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 happened only 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.
The most amazing book I have read in years. I got this book delivered to me at 11am. It is now 6pm. I have read 4 chapters in that time. So far, this book is amazing.
Epic tale of Trump’s shocking win. I could not put this down–the characters, the humor, the intensity. If you still don’t understand how Trump became president against all odds , simply read this book. You may not like the folks you meet in Joshua Green’s epic, but you will not soon forget them .
I love that, while the author obviously doesn’t share Bannon’s … Couldn’t put it down. I love that, while the author obviously doesn’t share Bannon’s worldview, to put it mildly, the book isn’t polemical — it gets out of the way of the story. And what a story. My goodness. I suspect that if you hate Trump you’ll be horrified and entertained, and if you love Trump you’ll be delighted and entertained, and that’s very high praise. I didn;t know that the wall wasn’t Trump’s idea; that’s sort of ironic.