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Combative, Populist Steve Bannon Found His Man in Donald Trump

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‘Working 100 Hours a Week’

Friends at Harvard and later at Goldman Sachs were aware of Mr. Bannon’s conservative views, but politics was rarely discussed. “He was in mergers and acquisitions, I was in corporate finance, and we were both working 100 hours a week,” said Scot Vorse, who met Mr. Bannon on their first day at Harvard and joined Goldman at the same time.

After less than four years, Mr. Bannon left Goldman to start his own firm, Bannon & Co., which Mr. Vorse soon joined. As head of a scrappy start-up going up against financial behemoths to get Hollywood deals, Mr. Bannon showed the fierce competitiveness that would later drive his politics.

“We were the underdog,” Mr. Vorse said. “We were competing for the business of the biggest entertainment companies in the world, and we did well.” Mr. Vorse said Bannon & Co. represented the Saudi businessman Prince Alwaleed bin Talal; the Italian media tycoon and later the prime minister Silvio Berlusconi; Samsung; Westinghouse; and other big players.

Mr. Vorse was the detail man, he said. Mr. Bannon “was the visionary, seeing things before anyone else. He was the rainmaker. He was a leader.”

Even as they became successful, Mr. Bannon was not a lavish spender. “He was driving an eight-year-old Celica convertible,” he said.

In fact, Mr. Bannon appears to have gone through some lean moments in the 1990s â€" court records show five federal and four state tax liens for amounts from $10,993 to $136,610. Ms. Jones, his film collaborator, said that when Mr. Bannon and his second wife, Mary Louise Piccard, separated, he lived for a time in a spare room at the home of his first wife, Cathleen Houff Jordan. Ms. Piccard had accused Mr. Bannon of grabbing her wrist and neck during an argument, an allegation he denied.

But in 1993, as part of the sale of Castle Rock Entertainment to Turner Broadcasting System, he acquired a share of the royalties from “Seinfeld,” a move that would prove extremely lucrative as the show became a cultural force.

In 1998, Bannon & Co. was acquired by Société Générale, and Mr. Bannon ran a series of companies working at the intersection of entertainment and finance.

“Very intense, very passionate,” said Trevor Drinkwater, who worked with him in film distribution from 2004 to 2010. “I was impressed that while he was very right wing, he had a lot of liberal friends.” He saw Mr. Bannon’s dress evolve toward the casual, “the flannel shirt over the polo shirt.”

Through films, Mr. Bannon was turning his attention back to politics. Tim Watkins, his co-director on the Reagan documentary, said Mr. Bannon worked from 7 a.m. to 2 a.m. “I’ve never known him to, say, go to a ballgame,” he said. But Mr. Watkins found his collaborator’s combativeness wearying.

“Steve thinks everything has to be a fight,” he said. Once, an argument broke out when he told Mr. Bannon that the rough cut of the film, at two hours and 10 minutes, should be trimmed further. Angry, Mr. Bannon “actually flipped over the table,” Mr. Watkins said.

At first, he recalled, before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, they intended to make a standard biopic. But the attacks “changed the film radically,” Mr. Watkins said. Mr. Reagan’s Cold War battles merged with the coda, which showed the hijacked airliners hitting the World Trade Center and people jumping to their deaths.

“Steve crafted a lot of the big ideas,” Mr. Watkins said, notably that “life is a battle of good and evil, and history repeats itself.”

Lou Cannon, a Reagan biographer, rejects comparisons of Mr. Reagan and Mr. Trump. He notes that Mr. Reagan had been governor of California before becoming president, never demonized opponents and signed a law giving amnesty to three million undocumented immigrants. Nonetheless, Mr. Watkins sees striking similarities and is sure Mr. Bannon does, too. In the Reagan memorabilia he accumulated while working on the film, Mr. Watkins said, he recently found some lapel stickers.

“Let’s Make America Great Again,” they read.

Mr. Bannon in 2010 at the Virginia Tea Party convention in Richmond. He told a Tea Party gathering that year in New York that the party was backed by “the people who fight our wars, pay our taxes, run our civic organizations, who build our cities and who hold our neighborhoods together.” Tina Fultz/ZUMApress.com

Anger at the Elite

When his eldest child, Maureen, got into West Point, Mr. Bannon was thrilled and joked about switching his allegiance to Army from Navy. He never missed her volleyball games, and he was at Fort Campbell, Ky., in 2011 when she returned from a deployment to Iraq. “That was one of the greatest feelings I’ve had, seeing my dad when I walked off the plane,” she said.

But through his daughter’s service, he saw an inequity that fueled his anger at the privileged Americans among whom he had long worked.

At West Point, “he saw a complete, utter lack of people from the upper economic levels of American society,” said Mr. Schweizer, the conservative writer. “He thought it was appalling, especially because the elite set so many policies that sent these kids into war.”

Mr. Bannon was put off by the George W. Bush administration’s creation in 2003 of the Medicare prescription drug benefit, which he saw as a blatant giveaway to the pharmaceutical companies. The financial collapse of 2008 and the bailouts that followed infuriated him, including the devastating effect of the stock market collapse on the retirement accounts of men like his father, a phone company retiree.

Mr. Bannon often spoke to friends about his father’s “honest work,” contrasting it with the paper-pushing he had seen on Wall Street. “We consider ourselves middle class, and we think the middle class has been shafted,” Mike Bannon said. “Black, Hispanic, white, everybody. The political class has given them happy talk but delivered nothing. I think that’s what Steve’s talking about.”

[embedded content] In 2010, Mr. Bannon spoke at Tea Party gathering in New York City. YouTube

By the time of a Tea Party gathering in 2010 in New York, Steve Bannon had fully embraced a class-based diagnosis of the country’s woes: “In the last 20 years, our financial elites and the political class have taken care of themselves and led our country to the brink of ruin,” he said. By contrast, he said, the Tea Party was backed by “the people who fight our wars, pay our taxes, run our civic organizations, who build our cities and who hold our neighborhoods together.”

Mr. Bannon honed his message as he reached out to politicians, beginning with his films about Mrs. Bachmann and Ms. Palin. He criticized the conservative elite, including some of his former business colleagues. “The reason I made these films is my buddies on Wall Street said, ‘These women are a bunch of bimbos,’” he told a 2011 gathering. “I said, ‘I know Governor Palin and Congresswoman Bachmann â€" they’re every bit as tough and smart as you guys are.’”

At times, Mr. Bannon’s rants against the ruling class â€" in which he is at least as unsparing of Republicans as of Democrats â€" strikingly echo populists on the left. In a revealing 2014 talk via Skype to a Vatican conference, some of his words might have come from Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts or Mr. Sanders of Vermont.

“Not one criminal charge has ever been brought to any bank executive associated with the 2008 crisis,” Mr. Bannon fumed. “And in fact, it gets worse. No bonuses and none of their equity was taken.”

But if his scathing economic analysis sometimes seemed to dabble in Marxism, on other subjects, including race and religion, he made no concessions to political sensitivities. After Mr. Bannon met Mr. Breitbart at the 2004 screening of “In the Face of Evil,” the two men hit it off, bonding over their similar views and a common irreverent streak.

Ms. Jones, the film colleague, said that in their years working together, Mr. Bannon occasionally talked about the genetic superiority of some people and once mused about the desirability of limiting the vote to property owners.

“I said, ‘That would exclude a lot of African-Americans,’” Ms. Jones recalled. “He said, ‘Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.’ I said, ‘But what about Wendy?’” referring to Mr. Bannon’s executive assistant. “He said, ‘She’s different. She’s family.’”

Mr. Bannon’s African-American friend from his Goldman years said that he had been at pains to defend him in recent years to mutual acquaintances put off first by Breitbart’s reputation and now by Mr. Bannon’s association with Mr. Trump. Most Christmas seasons over the past two decades, he said, Mr. Bannon was “my only token white guy,” or one of two or three, invited to an annual dinner at a New York City club for nearly a score of African-American friends who work or worked in finance.

“Now I’m getting a lot of, ‘What happened to Steve?’” from concerned black acquaintances, the friend said. He said he hoped Mr. Bannon â€" and more important, Mr. Trump â€" would more forthrightly denounce the bigots who have cheered them on. Still, he said, he completely rejects the accusations against Mr. Bannon.

“Hell, no, he’s not a white nationalist,” the friend said.

Mr. Bannon took over as executive chairman of Breitbart News in 2012 after Mr. Breitbart died, playing a hands-on role in assigning, approving and sometimes dictating changes to articles, according to several former Breitbart employees. Staff members grew polarized for or against him. Most of them spoke on the condition of anonymity because they had signed a nondisclosure agreement.

They describe a decentralized operation overseen by Mr. Bannon in two conference calls a day. Employees rarely had any idea where their peripatetic boss was because he seemed to be constantly moving between homes, offices or borrowed premises in Florida, Washington, New York and occasionally Los Angeles or London.

Mr. Bannon’s critics assert that he sometimes put his political preferences ahead of fairness or even of the facts, directing that stories be rewritten to his specifications and shrugging off protests that his changes might make them inaccurate. While Breitbart did not traffic in outright racial slurs, it specialized in inflammatory coverage of police shootings, immigration and Islam in ways intended to prick liberal pieties.

Alex Marlow, the editor in chief of Breitbart, denied that Mr. Bannon ever deliberately permitted an inaccurate story to run on the site. “Breitbart represents certain values, like conservatism, populism and nationalism, and Steve Bannon wanted our content to reflect that,” Mr. Marlow said. He said the site has 45 million readers and should not be judged by “a couple thousand people on Twitter” who express offensive views.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Bannon in October in Gettysburg, Pa. Mr. Bannon said during the presidential campaign that he knew Mr. Trump was an “imperfect vessel” for the revolution he had in mind. But the upstart candidate and the media entrepreneur bonded anyway. Damon Winter/The New York Times

In 2011, as Mr. Trump pondered a 2012 presidential run, David Bossie, a conservative activist who headed Citizens United, took Mr. Bannon to Trump Tower in New York to meet him. “They definitely hit it off,” said Mr. Bossie, who has collaborated with Mr. Bannon on a series of films.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Bannon had in common a willingness to defy some small-government conservative notions â€" for instance, by pushing for a large, costly infrastructure plan to create jobs.

Mr. Bannon was deeply impressed in 2014 when an insurgent Virginia Republican, David Brat, managed an unexpected primary race upset of Representative Eric Cantor, the House majority leader. “He began casting around for other unconventional candidates to support â€" people that were not a part of the establishment and would run populist campaigns,” Mr. Schweizer said.

As Mr. Bannon became a steadily more obvious supporter of Mr. Trump, some Breitbart editors and reporters thought he was turning a news site into a propaganda platform â€" though other staff members approved. Mr. Shapiro was the most outspoken critic, saying that Mr. Bannon had “betrayed” Mr. Breitbart’s mission of “fighting the bullies.”

“In my opinion, Steve Bannon is a bully, and has sold out Andrew’s mission in order to back another bully, Donald Trump,” Mr. Shapiro wrote in a statement when he quit Breitbart in March in support of Michelle Fields, a Breitbart reporter who had been roughly grabbed by Corey Lewandowski, then Mr. Trump’s campaign manager. “He has shaped the company into Trump’s personal Pravda.”

If the criticism bothered Mr. Bannon, he did not show it. He was already deeply involved in advising Mr. Trump, and he believed, unlike most pollsters and pundits, that the chaotic, low-budget campaign had a chance.

One warm evening in August, after Mr. Trump called on Mr. Bannon to take charge of the campaign, Mr. Caddell, the pollster, met with him at a New York hotel, sitting outside on a veranda.

Mr. Bannon said he knew the campaign needed discipline, with Mr. Trump more consistently presenting himself as a populist outsider, Mr. Caddell recalled. “He said, ‘Believe me, I’m going to bring this home. I know what needs to be done, and I’m going to do it,’” Mr. Caddell said.

Graphic A list of possibilities for top posts in the new administration. image> OPEN Graphic Whatever Reagan scholars like Mr. Cannon might say, Mr. Bossie, who also joined the Trump campaign, said that he and Mr. Bannon discussed Reagan parallels as they saw huge crowds waiting for hours to hear Mr. Trump. Mr. Reagan had run when many voters felt the country was threatened at home and abroad, Mr. Bossie said. “You can see the same things today with Donald Trump â€" that America has lost its way and it’s lost its strength, and Americans are looking for leadership,” he said. Kellyanne Conway, who took the job of campaign manager when Mr. Bannon became chief executive, would later call him “the general” who made many critical decisions. He pushed for Mr. Trump to visit Flint, Mich., where the water supply was contaminated with lead, and to appear at a black church. Mr. Bannon also hugely accelerated the tempo of what he thought had been a 9-to-5 campaign. After a devastating recording surfaced of Mr. Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women, it was Mr. Bannon’s idea to “race to the bottom” by inviting women who had accused former President Bill Clinton of sexual abuse to attend a presidential debate, according to another campaign official. Mr. Bannon believed airing the competing accusations would allow the campaign to return more quickly to the core issues of American nationalism and a suffering middle class, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity about internal discussions.

In the final weeks of the campaign, Mr. Bannon was sure the polls pointing to a Clinton victory were wrong, other campaign officials said. His family, including all four siblings and his 95-year-old father, made the trip to New York City for election night.

For Mr. Bannon, the long night at the New York Hilton was his second presidential campaign victory gathering, coming 36 years after the first. At 4:30 a.m., Mr. Vorse, his former colleague, reached him to offer congratulations. He was reminded of their Hollywood days, when “we would have victories and Steve would celebrate for two seconds, and then it was on to the next thing.”

“He said, ‘I got to go because we have a meeting in three hours. I got to hop.’”

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