Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the storming of the presidency

by Joshua Green

The instant #1 New York Times bestseller.

From the reporter who was there at the very beginning comes the revealing inside story of the partnership between Steve Bannon and Donald Trump — the key to understanding the rise of the alt-right, the fall of Hillary Clinton, and the hidden forces that drove the greatest upset in American political history.

Based on dozens of interviews conducted over six years, Green spins the master narrative of the 2016 campaign from its origins in the far fringes of right-wing politics and reality television to its culmination inside Trump’s penthouse on election night.

The shocking elevation of Bannon to head Trump’s flagging presidential campaign on August 17, 2016, hit political Washington like a thunderclap and seemed to signal the meltdown of the Republican Party. Bannon was a bomb-throwing pugilist who’d never run a campaign and was despised by Democrats and Republicans alike.

Yet Bannon’s hard-edged ethno-nationalism and his elaborate, years-long plot to destroy Hillary Clinton paved the way for Trump’s unlikely victory. Trump became the avatar of a dark but powerful worldview that dominated the airwaves and spoke to voters whom others couldn’t see. Trump’s campaign was the final phase of a populist insurgency that had been building up in America for years, and Bannon, its inscrutable mastermind, believed it was the culmination of a hard-right global uprising that would change the world.

Any study of Trump’s rise to the presidency is unavoidably a study of Bannon. Devil’s Bargain is a tour-de-force telling of the remarkable confluence of circumstances that decided the election, many of them orchestrated by Bannon and his allies, who really did plot a vast, right-wing conspiracy to stop Clinton. To understand Trump's extraordinary rise and Clinton’s fall, you have to weave Trump’s story together with Bannon’s, or else it doesn't make sense.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, History, Biography, Audiobook, American History, Presidents

226 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 18, 2017

Reviews

[Michael Finocchiaro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joshua Green's book was a bestseller from the minute it hit the shelves. Is it a great book? Almost, IMHO. It certainty made me feel almost physically ill seeing the utter depravity of Bannon and Drumpf as they mounted their assault on America in 2015-2016. It definitely reassured me in my previous statements (see my reviews of The Plot Against America by Philip Roth and It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis) that we are living in a dystopia where populist ideals amd alt-right fundamentals are driving public opinion. The book does a great job of profiling Bannon and the history of Breitbart as well as the (previously unknown to me) GIA juggernaut. HRC and the DNC recklessly underestimated the power of sexism, racism and xenophobia in the American heartland and the Drumpf campaign exploited this oversight with crushing efficiency.

Page 196, mid-July, Drumpf: "Russia, if you are listening, I hope you are able to find the thirty thousand e-mails that are missing." Well, with the meeting a few short weeks before in Trump Tower between Donald, Jr, Kurshner, Manafort and the Russians, we can be sure they were listening.
Also revealing, Bannon is a adept of René Guénon which preaches a dark apocalypse if the west does not return to a "traditionalist civilization." One of the lunatic fringe of the resulting Kali Yaga philosophy was an ally of Mussolini and help form Benito's fascist theories.


Political invective aside, the book retains a neutral political stance...until the end:
"But in the end, it's hard to imagine that Bannon and the legions he spoke for will wind up as anything other than the latest partners disappointed when their deal with Trump turns sour." (P. 242).
The book is great but comes off a bit rushed towards the end making the reader feel that the author was rushing to cash in on the Bannon-Drumpf alliance before everything around Drumpf implodes. It would be great if the author reissued the book with more details in the final chapter, say, six months to a year from now to analyze hoe, post-Election Day, Drumpf's strategy and Bannon's messaging changes with the fall of AHCA, the disappearance of "the Wall", the Russiagate scandal, etc. If you are smart - and I know you are - this will make you burn with righteous anger. But, that's a good thing. More people should have seen this coming, gotten angry, and taken steps to prevent the Drumpftastrophe. Just look how grassroots activism succeeded in killing "Repeal and replace". This is an important read to see under the rhetoric, all the shit that Fox&Friends would rather you be ignorant of. It also demonstrates how Bannon co-opted real news and was successful in injecting "fake news" into the stream which in turn spoiled the well enough for Drumpf supporters to drink exclusively from Breitbart, InfoWars and F&F.

Another really interesting angle you will learn is how critical Jeff Sessions' endorsement was to Drumpf's presidential run, and nevertheless Drumpf is throwing him under the bus as I write.
Also, lots of damning information here about Cambridge Analytica. Great documentary on You Tube

May all of this nightmare end sooner rather than later. #resist And I hope I'll get this back from the person I lent it to...my lawyer still has my copy of this book. You think I'll need to sue him to get it back? ;)

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Did you watch the Charlottesville “white power” vigil on TV, and were you surprised to see a new variety of racist, a Millennial, a man unmasked, unhooded—brandishing mommy’s tiki torch, wearing granddad’s WW II helmet—gazing self-confidently into the camera? I watched it, and began to question where this strange new beast had come from, when I remembered I had just read a book that provided me with part of the answer: Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump and the Storming of the Presidency.

These are the “alt-right,” the disaffected suburban isolates who once hid in their parents’ basement, playing computer games and using the internet to hurl sexist and racist slurs at every convenient target. These are the worst of the “Gamergate” guys, the ones resonsible for the Twitter attacks on “Ghostbusters” Leslie Jones. And although Steve Bannon didn’t invent them, he was the first to realize their power: he used them to grow his newsite Breitbart and, eventually, to magnify Moscow’s fake news and to elect Donald Trump to the presidency.

What was it that brought Bannon and the roots of the ”alt-right” together? The online game World of Warcraft, that’s what. It was in 2007, when Bannon’s company IGE was defending the vile practice of “gold farming” (hiring third-world workers at starvations wages to help affluent gamers acquire virtual Warcraft gold that could be used to “purchase” valuable objects—magic swords, healing potions, etc.--within the world of the game).

...the gamers ended up wrecking IGE’s business model by organizing themselves on the message boards and forcing the companies behind World of Warcraft and other MMO games to curb the disruptive practice of gold farming.

IGE’s investors lost millions of dollars. But Bannon gained a perverse appreciations for the gamers who’d done him in. “These guys, these rootless white males, had monster power,” he said. “ 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.

Now, not all of these guys were right-wingers, and Andrew Breitbart and Milo Yiannopolos deserve some of the credit (if you want to call it credit) for influencing those who were. But it was Bannon who saw the potential of these bitter young man, Bannon who weaponized them, and Bannon who brought them out into the light, grinning self-confidently into the camera.

Joshua Green’s well-researched book makes a good case for Bannon’s strategic genius and the fact that he himself may be the most crucial of the many factors that brought Donald Trump to the presidency. In addition to the mustering of the alt-right internet army, for example, Bannon helped rejuvenize the anti-Clinton propaganda industry by getting them to focus on facts instead of screwball conspiracy theories, and to concentrate on the target-rich envionment of the Clinton Foundation. (The resulting book, Peter Schweizer’s Clinton Cash, attracted the attention of the NYT and the rest of the mainstream media, and damaged Clinton’s reputation before her campaign ever got off the ground.) Oh, and the Mercer family money which has been so useful to Trump? Bannon was the first to tap into that too.

This is a good but not a perfect book. It contains an insightful account of Bannon’s early years, many interesting, if barely relevant facts (Bannon is an admirer of Rachel Madddow, Bannon was executive producer of the Julie Taymore/Anthony Hopkins’ movie Titus), as well as a relevant—and disturbing—analysis of the roots of Bannon’s thinking in Catholic anti-Modernist thought. But it also contains many chapters that are little more than familiar accounts of the Trump side of the 2016 election, imperfectly transformed from what they originally were, a series of campaign articles for Bloomberg. The stuff Green talks about in these chapters is of course relevant to Bannon too, but they are not seen from Bannon’s point of view, and are somewhat different in tone from the other chapters.

Oh, I would like to end this review with a couple of messages for those young white racists in Charlottesville this weekend. One: be sure to put those tiki torches back on the patio—just like you promised your mom. Two: dude, you’re lucky your grandfather is dead, ‘cause if he could have seen how you misused his army helmet this weekend, he would have kicked your sorry ass all the way from Virginia to the sands of Omaha Beach.

[Shawn Mooney (Shawn Breathes Books)]

A little more than a quarter of the way in, I've decided I don't want or need to know one more effing thing about these assholes.

[Trish · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yuck. Steve Bannon has a twisted sense of the world. One wonders how he got from the Navy & Harvard to the raving, unshaven ideologue he is today, but one guesses it was because he discovered good looks, money, and brains weren't enough to make him happy. But one could use these things to blow up the world.


Steve Bannon at Harvard

Joshua Green undoubtedly deserves at least four stars for being able to write and having the material no one else did. But I'd been following pretty closely this past year and really had a hard time spending another nanosecond thinking about this creep who can go to his grave without a single person to mourn him.

One thing that hadn't been entirely clear to me was the whole Fox News fight & subsequent ass-licking but I see it now through Green's careful, annotated timeline. I also hadn't been aware of the role of Bannon's Government Accountability Institute (GAI) in discrediting Hillary's candidacy. That was useful to understand. And, of course, the explicit statement by his colleagues and underlings, "Truth and veracity weren't his top priority. Narrative truth was his priority rather than factual truth."

I am going to have to call on other GReaders to tell me about the title of the Afterword: Kali Yuga. I sort of see Kali Yuga defined on Google as four stages of man's development & consciousness in Hinduism...please don't tell me Bannon is applying this...like he even cares. It could be that Green himself is applying the prophecy, which states that in the longest, and darkest, stage of Kali Yuga is the expectation "A person is considered unsuccessful and unholy if he does not have money, and the society will accept hypocrisy as a virtue." But that is from a quick search and not from deep understanding. Anyone else figure this out?

What a twisted man.

[Kressel Housman · Rating 5 out of 5]

The last time I read a book with the word "devils" in the title, it was about Wall Street and the crash of '08. This book is very similar; it shows how a bunch of disparate actors came together to create utter chaos, except this time it's political instead of financial. The main question I had going in was whether Bannon has ties to the Kremlin in the way the Trump family does, but it seems not. Either that or he's so politically savvy that he knows how to cover his tracks. But who knows what will be revealed in the future?

Believe it or not, the least interesting parts of this book were about Trump himself. I felt like I already knew that stuff, having just lived through the election. But the behind-the-scenes stuff, not just Bannon's biography but the story of the Mercers and David Bossie of Citizens United, were fascinating. I whipped through this book quicker than any of its size I read all year; that's how absorbing it was. It also did something to me that I didn't expect: it made me suspect that some of the charges about corrupting donations to the Clinton Foundation were true. But even so, I still fear for our future with Trump as president and Bannon whispering in his ear. The conclusion of the book is that Trump is likely to betray Bannon, or certainly the people he thinks he stands for, but now that I've learned so much about Bannon, I fear that he is the one more likely to survive.

May G-d protect us all.

[Rex Fuller · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author suffers the liberal’s handicaps of mistaking his opinions for facts and presuming his biases are received wisdom. Look no further than the title: insinuating that Steve Bannon’s relationship with Trump is sinister or possibly evil. In the text, examples are legion. One of the most glaring is his citing of Trump’s campaign flourish – at worst a rhetorical joke – suggesting that Russian intelligence might have, or be able to locate, Hillary’s missing emails to baldly assert “[Trump] invited Russia to interfere with the U.S. election.” There are so many things wrong with that (starting with the fact that under our laws we seek evidence of crimes wherever we can find it – ergo if the Russians have it, we should get it) that you really don’t need to know anything more about the author to understand what he believes.

So, recognizing you will have to separate a lot of liberal wrongheadedness chaff to find some wheat in this, you can do it. He gives a good description of Steve Bannon’s background and his world view. He also outlines Bannon’s approach to dealing with the Clintons pretty well. At the end you’ll have to decide if what you found was worth it.

[Beverly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of the same trolls who attacked Zoe Quinn in Gamergate are the same group who got Trump elected president, this is such a strange phenomenon, that I can't believe I just wrote this sentence. I just finished Quinn's book Crash Override about her horrible experience. Apparently Steve Bannon who worked happily for "elite enterprises" as he would state it, like Goldman Sachs and out in Hollywood in the movie industry, tapped into this group of disgruntled young men who live in their parent's basement and have tremendous amounts of time to engage in attacking young women and political candidates that they don't like. When he started working for Brietbart News he found them to have money and time to help him promulgate the vicious hate online and off of this past election. Green doesn't pull his punches he also talks as if there was some"there" there in business dealings of the Clinton Foundation. Green thinks though that more than Bannon's eventual work for the Trump campaign, it was in his publishing of a book called Clinton Cash and the undermining of her for years before the election that led to her downfall and Trump's eventual win.

[Tom Mathews · Rating 4 out of 5]

Green book changed the fundamental question about the 2016 election from "How could this have happened?" to "How could we have not seen this coming?"

[Mara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can't… I— Y'know what? Screw it! Just imagine this gif from Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, but somehow worse.

[Bettie]

Description: From the reporter who was there at the very beginning comes the revealing inside story of the partnership between Steve Bannon and Donald Trump—the key to understanding the rise of the alt-right, the fall of Hillary Clinton, and the hidden forces that drove the greatest upset in American political history. Based on dozens of interviews conducted over six years, Green spins the master narrative of the 2016 campaign from its origins in the far fringes of right-wing politics and reality television to its culmination inside Trump’s penthouse on election night.

The shocking elevation of Bannon to head Trump’s flagging presidential campaign on August 17, 2016, hit political Washington like a thunderclap and seemed to signal the meltdown of the Republican Party. Bannon was a bomb-throwing pugilist who’d never run a campaign and was despised by Democrats and Republicans alike.

Yet Bannon’s hard-edged ethno-nationalism and his elaborate, years-long plot to destroy Hillary Clinton paved the way for Trump’s unlikely victory. Trump became the avatar of a dark but powerful worldview that dominated the airwaves and spoke to voters whom others couldn’t see. Trump’s campaign was the final phase of a populist insurgency that had been building up in America for years, and Bannon, its inscrutable mastermind, believed it was the culmination of a hard-right global uprising that would change the world.

Any study of Trump’s rise to the presidency is unavoidably a study of Bannon. Devil’s Bargain is a tour-de-force telling of the remarkable confluence of circumstances that decided the election, many of them orchestrated by Bannon and his allies, who really did plot a vast, right-wing conspiracy to stop Clinton. It’s a story that only happened due to a remarkable confluence of circumstances, many of them driven by traps Bannon and his allies laid that suddenly snapped shut on their mortal enemy. To understand Trump's extraordinary rise and Clinton’s fall, you have to weave Trump’s story together with Bannon’s, or else it doesn't make sense.

As advertised on Stephen Colbert

Joshua Green

[Helga Cohen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a must read book to understand how Donald Trump won the White House. This reporter was there from the beginning and this telling book explains their partnership and is key to understanding the rise of the alt-right, the fall of Hillary Clinton and the forces that drove the biggest upset in American political history.
This book is based on 6 years of interviews. Bannon is describes as a hard edged nationalist who plotted for years on how to destroy Hillary Clinton and was the manipulator who paved the way for Donald Trump’s very unexpected victory. This book is more of a study of Bannon and how he and his allies did plot a right-wing conspiracy to stop Clinton. I learned that “The Wall” was not Trump’s idea but came from Bannon. Hillary didn’t help herself though by not listing foreign donors and releasing the Wall Street speeches and her email problems.
This book describes how Bannon went to a conservative Catholic School, the Navy, Ivy League University, Hollywood , Hong Kong and then to Robert Mercer( and their hatred of the Clinton’s) , Breitbart and finally the White House. Bannon has a Dr Jekyll and Hyde persona in my opinion mostly Hyde. It was fascinating to read. I am so glad he has been ousted from the White House but his evil will continue in Breitbart News.
This was a timely read and is highly recommended.

[Bren fall in love with the sea. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Skimmed. Not read. Skimmed.

To many books on the Donald. I mean..we already know he's an asshole, do we really need to know anymore? I went through a phase where I binge read all these books about Trump and then I realized something.

Why would I want to read ANYTHING about this Man Baby? I mean..you can't go online or put on the TV without hearing about him. It's enough already.

I am sure this book is good. I did a skim like I said and it was interesting. But I just cannot stand Con Don or the people of his ilk any longer. No more reads on the man child for awhile. It is just not worth it.

[Alan (the Lone Librarian) Teder · Rating 4 out of 5]

November 6, 2024 Update Time to revisit the Trump-Tell-Alls which have been relatively quiet for several years. Devil's Bargain is now #19 in a list of 253 books. The list may double during the next 4 years.

Caught in the Devil's Bargain
Review of the Penguin Press hardcover edition (2017)

Given the central role he had played in the greatest political upset in American history, [a] 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." - excerpt from pg. 236 of Devil's Bargain

Devil's Bargain is currently (as of early December 2020) the 41st most top voted book in the Trump Tell-alls List on Goodreads, which has the somewhat shocking current total of 225 books. The list is likely going to increase by 100+ with the Trump era ending and many retrospectives and memoirs yet to be written and published.

As indicated by its ranking in the Goodreads Trump Tell-Alls (which I have found to be a reliable guide to the best books on the subject), Devil's Bargain does not actually reveal very much about Trump himself. It is more a biography and background of the Trump advisor and final 2016 campaign manager Steve Bannon and his various financial backers & outlets which helped to defeat the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Probably the most surprising revelation about Bannon was the extent of his reading in world religions and mysticism, especially the work of René Guénon which ties into Bannon's traditionalist nationalist philosophy.

Bannon’s reading eventually led him to the work of René Guénon, an early-20th-​­century French occultist and metaphysician who was raised a Roman Catholic, practiced Freemasonry, and later became a Sufi Muslim who observed the Sharia. There are many forms of traditionalism in religion and philosophy. Guénon developed a philosophy often called “Traditionalism” (capital “T”), a form of anti-modernism with precise connotations. Guénon was a “primordial” Traditionalist, who believed that certain ancient religions, including the Hindu Vedanta, Sufism, and medieval Catholicism, were repositories of common spiritual truths, revealed to mankind in the earliest age of the world, that were being wiped out by the rise of secular modernity in the West. What Guénon hoped for, he wrote in 1924, was to “restore to the West an appropriate traditional civilization.” - excerpt from pgs. 204-205 of Devil's Bargain

Although it is more tied into the 2016 American Election, I read Devil's Bargain as background to my ongoing reading survey of various books in relation to the 2020 American Election. As a Canadian, I’ve generally ignored American politics and elections in past years, but the drama of the situation in 2020 has heightened my interest.

Trivia and Links
The hardcover edition of Devil's Bargain was published on July 18, 2017. This was one month before Steve Bannon's ouster from the White House on August 18, 2017, due to the behind the scenes machinations of Jarvanka (the Jared Kushner/Ivanka Trump contingent of advisors in the White House) according to later books such as Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (published January 5, 2018). The paperback edition of Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Nationalist Uprising (published on February 13, 2018) adds a new Preface to detail Bannon's firing along with a subtitle change.

[Alex Nelson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rating: 3.5 out of 5, mostly because it seems to be a rushed effort.

Some History

In 1824, for the first time in American history, no single candidate for president received a clear majority of electoral delegates. John C Calhoun received 99 delegates, John Quincey Adams received 84, William Crawford won 41, and Henry Clay 37. The US Constitution specified, at the time, the US House of Representatives would choose who (among the top 3 winners of electoral delegates) would become President. After some horse trading, John Quincy Adams won and picked Calhoun to be his vice President.

Martin Van Buren was so outraged by this, he spent the next 4 years assembling what essentially become the prototype for a modern political party. Each state had a local organization, with local politicians as its leaders, responsible for getting out the vote for...whomever ran for President on the party ticket. This involved a lot of politicking, but ultimately become a well crafted tool. All Mr Van Buren needed was a candidate.

Initially Van Buren favored William Crawford, but unfortunately Mr Crawford experienced a stroke and never really recovered his health. After some back-and-forth, Mr Van Buren teamed up with Andrew Jackson, and that's how the Jackson won a commanding victory in the 1828 presidential race.

(For more details on Martin Van Buren's organizational prowess, see chapter 3 of Joel Silbey's Martin Van Buren and the Emergence of American Popular Politics.)

The 2016 Presidential Election

Now, to bring things back to the present, Steve Bannon played a role in the 2016 presidential election analogous to Martin Van Buren in the 1828 election. Bannon created a coalition of alt-right "news", nutty billionaires, and other characters --- all designed to "take down" Hillary Clinton. (Just as Martin Van Buren designed his apparatus to "take down" John Quincy Adams.)

When viewed from this angle, the book delivers quite well. The style is, at times, a little choppy...giving the book the feel that it was rushed to the publishers without due editing for style, just fact checking.

But as a biography of Steve Bannon, I feel that Green fails to adequately capture the complexity and sheer vapidity of Bannon. For example, Green spends 1 page on Bannon's university years, and later in the book insists that Steve Bannon has "always been" this nutty, it has just been closeted. But none of his room mates or college friends remember Bannon as a right-wing individual: quite the opposite, they remember him as wildly liberal.

Why does this matter? Because if we give this due weight, the question presents itself "How did Steve Bannon end up a master of the alt-right universe?" (The answer appears to be, from what I can surmise from outside sources, Mr Bannon is abnormally "neurotic" [in the technical sense] and experienced crises of identity during his "participation" in the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, and then again with the 9/11 terrorist attacks. These pushed him further and further right.)

Green does too much honor to Steve Bannon by glossing over his police record, and wild law suits with, e.g., Sino-fresh. I guess that's to be expected, but it does leave a lot of the unsavory aspects of Bannon's character unexposed. Aspects which coincidentally played a role in the 2016 election.

But Green does deliver valuable new information about the Trump campaign, which is meritable in its own right.

Although Green does discuss ancillary players (like the Mercer family or Mr Schweizer) fairly well, I don't think the author adequately portrays them. (The episode where Rebekah Mercer stood on a chair, yelling at the Koch brothers about screwing up the 2012 election, is one memorable episode which was omitted, for example.) It's not that Mr Green was dishonest, far from it! It's that Mr Green did not give an adequate "backstory" to these oddballs Mr Bannon assembled.

Should you read this?

If you don't write your own encyclopedia about contemporary US politics, and if you haven't researched Steve Bannon seriously, then this is a great book for you.

If you are interested in the Trump campaign in the 2016 cycle, this is a good book for you.

If you are interested in Steve Bannon, this is not a "one stop shop" for you, but it does provide invaluable information not to be found elsewhere. It'd be good as an ancillary resource, but not a replacement for dozens of news articles.

[Bam cooks the books · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting account of the presidential election from the viewpoint of Joshua Green, a senior national correspondent for Bloomsberg Businessweek and Bloomsberg News who had front-row seats for the whole process.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Kali Yuga is upon us, Mr. President. Push the button.

Someday there will be a great book written about all this, assuming human civilization survives long enough. This isn't that book, and probably couldn't be, but it is a quick and informative read, similar in style to a magazine article. Some of the early chapters sketch Steve Bannon's life story; these are mercifully brief, but offer some important insights into Trump's former campaign manager and now senior advisor. I was particularly struck by the fact that Bannon went to a far-right, Christian military high school that was also composed of students from working-class families. As one of his former classmates points out, you've got three of Bannon's core principles right there: social conservatism, militarism and populism.

Bannon went on to the Navy, where his incipient belief that western civilization was under threat was nurtured by the Iran hostage crisis. What he regarded as Carter's weakness disgusted him; he was relieved when Reagan took office. He remembers getting into port in Karachi and realizing that "8 million of them had to be below the age of fifteen", whatever the significance of that is, exactly. He went on to work on Wall Street and later in Hollywood, where he eventually started to produce right-leaning political documentaries before taking over Breitbart. Books played a role in Bannon's development as well, although I think this aspect of his life is becoming overplayed. Does Bannon really deserve to be described as a "voracious autodidact", or is Green falling into the trap of helping Bannon to cultivate his own myth (or to blank his own blank, as Anthony Scaramucci put it)? He's read some books, good for him. Among the authors Bannon cites as influences are Rene Guenon and Julius Evola. Guenon founded a philosophy called Traditionalism; he believed that "...certain ancient religions...were repositories of common spiritual truths", and "...were being wiped out by the rise of secular modernity in the West." Like Bannon, "...Guenon was fascinated by the Hindu concept of cyclical time, and believed that the West was passing through the fourth and final era, known as the Kali Yuga, a six-thousand-year 'dark age' when tradition is wholly forgotten." Evola, also an enthusiast of Guenon, was an Italian who allied himself with Mussolini; Mussolini was influenced by Evola's Synthesis of the Doctrine of Race.

To play armchair psychologist, Bannon strikes me as an example of Eric Hoffer's "true believer." What someone like Bannon will never understand is that if he had been born in Minsk he would have become a Communist, if he had been born in Kabul he would have joined the Mujahideen to fight the Communists, and he would have pursued these holy causes with the same fervor and single-mindedness.

One of the advantages of reading this book may be to give you a better sense of which of Trump's moves seem to bear Bannon's influence. If it seems intentionally provocative, designed to appeal to people's basest impulses, an attempt to stir up a culture war, it seems to me that Bannon probably has some influence on it. The recent ban on transgender people in the military that is not an actual ban, for example, seems Bannonesque. Arranging for the women who've accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault to attend the second presidential debate was also Bannon's idea. Is this a masterstroke? It sounds more to me like something that would happen in the movie Cruel Intentions, or on a bad TV show. Then again, maybe that's part of the point. Bannon's M.O. aligns well with one of Trump's central insights- or let's say instincts- which was to apply the sensibilities of reality TV to politics. And it worked.

But did Bannon really turn the campaign around and rescue it, when he took over for Paul Manafort in August? Or is Green assisting Bannon in cultivating his personal myth? Perhaps there are a few points on which you have to give Bannon credit for effectiveness. One was convincing Jeff Sessions of Alabama, himself formerly a fringe Republican, to become the first Senator to officially endorse Trump (although Bannon brokered this before he officially joined Trump's campaign), shortly before crucial Republican primaries were held across the south, and despite Sessions's misgiving that if he endorsed Trump and it didn't work, his political career would be over (I wonder how he feels about it these days, but I can't say I feel much sympathy). Another was focusing Trump on a core message of Hillary Clinton's ostensible corruption and dishonesty. There also seems to be strategic acuity in his vision of turning the Republican Party into "the party of the workers" (Bannon also considers himself a Leninist, after all), thereby undermining the Democrats' traditional base.

Trying to discern how much power any individual has in the Trump White House at any given time is Kremlinology. But popular wisdom seems to hold that there's a power struggle going on between the 'globalists' and the Bannon camp, and that this is part of the reason some of Bannon's more apocalyptic inclinations have run into resistance. Then again, Trump has announced that the US will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accords, and that would seem to be a victory for the Bannon camp.

The title of the book raises the question of which of the two represents the devil. The cover photo, in which a strangely hypnotized-looking Bannon seems about to kneel in front of Trump to receive some dark, blasphemous communion, suggests that it is Trump. Everyone who goes to work for him, after all, immediately has to navigate impossible logical contradictions, abase themselves before the boss, and in a sense give up their "souls." Even complete and utter obeisance may not be enough, as Jeff Sessions is finding out. In this scenario, Bannon, in exchange for a role as advisor to the president and a platform from which to spread his nationalist ideas, aligns himself with someone whose only interest in those ideas is that they're useful, and who will get rid of Bannon the second they're not. If you imagine Bannon as the devil, on the other hand, it's a strange bargain in the sense that a bargain with the devil normally suggests an agonizing, wrenching quality. You will have to live with the knowledge of having given up your soul, or having altered history so that the Germans won WWII, or whatever the case may be; but what the devil offers is so sweet. In Trump's case, however, it's impossible to imagine that he felt the slightest compunction about the forces he might unleash by elevating someone like Bannon- a man without morals or convictions perhaps has no soul to surrender.

[Melora · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting and horrifying, though, given the outcome, “horrifying” predominates. The opening and some bits toward the end that rehashed familiar stories of the surprise and delight of Trump and his minions at winning the election almost made me set this aside, but after wading through those painful scenes the examination of Bannon's background and how he developed his ideology, skill sets, and influence was rather fascinating. Green's evaluation of Trump's “principles,” or, rather, lack of them, seems spot-on to me. In his “Afterword,” he offers what he thinks are the three main reasons for Trump's ineffectiveness once in the office he had won:

– “Trump thought being president was about asserting dominance.”
– “Trump ran against the Republican Party, Wall Street, and Paul Ryan, but then took up their agenda.”
– “Trump doesn't believe in nationalism or any other political philosophy – he's fundamentally a creature of his own ego.”

Once Bannon was pushed out of the White House for taking too much of Trump's limelight I briefly hoped Trump might moderate a bit, but that's clearly not happening. Bannon, back at Breitbart, has again proved with the Alabama senatorial primary race that his instincts (and data analysis tools) for sensing and directing voter sentiment are better than those of the GOP leaders in Congress. I expect this will only strengthen his influence with Trump, though it does seem that Bannon, like Ryan, is rather better at attacking and tearing down the work of others than he is at building the consensus needed to accomplish his own goals.

[Alex Kearney · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m a Popularist

Mr. Trump, it’s “Populist”

Yeah, a Popularist

It was clear in the early stages of his political saga that Donald Trump was ushering in a radical new era. He was disrupting the status quo of the Republican Party and shaking up the two-party system. There was a real populist-nationalist threat to the globalist elite.

In retrospect, that movement and all its promises has failed to deliver. We are still engaging in acts of war in the Middle East at the behest of Israel, we’re still funding the Ukraine War, mass deportations aren’t happening and amnesty is being recommended, and a deep state is burying the Epstein scandal.

Donald Trump believes that the MAGA movement is personality driven. This is only partially true. It’s more accurate to see him as the avatar of a nationalist zeitgeist that was rising in 2016. His ego has prevented him from recognizing his place as a stepping stone towards something greater. Further, he was ill prepared to face the challenges of the executive branch, expecting it to be a cakewalk compared to the cutthroat business environment he had previously mastered.

He didn’t think he needed Steve Bannon. He didn’t need intellectuals who were deeply versed in populist and nationalist philosophy. His pragmatism was his Achilles heel: he won because he spoke at a third grade level for the common person to understand, and he‘s failed to deliver because he lacked the guidance of a sophisticated political philosophy.

[Cody · Rating 5 out of 5]

In writing Devil's Bargain, author Joshua Green has arguably drafted the most encapsulating politically relevant book of 2017. Green's book focuses on the populist alt-right persona of Steve Bannon as a centerpiece to the understanding of the political climate that led to Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 election. Bannon can be described as a Machiavellian puppet-master, who's unconventional methods and shrewd political manuevering took years to fully formulate. For decades he sought the right political figure to counteract what he believed was a growing globalist power-base that conflicted with his strong sense of American nationalism. As Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign in 2015, Bannon had finally found that political persona that could carry him and his views to the White House, and so he did just that.

In many ways, Bannon is the personification of the underestimation of political extremism. Many polls, political corespondents, and notable intellectuals thought Trump had little to no chance to win the presidential election. The political populism him and Bannon were advertising subconsciously was thought to had long been rendered inept and even comically irrelevant with the conclusion of the Nuremberg trials in 1946. Extremism became an almost joke those ambitions seemed impossible to form any sense of real political majority. And yet, despite all the negatives associated with Trump and his campaign's message, the alt-right had a growing voice. It was the conventional Republicans and Democrats and their continuing alienation to many voters which led candidates from traditionally less moderate positions like Trump/Bannon on the right or Bernie Sanders on the left to gain real traction in the 2016 political race. Hillary Clinton's fumbling in the matter is the real lesson to take away from this book.

Green offers plenty of juicy tidbits. One of the most interesting is the demographic popularity Trump had while hosting his show "The Apprentice." The fact is he was more popular with minorities than whites during that era thanks to the voice and opportunities he gave to black and hispanic business hopefuls. That alone is fascinating considering the white nationalism he invoked in his campaign. Another is Steve Bannon's association with the famous Youtube video of the fearless honeybadger and how that formed his political characterization in tearing down the globalist establishment he saw as the ever-present enemy. Bannon is perhaps far more dangerous than Trump, having been flirting with far fringe right ambitions back in an era when Trump was considered a typical New York Democrat. Considering Breitbart news growing influence under Bannon and how he effectively began to overshadow people like Roger Ailes and Fox news, Bannon is someone to carefully watch.

Presently, Steve Bannon is continuing his fight from outside the White House, looking to the 2018 elections and fighting for more unorthodox far-right candidates to replace traditional conservative political leaders. With Trump's daily (and sometimes hourly) stumbles, fumbles, and embarrassing headlines of a variety of issues it remains to be seen if Bannon will have any effect. One thing is clear though, Bannon isn't one to be underestimated or taken lightly. As we all know, honey badgers don't go out without a real fight.

4.5/5

[thewanderingjew · Rating 2 out of 5]

Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency, Joshua Green, author; Fred Sanders, narrator
This was a difficult book to focus on because the message seemed preplanned simply to demonize the current President, Donald Trump, using Steve Bannon as the means to that end. In addition, as Bannon’s background and life wre explored, the author seemed intent on creating an evil human being, ignoring the positive side of his life. He is presented as ever eager to hurt and bully anyone with whom he came in contact, ruthless in his tactics and oblivious to the ordinary rules of decent conduct in his pursuits. The book is entitled, The Devil’s Bargain, and the author set out to make Steve Bannon the devil incarnate. I had hoped he would present a fairer picture of an election gone awry, but, instead, I was overwhelmed by the heavy-handed hit piece presented. It was filled with propaganda provided by the left leaning pundits and many innuendos that seemed to come from half- truths in order to present the progressive in a more positive light, ignoring their many conflicts, and corrupt behavior. He was intent on making the right seem deplorable in the way they were depicted by someone he respects highly, Hillary Clinton.
When describing the activities of Breitbart and Bannon, he used a term coined by Hillary Clinton which became popular. Suddenly, the left was populated by a group called the alt-right, but those on the right had no idea what that term actually meant. Clinton succeeded in hijacking the term and making it stick while she ignored what could be called the alt-left which represented her side of the aisle, Occupy Wall Street, Antifa, the undocumented who have committed a crime to get into this country. Joshua Green was only too happy to point fingers at the right while disregarding the heinous behavior of the left. Calling the alt-right white supremacists, religious zealots, and members of the rich and elite, he advanced the progressive rhetoric as if it was actual fact, much to the consternation of those conservatives who did not consider themselves a part of that group, and yet they represented Clinton’s opposition, in essence, her enemies.
When describing the right he used negative terms, but when describing the left and their tactics he described them in a positive way. So Hillary was being clever and Obama was logical, but Bannon grinned wickedly and Trump was unhinged. Even though it is now even more broadly known that the Democrats used underhanded tactics in the campaign, cheated and lied, he glossed over their misdeeds and their illegal behavior. Instead he used highly charged descriptions of anything representing conservatives in what seemed like an attempt to make the reader fear and dislike them. He used terms that the left used frequently to defame those they didn’t like. They call comments dog whistles and the GOP racist so often that they risk reducing the impact of the words with overuse. Green referred to the “fringe” element that has taken over the GOP, but never spoke negatively about the “fringe” element of the left that has infiltrated and changed the progressive agenda and the Democrat’s focus, that has caused chaos in their party.
To be fair, the book is not about Clinton and her dishonest cohorts, but it is hard to believe that a book concerned with the participants on the right, in the 2016 Presidential campaign, would so briefly mention the concerns about the opposing party on the left, even if only to compare them justly to make an honest point. It felt like fake news even when the truth was presented because of the obvious biased slant of the presentation of “the facts”. Oddly, at one point, the author even seemed to be praising Paul Manafort, recently indicted, for his effort to try to tame Donald Trump’s behavior. The author seemed to grasp at any straw to defame the current President and his supporters, and I fear that many of his accusations will not prove out, but the damage will be done because it is now in print. People do not often check the facts presented if they agree with the point that is made.
It seemed odd to me that he went after the wealthy Mercers, suggesting nefarious circumstances in their support of Trump, but Green never went after George Soros who may have used nefarious methods to invest vast sums of money into the DNC, using a multitude of groups associated with him, creating a maze which makes it difficult to trace the origin of the donations. He poured money into the DNC in support of Clinton, even as the left complained about the money poured into the coffers of the GOP.
He painted Bannon’s methods as ruthless but glossed over the fact that the left actually incited the violence at Trump rallies and worked actively to defeat Sanders and prop up Clinton who was even provided some debate questions, in advance, to enable her to perform better than her opposition on the stage. I deduced that this was basically nothing more than a “trash trump” exercise in book form. In the attempt to make Hillary a saint and Donald a devil, the left worked hard, but failed to secure the election. Although they demonized Trump for some classless comments, they forgave Clinton for his actual classless behavior against women. The electorate rejected the hypocrisy. They condemned Trump for anything they could think of; he is a germophobe, he is wily and a product of a racist upbringing, he is guilty of sexually harassing women. He is a loose cannon and an anti-semite given to hyperbole. These are just some of the names he has been called while the sins of his opposition were either ignored or not hammered day after day into the public arena. Obama, is described as measured, logical and sophisticated even as he interfered in a Presidential campaign which former Presidents are loath to do; and Hillary was presented as a champion of progressive causes, neither a liar nor a schemer.
The message from the author is so full of propaganda and the agenda of the left that the book, which could have been informative seemed to simply be a hit piece with the sole purpose of destroying the sitting President and those that associate with him. The author is very guilty of presenting a partisan view which I found to be extremely unfair and prejudicial. The left’s attempt to explain why Hillary lost is getting to be a very tired subject. She lost because Americans didn’t want her to win!

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Investigative piece extraordinaire. I appreciate the superhuman effort it took to gather this information together, make sense of it, organize it and write it up well and SO FAST. I admire and thank Joshua Green and those who supported this effort. And Robert Mueller. And Eric Schneiderman. And their teams. I crave justice.

Steve Bannon comes off even worse than I feared. He is smart, he knows it and he doesn’t waste it. He’s been studying, scheming and planning for a long time. He’s bursting with ideas and policies based upon an anti-modern, doomsday mentality. Donald Trump is not so smart but he thinks he is. He is bereft of ideas and policies. Ripe for Bannon’s plans. They both thrive on confrontation and aggressive humiliation. Drama queens wielding serious power. A dangerous duo.

Bannon looks at the world through a reactionary, Catholic, white supremacist lens. His money is on anarchy followed by a new order that harkens back to very traditional white society. French philosophe, Rene Guenon, is his muse. From Goodreads review of “Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century” by Mark Sedgwick: “From these beginnings grew Traditionalism, emerging from the occultist milieu of late nineteenth-century France, and fed by the widespread loss of faith in progress that followed the First World War.” “A number of disenchanted intellectuals responded to Guenon's call with attempts to put theory into practice. Some attempted without success to guide Fascism and Nazism along Traditionalist lines; others later participated in political terror in Italy. Traditionalism finally provided the ideological cement for the alliance of anti-democratic forces in post-Soviet Russia, and at the end of the twentieth century began to enter the debate in the Islamic world about the desirable relationship between Islam and modernity.”

“Bannon’s response to the rise of modernity was to set populist, right-wing nationalism against it.” “… in Trump… he found a leader who could rapidly advance the nationalist cause.”

Bannon understood very early the potential of under-socialized white guys who lived MMO and were online all the time. ”[T]he size and strength of on-line communities, along with an appreciation for the powerful currents that run just below the surface of the Internet.” Bannon: “The reality is, Fox News’ audience was geriatric and no one was connecting with this younger group.” That would be our younger group of ill-informed, fearful, insular, hate-mongers who follow Breitbart News. So lovely that can have their day in the sun! Then run back to mom’s basement before someone makes them cry in public.

Bannon has ushered in his own monstrous media machine. Breitbart News (Internet megaphone), the Government Accountability Office, GAI, (non-profit research, writing, press releases), Glittering Steel (film production) and Strategic Communications Laboratories (state-of-the-art data technology). Bannon, the Mercers and their ilk don’t need mainstream Republicans, including the RNC. “Through Breitbart, he [Bannon] could influence the right and through GAI, he could exert a subtler influence on the left.”

Bannon’s teams create a narrative based on verifiables dug up at GAI that they share with MSM to amplify their message. .” “His intuition about the reporters on the investigative desks of major newspapers was also correct: they weren’t the liberal ideologues of conservative fever dreams but kindred souls who could be recruited into his larger enterprise.” “If you were trying to create doubt and qualms about Hillary Clinton among progressives, the [New York] “Times” is the place to do it…. [T]he Times is the perfect host body for the virus.” “The modern economics of the newsroom don’t support big investigative reporting staffs.”

“Once that work [the verifiable stuff from GAI] has permeated the mainstream—then comes the ’pivot.’ Heroes and villains emerge and become grist for a juicy Breitbart News narrative [where they are looser with the truth].” “… [M]ost 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.” Bannon was successful for a time in Hollywood. Picked up some mad skills there. For the already converted, “Narrative truth was [Bannon’s] priority rather than factual truth” claims Ben Shapiro.

The idea for “Clinton Cash” originated at GAI and was released with a big splash before the election. (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) I understand politics is about power, influence and money, but Hillary did wrong. Her private e-mail server and classified e-mails were the worst. The book and negative press releases were picked up by the MSM because they were verifiable and true. I gotta say, if she hadn’t done the things outlined in the book, there wouldn’t have been a book to damage her chances. If you have to take money from and cavort with odious characters and illegally share classified info, maybe you’ve been in the game too long. I did vote for her. Against Trump.

Although Bannon is Svengali to the successful and real VAlt-RWC against Hillary, he offers up the ways of his winning strategy for the Dems to cherry pick from.

My favorite chapter title: “A Rolling Tumbleweed of Wounded Male Aggression.” Bannon and Trump could market this as an eau de cologne. Or Kryptonite.

When asked about the presidential campaign and surprise result resembling a movie, Bannon shot back “… Hollywood doesn’t make movies where the bad guys win.”

Green’s afterword from June 2017 describes three points he believes are resulting in Trump’s lack of accomplishment in office.

“Trump thought being president was about asserting dominance.”
“Trump ran against the Republican Party, Wall Street, and Paul Ryan, but then took up their agenda.”
“Trump doesn’t believe in nationalism or any other political philosophy--he’s fundamentally a creature of his own ego.”

Not so sure about #2. Trump has no agenda beyond campaign slogans. #3 was correct up until lately. I think Bannon has schooled and lured him over to the dark side. I await Bannon’s next moves. And the results of Mueller’s probe.

[Misfit]

I may try this another day, but it was time for it to go back to the library. Interesting, but at the same time I lost interest after spending so much time on CNN and other news sites, after that overload it was hard to pick this up.

[Nadine · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’d like to preface my review by saying that I’m Canadian. Proudly Canadian. So, my opinion about what happened in the American presidential race and vote and about the people involved, ultimately, means nothing. Therefore, my review will focus solely on the delivery of the content rather than not the content itself.

I decided to read Devil’s Bargain after becoming more interested and educated in American politics. American politics are thrilling and full of drama when compared to Canadian politics. I remember reading an article about the opposition bringing cardboard cutouts of Justin Trudeau to parliament to illustrate their point of overspending. Stimulating stuff eh? My knowledge base before reading Devil’s Bargain wasn’t anything extensive. I knew names and events, but nothing too specific.

“To understand Trump’s extraordinary rise, you have to go all the way back and begin with Steve Bannon, or else it doesn’t make sense.”

What Devil’s Bargain does best is lay out everything the reader needs to know about the great manipulator himself, Steve Bannon. If this book does anything, it convinces the reader of Bannon’s genius and everything he did to position himself where he is. This is arguably the best part of the novel. It’s delivered in a mostly clear fashion that links together cohesively. I got a little lost in Bannon’s time in Hollywood and Wall Street, but eventually got the gist of it. What I found most interesting was Bannon’s ties to World of Warcraft and the lessons he learned.

“Yet Bannon was captivated by what he had discovered while trying to build a business: an underworld he hadn’t known existed that was populated by millions of intense young men (most gamers were men) who disappeared for days of even weeks at a time in alternate realities. [...] This luciferous insight gave him an early understanding of the size and strength of online communities, along with an appreciation for the powerful currents that run just below the surface of the Internet. He began to wonder if those forces could be harnessed and, if so, how he might exploit them.”

After the rather in-depth look into Bannon’s past, Devil’s Bargain dissolves into a retelling of the campaign trail with few insights into the campaign itself. The focus shifts from Bannon and Trump to the larger picture. The delivery of information in lackluster in his section and had a hard time keeping my attention.

The ending is rushed, but that’s because most of the issues touched upon in the coverage of the campaign are on going.

Did Joshua Green quickly write this novel to cash in on Trump, Bannon, and the storming of the presidency? Perhaps, but am I glad he did? Yes. Devil’s Bargain gives the reader an in-depth look at the people and events leading up the to Trump becoming president in an easily digestible format. However, I would recommend getting to know some of the key players involved a little before reading to get a better understanding of their motivations and actions.

[Hoa · Rating 1 out of 5]

When you cite the a m a z i n g B u z z f e e d as a source, I know how reliable this book can be.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this book taught me two terrifying things: first, that as much as we like to hate Steve Bannon, make fun of his appearance and mock his weird apocalyptic beliefs, he is almost certainly the smartest guy in the White House and the primary reason Trump made it to the presidency; second, that with Bannon there and helping spin stories, the Trump campaign didn't necessarily need help from Russia in order to win. Steve Bannon found the right levers and pulled- and, Russia or no Russia, that might have been enough.

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

First I need to say as an irregular reader of nonfiction, I really appreciate Joshua Green's accessible writing style.

Devil's Bargain is an illuminating portrait of the man who so heavily influenced Trump's rise and the first 7 months of his presidency. Bannon's backstory and how it led up to Trump's 2016 election provided me with many "a-ha" moments. I'm glad I read it. Note: whether you're a fan or not, you'll love finding out exactly how Bannon made his millions. My husband has now sworn off watching what was his favorite sitcom!

[EllenZReads · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well-researched and fascinating (if sometimes nauseating) look at the relationship between Donald Trump and Steve Bannon, now-ousted White House chief strategist. The book, published long before Bannon's recent departure from Trump's staff, details Bannon's early life and career, and how his and Trump's paths intersected. I finished the book with a somewhat grudging respect for Bannon's wily intelligence and ability to manipulate situations to fit his desires, although I still think he's a white supremacist in "nationalist" clothing.

[Lorraine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Want to know how a narcissistic grifter with no core values or beliefs managed to get elected to our country's highest office? This book provides valuable insight into how it happened, and it's pretty unsettling. Know the enemy. Resist.

[Tara Brabazon · Rating 4 out of 5]

An extraordinarily disturbing book. Green captures the role of Bannon in the development of Trump's ideology and campaign. There is no doubt - after reading this book - that Trump would not be president without Bannon. Bannon encouraged the excesses, the ignorance, the racism and the sexism. He was able to mobilize the feral tantrums and unfortunate xenophobia to claim power. Finding the control in the hysteria, Bannon enabled a Trump presidency. This book explains how he did it. The 'why' to Trump remains illusive.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting look into some of the behind the scenes of the Trump campaign. The book focuses mainly on Steve Bannon, but the small bits that lend light on other lesser players in the campaign (such as the humiliated Chris Christie) made for almost MORE interesting stories. I kinda wish the book was longer and had included more about the secondary players as well.