All the President’s Men— Part One: Putin and Bannon’s Shared Ideology

An ongoing series of Trump’s main influencers by Sasha Stone and Ryan Adams

While the Democrats were busy squabbling with each other, dark forces consumed our American government. It was a well-planned, well-timed, well-executed coup, Vladimir Putin style, which has now put all three branches of our government into the hands of a radical far-right faction of the Republican Party, the upstart Tea Party, yet at odds with traditional conservatism too. As consequence, the rapid and systemic undermining of American principles now taking place at the highest levels of authority are being celebrated by Russia and Isis alike.

If they can manage to cling to power and prevail, by the end of his four-year term Donald Trump and Steve Bannon will have transformed our government in radical ways we haven’t seen since the Civil War and Reconstruction. By dismantling the Obama coalition, the world the Democrats fought so hard to build, the society we began to feel good about, and all the progress we have comfortably taken for granted has been upended. In charge now are people who want to isolate America, build walls on the borders, promote propaganda as news, teach faux-Christian nationalism in schools, and essentially “Make America Great Again” in the same way Hitler wanted to make Germany great again. Instead, unless we can find a way to apply the brakes to the catastrophe we’ve set in motion, in a few short years when we look around at the ruins that remain, the end result will have been to hand Putin his dream to make Russia great again, which will come at great cost to us and much of the world.

Vladimir Putin and Steve Bannon shared some of the same aims: to get rid of Hillary Clinton, steer the Brexit vote to isolate Great Britain, and impose harsh mistreatment of Muslim immigrants. They’re pretending it’s about “radical Islamic terrorism,” but make no mistake — this is good old fashioned ethnic cleansing and it isn’t only happening here. So great, right? Nothing like fanning the flames of Islamic hatred to instill terrorists with more justification for killing us. This probably means in my lifetime there will be a third World War, one that possibly involves Israel and Iran, maybe obliterates the Middle East with nukes (as long as we can take the oil). If millions of Americans are afraid for what this means for us here at home, imagine what they might thinking elsewhere.

Putin’s designs on Donald Trump have more to do with his desire to expand Russia’s territory and get international sanctions lifted that stand in the way of his quest for more oil profiteering, and to ensure promised and continued wealth of his inner circle. There is no doubt that Putin is trying to rebuild Russia to its former glory and he certainly didn’t appreciate Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama telling him what he could and couldn’t do in the Ukraine, impeding his plans to tap vast oil assets in the Arctic, and calling him out for his own election shenanigans in Russia, not to mention, advocating for his ouster.

Clinton’s relationship with Putin comes in stark contrast to her husband’s, back when everyone was celebrating Russia’s supposed new capitalist driven democracy. Putin wanted Hillary Clinton out of the way because she was one of the few most powerful players in the United States willing to take a stand against him.

It’s a virtual certainty that Putin has compromising material on Trump that he can use whenever he wants, which essentially means the incompetent and paranoid man in the Oval Office is mostly beholden to Putin. That is terrifying enough, but it gets worse. Putin’s stranglehold on Trump pales in comparison to Steve Bannon’s twisted vision for “new world order” whose elements he is setting in place as we speak, and Trump willingness to give Bannon the keys to the store.

There is nothing particularly sane about what Steve Bannon wants to do or how he goes about doing it. The underpinnings for this coup have been in the works for a very long time, but they had no viable puppet to put forth as figurehead. It wasn’t necessarily supposed to be Trump. Any vainglorious ignoramus that they could mold and bend to their will would do. It was supposed to be whatever Tea Party person they could ram through. Sarah Palin was Bannon’s girl after Obama was elected, but she had the wrong brand of blather, and too many Americans saw through her empty head. Maybe Ted Cruz would have been their pick, until he zeroed out with a total absence of charisma. Trump, though, was co-opted by the Tea Party even though he didn’t share their ideology or even understand it. Trump wanted only one thing: to win, and win bigly. He wanted to belatedly make Mommy and Daddy proud. Show them that he wasn’t a lifelong fuck-up who had to be sent to military school because he never outgrew throwing rocks at defenseless toddlers for kicks; couldn’t stop getting into shit then lying his way out of it. He was never as respected as his sister, the judge. He was always the tacky clown people laughed at. In his eyes, his sleazy image was all media-generated, which was why he posed as his own publicist to try to alter perception. That vanity still drives Trump and Bannon knows how to use it to his advantage.

The GOP elite are complicit but have now been rendered impotent. They’ve long been instrumental in the nuts and bolts groundwork of stealing elections state by state, cranking out their old reliable tricks of gerrymandering and voter suppression. They never care who they put in power in Washington, as long as they tow the party line. Neoconservative strategist Grover Norquist said in 2012: “We are not auditioning for fearless leader. We don’t need a president to tell us in what direction to go. We know what direction to go. We want the Ryan budget… We just need a president to sign this stuff. We don’t need someone to think it up or design it. The leadership now for the modern conservative movement for the next 20 years will be coming out of the House and the Senate… Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president of the United States.”

Well, they got their wish: They got a media-savvy know-nothing who hates to think but loves to sign things, loves to hold up papers he barely understands and show off that illegible signature of his that resembles nothing so much as the jagged spikes of a failed polygraph test.

On the same stage at CPAC with Grover Norquist 5 years ago, Andrew Breitbart spoke for 21 minutes. He shouted a warning to Democrats who weren’t there to hear it: “America’s finally awoken to your Saul Alinsky bullshit tactics, and we’re coming to get you!” 3 weeks later, Breitbart was dead. But his hate-fueled brainchild Breitbart.com lives on, led by Steve Bannon. By tailoring his foul message to appeal to the most resentful underbelly of the American electorate, and then hitching his wagon to Trump as his braying mule, Steve Bannon is now the most powerful man in the country, maybe in the world. I will be writing at greater length about Bannon, but for now it’s important to understand what happened in the U.S. election that led to Hillary Clinton’s devastating loss.

The Bernie folks will try to convince us Trump’s ascendance was all Hillary’s fault, that she bungled it. Establishment Democrats, they’ll say, are the problem (overlooking the 65.8 million Democrats who voted to support and defend the priceless progress that establishment has given America, from FDR to Kennedy to Obama, from Social Security to Civil Rights to ). “We need change in the party!” they chant. Yes, in some ways, that’s true. But it makes little sense for 5 million people who voted for Jill Stein and Gary Johnson to think they can drag 65 million moderate Democrats to left, and even less sense to think they can persuade us by foisting Bernie’s agenda on the party and try to ram that through. If pragmatic liberals had wanted to follow Bernie Sanders, he would have won the primary and been chosen as our nominee. Their plan of action will not work because it plays precisely into Steve Bannon’s hands. If we pursue that path we will lose in 2020 and lose badly, probably in a landslide similar to what happened with McGovern or Mondale.

But before we get to that, let’s look at what Putin and Bannon did in 2016 to hand the election to Donald Trump.

Putin’s goal was to discredit Hillary Clinton to the point where her clear strength as a candidate was clouded in a fog of doubt and suspicion. One way he did this was by mobilizing hackers to find vulnerabilities in the DNC’s internal communication network, in hopes of discovering embarrassing emails, perhaps even something illicit. Of course they never found anything actionable, but the massive heap of interoffice cross-talk was passed along to WikiLeaks who would selectively publish anything that could be given a negative spin by anti-Clinton outlets growling for raw meat.

Julian Assange, happy to work out his own personal mommy-hate issues against Hillary Clinton, did the bidding of the bitter Bernouts and fed the leftists in Europe more fuel for their vague anti-American tirades. Ever more insidious, Putin dispatched an army of trolls to infiltrate social media. Their mission: to find gripes to latch onto and amplify, sowing seeds of unease and spreading disinformatrion, targeting disaffected Democrats. That worked like a charm, thanks to Bernie Sanders and his army of disgruntled supporters who fell for it.

Ratfucking involves making a strong frontrunner look weaker so the weaker candidate appears to be stronger. It’s a brilliant strategy last year because there wasn’t a single Republican who didn’t want to run against Bernie Sanders. He would have been the easiest candidate to beat since McGovern, and everyone with a sense of history knew that except the idealistic Sanders supporters who were exploited beyond repair for that idealism. They still believe it, too. They believe that Bernie would have won, which should be viewed from now on as the gold standard for ratfucking: convincing a whole generation to think that an atheist socialist Jew who wanted to raise taxes on the middle class and couldn’t connect with the Southern Black vote could win the general election. You can’t convince die-hard Bernie disciples otherwise, even now. The stink of that ratfuck is going to linger through the next election cycle and risks giving Trump eight, not four, years.

But of course, democrats have no choice but to let it play out because there is no other option at this point. They might have helped sabotage it, but we still lost the election. They will argue, let us have a turn, and we can’t really tell them no.

Putin’s own strategy in Russia mirrors this pattern, as anyone who has read a Putin biography will know. Weaken or destroy your opponent’s character with lies and dirty tricks and if that doesn’t work, pad the voting in specific areas. Putin eventually held such a firm grip on power that he is now, quite simply, above the law. Anyone who challenges or investigates him ends up in jail or dead, as we see most recently with the ex-KGB chief who helped an MI6 agent build the now-released dossier on Trump. He was found dead in his car.

Putin has a long history of murdering his enemies and controlling the press to prevent free speech. At least 27 journalists in Russia have ended up dead or disappeared, including one who was murdered for writing a book about him. Worse, there are solid indications Putin was involved in blowing up several apartment buildings in 1999. Those 300 deaths were then blamed on Chechen terrorism in order for then Prime Minister Putin to rush in as their savior, helping ensure his election as President 6 months later, consolidating his power. Again, anyone attempting to investigate these bombings will instead stumble upon a good way to be murdered or be thrown in jail. Putin’s history is as corrupt and vengeful as they come. Hillary Clinton knew that, and was prepared to stand against it, which is why he had to get rid of her. At least he didn’t kill her, although he probably did poison her that time she supposedly fell severely ill with pneumonia. Who would have believed her if she said she’d been poisoned, but dollars to donuts she was.

Bannon and Putin both rose from humble backgrounds, and though the avenues they took on their way to power are markedly different, there’s no doubt Bannon has studied Putin’s rise and adopated a lot of his tactics to use to help Trump succeed. It will infuriate their fans on both ends of the extreme to hear it, but in essence, Bannon’s ideology is not all that different from the ideology of Bernie Sanders. If you actually listen to a Bannon speech, or any Tea Party speech for that matter, they sound very similar to Bernie’s speeches because they attack Wall Street and the financial bailout and the elites in Washington sticking it to the middle class. It was easy for Bannon to pass along the insight to Trump that the way he could win would be to say those things out loud and often, to help draw Bernie supporters away from their cause. In fact, Bannon looked at the Occupy Wall Street movement and he wanted those people to join the Tea Party. He even created Generation Zero to try to recruit some of them.

But once you get beyond the anger at Washington and Wall Street, the similarities between Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon begin to diverge. Bernie is pro-environment. He wants bigger government for free college for all and free healthcare for all. He actually thinks that we can just go to Washington and say “okay, we’re going to raise everyone’s taxes now.” Bannon knows that he and Trump can shred Bernie if he dares to run again, but many Democrats will try to run him anyway, probably. Thus, you can expect the same devious things we saw in this election to happen again four years from now in a nauseating replay, only this time Hillary won’t be the target — Bernie will.

Bernie is going to have a hard time selling an anti-establishment message if the party in power is the ultimate anti-establishment. They are there to tear it all down and begin again. They want to undo everything Obama did, everything Bill Clinton did — even undo everything Johnson and FDR did — to take America back to Bannon’s ideal: white kids playing stickball in the street after dark while mom sticks a cherry pie in the oven and dad brings home the bacon. In Bannon’s vision of America, Black people will again know their place and stay mostly out of sight. Schools will teach the dimensions of Noah’s Arc in science class and there will no mention of the myth of global warming, that’s just God’s way.

Bannon will continue to use farmed data to monitor the attitudes and behavior of every American citizen, to microtarget us and help sway public opinion his way. They are dismantling the media, removing the power of the press, and making decisions on their own without consulting experts, forgetting that they work for the American people, not for Steve Bannon or Putin or Bernie or Trump. Our country is for the people, by the people, of the people, but the circle of greed and corruption and hate now ensconced in the White House has chosen to ignore that.

Putin and Bannon exercised the same strategy in Great Britain to help push forward Brexit, another thing the majority of English citizens don’t want but now have to live with. Then they successfully drove a wedge between the Democratic factions an we cannot win with a fractured party. Young women were specifically targeted to hate Hillary, but the microtargeting went much much deeper thanks to a data system of a company called Cambridge Analytica. The unified goal of Putin and Bannon was to keep liberal voters at home. Black men were microtargeted with videos of Hillary talking about “superpredators.” Young women were targeted with messages about Bill Clinton’s imagined “sexual assault.” All those arguments you’d get into with people that sounded completely insane coming from the left? Instigated and promulgated by microtargeting. And because we live in the era so saturated with fake news, many young people simply didn’t know the difference.

Their strategy was to keep enough people away from the polls by smearing Clinton day in and day out so that they could just barely eke out a win. And thanks to additional shearing using the bait of Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, they did it.

Donald Trump is not a president the American people wanted, just like Brexit wasn’t an outcome the British people wanted. They and we live with regret as we watch the horror show unfold. This was not a legitimate win by any means, not with that asterisk of a three million popular vote lead hanging over him. He knows it. He’s embarrassed by it. Their strategy worked enough to win the battle. Who knows if it will work for the war.

Democrats should use every means at their disposal to get rid of Citizens United (which Bannon has built a career on promoting) and they should never stop protesting. Unlike Russia where protesters are shut down and thrown in jail, in America they can’t do that to us. Not yet. The louder we are, the more we show up, the more we protest, protest, oppose, oppose, resist, resist, the harder it will be for Bannon to execute his plan. If we don’t succeed, you will not recognize this country four years from now.