Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump and the Storming of the Presidency
Joshua Green
Penguin Press
Hardcover, 272 pages, $27.00
July 2017
I’d been meaning to read this book for a while. I’d put it off because, to be honest, the loss suffered by our country on Election Day 2016 was simply too raw for me to go deep into a book about the Trump campaign. However, after the resounding rejection of Trumpism we witnessed on Election Day 2017 gave me real hope for the future, I decided to dive in.
Devil’s Bargain grew out of Joshua Green’s October 2015 profile of Steve Bannon, the title of which presciently dubbed him “The Most Dangerous Political Operative in America” a full year before he took over the Trump presidential campaign. Talk about being ahead of the curve. The book expertly weaves together two distinct, but related stories. One is a brief, albeit comprehensive enough biography of Bannon himself.
The book details his early life in Richmond, Virginia, where Bannon was raised in a conservative, Catholic Democratic household and attended a private, Catholic, military school. It was at Benedictine High School where he first imbibed the notion of a cataclysmic conflict between the Christian (people like Bannon would rather just ignore the “Judeo” part) and Muslim civilizations during the medieval period, one that, in Western Europe at least, culminated in the expulsion of Muslim forces—not to mention Muslims and Jews period—from Spain in 1492. That conflict remains central to Bannon’s worldview, and was severely heightened by the 9/11 attacks.
We also learn about Bannon’s adult life, his service in the Navy, his studies at Harvard Business School and his business career, which ultimately led him into right-wing politics, connected him to the Mercer family, and brought him to the helm of Breitbart.com—which he proudly labeled “the platform of the alt-right.” This story provides background and context to Bannon’s takeover of the Trump campaign in August 2016.
The second story told in Devil’s Bargain is, of course, Trump’s path to the presidency, a journey that began long before Trump and Bannon made whatever bargain they did with one another (who exactly the Devil is in this story is not explicitly revealed). That part of the story is likely to be familiar to most of those who follow politics closely enough to be reading this review.
Whether or not you are familiar with the material, Green provides a very readable account of both of these stories. I feel like I know Bannon better now than I did before, despite how much I had already learned about him from the research I’ve done for my own writing. Do I feel better for knowing him better? That’s not a word I would use, no. But knowledge is power.
While I’m not going to rehash the whole of the campaign, I will highlight a couple of points I found particularly interesting. Green gives a bird’s-eye view from the inside, and notes that the Trump people saw their internal numbers already improving a few days before James Comey made his little announcement about Hillary Clinton’s emails ten days before Election Day. Then, after that, Trump’s numbers improved much more strongly, to the point that his campaign officials thought they had a real chance at winning on Election Day.
The Trump campaign’s models—which, as Green noted, drew on early voting data as well as absentee ballots cast early—were predicting an electorate that was much more rural, white, older and “more populist” than what the Clinton team or the media was expecting. These models gave Trump a path to 270 electoral votes and the presidency because they found him to be competitive in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. He shifted his focus to those states while Hillary Clinton was still campaigning in Arizona, looking to push her Electoral College total above 330 votes, presumably. Again, this is a familiar story, but Green tells it well.
In the final week of the campaign, Bannon guided Trump to focus on the threat to the “sovereignty” of the United States. Green noted that Trump actually, shockingly, became a disciplined candidate: “he stuck to a Bannon-style, ‘America first’ nationalism” as well as slamming Hillary Clinton’s “character and moral corruption.” It worked all too well, as we know.
As for the role race played in influencing voters, Green provides Bannon’s take. Regarding the Clinton campaign’s highlighting of Trump’s hatemongering and racism, and connecting Trump’s campaign to the white nationalist/white supremacist alt-right in the hopes that it would both sour moderate whites on Trump and increase turnout for Clinton among the minority groups Trump had targeted, Bannon said it simply didn’t work. About six weeks before Election Day, he said “we polled the race stuff and it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t move anyone who isn’t already in her camp.”
Here’s more from the final page of the last chapter, where Green summarizes Bannon’s post-Election Day reflections:
Clinton’s great mistake . . . . was one he [Bannon] recognized all too well, since he’d watched Republicans commit it during their anti-Clinton witch hunts of the nineties: they’d become so intoxicated with the righteousness of their cause, so thoroughly convinced that a message built on identity politics would carry the day and drown out the “deplorables” that they became trapped in their own bubble and blind to the millions who disagreed with them—“and that goes for you guys in the media, too,” he [Bannon] added.
Do with what you will with Bannon’s words on these matters. I’ve argued elsewhere that, for all the Clinton campaign’s mistakes—9 percent of her ads mentioned economic issues, compared to 34 percent of Trump’s, for example—she still would have earned an Electoral College victory along with a more substantial popular vote margin if not for Comey. What Green’s book described about the Trump campaign’s data and Election Day expectations fits that assessment.
As for Devil’s Bargain, if you’re a political junkie, and you are ready to go inside the belly of the beast, this is a book you’ll want to read and probably even learn something from, but I wouldn’t call it a must-read. On the other hand, if the thought of spending a few hours inside the world of Donald Trump and Steve Bannon makes you want to puke up your Thanksgiving dinner—even three days later—then you can certainly skip this book without a second thought.
Ian Reifowitz is the author of Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity (Potomac Books).