I was, and I am, sympathetic. My son was really angry with me because I voted for Hillary in the Massachusetts primary. Why didn’t I vote for Bernie? My simple answer is I didn’t think Bernie was electable and I thought she was, which, I think, in retrospect, is a bad answer.
But you tell Bannon that you voted for Hillary Clinton in the primary because you were afraid of him, and Donald Trump.
I was afraid of those people. Still I’m afraid of them. Really afraid. If you’re not afraid of them, you’re not really paying attention.
Bannon looks like he’s scored a point.
Maybe he even has, I don’t know. If you see some gigantic scorecard. It’s really not about point-scoring. Sorry.
In other interviews you’ve talked about not being interested in “confessions” from your subjects. The moment when you talked about voting for Clinton, it felt like you were confessing something.
It’s true. I mean, I was expressing my embarrassment. But it wasn’t made clear. It’s the embarrassment for not voting for Bernie. My producer, who was an ardent Hillary supporter, said, “You have to take that out. That’s wrong. You should not be embarrassed for voting for Hillary.”
But even if you are embarrassed—
Why confess it to him? Why not? I think one of the things that people really hate is that I’ve given him a kind of authority. Say that Bannon is laying down a bullshit narrative that, of course, puts Bannon at the center of his narrative. It’s the heroic Bannon. And instead of challenging this bullshit view—this would be the argument—I endorse it. I endorse it by cozying up to him in various ways. I endorse it by exhibiting my self-loathing, which, by the way, I have a harder and harder time of hiding, because it’s there in everything I do. Actually, it gives me a much clearer understanding of the hatred of my being embarrassed for voting for Hillary. I remember something raw about the whole experience of sitting there in front of him.
But here’s why you may hate me even more. It’s that I do buy into this bullshit. I buy into Bannon’s belief that he was the kingmaker. I don’t think people want to give him that.