Back in the White House, Jared Kushner, watching the proceedings casually and then more attentively, suddenly felt a rising anger. Thin-skinned, defensive, on guard, he perceived Bannon’s speech as a message sent directly to him. Bannon has just credited the Trump victory to everybody else. Kushner was certain he was being taunted.
When Schlapp asked the two men to enumerate the accomplishments of the last thirty days, Priebus floundered and then seized on Judge Gorsuch and the deregulation executive orders, all things, said Priebus, “that”—he paused, struggling—“eighty percent of Americans agree with.”
After a brief pause, as though waiting for the air to clear, Bannon raised the microphone: “I kind of break it down into three verticals, three buckets; the first, national security and sovereignty, and that’s your intelligence, defense department, homeland security. The second line of work is what I refer to as economic nationalism, and that is Wilbur Ross at Commerce, Steve Mnuchin at Treasury, [Robert] Lighthizer at Trade, Peter Navarro, [and] Stephen Miller, who are rethinking how we are going to reconstruct our trade arrangements around the world. The third, broadly, line of work is deconstruction of the administrative state—” Bannon stopped for a moment; the phrase, which had never before been uttered in American politics, drew wild applause. “The way the progressive left runs is that if they can’t get it passed they’re just going to put it in some sort of regulation in an agency. That’s all going to be deconstructed.”
Schlapp fed another setup question, this one about the media.
Priebus grabbed it, rambled and fumphered for a while, and ended up, somehow, on a positive note: We’ll all come together.
Lifting the microphone, once again Joshua-like, and with a sweeping wave of his hand, Bannon pronounced, “It’s not only not going to get better, it’s going to get worse every day”—his fundamental apocalyptic song—“and here’s why—and by the way, the internal logic makes sense, corporatist, globalist media, that are adamantly opposed, adamantly opposed, to an economic nationalist agenda like Donald Trump has. And here’s why it’s going to get worse: because he’s going to continue to press his agenda. And as economic conditions continue to get better, as more jobs get better, they’re going to continue to fight. If you think they’re going to give you your country back without a fight you are sadly mistaken. Every day it is going to be a fight. This is why I’m proudest of Donald Trump. All the opportunities he had to waver off this. All the people he had coming to him saying ‘Oh, you got to moderate.’ ” Another dig at Kushner. “Every day in the Oval Office he tells Reince and me, ‘I committed this to the American people. I promised this when I ran. And I’m going to deliver on this.’ ”
And then the final, agreed-upon-beforehand question: “Can this Trump movement be combined with what’s happening at CPAC and other conservative movements for fifty years? Can this be brought together . . . and is this going to save the country?”
“Well, we have to stick together as a team,” said Priebus. “It’s gonna take all of us working together to make it happen.”
As Bannon started into his answer, he spoke slowly, looking out at his captive and riveted audience: “I’ve said that there is a new political order being formed out of this and it’s still being formed. If you look at the wide degree of opinions in this room, whether you are a populist, whether you’re a limited-government conservative, whether you’re a libertarian, whether you’re an economic nationalist, we have wide and sometimes divergent opinions, but I think the center core of what we believe, that we’re a nation with an economy, not an economy just in some global market place with open borders, but that we are a nation with a culture, and a reason for being. I think that’s what unites us. And that’s what’s going to unite this movement going forward.”
Bannon lowered the microphone to, after what might be interpreted as a beat of uncertainty, suddenly thunderous applause.
Watching from the White House, Kushner—who had come to believe that there was something insidious when Bannon used the words “borders,” “global,” “culture,” and “unite,” and who was more and more convinced that they were personally directed against him—was now in a rage.
* * *
Kellyanne Conway had increasingly been worrying about the seventy-year-old president’s sleeplessness and his worn look. It was the president’s indefatigability—a constant restlessness—that she believed carried the team. On the campaign trail, he would always add stops and speeches. He doubled his own campaign time. Hillary worked at half time; he worked at double time. He sucked in the energy from the crowds. Now that he was living alone in the White House, though, he had seemed to lose a step.
But today he was back. He had been under the sunlamp and lightened his hair, and when the climate-change-denying president woke up on another springlike morning, 77 degrees in the middle of winter, on the second day of CPAC, he seemed practically a different person, or anyway a noticeably younger one. At the appointed hour, to the locked-down ballroom at the Gaylord Resort, filled to capacity with all stripes of the conservative faithful—Rebekah Mercer and her daughter up front—and hundreds of media people in an SRO gallery, the president emerged onto the stage, not in an energetic television-style rush, but with a slow swagger to the low strains of “I’m Proud to Be an American.” He came to the stage as a political strongman, a man occupying his moment, clapping—here he reverted to entertainer pose—as he slowly approached the podium, mouthing “Thank you,” crimson tie dipping over his belt.
This would be Trump’s fifth CPAC address. As much as Steve Bannon liked to see himself as the author of Donald Trump, he also seemed to find it proof of some added legitimacy—and somehow amazing in itself—that since 2011 Trump had basically come to CPAC with the same message. He wasn’t a cipher, he was a messenger. The country was a “mess”—a word that had stood the Trump test of time. Its leaders were weak. Its greatness had been lost. The only thing different was that in 2011 he was still reading his speeches with only occasional ad-libs, and now he ad-libbed everything.
“My first major speech was at CPAC,” the president began. “Probably five or six years ago. My first major political speech. You were there. I loved it. I loved the people. I loved the commotion. They did these polls where I went through the roof. I wasn’t even running, right? But it gave me an idea! And I got a little bit concerned when I saw what was happening in the country so I said let’s go to it. It was very exciting. I walked the stage at CPAC. I had very little notes and even less preparation.” (In fact, he read his 2011 speech from a sheet of paper.) “So when you have practically no notes and no preparation and then you leave and everybody was thrilled. I said, I think I like this business.”
This first preamble gave way to the next preamble.
“I want you all to know that we are fighting the fake news. It’s phony. Fake. A few days ago I called the fake news the enemy of the people. Because they have no sources. They just make ’em up when there are none. I saw one story recently where they said nine people have confirmed. There are no nine people. I don’t believe there was one or two people. Nine people. And I said, Give me a break. I know the people. I know who they talk to. There were no nine people. But they say nine people. . . .”
A few minutes into the forty-eight-minute speech and it was already off the rails, riff sustained by repetition.
“Maybe they’re just bad at polling. Or maybe they’re not legit. It’s one or the other. They’re very smart. They’re very cunning. And they’re very dishonest. . . . Just to conclude”—although he would go on for thirty-seven minutes more—“it’s a very sensitive topic and they get upset when we expose their false stories. They say we can’t criticize their dishonest coverage because of the First Amendment. You know they always bring up”—he went into a falsetto voice—“the First Amendment. Now I love the First Amendment. Nobody loves it better than me. Nobody.”