Devil's Bargain
CBC Books | CBC | Posted: December 6, 2017 10:15 PM | Last Updated: December 6, 2017
Joshua Green
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.
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. (From Penguin Random House)
From the book
F***ing unbelievable, Steve Bannon thought, shaking his head in disgust as the "Breaking News" alert raced across the television screens in the Trump Tower war room. It was 7:22 p.m. on Election Night, the polls hadn't even closed, and yet here was CNN's Jim Acosta breathlessly touting a damning quote he'd pried out of an anonymous senior Trump adviser: "It will take a miracle for us to win."
Bannon didn't have to guess at the culprit. He simply assumed it was Kellyanne Conway, Trump's campaign manager, and how the hell would she know? Conway was a pollster by trade, but she tested messaging, not horse race, and the campaign had cut her off weeks earlier because Trump preferred to see her spinning on TV. If Bannon cared to—and right now, he did not—he could have watched Acosta's full report and looked for the Tell. That's what always gave her away. Because Conway was the only woman on Trump's senior staff, reporters avoided using gender pronouns when quoting her anonymously, lest an errant "she" slip out and reveal their source. Instead, they employed the awkward but gender‑neutral "this adviser" or "this person," and by the third or fourth reference what they were doing became pretty obvious. That was the Tell. Some of Trump's advisers had long ago caught on and joked about it.
From Devil's Bargain by Joshua Green ©2017. Published by Penguin Random House.