At about the time that Conway was explaining her particular brand of antifeminist feminism, Richard Spencer arrived at the convention center hoping to attend the breakout session “The Alt-Right Ain’t Right at All,” a modest effort to reaffirm CPAC’s traditional values. Spencer, who since the Trump victory had committed himself to full-time activism and press opportunities, had planned to position himself to get in the first question. But almost immediately upon arriving and paying his $150 registration fee, he had attracted first one reporter and then a growing circle, a spontaneous press scrum, and he responded by giving an ad hoc news conference. Like Yiannopoulos, and in many ways like Trump and Bannon, Spencer helped frame the ironies of the modern conservative movement. He was a racist but hardly a conservative—he doggedly supported single-payer health care, for instance. And the attention he received was somehow less a credit to conservatism than another effort by the liberal media to smear conservatism. Hence, as the scrum around him increased to as many as thirty people, the CPAC irony police stepped in.
“You’re not welcome on the property,” announced one of the security guards. “They want you off the property. They want you to cease. They want you off the property.”
“Wow,” said Spencer. “Can they?”
“Enough debate,” the guard said. “This is private property and CPAC wants you off the property.”
Relieved of his credentials, Spencer was ushered to the CPAC perimeter of the hotel, where, his pride not all that wounded, he turned, in the comfort of the atrium lounge area, to social media and to texting and emailing reporters on his contact list.
The point Spencer was making was that his presence here was not really so disruptive or ironic as Bannon’s, or, for that matter, Trump’s. He might be ejected, but in a larger historical sense it was the conservatives who were now being ejected from their own movement by the new cadre—which included Trump and Bannon—of what Spencer called the identitarians, proponents of “white interests, values, customs, and culture.”
Spencer was, he believed, the true Trumper and the rest of CPAC now the outliers.
* * *
In the green room, after Bannon, Priebus, and their retinues had arrived, Bannon—in dark shirt, dark jacket, and white pants—stood off to the side talking to his aide, Alexandra Preate. Priebus sat in the makeup chair, patiently receiving a layer of foundation, powder, and lip gloss.
“Steve—” said Priebus, gesturing to the chair as he got up.
“That’s okay,” said Bannon. He put up his hand, making another of the continual small gestures meant, pointedly, to define himself as something other than every phony baloney in swampland politics—and something other than Reince Priebus, with his heavy powder foundation.
The significance of Bannon’s first appearance in public—after days of apparent West Wing turmoil, a Time magazine cover story about him, nearly endless speculation about his power and true intentions, and his elevation at least in the media mind to the essential mystery of the Trump White House—could hardly be underestimated. For Bannon himself this was, in his own mind, a carefully choreographed moment. It was his victory walk. He had, he thought, prevailed in the West Wing. He had, again in his own mind, projected his superiority over both Priebus and the idiot son-in-law. And he would now dominate CPAC. But for the moment he attempted a shucks-nothing-to-it lack of self-consciousness even as, at the same time, he was unquestionably the preening man of the hour. Demurring about accepting makeup was not just a way to belittle Priebus, but also a way to say that, ever the commando, he went into battle fully exposed.
“You know what he thinks even when you don’t know what he thinks,” explained Alexandra Preate. “He’s a bit like a good boy who everybody knows is a bad boy.”
When the two men emerged onto the stage and appeared on the big-screen monitors, the contrast between them could hardly have been greater. The powder made Priebus look mannequin-like, and his suit with lapel pin, little-boyish. Bannon, the supposedly publicity-shy man, was eating up the camera. He was a country music star—he was Johnny Cash. He seized Priebus’s hand in a power handshake, then relaxed in his chair as Priebus came too eagerly forward in his.
Priebus opened with traditional bromides. Bannon, taking his turn, went wryly for the dig: “I want to thank you for finally inviting me to CPAC.”
“We decided to say that everybody is a part of our conservative family,” said Matt Schlapp, resigned. He then welcomed “the back of the room,” where the hundreds of reporters covering the event were positioned.
“Is that the opposition party?” asked Bannon, shielding his eyes.
Schlapp went to the setup question: “We read a lot about you two. Ahem . . .”
“It’s all good,” replied Priebus tightly.
“I’ll bet not all of it’s accurate,” said Schlapp. “I’ll bet there’s things that don’t get written correctly. Let me ask both of you, what’s the biggest misconception about what’s going on in the Donald Trump White House?”
Bannon responded with something just less than a smirk and said nothing.
Priebus offered a testimonial to the closeness of his relationship with Bannon.
Bannon, eyes dancing, lifted the microphone trumpetlike and made a joke about Priebus’s commodious office—two couches and a fireplace—and his own rough-and-ready one.
Priebus hewed to the message. “It’s, ahh . . . it’s actually . . . something that you all have helped build, which is, when you bring together, and what this election shows, and what President Trump showed, and let’s not kid ourselves, I can talk about data and ground game and Steve can talk about big ideas but the truth of the matter is Donald Trump, President Trump, brought together the party and the conservative movement, and I tell you if the party and the conservative movement are together”—Priebus knocked his fists—“similar to Steve and I, it can’t be stopped. And President Trump is the one guy, he was the one person, and I can say this after overseeing sixteen people kill each other, it was Donald Trump who was able to bring this country, this party, and this movement together. And Steve and I know that and we live it every day and our job is to get the agenda of President Trump through the door and on pen and paper.”
With Priebus gasping for breath, Bannon snatched the relay baton. “I think if you look at the opposition party”—throwing his hand out to the back of the room—“and how they portrayed the campaign, how they portrayed the transition, and now how they are portraying the administration, it’s always wrong. I mean on the very first day that Kellyanne and I started, we reached out to Reince, Sean Spicer, Katie. . . . It’s the same team, you know, that every day was grinding away at the campaign, the same team that did the transition, and if you remember, the campaign was the most chaotic, in the media’s description, most chaotic, most disorganized, most unprofessional, had no earthly idea what they were doing, and then you saw ’em all crying and weeping that night on November 8.”