When journalist Josh Green wrote a lengthy profile of Breitbart News chief Steve Bannon back in 2015, the piece ran under the headline “This Man is the Most Dangerous Political Operative in America.”

Green had no idea how right that was.

“As a political magazine writer, my fascination has always been with very ambitious, driven, slightly crazed, interesting people,” Green says now. “It was clear to me pretty much from the get-go that Bannon was a guy I needed to add to my collection.”

“But [even then], never in a bazillion years would I have imagined any of this — that Donald Trump would be president, that Steve Bannon would be involved in it.”

Now Green has expanded his reporting into a book, titled Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency, that was released this week.

I interviewed Green about what he learned after spending so much time digging into Bannon’s ideology. He argued that religion is more important to understanding the operative than one might think — that he has an apocalyptic, decline-obsessed worldview and a very real interest in esoteric mystic thinkers.

But in the end, Green says, what helped both Trump and Bannon rise to prominence in the Republican Party was much more simple and crude: They realized “the power of demonizing immigrants as a way of motivating grassroots voters.”

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

What does Steve Bannon believe?

Andrew Prokop

Let’s start big picture. Do you think Steve Bannon has an ideology, and if so, what are the most important aspects to it?

Josh Green

I absolutely think Steve Bannon has an ideology. I didn’t at first; I thought he was a huckster. But it became pretty clear early on that he had a very distinct ideology. At first I thought of it as being Tea Party conservatism, but the more I got to talking to him, the more it really just seemed like this hardcore right-wing nationalism.

The major elements to it, as far as I’m able to detect, are an antipathy to free trade, a hostility to immigrants both legal and illegal, this kind of misty nostalgia for the white, blue-collar manufacturing economy of the mid-20th century.

And in terms of foreign policy, there’s a kind of America-first isolationism coupled with what I guess you could describe as Islamophobia. But that isn’t rooted in the Fox News post-9/11 strain of Islamophobia; it’s something much deeper and religiously driven in Bannon that’s been around for a lot longer.

Andrew Prokop

So more of a sort of “clash of civilizations,” “survival of the West” kind of thing.

Josh Green

Exactly. “The West versus the East.” But really if you drill down into what the guy believes, it’s tradition versus modernity. It’s God versus secularism.

There are also some big holes in Bannonism. One of the big holes in Bannon’s politics is health care. I’ve tried at various points over the last couple years to try and engage him on the issue of Obamacare, and it just doesn’t take with him. It hasn’t gripped his imagination in the way that immigrants do or big-shot international financiers at the Davos conference do.

I kinda wonder myself if that isn’t one reason Trump has had such a big problem with health care — that the guy filling his head with ideas isn’t interested in it.

Andrew Prokop

Now, Bannon also got a lot of attention this year when he said at CPAC that Trump wanted “the deconstruction of the administrative state.” What does that mean? Is that just a Bannon-y catchphrase for mainstream Republican deregulatory policy, or do you interpret it as something different and new?

Josh Green

I interpret that as being kinda two things at once. On its face it’s a nod to small-government conservatism — the kind of people who show up at CPAC, that’s their passion.

On a deeper level with Bannon, I also think part of that is religiously driven. As nutty as it may sound, part of his “Traditionalist” philosophy holds that the rise of the modern nation-state system beginning 500 years ago has built up administrative infrastructures that have taken the place of the traditional and the transcendent. And that is one reason he’s so hostile to outfits like the EU and also outfits like the US government.

Decline and apocalypse in Bannon’s thinking: “Like [Karl] Rove on an acid trip”

Andrew Prokop

To take a step back, though, how did you conclude that these concerns are driving him? When you interview him, does he tell you up front that he believes these things for these reasons? Or is your approach more about piecing together statements he’s made over his career?

Josh Green

The way I initially got into this line of research for the book is I went and said [to Bannon], “Hey, if you’re not a racist and an anti-Semite” — Bannon of course claims not to be — “why is it that you’re so drawn to these fascist nationalist ideologues from the 1930s and 1940s?” People like Julius Evola, who was Mussolini’s ideologist and who Bannon mentioned in a video at this Vatican conference that he spoke to in 2014 that was discovered by BuzzFeed last year.

His answer was — I’m paraphrasing here — well, I’m a nationalist and I went looking for intellectual underpinnings to support my philosophy. And the most prominent nationalist thinkers were guys like Julius Evola, who, while they had some very ugly beliefs and associations, were doing a lot of the thinking about nationalism.

And through Evola he went back and kinda became mesmerized by Evola’s guru, who is this French metaphysician named René Guénon who was raised a Catholic, practiced occultism, and joined a Freemason lodge, and eventually converted to Sufi Islam and followed Sharia. Guénon is kinda the godfather of capital-T Traditionalism.

What attracted Bannon to them was this idea of decline. Guénon’s famous book was called Crisis of the Modern World, and it laid out this view that essentially beginning with the Enlightenment and the rise of modernity and the nation-state system, we in the West lost our connection to the esoteric, to God. And that we were entering a six-thousand-year dark age. I’m trying to think how to explain this without sounding batshit crazy.

And Bannon is in his own way a kind of a spiritual seeker. There was a great article in Salon written by a guy who runs kind of a New Age magazine. The author says, essentially, “Hey I’ve known Steve Bannon for a long time, we have a lot of interests in common. He’s really into this kind of spiritual seeking and these kinda Christian mystical thinkers and some of these New Age guys.”

So I asked Bannon about that and he said, oh yeah, I went through this 10-year period where I did this really deep dive and read every religion book I could get my hands on.

Andrew Prokop

It reminds me of when you profiled Karl Rove, and wrote about his idiosyncratic infatuation with the idea that William McKinley had realigned American politics, and he could pull off something similar.

Josh Green

It’s like that but with an extra touch of weirdness, millennialist apocalyptic paranoia. Like Rove on an acid trip.

Andrew Prokop

Can I push you on this a little, though? Because I think what some people would say in response to that is, okay, Bannon may have read some weird books but at the end of the day, is that really core to what’s driving him here?

The throughline from his Breitbart work to the Trump campaign to the White House is this anti-immigration, anti-Islam mentality. Is all the mysticism stuff just that in fancy clothes, dressing up something that’s just pretty basic and ugly?

Josh Green

If you go back and read people like Evola and Guénon, they literally think that we’re in a dark age. That the apocalypse is coming, and stuff like that. It’s impossible for me to draw the line between “does Steve Bannon really think the apocalypse is coming, or does he kinda just get off on this apocalyptic imagery?”

But either way, the kinds of stories he published at Breitbart are pretty consistent with the idea that the whole world is falling apart, the country is going to hell, these dangerous immigrants and criminals are kinda marauding through our culture, and meanwhile the secular PC liberals are turning a blind eye to it and destroying American identity and so on and so forth.

I don’t see it as being necessarily at odds with what any of these crazy thinkers in the books are writing. What’s unsettling to me is the thought that maybe this isn’t just intellectual preening; maybe he believes it.

Bannon and Trump’s parallel realization: “the power of demonizing immigrants”

Andrew Prokop

That reminds me of a part of your book I found really interesting. You described how over the past few years, both Bannon and Trump were sort of running these parallel focus groups about what the conservative base really wanted and what they cared about.

You had Bannon running Breitbart and checking his traffic stats to see what kinds of stories struck a chord with his readers. And you had Trump, in 2013 and 2014, sending out political tweets and giving speeches to conservative audiences, and looking really closely at which tweets or which lines in a speech got the most enthusiastic responses.

And basically, the two separately came to the same realization. What did they see that the mainstream Republican Party was missing?

Josh Green

The power of demonizing immigrants as a way of motivating grassroots voters. Illegal and legal.

In a way, that wasn’t a shocking discovery. These currents have always been roiling in the American electorate, and George Bush back in 2006, 2007 was basically brought up short by voters in his own party when he tried to pass immigration reform. It always existed on the margins and on right-wing talk radio.

But Bannon and Trump amplified it in a way that had a pretty profound effect, and they did it in the wake of a financial crisis with an economy that isn’t working for a lot of middle-class and working-class and working poor people. And both of them had a real talent for kind of stoking resentment and channeling that resentment into a political force that they could direct at more mainstream Republicans and at Democrats.

Andrew Prokop

Plus, both Bannon and Trump have this temperament where they were willing and actually eager to go beyond the acceptable political discourse and language. They certainly feel no particular inclination to condemn racism when they see it and deliberately cultivate more racist elements as part of the big tent supporting them.

Josh Green

I think Bannon showed himself more than willing not only to make common cause with those elements but to almost provoke and goad that strain of thinking.

Andrew Prokop

What do people most get wrong about Bannon, then?

Josh Green

That he’s some kind of all-powerful Machiavelli figure. What he really is, is kind of a charismatic dealmaker. He has this personal affect of like an ’80s Wall Street banker, very fast-talking and funny and sexist and profane. And still smart, but in a way that appeals to a certain type of male. People like Donald Trump. People who miss the 1980s.

Why Steve Bannon is completely ill-suited to work on major legislation

Andrew Prokop

I want to catch us up to the present day and what’s going on right now in the Trump administration. How would you characterize the tensions that someone like Bannon faces at both working with someone like Trump and also trying to move his own ideas into policy?

Josh Green

I think there are two challenges. One is surviving the Game of Thrones-style backstabbing and power playing that has consistently gone on in the White House since day one. And as we all know, Bannon has had his ups and downs in that regard.

Andrew Prokop

He seems to have hung on!

Josh Green

Yeah.

But the other bigger and more fundamental challenge, I think, is that Bannon has never worked in government, has never thought about or passed any kind of legislation, had not even worked on a campaign until Trump hired him, what, 100 days before the election. And he has a view of the world in Washington and how to manipulate things that very much mirrors Trump’s own — that it’s a dominance play, that essentially you muscle your opposition or you muscle the people in your own party to do your bidding.

That’s not the way policy gets made, and it’s not the way legislative coalitions are put together. At the risk of being annoyingly self-referential, for the last book I wrote, I helped [former Rep.] Henry Waxman, the great Democratic legislator, write his memoir in 2009, The Waxman Report.

The entire book was about how you solve public policy problems in the face of intense opposition. How you use the media, how you work behind the scenes, how you defer and give credit to other people, how you accept partial victories and slowly advance your policy ideas even when a president of the other party is in the White House. And a lot of Waxman’s biggest gains came during the Reagan years.

To me, Steve Bannon is the polar opposite of Henry Waxman in every way, shape, and form, from his personality to his approach to politics to his interest in the minutiae of policy. And Donald Trump of course is too.

Everything that Waxman knew and laid out in that memoir are the things that are missing from the Trump administration and are why they haven’t managed to pass any kind of substantial legislation, even though Republicans have unified control of government.