Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Nationalist Uprising by Joshua Green (Epub)

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. 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.

User’s Reviews

Review One of The New York Times Book Review’s Notable Books of 2017 One of NPR’s Great Reads of 2017 “The first deeply insightful political narrative of the Trump era.” —David Leonhardt, The New York Times “Indispensable.” —Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker “Mr. Green is a talented reporter and a gifted storyteller. The anecdotes he records from the chaotic 2016 Trump campaign are both well chosen (they’re there for thematic reasons, not as gratuitous gossip) and brilliantly told.” —Wall Street Journal “You won’t be able to put it down. I certainly couldn’t, surrendering a weekend I should have rightly spent with the kids. I spent it instead with a 63-year-old nationalist whom Time magazine all but called the shadow President of the United States . . . Addictive.” —Newsweek “Deeply reported and compulsively readable . . . Green is consistently interesting on the subject of Trump. But the real value of Devil’s Bargain is the story it tells about Bannon, some of which has been previously reported (not least by Green himself) but never so well synthesized or explained as it is here.” —Bret Stephens, The New York Times “Tremendous.” —GQ “Vividly pulls back the curtain on the symbiotic relationship between two of America’s most polarizing figures. . . . Green is nothing but prescient.” —The Guardian “Green saw Bannon as an important figure early on and began to track his career long before other journalists. As a result, Green had the material and access to produce a deeply researched and sharply observed account of a political figure and a movement that took most of the country by surprise . . . Readers will find no better guide to Bannon’s vision than this gripping and sometimes appalling account.” —Foreign Affairs “One of the best, more thoroughly researched, and arguably most influential 2016 books to come out so far, Devil’s Bargain is the product of years of interviews and tight reporting from journalist Joshua Green. He thrillingly tracks the influence of Steve Bannon and the alt-right on Trump’s candidacy, persuasively arguing they were intrinsic to his rise and eventual victory. It’s disturbing, fascinating stuff for anyone interested in this newly powerful fringe.” —Entertainment Weekly “In this important and vivid book, the veteran journalist Joshua Green . . . examines the role of Bannon, the man who, on convincing evidence laid out here, was instrumental in securing the most improbable election victory in modern political history.” —The Times (London) “Intelligent, insightful, and fast-moving.” —The Washington Times “Delicious from page one.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette “Fast-paced, crisp, and cogent, this is a first look into a dark corner of history whose ramifications are only beginning to be understood.” —PopMatters “Joshua Green is an incredible storyteller, and Bannon is an incredible subject.” —Paste Magazine “Splendid.” —Esquire “Fascinating . . . required reading for anyone interested in the future.” —Janet Maslin, The New York Times “Absorbing . . . the first thing I’ve read in the last year and a half that manages to make some sense of the human catastrophic weather event that is Steve Bannon.” —The Millions “Behind the scenes and ripped from the headlines, Green’s saga exuberantly traces Trump’s wild ride to the presidency.” —Kirkus

Reviews from Amazon users, collected at the time the book is getting published on UniedVRG. It can be related to shiping or paper quality instead of the book content:

⭐ As I do with all political books, I begin by saying that I’m reviewing the book and the writing, rather than the political policies or personalities.Joshua Green’s new book, “Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency”, is a well written, non-partisan look at Donald Trump and his campaign and victory, with particular emphasis on Steve Bannon and his influence both on the Trump campaign and on the wider political world of the 2016 presidential election. This is one of those well-composed books on the absurdity of politics which manages to capture the true absurdity without sounding condescending in the process.Although I describe myself as a political junkie, I’m not going to read many books about the campaign. In fact, this is the first one I’ve read and may well be the last. Joshua Green is not a “campaign insider”, but rather a political reporter. He has no bone to pick with either the Trump campaign or the Clinton campaign. Because he isn’t trying to justify any person connections, he can remain non-partisan, which I believe his writing is in this book. (He does have a bit of a juicy story about Donald Trump and Chris Christie, which seems right on to both men.)

⭐ I had no idea that the hype about big money influencing political elections is so singular in its application. Devil’s Bargain was a real eye-opener to me. It made me realize that we “everyday Americans” must get fully involved in politics in order to truly have a government “of the people, by the people, for the people”. If we don’t head this warning we will just get more of a government run by big money and special interest groups to the detriment of main street America and the good of the country.

⭐ 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.

⭐ Devil’s Bargain is a fascinating book written by Bloomberg journalist Joshua Green. It details the short-lived partnership between Donald Trump and Steve Bannon. Green interviewed Bannon at length and he takes you inside the Trump campaign. Green argues that Bannon, who first met Trump in 2011, offered the future president two services without which Trump could never have won the 2016 election: “a fully formed, internally coherent worldview…about trade and foreign threats,” and an “infrastructure of conservative organizations” that had spent years attacking and hating Hillary Clinton.Bannon has a habit of taking credit for everything that went right on the Trump campaign. Green makes a persuasive case: that Trump “seemed to recognize” that it was “Bannon alone” who could get Trump elected. The book argues that Trump’s win is largely due to Bannon and Trump became a vessel for Bannon’s nationalist ideas. The book is gossipy and very readable and helps explain how Trump managed to get elected.The book is good on the campaign, but it also explains Bannon’s long-term objectives and his political ideas. The central character of the book is Bannon and it provides a brief biography. Bannon grew up in a working class, Irish-Catholic family in Virginia. He joined the Navy, got a master’s degree from Georgetown. He went to Harvard Business School and then to Goldman Sachs. He specialized in media and made deals between movie studios and TV companies and then became a film producer. Having acquired wealth, Bannon began focusing on politics. Before meeting Trump, Bannon had advised Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann.Bannon became the chairman of Breitbart News. Bannon described his ideology to Mother Jones as “nationalist” and claimed that Breitbart News was the “platform for the alt-right”. The alt-right has been demonized by the liberal intelligentsia. The New York Times described it “as a loosely organized group of mostly young men who believe in white supremacy; oppose immigration, feminism, and multiculturalism; and delight in harassing Jews, Muslims, and other vulnerable groups by spewing shocking insults on social media.” The alt-right is often described as neo-Nazi by the left because they view them as racists. Bannon is adamant that populism and fascism ‘are not even related’. On economic policy, he may be right. In the 1930s Hitler’s regime was closer to the totalitarian rule of Stalin than it was to the laissez-faire capitalism of Herbert Hoover. Hitler rejected the market economy, embraced socialist policies and government intervention. Like the communists, he also believed in world domination.Breitbart News helped Trump dispatch his Republican competitors. Bannon became Trump’s campaign manager in August 2016 at the behest of the Mercer family, which funds right-wing causes (including Breitbart). Bannon took a leave from Breitbart while working for Trump. The book claims that Bannon was the architect of Trump’s populist campaign message. Green believes that Trump was never really a nationalist, but instead, was an opportunist who wanted to get elected and Bannon’s ideas seemed to be popular.Bannon views himself as a political philosopher. He has read a lot of history and can quote Plutarch. His political views often shock the political establishment. He does not believe in virtue signaling or political correctness. He believes in a coming great-powers clash with an axis of the ancient Turkish, Persian and Chinese civilizations. According to Michael Wolff, Bannon told former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes that “China is where Nazi Germany was in 1929 to 1930.” Bannon believes “we’re at economic war with China” and only one will be a global hegemon in 25 or 30 years. He views China as an existential threat and argues that the US is losing the economic war. He has also predicted a military conflict in the South China Seas within 5-10 years.Bannon is critical of Wall Street. He believes that by 2008 Wall Street firms had become “highly leveraged hedge funds” and they had “wrecked the economy.” He believes in capitalism and does not believe that taxpayers should bail out Wall Street. Strangely, Bannon suggests that liberal/left wing ideas have corrupted Wall Street. He believes in protectionism and has criticized Wall Street for promoting free trade and helping to outsource American jobs.According to Green, Bannon is worried about globalization. He believes that the rise of populist movements in the U.S., Europe, and Japan represents a return to tradition. Bannon believes you have to control: the border, the currency, the military, and national identity. People are finally coming to realize that, and politicians will have to follow.Bannon believes the EU and Angela Merkel plan to abolish the nation-state and create a world without borders. German nationalism caused a lot of problems in the 20th century, so Merkel’s fears are understandable. However, Bannon views the EU and Merkel as twin threats. Bannon fears the EU is trying to eliminate national culture through immigration. Bannon has often spoken favorably about European populist movements that want to preserve the nation-state and he has supported nationalist movements in Europe. Helping to get Trump elected has given him credibility with European populists. The left-wing London Guardian has described Bannon as an evil genius.Bannon has a habit of biting the hand that feeds him. He often makes controversial statements that upset even his allies. Bannon seems to have fallen out of favor with Trump and the Mercers. The Wall Street Journal believes that Trump feels “betrayed” depicting Bannon as a self-promoter who inflated his importance in the president’s election victory. Rebekah Mercer has said that Bannon, “took Breitbart in the wrong direction.” However, Bannon has not gone away and he is turning his attention to Europe where populism is on the rise. He appears to be trying to cobble together an international front of far-right and neo-fascist political parties. Many of his ideas seem to resonate with ordinary people because their views are often ignored by the elites. The establishment in Europe is starting to view Bannon as a potential threat to stability. Some conservative commentators in London believe that Bannon is a racist who has crossed the line into fascism. We are waiting to see what Bannon does next.

⭐ I couldn’t resist reading another book that explores how Trump succeeded in the 2016 election. This book focuses on Steve Bannon, his career before politics, and his personal philosophy about government and much else. Written by Joshua Green, a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek, this is an excellent exposé of how Bannon and others influenced Trump, his campaign, and the early days of the administration.It’s horrifying to think that such a large percentage of the U.S. population could be so easily manipulated by these creeps. But the toxic combination of white supremacists, racists, misogynists, and pseudo-Christians just ate up what was served by Trump, Bannon, and others. The thought that the 35-40 % of Americans who support Trump are holding the rest of us hostage to this craziness is just maddening. Republicans who are doing nothing to rein him in will not be looked kindly on by history. I’m looking forward to the day when the truth comes out and they are shown for the racist kleptocrats that they are.Devil’s Bargain is well-written and reads like a novel; however, it’s also well-researched. Anyone who wants a fuller picture of how we got where we are should read this book.

⭐ If you were wondering how Donald Trump secured the White House, Green will show you just how Steve Bannon was a critical instrument of that process. In his campaign, Trump channeled Bannon’s conspiratorial worldview. Yes, that view includes Clinton’s dark web of moral and intellectual corruption, the banks, the media, and financial titans (left wing, of course). The message was of a global power structure that was responsible for economic decisions that funneled money to a handful of large corporations and political entities, thus stripping the country of its wealthAccording to the author, “you have to go all the way back and begin with Steve Bannon, or else it doesn’t make sense.” We are also introduced to some of the other players who were instrumental, such as David Bossie, Rodger Stone, Kellyanne Conway, and others; but the greatest influence on Trump was Bannon. What Bannon built was a “vast right-wing conspiracy” designed to tear down Hillary – Trump just happened to be the fortunate beneficiary of this elaborate plot. Green delineates the history that brought Bannon to this point: his experience as a naval officer, his dissatisfaction with President Carter, his admiration of Reagan, his time at Harvard, his stint on Wall Street, his time in Hollywood, his time as head of Breitbart News. At Breitbart, he marshaled the online armies of trolls and activists that infiltrated national politics that gave rise to Donald Trump.There were other factors as well. Trump’s time on The Apprentice increased his popularity among black and Hispanic audiences. Then there was the Mercer family that without a doubt was very important in helping Trump win the presidency. We learn of four organizations that Bannon had a hand in building, and which was funded by the Mercers. These were Breitbart News, the Government Accountability Institute, a film production company called Glittering Steel (this company produced a movie version of Clinton Cash), and lastly, Strategic Communication Laboratories. By the time Clinton launched her campaign, all four of these entities were up and running like the machine they were envisioned to be.The first organization Breitbart News according to its founder “was always to build a global center-right, populist, anti-establishment news site.” This media outlet was instrumental in bringing down Hillary. The author continues on describing how Bannon aided Trump. We see Stephen Miller and later Paul Manafort enter Trump’s campaign. Later the Mercer family gets Trump to bring in Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway. With Bannon at the helm now, we see “a nationalist, divisive campaign in which issues of race, immigration, culture, and identity were put front and center. Bannon exhumed the nationalist thinkers of old to build an intellectual basis for Trumpism” or what the author labels American Nationalist-Traditionalism.Green concludes saying, “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.” Before I finished reading this book, Bannon was fired.

⭐Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency The 1980 miracle consisted of an all-amateur USA Hockey Team defeating an undefeated all-professional team of Russian hockey players.The 2016 miracle consisted of Donald J. Trump — a man with zero political experience — defeating a Democrat political machine that had outspent him by billions of dollars.How did the US hockey players — the youngest team in the tournament and in U.S. national team history — pull it off? The answer is that the crowd in Lake Placid, New York, with their nonstop chanting, “USA! USA!” willed it.How did Donald J. Trump make it happen? The answer is that — late in the game but not too late — he selected Steve Bannon to focus him. Before long, massive crowds were once again chanting “USA! USA!”Suggestion: Don’t open this book until you have sufficient time available to read it from beginning to end because, if you are like me, you will find yourself unable to put it down.Simply stated, Joshua Green has created a spellbinding story of how two humans from highly-dissimilar backgrounds merged each’s distinct subset of skills to create what would become popularly known as the unstoppable Trump Train.

⭐ This book starts off very well. Until about half-way in. It went from showing Bannon’s beliefs, Trump’s opportunistic actions, and how they came together to pull off one of the most stunning upsets in the US electoral history.And then all of a sudden, the author goes off into rank speculation (he offers nothing more than a quote or two) and then runs off for page after page after page like his hair is on fire to link Bannon to the author’s weird thesis that Bannon believes that everything from the Treaty of Westphalia and the destruction of the Knights Templars and the beginning of the downfall of western civilization, and then throws in the ideas of obscure political thinkers such as Guenon and Evola in the most lame attempt to link Bannon to Nazi Germany and other totalitarian regimes (yes it gets that weird).Again, the first half of the book is very good. But from about 50-75% of the book is just too rambling and weird. Can’t say anything after that point, as I just couldn’t take any more of this author’s very strange ideas and ramblings.

⭐ A worthwhile read dissecting Trump’s victory and the architect behind his upset, Steve Bannon. Bannon is truly a brilliant man with a varied past who now has a hard right view of the World and the place of America in this world. I truly doubt Trump wins without him which is conveyed perfectly in the timing of his hire in this book.But with his great passion and strategy comes his prickly personality and ability to interface with those around him in the White House so as I finished this book he was relieved of duty at the White House. Some due to relationship problems, some due to his upstaging the man with the biggest ego in the room. While not in the book one wonders how this will play out. Is there room for both men to coexist in one country with such passion of ideas. Time will tell. Forget your political leanings, a very worthwhile read.

⭐ The five-star review I give this book is possible mostly because of the strong credibility of the author. Joshua Green has proved his journalistic chops with a number of great publications, but it was his time at The Atlantic that endeared him to me. This is a riveting account of the most controversial, upsetting presidential election of my 72 years. Full disclosure: I’m a Democrat, but I was a Biden girl. Green’s revelation of the Clinton Foundation workings was very disturbing to me. Shame on them. The documentation in this book is precise, the story is told with little embellishment, and the overall effect, amazingly sobering. I predict many reprints of this book as scholars of the future look back, scratch their heads, and wonder, “How did this happen?” Green nails it. God bless his family for hanging in there while he wrote this important book.

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