Institute and the Glittering Steel film production company. And it is from those investments that their influence extends. It is true that the Mercers donate money to Republican candidates and campaigns (more than $40 million over the past decade), but that’s just hobby giving—and not always so successful, as was seen with the $10 million they invested in the Kellyanne Conway–run super PAC that was supposed to elect Cruz. But what makes them matter is the money they give to shape the issues that Republican candidates and campaigns, as well as the media and a lot of voters, end up talking about. “The Mercers’ approach is far different from that of other big donors. While better-known players such as the Koch brothers on the right and George Soros on the left focus on mobilizing activists and voters, the Mercers have exerted pressure on the political system by helping erect an alternative media ecosystem, whose storylines dominated the 2016 race,” wrote Matea Gold in a profile of the family for the Washington Post. “Their alliance with Bannon provided fuel for the narrative that drove Trump’s victory: that dangerous immigrants are ruining the country and corrupt power brokers are sabotaging Washington.”
Yes, it is absurd that billionaires with a $75 million luxury yacht cal
led the Sea Owl (which Newsweek says “has a crew of 18, fingerprint-recognition keypads, a self-playing Steinway baby grand piano and a mural of a tree, carved from Peruvian mahogany, that spans several flights of stairs”), a private-pistol range in the North Shore mansion (and a firearms company to provide weaponry if needed), a $2.7 million model-train set in Robert Mercer’s basement and all the other arguments for more taxation of the rich imagine themselves fighting the elites. It is almost as absurd as adults dressing up as Mandrake the Magician and the Black Widow and Supergirl and Donald Trump for a costume party in the middle of a presidential transition that was not going very well.
But rich people can do that. And the Mercers are just getting started. Their associates say they’ve got a “Silicon Valley” view of politics that throws money around “to test various tactics to see which is most effective.” It doesn’t have to work every time. It can even be a little messy; maybe they didn’t get a Ted Cruz. But they got a Donald Trump.
A president’s a president after all, and when he puts your employees in the Oval Office and shows up for your costume parties, well, you’ve won.
— 2 —
THE JACKSONIAN DEMOCRAT
Stephen Bannon
White House Senior Strategist
Steve Bannon reads history. A lot of it. Bannon is of an age where he is more likely to be found with a book under his arm than one of the electronic screens into which his operations fed so much fake news before, during and after the 2016 presidential campaign. The former naval officer, special assistant to the chief of naval operations at the Pentagon, Harvard Business School graduate, Goldman Sachs investment banker, Hollywood mogul, new-media entrepreneur, right-wing propagandist, political Svengali and alt-president regularly reads his way into places no one ever expected to find him. Then, as the smartest person in the room, he rewrites the rules to make history of his own.