Joshua Green > Quotes

“Ivanka spoke up: “My father has something big to tell you.”  “What’s that?” Murdoch said. “He’s going to run for president.” “He’s not running for president,” Murdoch replied, without looking up from his soup. “No, he is!” she insisted. Murdoch changed the subject. Trump nursed the slight for months, seething at the indignity. “He didn’t even look up from his soup!” he’d complain. The insult weighed heavily on him, and it made Fox News a perennially fraught subject.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“After Pope John Paul II permitted limited use of the Latin-only Tridentine Mass, which was banned by the Second Vatican Council, the elder Bannons became Tridentine Catholics. “When [the Roman Catholic Church] first started allowing it in the mid-eighties,” Steve Bannon recalled, “we left our parish that we’d been in for years and went and joined St. Joseph’s in Richmond, which offers a Tridentine Mass.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“For all his paranoid alarm, Bannon believes that the rise of nationalist movements across the world, from Europe to Japan to the United States, heralds a return to tradition. “You have to control three things,” he explained, “borders, currency, and military and national identity. People are finally coming to realize that, and politicians will have to follow.” The”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“One of the things Goldman teaches you is, don’t be the first guy through the door, because you’re going to get all the arrows,” said Bannon. “If”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“At his peak in 2010, Trump’s positive Q Score with black audiences was 27, while his positive score among English-speaking Hispanic audiences reached 18. Among nonblack audiences, however, Trump’s positive Q Score was just 8. White audiences, along with everybody else, tuned in to watch Trump—but either they didn’t particularly like him or they simply loved to hate him. Either way, said Schafer, “he definitely had a stronger positive perception among blacks and Hispanics.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“Milken, a Jew who wore an ill-fitting toupee, was initially shunned, and later despised, by the old money firms with their WASP lineage and culture of restraint. But it was Milken who ultimately prevailed by storming their fortresses and upending their business....More than anything, Milken was a kind of spirit animal who fired the imagination and showed just how far you can go if you stopped worrying about appearances and seized opportunity. His lesson was never forgotten.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“Kushner, now back from vacationing in Croatia, delivered the news at a Friday morning breakfast as diplomatically as he could. “We’ve really got a problem here, Paul,” Kushner told him. “You’re going to have to step down.” But Manafort objected. “Well, I don’t want to do that, because it’ll look like I’m guilty,” he said. Kushner pressed harder. “It would be helpful if you stepped down.” “Yes,” Manafort replied, “but I can’t do that.” At this, Kushner’s demeanor hardened and he glanced at his watch. “We’re putting out a press release at nine a.m. that says you’ve resigned,” he said. “That’s in thirty seconds.” Manafort’s ouster extinguished the last vestige of hope for”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“By the time Trump arrived at his next event, in Lisbon, Maine, he had hit upon an even better sound bite to capture Clinton’s travails. “This,” he told the audience, “is the biggest political scandal since Watergate.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“the Clinton campaign showed no sign at all that the midwestern states Trump’s scientists now considered winnable were even in play. As he had done periodically throughout the fall, he posed a question to a reporter he knew that had nagged at him for weeks. “What is Clinton doing? What’s their strategy? It’s a week from Election Day and she’s in Arizona.” ELEVEN “THE FBI HAS LEARNED OF THE EXISTENCE . . .”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“Thirty minutes later, a tweet from the account of RNC chairman Reince Priebus, ghostwritten by his deputy, Sean Spicer, a notoriously poor speller, made the news official: “@realDonaldTrump will be presumtive [sic] @GOP nominee, we all need to unite and focus on defeating @HillaryClinton #NeverClinton.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“by installing Bannon, Conway, and later Bossie, Trump was handing the reins of a half-billion-dollar political enterprise to a seasoned team of professional anti-Clinton operatives. These”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“In the same way that a collateralized-debt obligation is the sum of hundreds of individual mortgages, the real value of a film is the outstanding sum of its individual licensing deals: both products can quickly ruin investors who don’t understand them. When”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“The Supreme Court case briefly turned Bossie into a conservative cause célèbre, not because Republicans thought his film would have any effect on Clinton, who had already been dispatched by Obama, but because it was the vehicle that eliminated campaign spending restrictions, opening the floodgates for more corporate money to pour into electoral politics. It bestowed upon Bossie a temporary glow that made him seem like a big deal and a consequential player in Republican circles at the very moment when Donald Trump was getting serious about running for president and casting about for advice. Trump”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“Bossie hired Kellyanne Conway to poll likely New York voters to get a clear picture of Trump’s chances. The results were as bad as Stone and Nunberg anticipated—but instead of highlighting the fact that her poll showed Trump losing to Cuomo by 35 points, Conway left out that information and produced an analysis suggesting that Trump could win. “She wrote a sycophantic memo telling Trump he was like the Kennedys,” Nunberg complained.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“the negative coverage of Bannon and Trump and their relationship to the alt-right carried on for weeks. It was a subject any ordinary campaign would be toxically afraid of. But it didn’t produce the political dynamic Clinton expected: her lead actually narrowed in the month after her speech, from six points to two points in the RealClearPolitics average of polls. Bannon thought he knew why. “We polled the race stuff and it doesn’t matter,” he said in late September. “It doesn’t move anyone who isn’t already in her camp.” — What became much more worrisome for the Trump campaign was sex—and sexual assault. On October 7, David Fahrenthold, a reporter at The Washington Post, was leaked outtake footage from a 2005 Trump appearance on the NBC show Access Hollywood. In the tape, the recently married Trump is heard bragging in lewd and graphic detail to the show’s host, Billy Bush, about kissing, groping, and trying to bed women. “When you’re a star, they let you do it,” Trump says. “You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy.” From the moment it posted at four”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“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 Clinton Cash narrative to undermine the public’s trust in her. Clinton”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“I realized I liked being hated more than I liked being liked-that's when the game began.”
― Joshua Green

“few days earlier, Trump and some aides had offered the exclusive story of his upcoming entrance into the race to Maggie Haberman, a star reporter at The New York Times—and had been rebuffed. Trump’s long”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“Ted was short of cash.” Westinghouse wanted out. Bannon pleaded with them not to walk away from the bargaining table. “We told them, ‘You ought to take this deal. It’s a great deal,’” he said. “And they go, ‘If this is such a great deal, why don’t you defer some of your cash fee and keep an ownership stake in a package of TV rights?’” Bannon had no interest in getting into the residuals business. But neither did Westinghouse. The company made clear that unless Bannon & Co. swapped its cash fee for residuals the deal was off. “So we took a residual,” he said. In lieu of a full adviser’s fee, the firm accepted a stake in five Castle Rock television shows, including one in its third season that was regarded as the runt of the litter: Seinfeld. At”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“We live and die by the media. Every time we’re launching a book, I’ll build a battle map that literally breaks down by category every headline we’re going to place, every op-ed Peter’s going to publish. . . . Getting our message embedded in mainstream outlets is what gets us the biggest blast radius.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“British data analytics company, Strategic Communication Laboratories, that advised foreign governments and militaries on influencing elections and public opinion using the tools of psychological warfare. The American affiliate of SCL, of which Robert Mercer became principal owner, was christened Cambridge Analytica. (Bannon, too, took an ownership stake and a seat on the company’s board.) The”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“Once that work has permeated the mainstream—once it’s found “a host body,” in David Brock’s phrase—then comes the “pivot.” Heroes and villains emerge and become grist for a juicy Breitbart News narrative. The story takes on a life of its own. Hillary Clinton became the biggest narrative of all, even though none of the GAI reporting went directly to Breitbart. It”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“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

“Bannon, more synthesist than adherent, brought to Guénon’s Traditionalism a strong dose of Catholic social thought, in particular the concept of “subsidiarity”: the principle expressed in Pope Pius XI’s 1931 encyclical, Quadragesimo anno, that political matters should devolve to the lowest, least centralized authority that can responsibly handle them—a concept that, in a U.S. political context, mirrors small-government conservatism.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“And yet Trump was hardly dissuaded. His habit always was to quiz anyone and everyone about what they thought, whether or not that person could claim any expertise on the topic at hand. In Trump's mind, then, Steve Wynn's opinions about politics and how to shape it were every bit as valid and worth listening to as those of a seasoned political consultant.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the storming of the presidency

“Nobody knew it yet, but the president and his staff would not be so solicitous. They had, in fact, been eagerly awaiting Trump’s arrival in Washington from the moment the news became public, recognizing the occasion as the perfect opportunity to exact a humiliating revenge. Obama’s writing staff even brought in a ringer, the comedian and director Judd Apatow, to”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“He went on to make a series of preposterous-sounding claims—almost all of which would be borne out in the end: he would win a larger share of African Americans and Hispanics than Romney had (they loved him on The Apprentice!); he would open up new electoral college paths for the Republican Party; he would defeat Hillary Clinton; and he would do all this without raising the $1 billion to $2 billion that modern presidential campaigns were thought to require. Trump didn’t have the typical qualifications of a major-party presidential nominee, this he admitted. But”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“GAI does this because Bannon decided it’s the secret to how conservatives can hack the mainstream media. Hall has distilled this, too, into a slogan: “Anchor left, pivot right.” It means that “weaponizing” a story onto the front page of The New York Times (“the left”) is infinitely more valuable than publishing it on Breitbart (“the right”) because the Times reaches millions of readers inclined to vote Democratic. This approach prompted a wholesale change in how Bannon and his confederates think about elite media. “We don’t look at the mainstream media as enemies, because”
― 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. One”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“Too late, Clinton had awoken to the danger of the tightening race: she, too, had swept through Pennsylvania (twice) and North Carolina, and had also visited Grand Rapids earlier in the day.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency