...a reader of Devil’s Bargain who knew nothing about American politics and didn’t catch Mr. Green’s subtle but thoroughly unsympathetic judgments of his subject might come away thinking Mr. Bannon was the book’s hero: Everyone roots for an irreverent upstart who outrages a self-satisfied establishment and turns the system upside down ... I suspect Mr. Trump was also impressed by Mr. Bannon’s career and accomplishments, engagingly recorded in Devil’s Bargain ... 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.
The spotlight may be on Bannon, but Devil’s Bargain is really about how a bunch of sinister Bannon-esque forces aligned not just to win Trump the presidency, but to ensure that Hillary Clinton lost it ... There are reasons to doubt that Bannon’s role was as central as Green sometimes makes it—Michael Flynn was leading 'lock her up chants' at the Republican National Convention a month before Bannon took over the campaign—but the most salient takeaway from Devil’s Bargain is that Trump didn’t build that. It was fortuitous alliances with dark figures like Bannon and the Mercers, and decades of anti-Clinton work, that ultimately paved the road to victory.
...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.
Green makes an important point about the vital role that “The Apprentice” played in making Trump president. Trump was even more popular among blacks and Hispanics than he was among whites. That made Trump a darling of advertisers eager to be associated with a show and a character that were friendly to a multicultural image of the new America ... Devil’s Bargain markets itself as a dual profile, the story of the core relationship that shaped Trump’s appeal and his presidency. The tendency here to put Bannon at the heart of the action perhaps stems in part from the fact that Green had more than 20 hours of interviews with Bannon, and just 90 minutes with Trump. But there are some remarkable parallels between the two men.
Green persuasively argues that Bannon, who first met Trump in 2011, offered the future president two services without which Trump never could have won: first, ‘a fully formed, internally coherent worldview…about trade and foreign threats,’ and, second, a turn-key ready ‘infrastructure of conservative organizations’ that had spent decades attacking his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton. Indeed, at times reading Green’s book, one comes away with the gnawing sense that Trump did not so much win the 2016 election as happen to be the guy who benefitted when the darker forces on America’s right wing finally succeeded in destroying Hillary after failing to drive her husband from office in the 1990s.
One of the virtues of Green’s book is that he allows Bannon to tell much of the story himself through extensive interviews ... were Bannon’s insights the elixir for Trump’s victory? It is hard for Green to prove his case beyond doubt. But he reminds us that the last three weeks of Trump’s campaign were undiluted Bannon. It followed the leak of the notorious Access Hollywood tape where Trump talked of grabbing women 'by the pussy.' After that, Trump went full Kali Yuga. He talked of dark plots against America and global banking conspiracies. It hardly matters whether these borderline anti-Semitic rants tipped Trump over the finishing line. The point is that they did not kill his campaign — as they should have. For that, and much else, history will credit Bannon.
