Joshua Green > Quotes

“Bannon thrived on the chaos he created and did everything he could to make it spread. When he finally made his way through the crowd to the back of the town house, he put on a headset to join the broadcast of the Breitbart radio show already in progress. It was his way of bringing tens of thousands of listeners into the inner sanctum of the “Breitbart Embassy,” as the town house was ironically known, and thereby conscripting them into a larger project. Bannon was inordinately proud of the movement he saw growing around him, boasting constantly of its egalitarian nature. What to an outsider could look like a cast of extras from the Island of Misfit Toys was, in Bannon’s eyes, a proudly populist and “unclubbable” plebiscite rising up in defiant protest against the “globalists” and “gatekeepers” who had taken control of both parties. Just how Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty figured into a plan to overthrow the global power structure wasn’t clear, even to many of Bannon’s friends. But, then, Bannon derived a visceral thrill anytime he could deliver a fuck-you to the establishment. The thousands of frustrated listeners calling in to his radio show, and the millions more who flocked to Breitbart News, had left him no doubt that an army of the angry and dispossessed was eager to join him in lobbing a bomb at the country’s leaders. As guests left the party, a doorman handed out a gift that Bannon had chosen for the occasion: a silver hip flask with “Breitbart” imprinted above an image of a honey badger, the Breitbart mascot. — Bannon’s cult-leader magnetism was a powerful draw for oddballs and freaks, and the attraction ran both ways. As he moved further from the cosmopolitan orbits of Goldman Sachs and Hollywood, there was no longer any need for him to suppress his right-wing impulses. Giving full vent to his views on subjects like immigration and Islam isolated him among a radical fringe that most of political Washington regarded as teeming with racist conspiracy theorists. But far from being bothered, Bannon welcomed their disdain, taking it as proof of his authentic conviction. It fed his grandiose sense of purpose to imagine that he was amassing an army of ragged, pitchfork-wielding outsiders to storm the barricades and, in Andrew Breitbart’s favorite formulation, “take back the country.” If Bannon was bothered by the incendiary views held by some of those lining up with him, he didn’t show it. His habit always was to welcome all comers. To all outward appearances, Bannon, wild-eyed and scruffy, a Falstaff in flip-flops, was someone whom the political world could safely ignore. But his appearance, and the company he kept, masked an analytic capability that was undiminished and as applicable to politics as it had been to the finances of corrupt Hollywood movie studios. Somehow, Bannon, who would happily fall into league with the most agitated conservative zealot, was able to see clearly that conservatives had failed to stop Bill Clinton in the 1990s because they had indulged this very zealotry to a point where their credibility with the media and mainstream voters was shot. Trapped in their own bubble, speaking only to one another, they had believed that they were winning, when in reality they had already lost.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“Breitbart’s genius was that he grasped better than anyone else what the early twentieth-century press barons understood—that most readers don’t approach the news as a clinical exercise in absorbing facts, but experience it viscerally as an ongoing drama, with distinct story lines, heroes, and villains. Breitbart excelled at creating these narratives, an editorial approach that lived on after his death.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“And then Trump delivered one final importunement to the crowd. “Go to bed!” he told them. “Go to bed right now! Get up and vote!” On Election Day, Trump’s forecasting model indicated that he probably wouldn’t make it. Some of his advisers said his odds of victory were 30 percent; others went as high as 40 percent. At least one adviser said, “It will take a miracle for us to win.” And then the world turned upside down.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“For all his early-morning bravado, Bannon sounded as if he still couldn’t quite believe it all. And what an incredible story it was. Given the central role he had played in the greatest political upset in American history, the reporter suggested that it had all the makings of a Hollywood movie. Without missing a beat, Bannon shot back a reply worthy of his favorite vintage star, Gregory Peck in Twelve O’Clock High. “Brother,” he said, “Hollywood doesn’t make movies where the bad guys win.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“The last few days have proven to be pivotal in the minds of voters with the recent revelations in reopening the investigation of Secretary Clinton,” it read. “Early polling numbers show declining support for Clinton, shifting in favor of Mr. Trump,”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“From a raw political standpoint, Trump’s decision to adopt a set of views that offended and alienated minority voters, ugly though it was, turned out well for him. He would soon go further, broadening his attacks to include illegal immigrants. Trump did so at precisely the moment when Republican leaders, led by party chairman Reince Priebus (Trump’s future chief of staff), released an “autopsy” of Mitt Romney’s defeat that included a detailed plan for how the party could recover. Its most important recommendation was that Republicans embrace comprehensive immigration reform in order to broaden their appeal to minority voters. In so many words, Republican leaders were telling their rank and file that they needed to be more like Trump during his Apprentice glory days—while Trump was arriving at the opposite conclusion and, with Bannon’s eager encouragement, doing everything he could to build a political movement around white identity politics. A wily”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“As he broadcast his birther charge against Obama, Nielsen ratings for The Celebrity Apprentice took a sharp turn for the worse. “Given the downward trend of Trump’s ratings among his current, liberal audience,” joked one Republican media buyer, “maybe he’s running as a Republican to add a little bipartisan diversity to his viewership.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“Manafort’s ouster extinguished the last vestige of hope for Republicans praying that Trump would at last pivot to a more statesmanlike approach. No one believed he had any chance of winning in November; their desperation, at this point, was driven purely by the desire to limit the scope of the expected GOP losses down the ticket. Bannon’s elevation was simply unimaginable, the Republican establishment’s worst nightmare come to life. “This is the bunker scene in Downfall, only the Trump crowd won’t tell Hitler the truth. It’s utter madness,” said Stuart Stevens, who ran Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. “Trump is a nut, and he likes to surround himself with nuts. It’s a disaster for the Republican Party.” Although few Republicans knew Bannon personally, many were acquainted with Breitbart’s aggressive, hard-edged populism, often because they had been on the receiving end of one of its journalistic assaults. Bannon, they understood, would pay no heed at all to the sensitivities of down-ballot Republicans, and indeed would gladly indulge Trump’s impulse to burn everything down. “If you were looking for a tone or pivot, Bannon will pivot you in a dark, racist, and divisive direction,” said the GOP consultant Rick Wilson. “It’ll be a nationalist, hateful campaign. Republicans should run away.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“In the shell-shocked aftermath of the election, President Obama, looking shaken, appeared in the White House Rose Garden to deliver public remarks intended to project a sense of calm—a sense, really, that the basic stability of the country remained intact. “The sun is up,” Obama said. “I know everybody had a long night. I did as well. I had a chance to talk to President-elect Trump last night—about 3:30 in the morning, I think it was—to congratulate him on winning the election.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“Within minutes of the debate’s end, even as Trump was still nursing his grievances on live television, reporters began to realize that the revelations of his past behavior, so bluntly excavated by Kelly, had indeed caused an intense reaction among Republican voters—not against Trump, but against Fox News.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“of Clinton’s close aides, who had saved some of Clinton’s e-mails on Weiner’s laptop. Having declared the Clinton e-mail case closed in July, when he delivered an unprecedented public rebuke of her “extremely careless” conduct, Comey now told Congress that he was reopening the Clinton investigation. Ever since The New York Times broke the news on March 2, 2015, that Clinton used a personal e-mail account and private server as secretary of state, risking exposure of classified documents to hostile foreign powers, the subject of her e-mails had stalked her campaign, fusing with the damaging”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“These guys, these rootless white males, had monster power,” he said. “It was the pre-reddit. It’s the same guys on Thottbot who were [later] on reddit” and 4chan—the message boards that became the birthplace of the alt-right.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“On his desk was a printout of an article, set to run in the next morning’s New York Times. It explained how a Ukrainian government anticorruption team had discovered a secret handwritten ledger listing Manafort as the designated recipient of $12.7 million in previously undisclosed cash payments from a pro-Russian political party aligned with former president Viktor F. Yanukovych, Manafort’s client.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“At heart, Trump is an opportunist driven by a desire for public acclaim, rather than a politician with any fixed principles.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“Trump’s campaign was built on stoking xenophobic impulses,”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“outset of the election cycle, I’d approached the job of”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“We are led by very, very stupid people,” Trump declared at a September 9 rally on Capitol Hill. But it didn’t have to be that way. “We will have so much winning if I get elected,” he vowed, “that you may get bored with the winning.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“Trump,” she declared, to a multicultural audience at a community college, “is reinforcing harmful stereotypes and offering a dog whistle to his most hateful supporters. It’s a disturbing preview of what kind of president he’d be. And that’s what I want to make clear today: a man with a long history of racial discrimination, who traffics in dark conspiracy theories drawn from the pages of supermarket tabloids and the far, dark reaches of the Internet, should never run our government”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“Stuart Stevens, who ran Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. “Trump is a nut, and he likes to surround himself with nuts. It’s a disaster for the Republican Party.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“Truth be told, the party was moving in entirely the wrong direction. Ever since 1964, when Barry Goldwater championed “states’ rights”—understood to signify his opposition to the civil rights movement—minority voters had turned their backs on the Republican Party.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“such as the alt-right’s mascot, Pepe the Frog.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“an unlikely pair of guests: Nigel Farage, the leader of the right-wing UK Independence Party, and Phil Robertson, the bandanna’d, ayatollah-bearded Duck Dynasty patriarch who was accepting a free-speech award. CPAC is a beauty contest for Republican presidential hopefuls. But Robertson, a novelty adornment invited after A&E suspended him for denouncing gays, delivered a wild rant about beatniks and sexually transmitted diseases that had upstaged them all, to Bannon’s evident delight.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“It fed his grandiose sense of purpose to imagine that he was amassing an army of ragged, pitchfork-wielding outsiders to storm the barricades and, in Andrew Breitbart’s favorite formulation, “take back the country.” If Bannon was bothered by the incendiary views held by some of those lining up with him, he didn’t show it. His habit always was to welcome all comers.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“If you were looking for a tone or pivot, Bannon will pivot you in a dark, racist, and divisive direction,” said the GOP consultant Rick Wilson. “It’ll be a nationalist, hateful campaign. Republicans should run away.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“He loved the guy.” It was clear the connection was genuine, said Roger Stone, “because Steve is a slob, and Trump hates slobs.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“Bannon and the Breitbart editors had the same reaction and immediately turned on Megyn Kelly, with a fusillade of negative articles. She became the newest Breitbart narrative: the back-stabbing, self-promoting betrayer-of-the-cause. And Breitbart became the locus of pro-Trump, anti-Fox conservative anger. Between Thursday night, when the debate took place, and Sunday evening, Breitbart published twenty-five stories on Kelly, and the site’s editor in chief, Alex Marlow, went on CNN to accuse Fox News of “trying to take out Donald Trump” and staging “a gotcha debate.” The intensity of Republican anger stunned Fox News executives. The debate had drawn a record 24 million viewers. Now many of them were apoplectic at the network’s top talent. “In the beginning, virtually 100 percent of the emails were against Megyn Kelly,” a Fox source told New York’s Gabriel Sherman. “Roger was not happy. Most of the Fox viewers were taking Trump’s side.” Word spread through the building that Kelly was furious and had personally complained to Ailes. By Sunday, the attacks against her showed no sign of letting up, as other conservative opinion makers, such as radio host Mark Levin, agreed that her questions to Trump had been “unfair.” In a panic, Ailes called Bannon and begged him to call off the attacks. “Steve, this isn’t fair, and it’s killing us,” Ailes said. “You have to stop it.” “Fuck that, that was outrageous what she did!” Bannon retorted. “She pulled every trick out of the leftist playbook.” “You’ve gotta knock this crap off, Steve.” “Not until she backs off Trump—she’s still going after him on her show.” “She’s the star of this network! Cut it out!” The call ended without resolution. Bannon and Ailes would not speak again for almost a year.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“This popularity extended to Trump himself, who, according to private demographic research conducted at the time, was even more popular with African American and Hispanic viewers than he was with Caucasian audiences. “He was getting so much exposure from the prime-time show, and getting good ratings on NBC, that both his positive perception and his negative perception were well above average,”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“Just how Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty figured into a plan to overthrow the global power structure wasn’t clear,”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“Manafort’s ouster extinguished the last vestige of hope for Republicans praying that Trump would at last pivot to a more statesmanlike approach.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“about the worst choice Trump could have made because it signaled that, rather than steer toward a gentlemanly defeat that might preserve Republican seats in the House and Senate, Trump was going to burn it all down en route to a loss so ugly it might destroy the party.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency