After Roy Moore’s victory in the Alabama Senate primary, Steve Bannon and his populist-nationalist allies sent an unsubtle warning to Congress: align with our agenda, or risk losing your seats in 2018 to a selection of our preferred candidates. Over the past several weeks, however, Bannon has met with G.O.P. mega-donors, endorsed establishment-friendly candidates, and, perhaps most damning of all in the eyes of the right-wing activist class, brought in political professionals—all moves that seem less aimed at stacking Congress with “America First” ideologues than embezzling Senate leader Mitch McConnell’s power.
So far, according to Politico, Bannon’s donor outreach rests on a simple message: Mitch McConnell has done nothing to fulfill the seven years of promises he made before Donald Trump was elected. While this pitch hasn’t completely convinced current G.O.P. mega-donors to jump ship and join the insurgency, it’s been enough to get him into meetings with Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, venture capitalist John Childs, and casino mogul Sheldon Adelson. It’s not clear yet if any big names have actually made financial commitments, and an adviser to Marcus, a longtime Senate Republican donor, told Politico that the billionaire plans to wait until the end of the year, after the debate over tax reform ends. “If the gridlock continues in Washington, Mr. Marcus will consider new approaches to breaking the gridlock, including those proposed by Steve Bannon and others,” the adviser said.
Though mainline conservative business owners mostly align with free-trade and open-border positions, Bannon may have no choice but to reach out—as a former G.O.P. fund-raiser told me, the only real populist-nationalist billionaires in the donor game are the Mercers, the father-daughter duo of Bob and Rebekah who are bankrolling Breitbart. But his endorsement of and interest in several swamp-friendly candidates is mildly baffling to G.O.P. insiders. Matt Rosendale, the Montana state auditor running for Senate, has both Bannon’s endorsement and the backing of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the establishment’s clearing house for Senate candidates. Josh Hawley, another potential Bannon endorsee, was recruited to run in Missouri by McConnell himself. Ohio’s Josh Mandel, a Bannon favorite, took money from the McConnell-aligned Senate Leadership Fund six years ago—the very fund that Bannon blasted during the Alabama primary. “He is out there looking for people who are going to win their primaries,” is how Guy Harrison, an N.R.S.C.-aligned consultant working closely with Rosendale, explained Bannon’s apparent willingness to field establishment candidates.
Bannon’s strategy isn’t just inconsistent. It also seems to be alarming the true believers in the populist-nationalist camp: on Tuesday night, Dustin Stockton and Jen Lawrence, two “America First” activists who had been staffers on Kelli Ward’s Arizona Senate campaign, announced that they had left their positions and condemned Ward for hypocrisy. “When we walked into the campaign, we thought that Kelli was up to . . . drain the swamp, and after a while, we saw her bringing in people from the political consultant class,” Lawrence told the Daily Beast. (Notably, this was before a pro-Ward rally where Bannon and Laura Ingraham were slated to speak.)
Even Bannon’s allies suggested that the wannabe kingmaker’s insurgency lies more in populist packaging than in a real anti-establishment ideology. “The Republican establishment is so hollow and lacking in ideas that they’re almost forced to try and latch on to our slate of populist conservatives and call them their own to survive,” said Andrew Surabian, an ex-White House adviser who now works for the pro-Trump Great America Alliance super PAC. He added that “candidates are flocking to be aligned with Bannon because they understand that the power in the Republican Party now lies in its ‘America First,’ anti-establishment wing.”
That’s one way of looking at it. Another is that the G.O.P. has always been more comfortable waging war than governing—a fact that Bannon seems to have grasped, and is now deploying to his advantage.
