Most of all, Bannon was intellectually curious and valued tradition, while Trump lacked a “political philosophy” and cared about little. Trump never wore a uniform as an adult, Bannon was a former officer in the US navy. Bannon was raised in a traditional Catholic working-class home in Richmond, Virginia. Trump grew up as the son of a New York City real estate mogul.

Green makes clear that Bannon’s and Trump’s biographies were far from identical. Bannon emerges as an iconoclast and would-be revolutionary, Trump the moneyed vandal from Queens In the end, Trump managed to simultaneously inflame and inspire, wooing late-breaking voters to his side after the FBI revealed that it had momentarily re-opened its investigation into Clinton’s emails. Correctly, the book characterizes Trump’s campaign as a cause, in contrast to Clinton’s second failed bid for the presidency. The wall became their metaphor, “America First” their creed. The two men were also in sync with white working-class antipathy toward immigration, Islam and liberal identity politics. Indeed, a month before Trump announced his candidacy in June 2015 and more than a year before Bannon joined the campaign, Trump was searching out Bannon at a conservative confab, the South Carolina Freedom Summit, going: “Where’s my Steve? Where’s my Steve?”īoth men intuited the electorate’s discontent with the status quo and a slumbering animus toward Hillary Clinton. As Green frames things, Trump “seemed to recognize” that it was “Bannon alone” who could get Trump elected.Īlthough Bannon did not “make” Trump president in the way Karl Rove helped transport George W Bush from Austin to the White House, “Trump wouldn’t be president if it weren’t for Bannon”. Enter The Devil’s Bargain by Joshua Green, senior national correspondent for Bloomberg Businessweek, which vividly pulls back the curtain on the symbiotic relationship between two of America’s most polarizing figures.īannon’s top billing in the book’s title is telling.

Devil house book review