Prologue: Ailes And Bannon

Fire And Fury

The evening began at six-thirty, but Steve Bannon, suddenly among the world’s  most  powerful  men  and  now  less  and  less  mindful  of  time constraints, was late.

Bannon  had  promised  to  come  to  this  small  dinner  arranged  by  mutual friends in a Greenwich Village town house to see Roger Ailes, the former head of Fox News and the most significant figure in right-wing media and Bannon’s sometime mentor. The next day, January 4, 2017—little  more than two weeks before the inauguration of his friend Donald Trump as the forty-fifth president— Ailes would be heading to Palm Beach, into a forced, but he hoped temporary, retirement.

Snow was threatening,  and for a while the dinner appeared  doubtful.  The seventy-six-year-old  Ailes,  with a long history  of leg and hip problems,  was barely  walking,  and,  coming  in to Manhattan  with  his  wife  Beth  from  their upstate home on the Hudson, was wary of slippery streets. But Ailes was eager to see Bannon. Bannon’s aide, Alexandra Preate, kept texting steady updates on Bannon’s progress extracting himself from Trump Tower.

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As the small group waited for Bannon, it was Ailes’s evening. Quite as dumbfounded by his old friend Donald Trump’s victory as most everyone else, Ailes provided the gathering with something of a mini-seminar on the randomness and absurdities of politics. Before launching Fox News in 1996, Ailes had been, for thirty years, among the leading political operatives in the Republican Party. As surprised as he was by this election, he could yet make a case for a straight line from Nixon to Trump. He just wasn’t sure, he said, that Trump  himself,  at  various  times  a  Republican,  Independent,  and  Democrat, could make the case. Still, he thought he knew Trump as well as anyone did and was eager to offer his help. He was also eager to get back into the right-wing media game, and he energetically described some of the possibilities for coming up with the billion  or so dollars  he thought  he would  need  for a new cable network.

Both  men,  Ailes  and  Bannon,  fancied  themselves  particular  students  of history, both autodidacts  partial to universal field theories. They saw this in a charismatic sense—they had a personal relationship with history, as well as with Donald Trump.

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