The FRONTLINE Interviews
Joshua Green
Author, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the National Uprising
Joshua Green is a political correspondent for Bloomberg Businessweek and is the author of Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the National Uprising.
This is a transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE’s Michael Kirk conducted on June 5, 2019. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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Rejecting the Republican “Autopsy”
OK, Josh, here we go.We’ll start and try to stay with the chronological narrative.It’s 2013-14, somewhere in there, at the “Breitbart Embassy.” …The “autopsy” has been done post-[Mitt] Romney.And they’ve got a different view of the world.Tell me, first, who are these three characters?
Well, you have Jeff Sessions, who is the ultraconservative senator from Alabama, so far right-wing that he’s viewed as a gadfly.His chief consigliere staff are Stephen Miller, again, viewed with some curiosity on the Hill, somebody who is virulently anti-immigration and yet doesn’t have a lot of sway on Capitol Hill.Then you have Steve Bannon, who had just taken over Breitbart News, which became a kind of locus point for anti-immigrant folks to organize and push back against this establishment Republican immigration bill that they worried was going to legalize millions of illegal immigrants, which was the last thing they wanted to see happen.
So back up.They have identified a segment of the Republican Party and the edges of the Republican Party that is ignored, largely, by the autopsy and the efforts by the Republican establishment to broaden their base.Who is the base that these people have identified?
Well, to put this all in context, the Republican Party, after Mitt Romney’s loss, looked at the demographic numbers, saw how poorly they performed—Romney only won 27 percent of the Hispanic voters—conducted this autopsy and said to themselves, the leaders of the Republican Party, “If we don’t get right with the Hispanic voters, we’ll never win the White House again.”And so that—that launched this big push among the business community, among the Republican establishment but not among the Republican grassroots, not among the Jeff Sessionses and the Steve Bannons of the world, who existed in what I called, at the time, the “conservative underworld,” the world of conservative talk radio and websites like Breitbart News, that were aggressively anti-immigration, and yet didn’t have any real representation in the mainstream media, including in outlets like Fox News, where Rupert Murdoch was—was very much pro-immigration reform.
So in 2013, at the time that Republicans introduced this Gang of Eight bill, it seems like it is headed for an easy passage, not least because it’s been championed by Marco Rubio, the Florida senator who looks like the next great Republican hope.… You know, you have these three hardcore anti-immigrant activists in Sessions, Bannon and Miller, organizing in the Breitbart Embassy for what seemed, at the time, like this quixotic quest to kill the Gang of Eight bill and redirect the Republican Party in a completely different direction.
Defeating Eric Cantor
So Sessions and Miller are instrumental in at least slowing it down through the House.But let’s slightly skip over it and just say there is a moment where somehow the three of them, I think, and maybe others, including people in talk radio, including Laura Ingraham and others, decide that Eric Cantor should be the target, a demonstration project, a proof positive that there is this base, and it can be activated.
So the challenge for Sessions and Bannon was essentially, how do we find a place to make a stand?You know, Sessions told me at the time that he viewed the Gang of Eight bill as a kick in the teeth to decent Americans.And yet there wasn’t anywhere where they felt like they could get their message out to the rest of Republicans.And so what they decided they need to do was to find an example of someone they could take down in the Republican establishment, who represented all that they considered to be wrong with where the party was going—the fealty to Wall Street, the interest in serving employers rather than workers.And when they looked around, the guy that they thought was most vulnerable was Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, who was widely expected to be the heir apparent to House Speaker John Boehner.
And they found a challenger who shared their views and was willing to take on Cantor, and that was a little-known economics professor named Dave Brat, who ran in Cantor’s district, almost without any notice.Nobody in politics thought Eric Cantor was vulnerable, and so nobody paid attention to the polls or to what was going on with the race.Even Cantor’s own pollster was blindsided by what eventually became clear was—was Brat’s strength.But at the time, it seemed like this no-hope effort that a bunch of anti-immigrant Breitbart folks and Stephen Miller were launching to really no attention at all in the rest of the media.
It’s interesting about attention in these moments.When we interviewed Bannon, he said, “Look, I was in full-scale war at Breitbart against Fox, which really represented”—you mentioned this already—“really represented Murdoch, moneyed interest, the Republican establishment.Even Sean Hannity is against—or is in favor of the Gang of Eight bill, the accommodation, the broadening of immigration.”Explain where Fox was at that time.
Well, after Romney’s loss, there was essentially a broad-scale Republican capitulation to the idea that we need to get right with Hispanic voters.And so you have everyone from Rupert Murdoch to Sean Hannity come out and say as a measure of political expediency, that Republicans need to take this step and pass immigration reform in a way that legalizes millions of undocumented Americans.And that was the reigning position in Republican politics in 2013 and 2014.It seemed like the Gang of Eight bill was going to rocket through the House and Senate, and possibly deliver Marco Rubio to the White House in 2016.
So they're looking the other way—that is, Fox and others, as Ingraham, Levin, Bannon through Breitbart, Miller with Sessions, and Miller with Ingraham, are pushing forward on Brat against Cantor.
Yeah.I mean, so what you had at the time is essentially, you had Fox News, which was the mainstream wing of the Republican Party, and then you had Breitbart News and talk radio, which was the kind of populist, nationalist, right-wing view that wasn’t really paid a lot of attention, but should have been, because what happened was, on these radio shows, among the listeners, ordinary rank-and-file voters were getting angry about this immigration reform bill, and they were being told that it wasn’t Democrats that were to blame; it was the Republican leaders, the leaders of their own party.
And I remember talking to Jeff Sessions at the time, who told me: “You know, I do a lot of talk radio, and even though you guys in the mainstream media aren’t covering this, I can tell it resonates.I can tell that people in the conservative base are reading Breitbart News, because every time I go on one of these radio shows, that’s what the hosts are asking me about, and that’s what the callers want to discuss.”So you had, at the time, this building wave of voters who were getting angrier and angrier over immigration reform, and they were looking for a target within the Republican Party.
So when lightning strikes, and Cantor goes down, first the impact on the Gang of Eight bill.
Well, when—when Cantor went down, it was like a lightning bolt.Nobody had expected this.I remember being at dinner, and my phone starts buzzing, and people are saying: “Can you believe it?Can you believe what happened to Cantor?”And I thought initially that like he’d had a heart attack or something.You know, the idea that he was vulnerable and would lose his seat to this upstart nobody had never entered my mind.
And so the immediate effect was to put a brake on the momentum toward immigration reform.If these anti-immigrant forces could take down Eric Cantor, you know, the next Republican speaker of the House, then they could come for anybody.And nobody wanted to go out on a limb and take the chance of being the next victim of these anti-immigrant forces.
And so, you know, you have these—these really, frankly, awkward turnarounds, where Marco Rubio goes and kind of turns on a dime, and goes from being the champion of this Gang of Eight bill to turning around and reversing himself on his own bill.And this is—this is something he’d gone out and sold on conservative talk radio.He’s sold it in the media.He’d been all over television, pushing this bill.And here he is, realizing, if I want to have any hope of getting in the White House, I've got to flip-flop and now take the other side.
If you're Bannon, Miller and Sessions at that moment, how are you feeling?
You are feeling gleeful.You know, you—you have finally put a flag down.You’ve established a beachhead.You’ve stopped the momentum of this bill that had every indication that it was going to pass and be put into law, and you’ve got the enemy running scared.A couple years later, I was working on a profile of Stephen Miller, and one of my sources says, you know: “The Cantor loss was really pivotal, especially for Stephen Miller.Do you want to see why?”And I said, “Sure.”
And she sent me an email that Miller had sent to a couple of close friends, saying, you know: “This is wonderful.Cantor is lost.”Miller had just seen Trump on TV talking about Cantor’s loss, talking about the problems of immigration.And Stephen Miller, in 2014, says in this email, “I sure hope Donald Trump runs for president.”You know, at the time, that would—that was, you know, a laughable sentiment that nobody would have entertained.But of course, here we are, five years later, and look who’s in the White House running immigration policy.
Finding Candidate Trump
It was also a laughable sentiment that they could stop the Gang of Eight bill.It was a laughable sentiment that they could take down Eric Cantor.And so I think, with a little validation there, you could imagine…Sessions, Bannon and Miller, casting about and saying, “We need to find ourselves a presidential candidate to carry this torch.”… First stop was Sessions, then Dobbs, and eventually they find their way to Trump.
Well, what—what—what Bannon realized after Cantor’s loss was that this is an issue that has salience.It has power.And of course the main event in Republican politics as you look ahead from 2014 was going to be the 2016 presidential election, and specifically the Republican primaries.And so at that moment, Bannon resolves, “I need to find a candidate who will represent my views, views that are still considered to be on the fringe of Republican politics, protectionism and anti-immigration.”And he wants to find somebody to kind of run and lift those issues up from kind of the bottom of the barrel, when it comes to Republican issue concerns, to somewhere near the top.
And so the first—the first effort was to recruit Sessions himself, who had no problem getting out on the floor of the Senate and talking about these things.Tried to get Sessions interested.He said, “Listen, you know, you're not going to be the nominee, but you could sure do a lot to advance our issues if you're going to run.”Sessions ultimately says no.Bannon next approaches Lou Dobbs, interesting guy, charismatic, a lot of presence on television, knows how to work with the media…So eventually Bannon winds up linking up with Donald Trump, of all people, who he realizes in the first meeting is a very charismatic guy.He’s a natural salesman, and he’s someone who, if he can be convinced to take the right position on immigration, maybe could be the answer to push these views in the Republican primary.
Bannon called him the “imperfect instrument.”
Yes.
Recognized it right away.What do you think he meant by that?
You know, ideally what you look for in a messenger, in a political messenger, is somebody who is, you know, smooth and clever, can debate and articulate a set of principles, stick to a message.Trump was somebody who’s all over the place.Says whatever comes to mind, veers around from topic to topic, not a national—not a natural messenger, you know, to hammer home something like opposition to immigration, at least not initially.But Trump is someone who can be persuaded.
And back at the time, Trump had just discovered Twitter and loved the idea that he could tweet something and get instant feedback from what, at the time, were his hundreds of thousands of followers.And what he found was that when he tweeted about immigration, it got a big response.So Trump began to get more open to the Bannon catechism, to the idea that, you know, that—that ejecting immigrants from this country, tightening immigration laws, making this a primary issue, was something that would resonate with voters, and that would advance Trump’s own candidacy in a GOP primary.The problem they had was, how do we get Trump to stick to the subject?
The Trump Campaign
… I think, as I understand it, everybody was a little dicey about him as a candidate until he came down that escalator and uttered the phrases about Mexican rapists and others coming in.
Well, I don’t know.I mean, my own impression reporting on it, at the time, was that pretty much from the moment Trump started to talk about the wall and get the reaction that he got at these different conservative cattle-call events, that he was viewed, at least by the grassroots, as someone who was solid on immigration, because, you know, at the—at the time, there weren’t a lot of other candidates in the field, or potential candidates, who held those views.I mean, you still had people, although they tiptoed away from the Gang of Eight bill, who were looking for some kind of immigration reform that would provide a pathway to legalization for all the undocumented immigrants.Instead of pushing immigration reform, what they tried to do is bury the issue.Trump was one of the few candidates who wanted to push this issue to the floor and talk about it once his own advisers convinced him that this was something that he should be talking about.
That's obviously music to the ears of Bannon and especially Miller, who ends up working on the Trump campaign, being the warmup act out there in the arenas where Trump is speaking.Give me a little sense, from what you wrote and what you know, of who is Steve Miller at that moment. ...
You know, Miller, at the time, was a well-known figure to reporters on Capitol Hill.He just wasn’t seen—he just wasn’t seen as important at all.I mean, he was someone who was associated with this fringey anti-immigrant worldview, who would blast reporters with press releases, who would call up and talk our ears off about all the perils and problems of immigration, and yet his boss was a gadfly and couldn’t build a coalition.Didn’t really speak for anybody else in the Senate.Was viewed as kind of an oddball.So, you know, it made a certain kind of sense that—that Miller would gravitate to a candidate like Trump, who was talking about immigration.But at the time, you know, neither Miller nor Trump were viewed as serious political figures.So, you know, we kind of saw the fact that he’d gone to the Trump campaign and shrugged and didn’t think much more about it.
His value to Trump?
His value to Trump was, you know, Trump is an instinctual politician.He can—he can see what connects, and he can kind of build on it, right?Once—once Trump got the idea for the wall in his head and saw that it connected with audiences, he starts talking about it more.He starts riffing on it.You know, “I'm going to build a wall, and nobody builds a wall like Trump.I'm going to build a wall, and Mexico is going to pay for it." What Trump didn’t have initially was a fully formed understanding of the issue.You know, he had long been anti-trade, going back to the 1980s.But until he met Steve Bannon and later Steve Miller, he didn’t really talk about immigration.And what—what Miller did, essentially, was to, you know, inject into Trump a worldview in which the problems of immigration were the kind of Rosetta stone for understanding all that had gone wrong in American economy, in the American society, and that fixing that problem, meaning deporting illegal immigrants, and locking down the borders was the solution to all of these things.
They have a kind of mind meld?
I think they did, yeah, yeah.That—that—you know, what Stephen Miller provides for Trump is a kind of intellectual ballast to flesh out Trump’s own anti-immigrant instincts.Whether it’s in speeches, whether it’s in talking points, whether it’s in trotting out the parents of children who were murdered by illegal immigrants, you know, Miller is the guy constantly supplying the fuel to keep this campaign going, this—this campaign of demonization that powers Trump, you know, at first to the head of the GOP primary field and ultimately into the White House.
So when you see Miller opening, as the opening act for Trump, what do you see?
What you see is somebody setting the tone, somebody directing the focus of the campaign event to the issue of immigration, and specifically all the problems that—that—that Miller and Trump claim that it causes.He’s priming the crowd.You know, he’s getting Trump fired up, who, of course, is also watching the crowd.So when he comes out, these audiences are expecting it.You know, it’s like being at a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert, you know, and everybody’s saying, “‘Free Bird’!”You know, everybody at Trump events in 2015 and 2016 was waiting for the bit about the wall.
…. So let’s take it to Sessions deciding to sign up as the only United States senator supporting Trump.How important was that moment?
It was a big deal to Trump, because even though he was leading the GOP primary polls, no serious politician, no elected official had yet endorsed him.And getting that endorsement, especially ahead of the string of Southern primaries, was a really big deal.And it was something that Sessions originally was on the fence about.He thought that if he followed Bannon’s bidding and went ahead and came out and endorsed Trump, and Trump lost the nomination, then Sessions’ career in the Senate would effectively be over.
Why?
Sessions, before Trump came along, was viewed as an annoyance, as—as someone who didn’t go along with the Republican Party’s wishes on immigration, was kind of a retrograde embarrassment in the way that he demonized immigrants; someone who tarnished the public image of Republicans in a way that they knew was harmful.They didn’t like him, but they put up with him because he wasn’t too much of a problem.
Once you get out there and endorse Donald Trump, you're effectively putting the Republican Party’s seal of approval on a candidate who routinely espouses racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, sexism, anti-gay-and-lesbian sentiments, all the things that the Republican—the moderate Republican Party is trying to leave behind.That was a real threat.Nobody wanted Sessions to do this.In the Republican Party, he had already been denied, passed over for some choice committee assignments, as a punishment for his heterodox views.And he knew full well—he understood that if he endorsed Trump, and Trump lost, that essentially he would be a dead man walking in the Senate.
The Trump Transition
So they win.For those three guys, and [Sebastian] Gorka and [Julia] Hahn and just a handful of people, suddenly they're in the White House.
Yeah.That's right.Look, you know, Trump’s victory, after having run on this anti-immigrant message, had precisely the effect that Bannon and Sessions had hoped for three years earlier, when they first sat in the Breitbart Embassy.It elevated the issues of immigration and trade to the forefront of the Republican Party.All of a sudden, it illuminated an electoral path through the Upper Midwest, where a Republican could run, you know, not as a modern ecumenical, multicultural type of candidate, but as someone looking to the past and still hammer together a coalition that could get a Republican into the White House.
Bannon thought, at the time, that Trump’s politics would give Republicans a hammer lock on the Electoral College for the next 20 to 30 years, and that Republicans, elected officials sensing this, would fall in line behind Trump, as they pretty much did.So, you know, what it did was reorient the direction of the Republican Party in a radically different direction than its leaders had been trying to take it before Trump came along.And Trump, both through intimidation, through the fact that he’d won, through his willingness to bully and attack members of his own party publicly on Twitter, frankly scared a lot of Republicans into going along with him.
And what would happen is, you’d—you’d talk to these Republicans privately, and they’d say: “Trump is terrible.I can't believe the things he says about immigrants.This is killing our party.”And you’d turn around and see those same Republicans on television, parroting Trump’s talking points, attacking immigrants and saying that we need to deport them.
The Travel Ban
Obviously, within that first week, with what's become called the Muslim ban, a statement is being made by that small band of revolutionaries sitting in the West Wing.Tell me about the intent and the result of the Muslim ban.
Well, the goal of the Muslim ban, as Bannon described it to me at the time, was to launch a kind of shock-and-awe strategy that would send a message to the world, but especially to the people who elected Donald Trump, that he is serious about immigration and that he’s doing something about it right now, right away, and he isn't waiting for those pipsqueaks in Congress.
And so Bannon, Miller, a couple other folks sit down and draft this executive order, not really knowing what they're doing—these guys aren’t lawyers; they don’t have a lot of experience with legislation—and essentially foist this thing on a Friday afternoon, without alerting law enforcement officials, foreign governments, all the kind of people who are going to be affected right away by this policy, and instantly it causes chaos.
Something they designed, something they wanted to have happen.It was—yeah, so go ahead.
Yeah.So, you know, you saw literally, in like the course of an hour or two, protesters rushing to airports, to protest, to try and stop this policy from going into effect.Bumper to bumper on cable news.Nobody really knows what's happening.It is a scene of pure chaos.And Bannon claimed that all of this was intentional, that they launched the executive order on a Friday, knowing that a lot of young liberal workers would just be getting off their shifts and would actually have the free time to show up and make this big scene at airports.
Bannon thought that this would be a good thing, that it would galvanize Trump’s supporters, because they would see all these angry liberals and think to themselves, Trump is doing exactly what he said he was going to do; I'm going to stick with this guy; he’s my president.The problem was, there was a lot of blowback, not only from other countries, not only from voters, but also from law enforcement officials who didn’t understand what this was, how it was happening, who had given the authority, or what the resolution was going to be.
Miller goes on television, I guess, I gather, volunteers to go on television on the Sunday-morning programs right after that.It's an amazing performance, and Trump loves it.
Yeah.I mean, when Stephen Miller goes on television, he is performing for an audience of one.He’s performing for Donald Trump.And in order to succeed in that capacity, what you have to do is talk about the success of Donald Trump, the strength of his policies, how he’s doing exactly what he said he was going to do, exactly what got him elected, and brook no criticism.Everything is going great.Nothing ever goes badly.All those protesters you saw marshalling in airports, you know, enraged about the fact that travelers were being banned from all these countries, in many cases their kids, their relatives, all of this was precisely Trump’s plan and working just the way he wanted it to, when in fact behind the scenes it was utter chaos.
That Sunday night, sitting there—maybe you’ve talked to Bannon or Miller or Sessions about it—what were they thinking?What were they feeling?Was this the culmination of a multiyear quest?How thrilled were they with what had happened?
Initially they were thrilled.There was this great sense of satisfaction that not only had they gotten Trump elected, but here he was, in week one, delivering on the promises that he had made to voters.But, you know, within a couple days, it’s clear that there is serious fallout from this policy that they hadn’t counted on.It’s blocked by the courts.You have law enforcement officials, you know, complaining publicly and privately.It divides the administration almost immediately.Essentially, it was the first serious break within the Trump administration, the first internecine war that of course went on to lead to endless infighting and backstabbing among Trump’s advisers, often over issues of immigration policy.
… I mean, you talk about balance or whatever Trump has created.And it does feel, if you look at the spring, like he is pulled back to the center from that first warning shot, first volley.They don’t—immigration basically just goes right down into the surface for months as a result.
Yeah, I think that’s right.I mean, it established a pattern where there is some very aggressive extreme action, usually taken through an executive order that doesn't need to involve Congress or anybody else, pushed by the anti-immigrant right-wingers in the administration.And then from there, it’s pulled back by the likes of Jared and Ivanka, by Gary Cohn, by the globalists who understand a, this is bad policy, and b, this is really going to jeopardize Republicans’ ability to put together a coalition to pass all sorts of other laws that they're interested in doing, whether it’s Obamacare repeal or a tax cut, that sort of thing.We don’t want the headlines, they would—they would say, to be, you know, these—these poor, wailing immigrants in airports who are being separated from their families.
And there were many other executive orders, of course.As you know, the sanctuary cities, the first go-around of DACA [Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals].Let’s get rid of the Obama executive order.All those things were sitting there, waiting.They were cooking and ready to go, and suddenly, all of that stops.
Yeah.I mean, Miller’s belief—he told me his first month in the White House—was that Trump didn’t need to pass new laws.There was enough existing statutory authority that simply, through the force of will, the Department of Homeland Security secretary, the Trump administration could reach out by fiat and change the interpretation of these laws, do things like expel illegal immigrants who had been released into the interior; you know, move border guards around; crack down, have ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] crack down more on groups of immigrants who hadn’t been targeted during the Obama administration and do it in a manner that was so aggressive that it would send a signal to other potential immigrants thinking about coming to the country, both legally and illegally, “You are not wanted here.Stay out.”
The Influence of Sessions and Miller
…. The effect of Sessions’ recusal, in terms of the immigration fight?
You know, I honestly don’t think that Sessions’ recusal had a big effect on immigration.I mean, it certainly made him persona non grata with President Trump.But Sessions is a true believer and—and was as effective an aggressor, from his role as attorney general, as anyone could possibly have been to keep pushing those anti-immigrant policies, even when Trump was trashing him publicly.
So, you know, I think Miller essentially went to ground because not only was Sessions unpopular, but at the same time, Bannon is becoming unpopular as, you know, he begins to hog the limelight, as Trump begins to resent the attention he’s getting in the press: the fact that Trump is being mocked as a tool of Steve Bannon on Saturday Night Live; he appears in the famous, the iconic Time magazine cover story; and then the books start to come out, talking about Bannon’s role.I think Miller realized, at the time, you know, this guy isn't going to be long for this administration.Sessions is probably never going to get back into his good graces.I, Stephen Miller, am going to have to begin to forge some new alliances.
And so what you see is Miller cozying up to Jared Kushner and finding a new patron inside the administration through which to exert influence, and kind of build back up his stature with President Trump.
And at the same time, as far as we can tell, he’s working the back channel to Sessions.Things are—new attorney generals [sic], new judges, all kinds of things are happening on the immigration front, sub rosa during this time, courtesy Miller and Sessions.
Yeah.At no point did the anti-immigration push ever slow down while Stephen Miller was in the White House.Sessions publicly fell out of favor.Trump publicly talked about other things like immigration reform.But beneath the surface, major changes were happening.Nothing slowed down for a minute.
The Dreamers and DACA
… Let’s talk about DACA in the fall of ’17.By Sept. 5, the holidays are over, and suddenly Sessions basically makes an announcement, “I can no longer support the Obama executive order.I think it’s unconstitutional.We’re not going to do it,” in a way forcing Trump, who didn’t want to face all the “Dreamer” video and all that other stuff, into a position where he has to do what he has to do.Do you know what brings Sessions to that moment and whether this actually did force Trump into action?
Yeah, I think it did.I mean, Sessions and Miller understand the particulars of immigration policy better than anybody and knew that, by pulling this lever, by coming out and saying this publicly, that essentially you're forcing the president’s hand.You know, ending DACA is something that Trump had promised during the campaign he was going to do on day one.He hadn’t yet.And so by raising this, Sessions essentially forced Trump’s hand, forced him to confront the issue, knowing that Trump wasn’t likely to back away from it.It was too important an issue.It was too central to his character as a politician.And Bannon, Trump and Miller all knew that Trump believed that immigration was his one true channel to his grassroot supporters, the one issue that he could never back away from.If he did, he’d jeopardize his own political standing.So I think Sessions knew that when he forced the issue on immigration, Trump would respond in the way that he wants him to.
But then all of a sudden, MSNBC and 60 Minutes, all the crying Dreamers show up on television.Here's Trump, who’s always historically been sort of squishy about the Dreamers—“I love the Dreamers; I believe in the Dreamers”—and he starts to drift away from the sort of hard-right position on this.
Yeah.I mean, Trump has always talked out of both sides of his mouth about immigration.On the one hand, he’s going to be the tough guy who’s going to end DACA and get these people out of our country.On the other hand, he’s this great president who’s going to make a great deal, and everything is going to be wonderful for everyone, including the DACA kids, you know.But by the fall, that bill had come due, and there wasn’t an easy way for Trump to solve this.So you see him moving at the behest of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner to say comforting things to DACA, to try and strike some kind of a deal.But when the deal never came to pass, you know, Trump wound up going back to the anti-immigrant crowd from whence he’d come, and you wind up with this epic showdown over the fate of these DACA kids.
Trump Wavers on DACA
It’s an amazing moment that plays itself out publicly in two meetings, one where he invites the cameras in, and he basically tries to do a deal on TV with [Sen.] Dianne Feinstein, and [Rep.] Kevin McCarthy calls him back and says, “Wait, you really want to do that?,” right?You remember that scene?
I vaguely do.But honestly, there have been so many of these public things, I get them mixed up in my mind.
So this meeting happens.Miller’s standing in the back of the room and goes, “Oh, my God, he’s—you know, he’s trying to give away the farm here after all this.”And over 48 hours, Miller is ginning up, you know, Republican—conservative Republican [senators Tom] Cotton, [David] Perdue, others.Meanwhile, [Sen. Dick] Durbin and [Sen.] Lindsey Graham are working up a bipartisan solution.Trump says: “Come on over to the White House.Show me this thing.”They come, and this is the “s—hole countries” moment where they come in thinking, oh, our friend Donald Trump is here, the guy who Ivanka and Jared have teed up.But he’s been stoked up and angry as a result of what Miller and others were telling him.
Well, the one thing Miller does throughout Trump’s presidency is whenever Trump drifts from true orthodoxy, he goes back channel and gives him the old-time religion about how we need to get these people out of the country, and we need to lock down our borders; we need to do right by American workers.And so you have this moment where Durbin and Graham come in thinking that there might be a deal to be made here and find Trump absolutely on fire, talking about, you know, “s—hole countries,” a term that’s immediately leaked to the press.And all hell breaks loose, and, you know, any hope of some kind of a reasonable bipartisan consensus immediately collapses, and you're back to acrimony and accusations—and accusations.
The Wall
… Did you report on the wall a little bit, though?
Yeah, yeah, that was the big scoop in the book.Do you want me to just go through the wall story, how it came to be?
Yeah.Yeah.
You know, so early on, 2013-2014, you know, Bannon and Miller, Nunberg had realized that this issue of immigration has real salience with Republican voters.They could see this as they took Trump around to these various conservative cattle calls.The problem they had was, they couldn’t get Trump to stay on topic.Famously short attention span.And so Sam Nunberg came up with this idea, essentially a mnemonic device to keep Trump focused on the issue of immigration.And they pitched it to Trump, and he [Nunberg] said: “Listen, tell them you're going to build a wall to keep people out of the country.See how that does with audiences.”And it took Trump a couple weeks to try it out.But he tried it out, and it got a rapturous applause.And Trump, who’s better than any politician at reading the audience and what they want, sees that this is working and keeps repeating it—“I'm going to build a wall”—and then beginning to embellish that wall.“I'm going to build a wall, and Mexico is going to pay for it.I'm going to build a wall, because nobody builds like Trump.”
It becomes a part of Trump’s brand.And it supercharges Trump’s candidacy among anti-immigrant, grassroots Republican voters who come out, again and again, and love it when Trump says this stuff.
And start shouting, “Build the wall!Build the wall!”It becomes the clarion call, right?
Yeah.
Amazing.
I mean, it really becomes—you know, at that point—this was before “Lock her up” became the favorite Trump refrain.You know, “Build the wall” became Trump’s greatest hit.It was a thing that people chanted at rallies, waiting for him to get to.And when he—when he said it, you know, there was just rapturous applause.It became his—his real identifying quality as a politician.
Miller’s Staying Power
Bannon fades; Sessions will eventually fade—not only fade, but go away.And the guy standing, of the three guys that were at the Breitbart Embassy back in the day, is Stephen Miller.And all the way down to what happens with [Kirstjen] Nielsen and all the ICE people, all the people at DHS, all of those moments, he’s there.He’s whispering.He’s in the ear.How surprising is that to you, given that you knew once upon a time this guy, that he would be this close, this long?
Miller is a talented bureaucratic infighter.You know, he’s someone who knows when you're better off shrinking back, whispering in Trump’s ear, staying in the background.Sessions could never do that, because he was the attorney general.Bannon never had the self-control to keep himself out of the limelight.Miller, on the other hand, knew in order to survive, you know, he’s going to have to be in the background, make his influence known through other measures, through speeches, through whispering in Trump’s ear, by finding new patrons, and essentially enduring in the job while others were pushed out.But above all, I think Miller understood that, in order to survive and have influence with Donald Trump, you need to consistently display a fanatical degree of loyalty, and Miller has always been willing to do that publicly and privately.
The 2020 Campaign
… It’s probably your guess, it’s certainly mine, that the 2020 campaign, immigration is going to be right up there, front and center, all the way along.This is very important to Donald Trump’s reelection.
Yeah.And I think Trump views immigration as integral to his reelection hopes.You know, he got elected on a set of promises.He was going to stop the inflow of migrants at the southern border.He was going to build a wall.Well, neither of those things had happened yet.And Trump is acutely aware of the fact that he hasn’t delivered what he said he was, and I think he worries that, if he can't make substantial progress before November of 2020, then he risks losing; that his voters will look at what he’s done and say, “This isn't what he promised,” and abandon him.And that is Trump’s greatest fear.
Trump and the Conservative Media
… Do you think that Bannon and Miller used Breitbart or other conservative media to keep—this is when Trump is president—to keep Trump on the path that they want him to?Are they intentionally doing that?
Oh, yeah, yeah, I think so.I mean, you know, one of the interesting dynamics, when Trump gets in the White House is that you have this entire alternative media that is pushing him to keep his promises and when he veers from those promises is willing to attack him.And so, you know, every political reporter in Washington is reading Breitbart News to see, you know, how are they responding to what Trump did today?It was viewed as a mouthpiece for folks like Bannon and Miller to see, you know, how are they reacting to the news of the day?Are they happy with Trump’s move on this or that?And also used this kind of an attack vehicle to go after the so-called globalists in the administration who they thought were an impediment to achieving the policies that they had set out to.
….You know, Bannon talked to us a lot about the battle he felt—that he felt he was fighting with Fox from the very beginning, that he had the numbers.He had an issue.It was not their issue.They blew it on this issue.They had to slowly come toward—toward Trump or toward them.
I mean, I feel like by that point, they really had.I mean, Bannon and Breitbart won the civil war in the Republican Party, and once they did, Fox News fully got onboard with these anti-immigrant positions.You saw people like Sean Hannity flip-flop and change their views outright.And all of a sudden, this is—this is an anti-immigrant network that essentially parrots whatever it is that Trump is trying to do.I mean, my own sense is that Trump was much more attuned to what Fox News was saying because that’s what he watches for hours of the day than he was to what Breitbart was writing, because I don’t think Trump is a big reader of anything.
And when Lou Dobbs essentially says to Trump, “Shut down the government,” from television, and Trump shuts down the government, that’s clout.
Yeah.And, I mean, you’ve got Fox News hosts like Lou Dobbs on White House conference calls, as if they are senior advisers to the White House—which in some sense they are.
Amazing.
It’s an unusual set of circumstances.
Miller’s Immigration Handbook
Do you know anything about the immigration handbook that Miller drafts for Sessions in like, 2015?
You know, yeah, a little bit.I mean, so—so Miller believed that one of—one of the problems with immigration, one of the—one of the reasons that his views could advance was that both Republicans and the mainstream media covered immigration from the standpoint of the immigrants, and that essentially the framing of the issue ensured that Miller’s side was going to lose.
So he sat down and put together this booklet, filled with arguments and statistics, you know, rebutting the kind of things that reformers would say, and circulated this in an effort to arm his allies with counterpoints, to try and push back against the movement toward liberalization of immigration laws.
To what effect?
I'm not really sure, to be honest with you.I mean, like, you would never know, hearing somebody on Fox News, whether they’d pulled their talking points from Miller’s—Miller’s booklet.I mean, I always just took it as evidence that, you know, this is kind of the guy leading the charge, disseminating the talking points, you know, shaping—shaping the worldview and, you know, arming whatever allies he’s—he’s managed to build, you know, whether it’s talk radio hosts or, you know, assorted politicians like Dave Brat or Jeff Sessions or simply, you know, like-minded journalists at Breitbart and places like that, that can kind of disseminate this stuff in order to kick up more of this anti-immigrant sentiment.
Can you just finish the thought you started about what the message was that he was delivering to what would become the “forgotten”?What was Miller’s vision for changing the way that immigration was discussed as an economic issue?
You know, Miller’s complaint to me, when I spoke to him in 2017, was that immigration was always viewed as a humanitarian issue, viewed through the lens of how the immigrant feels and what their challenges are, whereas Miller himself thought it was an economic issue that hurt U.S. citizens and hurt American workers; that the way the issue ought to be covered is that these hordes of undocumented immigrants are coming into our country and taking our jobs, and that is a bad thing that we need to change.Miller was endlessly frustrated that journalists didn’t cover it that way, that politicians didn’t speak about it that way.And he was going to do everything he could to make sure that Trump and everybody around him changed the framework in which immigration was viewed.
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