 Bannon, whose wild gambits in the campaign had invariably paid off, seemed to run out of magic tricks when Hillary Clinton was no longer a target. The government wasn't as malleable to Trump and Bannon's aggressions as the Republican Party and the cable news channels had been. And they found themselves consistently thwarted and undermined by the courts, by right-wing hardliners in Congress, by their own inexperience in Trump's errant tweets, and by the bureaucracy they were now overseeing.