HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_021140.jpg

32 MICHAEL WOLFF gain a majority greater than the one the Republicans held now. Except, unlike the Republicans, theirs would be a unified party—or at least one that was unified against Donald Trump. Ryan and Stivers were hardly the only ones seeing such a result. Mitch McConnell was telling donors not to even bother contributing to House races. The money should go to the Senate campaign, where prospects for holding the Republican majority were significantly brighter. This was, for Donald Trump, in Bannon’s view, the most desperate moment in his political career, arguably even worse than the revelation of the Access Hollywood grab-them-by-the-pussy tape. He was already on the ropes legally, with Mueller and the Southern District bearing down; now, looking at a likely wipeout in the midterm elections, he was in seri- ous political jeopardy as well. But Bannon’s usual ebullience quickly returned. As he talked his way out of his funk, he became nearly joyful. If the establishment— Democrats, Republicans, moderate thinkers of every sort—believed that Donald Trump needed to be run out of town, then Bannon relished the prospect of defending him. For Bannon, this was the mission, but it was also sport. Bannon thrived on the possibility of upset. His own leap to the world stage had come because the Trump campaign was so deep in hopelessness that he was allowed to take it over. Then, on Novem- ber 9, 2016, against all odds and expectations, Trump, riding Bannon’s campaign—with Bannon’s primacy soon one of the bitterest pills for Trump to swallow—won the presidency. Now, even with almost every indicator for the November elections looking bleak, Bannon believed he could yet see how Republican losses could be held to under the twenty- three seats needed to save the House majority. Still, it was going to be a grinding fight. “When Trump calls his New York friends after dinner and whines that he doesn’t have a friend in the world, he’s kind of right,” said a mordant Bannon. Bannon viewed the case against Donald Trump as both inherently political—his enemies willing to do whatever it took to bring him down— and essentially true. He had little doubt that Trump was guilty of most of what he was accused of. “How did he get the dough for the primary and SIEGE 32 then for the general with his ‘liquidity’ issues?” asked Bannon with hi: hands out and his eyebrows up. “Let’s not dwell.” But for Bannon there were two sides in American politics—not s much right and left, but right brain and left brain. The left brain wa represented by the legal system, which was empirical, evidentiary, an: methodical; given the chance, it would inevitably and correctly convic Donald Trump. The right side was represented by politics, and therefor by voters who were emotional, volatile, febrile, and always eager to throy the dice. “Get the deplorables fired up’—he slapped his hands in thunder clap effect—“and we'll save our man.” Almost a year and a half on, all of the issues of 2016 remained a powerful and raw as ever: immigration, white man’s resentment, and th liberal’contempt for the working—or out-of-work—white man. The yea 2018 was, for Bannon, the real 2016: the deplorable base had become th deplorable nation. “It’s civil war,” Bannon said, a happy judgment he ofte repeated. The most resonant issue was Donald Trump himself: the people wh elected him would be galvanized by the effort to take him from then Bannon was horrified by mainstream Republican efforts to run the com ing election on the strength of the recent Republican tax cut. “Are yo kidding? Oh my fucking god, are you kidding?” This election was abou the fate of Donald Trump. “Let’s have a do-over election. That’s what the libs want. They ca have it. Let’s do it. Up or down, Trump or no Trump.” Impeachment was not to be feared, it was to be embraced. “That what youre voting for: to impeach Donald Trump or to save him fror impeachment.” The legal threat, however, might be moving faster than the electio1 And to Bannon—who knew more about the president’s hankerings, moo swings, and impulse-control issues than almost anyone—you could n« have produced a needier or more hapless defendant. OF Since coming aboard in the summer of 2017, the president's legal team- Dowd, Cobb, and Sekulow—had delivered the message their client insiste HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_021140