Stephen Bannon: ‘I never doubted we’d win’

Stephen Bannon and his team were in the “crack den.”  

There was no floor covering. The walls were unpainted. The room on the sixth floor of Trump Tower where Bannon and strategists had holed up for election night looked more like a stripped-out warehouse than a Manhattan suite.

{mosads}The atmosphere in the room was far different from the Trump campaign’s election night party that was going on upstairs. About 20 people were crammed inside, sweating as they frantically typed into their handheld calculators and poured over the maps they’d pinned to the walls. 

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Bannon and political director Bill Stepien analyzed the results as they rolled in from Florida.

“I never doubted we’d win, but I knew for sure when Stepien got this glint in his eye,” Bannon said. “We were winning so big in Pensacola and along the I-4 corridor, Stepien looks at me and he says – ‘I don’t care how much they cheat or how many votes they steal in Dade and Broward Counties, they can’t do it. We got this.’ ”

Bannon and Stepien fist-bumped.