Bannonites would, with lowered voices and certain pity, ask each other how he seemed and how he was holding up; invariably they would agree about how bad he looked, the strain etching ever deeper into his already ruined face. David Bossie thought Bannon “looked like he would die.” “T now understand what it is like to be in the court of the Tudors,” reflected Bannon. On the campaign trail, he recalled, Newt Gingrich “would come with all these dumb ideas. When we won he was my new best friend. Every day a hundred ideas. When”—by spring in the White House—“T got cold, when I went through my Valley of Death, I saw him one day in the lobby and he looks down, avoiding my eyes with a kind of mumbled ‘Hey, Steve.’ And I say, ‘What are you doing here, let’s get you inside,’ and he says, “No, no, I’m fine, I’m waiting for Dina Powell.’” Having attained the unimaginable—bringing a fierce alt-right, anti-liberal ethnopopulism into a central place in the White House—Bannon found himself face to face with the untenable: undermined by and having to answer to rich, entitled Democrats. * KOK The paradox of the Trump presidency was that it was both the most ideologically driven and the least. It represented a deeply structural assault on liberal values—Bannon’s deconstruction of the administrative state meant to take with 1t media, academic, and not- for-profit institutions. But from the start it also was apparent that the Trump administration could just as easily turn into a country club Republican or a Wall Street Democrat regime. Or just a constant effort to keep Donald Trump happy. Trump had his collection of pet- peeve issues, test-marketed in various media rollouts and megarallies, but none seemed so significant as his greater goal of personally coming out ahead of the game. As the drumbeat for Bannon’s removal grew, the Mercers stepped in to protect their investment in radical government overthrow and the future of Steve Bannon. In an age when all successful political ca