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22 MICHAEL WOLFF

In the last few weeks, he had helped install his allies—and first-draft choices during the presidential transition—in central posts in the Trump administration. Mike Pompeo had recently been named secretary of state, John Bolton would soon become the national security advisor, and Larry Kudlow had been appointed director of the National Economic Council. The president’s chief political aides were Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie, both Bannon allies, if not acolytes; both operated outside the White House and were frequent visitors at the Embassy. Many of the daily stream of White House defenders on cable television—the surrogates—were Bannon people carrying Bannon’s message as well as the president’s. What’s more, his enemies in the White House were moving out, including Hope Hicks, H. R. McMaster, the former national security advisor, and the ever shrinking circle of allies supporting the president’s son-in-law and daughter.

Bannon was often on the road. He was in Europe meeting with the rising populist right-wing groups, and in the U.S. meeting with hedge funders desperate to understand the Trump variable. He was also looking for every opportunity to try to convince liberals that the populist way ought to be their way, too. Early in the year, Bannon went to Cambridge to see Larry Summers, who had been Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary, Barack Obama’s director of the National Economic Council, and, for a time, president of Harvard. Summers’s wife refused to allow Bannon into their home, so the meeting happened at Harvard instead. Summers was mis-shaven and wearing a shirt that was missing a button or two, while Bannon was sporting his double-shirt getup, cargo pants, and a hunting jacket. “Both of them looked like Asperger guys,” said one of the people at the meeting.

“Do you fucking realize what your fucking friend is doing?” yelled Summers about Trump and his administration. “You’re fucking the country!”

“You elite Democrats—you only care about the margins, people who are rich or people who are poor,” returned Bannon.

“Your trade mumbo jumbo will sink the world into a depression,” thundered Summers.

“And you’ve exported U.S. jobs to China!” declared a delighted Ban-

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non, always enjoying the opportunity to joust with a member of the establishment.

Bannon was—or at least saw himself to be—a fixer, power broker and kingmaker without portfolio. He was a cockeyed sort of Clark Clifford, that political eminence and influence peddler of the 1960s and ’70s. Or a wise man of the political fringe, if that was not an ultimate kind of contradiction. Or the head of an auxiliary government. Or, perhaps something truly sui generis: no one quite like Bannon had ever played such a central role in America’s national political life, or been such a thorn in the side of it. As for Trump, with friends like Bannon, who needed enemies?

The two men might be essential to each other, but they reviled and ridiculed each other, too. Bannon’s constant public analysis of Trump’s confounding nature—both its comic and harrowing components, the behavior of a crazy uncle—not to mention his indiscreet diatribes or the inanities of Trump’s family, continued to further alienate him from the president. And yet, though the two men no longer spoke, they hung on each other’s words—each desperate to know what one was saying about the other.

Whatever current feeling Bannon might have for Trump—his mood ranged from exasperation to fury to disgust to incredulity—he continued to believe that nobody in American politics could match Trump’s midway-style showmanship. Yes, Donald Trump had restored showman ship to American politics—he had taken the wonk out of politics. In sum he knew his audience. At the same time, he couldn’t walk a straight line Every step forward was threatened by his next lurch. Like many great actors, his innate self-destructiveness was always in conflict with his keen survival instincts. Some around the president merely trusted that the latter would win over the former. Others, no matter the frustration of the effort, understood how much he needed to be led by unseen hands—unseen being the key attribute.

With no one to tell him otherwise, Bannon continued, unseen, to conduct the president’s business from his dining-room table on A Street

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