Tag: Bannon

Posted on by — 3 Comments

Bannon: Always the Rebel

To understand the Trump White House, you need to understand Steve Bannon: what’s driving him, what his true role is, and what he’s trying to accomplish on behalf of the American middle class.

White House reporter Keith Koffler penetrates the fog surrounding the mysterious senior White House advisor, tracing Bannon’s wild and distinctly American path to the White House in this first-ever honest biography of the controversial figure. Born to working-class Democrats in Virginia, Bannon has barrelled through the Navy, Harvard, Wall Street, and Hollywood; he is fluent in esoteric philosophies and political theories; and he has diagnosed the problem with today’s America – the rot that has eaten away at working Americans’ hopes, opportunities, and freedoms – and developed a winning strategy for taking America back.

With inside information on Bannon’s current White House projects and his relationships with other figures in the Trump orbit – and with President Trump himself – Bannon: Trump’s Rebel in the White House is not only a three-dimensional guide to one of the most fascinating figures of modern American history; it’s also a guide to understanding the Trump administration’s plans for our future.

Posted on by — 3 Comments

Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

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.