bureaucratic power, he did not want to see himself as a bureaucrat. He was of a higher purpose and moral order. He was an avenger. He was also, he believed, a straight shooter. There was a moral order in aligning language and action—if you said you were going to do something, you do it.
In his head, Bannon carried a set of decisive actions that would not just mark the new administration’s opening days, but make it clear that nothing ever again would be the same. At the age of sixty-three, he was in a hurry.
* * *
Bannon had delved deeply into the nature of executive orders—EOs. You can’t rule by decree in the United States, except you really can. The irony here was that it was the Obama administration, with a recalcitrant Republican Congress, that had pushed the EO envelope. Now, in something of a zero-sum game, Trump’s EOs would undo Obama’s EOs.
During the transition, Bannon and Stephen Miller, a former Sessions aide who had earlier joined the Trump campaign and then become Bannon’s effective assistant and researcher, assembled a list of more than two hundred EOs to issue in the first hundred days.
But the first step in the new Trump administration had to be immigration, in Bannon’s certain view. Foreigners were the ne plus ultramania of Trumpism. An issue often dismissed as living on the one-track-mind fringe—Jeff Sessions was one of its cranky exponents—it was Trump’s firm belief that a lot of people had had it up to here with foreigners. Before Trump, Bannon had bonded with Sessions on the issue. The Trump campaign became a sudden opportunity to see if nativism really had legs. And then when they won, Bannon understood there could be no hesitation about declaring their ethnocentric heart and soul.
To boot, it was an issue that made liberals bat-shit mad.
Laxly enforced immigration laws reached to the center of the new liberal philosophy and, for Bannon, exposed its hypocrisy. In the liberal worldview, diversity was an absolute good, whereas Bannon believed any reasonable person who was not wholly blinded by the liberal light could see that waves of immigrants came with a load of problems—just look at Europe. And these were problems borne not by cosseted liberals but by the more exposed citizens at the other end of the economic scale.
It was out of some instinctive or idiot-savant-like political understanding that Trump had made this issue his own, frequently observing,
Wasn’t anybody an American anymore?
In some of his earliest political outings, even before Obama’s election in 2008, Trump talked with bewilderment and resentment about strict quotas on European immigration and the deluge from “Asia and other places.” (This deluge, as liberals would be quick to fact-check, was, even as it had grown, still quite a modest stream.) His obsessive focus on Obama’s birth certificate was in part about the scourge of non-European foreignness—a certain race-baiting.
Who were these people? Why were they here?
The campaign sometimes shared a striking graphic. It showed a map of the country reflecting dominant immigration trends in each state from fifty years ago—here was a multitude of countries, many European. Today, the equivalent map showed that every state in the United States was now dominated by Mexican immigration. This was the daily reality of the American workingman, in Bannon’s view, the ever growing presence of an alternative, discount workforce.
Bannon’s entire political career, such as it was, had been in political media. It was also in Internet media—that is, media ruled by immediate response. The Breitbart formula was to so appall the liberals that the basewas doubly satisfied, generating clicks in a ricochet of disgust and delight. You defined yourself by your enemy’s reaction. Conflict was the media bait—hence, now, the political chum. The new politics was not the art of the compromise but the art of conflict.
The real goal was to expose the hypocrisy of the
In his head, Bannon carried a set of decisive actions that would not just mark the new administration’s opening days, but make it clear that nothing ever again would be the same. At the age of sixty-three, he was in a hurry.
* * *
Bannon had delved deeply into the nature of executive orders—EOs. You can’t rule by decree in the United States, except you really can. The irony here was that it was the Obama administration, with a recalcitrant Republican Congress, that had pushed the EO envelope. Now, in something of a zero-sum game, Trump’s EOs would undo Obama’s EOs.
During the transition, Bannon and Stephen Miller, a former Sessions aide who had earlier joined the Trump campaign and then become Bannon’s effective assistant and researcher, assembled a list of more than two hundred EOs to issue in the first hundred days.
But the first step in the new Trump administration had to be immigration, in Bannon’s certain view. Foreigners were the ne plus ultramania of Trumpism. An issue often dismissed as living on the one-track-mind fringe—Jeff Sessions was one of its cranky exponents—it was Trump’s firm belief that a lot of people had had it up to here with foreigners. Before Trump, Bannon had bonded with Sessions on the issue. The Trump campaign became a sudden opportunity to see if nativism really had legs. And then when they won, Bannon understood there could be no hesitation about declaring their ethnocentric heart and soul.
To boot, it was an issue that made liberals bat-shit mad.
Laxly enforced immigration laws reached to the center of the new liberal philosophy and, for Bannon, exposed its hypocrisy. In the liberal worldview, diversity was an absolute good, whereas Bannon believed any reasonable person who was not wholly blinded by the liberal light could see that waves of immigrants came with a load of problems—just look at Europe. And these were problems borne not by cosseted liberals but by the more exposed citizens at the other end of the economic scale.
It was out of some instinctive or idiot-savant-like political understanding that Trump had made this issue his own, frequently observing,
Wasn’t anybody an American anymore?
In some of his earliest political outings, even before Obama’s election in 2008, Trump talked with bewilderment and resentment about strict quotas on European immigration and the deluge from “Asia and other places.” (This deluge, as liberals would be quick to fact-check, was, even as it had grown, still quite a modest stream.) His obsessive focus on Obama’s birth certificate was in part about the scourge of non-European foreignness—a certain race-baiting.
Who were these people? Why were they here?
The campaign sometimes shared a striking graphic. It showed a map of the country reflecting dominant immigration trends in each state from fifty years ago—here was a multitude of countries, many European. Today, the equivalent map showed that every state in the United States was now dominated by Mexican immigration. This was the daily reality of the American workingman, in Bannon’s view, the ever growing presence of an alternative, discount workforce.
Bannon’s entire political career, such as it was, had been in political media. It was also in Internet media—that is, media ruled by immediate response. The Breitbart formula was to so appall the liberals that the basewas doubly satisfied, generating clicks in a ricochet of disgust and delight. You defined yourself by your enemy’s reaction. Conflict was the media bait—hence, now, the political chum. The new politics was not the art of the compromise but the art of conflict.
The real goal was to expose the hypocrisy of the
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