How a Marriage of Convenience With Steve Bannon Exploded in My Face

I was seated at a mahogany table in the “Breitbart Embassy” great room when a frowzy, triplicate-shirted Steve Bannon proposed that I join him on a trip to Laredo, Texas. With a roguish grin, he insisted that such an expedition would win me over to his side on the need for more draconian border security measures.

Listening to this pitch was one of those record-scratch, freeze-frame moments in life. Even as it was happening, I remember being taken aback by how absurd it was that I had found myself there. It was August 2014 and Steve Bannon was not yet “Evil Mastermind on the Cover of Time Steve Bannon,” but Breitbart’s ascension was well under way. The website was the home of the populist, nativist, culturally conservative #war against the old-line RINO elites. And there I was a gay, immigrant-loving, establishment Bushie discussing a postelection holiday with the wannabe revolutionary who was openly plotting to destroy all of the politicians I admired.

I would be lying if I denied giving serious consideration to accompanying him on this Rio Grande Dreamer Cruise for the sake of the story, the weird life experience, and, most importantly, the relationship. I figured he could be leveraged in the service of my clients and candidates, a political consultant’s core purpose. As such, I didn’t contemplate the sacrifices such relationship building might require. My job with America Rising, an opposition research firm, was to use media contacts to buff up my clients and savage the competition. It’s a job that often requires dealing with unsavory characters with questionable journalistic ethics. The line between dealing with Bannon and others seemed murky. Where was a professional PR man supposed to draw it? It was a question that required more reflection than I gave it.

In an email to Bannon following the meeting, I wrote, “I want to go to the border! Let’s do it in November. ” He replied, “K. . . I will organize a trip for right after the elections. . . some guys go to the islands America Rising goes to laredo !!! ” (Yes, Steve Bannon is a multiple-exclamation-point guy in emails. Now you know.)

Our Juarez fantasy never came to pass, but that meeting did kick off a multiyear informal working relationship whereby Bannon and I would collaborate on a story or issue in which we had common interests despite having deeply conflicting values ​​and big-picture objectives. Sometimes our target was a Democrat, of course, but on other occasions there would be a Republican primary where Bannon would support the cryptofascist and I would back the moderate squish and we would make a common cause by sullying the regular old Republican in the middle.

This was the case during the 2016 primary, when I became the Jeb Bush campaign’s liaison to Bannon, kinda by default. I don’t think any of the other senior staff had ever talked to him, or if they had, they didn’t have much interest in doing so again. As a result, my “relationship” paid some internal dividends. It allowed me to get early intel on the content in his colleague Peter Schweizer‘s upcoming anti-Jeb polemical e-book, Bush Bucks, which turned out to be a dud. It also gave me the ability to kneecap the candidates that I saw at the time as our rivals in the establishment “lane,” such that it was, when they would find themselves afoul of the Breitbart base.

These exchanges were made possible by the time I had spent at the Breitbart Embassy, ​​a town house in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington, DC, that served as the headquarters for the website, a gathering place for “anti-establishment” Republicans, a crash pad for Breitbart employees, and a party venue where they would host the very establishment types whom they pretended to hate but were actually obsessed with. The house’s most distinguishing feature is a replica Lincoln Bedroom, just off the stairs on the second floor. It is said that Bannon slept, and perhaps even lived there, for a while, but I never had the nerve to ask him if that was the case. His wrinkled garb that first afternoon certainly suggested that he might have just rolled out of bed, but then again, Trump dubbed him “Sloppy Steve” for a reason. My cousins ​​would have called him a hoosier.