Joshua Green’s Devil’s Bargain is pitched as a book about Steve Bannon, the former Breitbart News executive chairman who is now chief White House strategist, but it isn’t a biography per se. The now-familiar checkpoints of Bannon’s life—his working-class roots and Catholicism, his stints in the Navy (the source of his Islamophobia) and Goldman Sachs, and his stewardship of Breitbart—are mere fodder for an inevitable ending: the election of Donald Trump. Which is to say that Devil’s Bargain is really a campaign book.

As a result, the mangy Wario disappears for large chunks of this relatively short book, which also covers the bizarre workings of the “alt-Koch” billionaire Mercer family, the numerous institutions that have been created over the last three decades to take down the Clintons, and the inner workings of Trumpland prior to Bannon taking over the operation in August of 2016. 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.



Bannon’s exact role in all of this is in dispute. This April, two months after he demoted Bannon following a spate of stories alleging that Bannon was the real power behind the throne, Trump told The New York Post that Bannon was overrated, more Falstaff than Machiavelli. “I like Steve, but you have to remember he was not involved in my campaign until very late,” Trump said. “I’m my own strategist and it wasn’t like I was going to change strategies because I was facing Crooked Hillary.”



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.

But Devil’s Bargain argues that, contra the president, Trump’s victory would not have been possible without Bannon. It was Bannon who brought decades of anti-Clinton knowledge and connections when he took over the Trump campaign and guided it through its burn-everything-down final act. It was Bannon who realized that a small group of aggrieved outsiders could change the future of American politics. And it was Bannon who gave an intellectual skeleton to Trump’s instinctive, ego-driven brand of white populism.



The deciding voters in the 2016 election mostly broke toward Trump in the last two weeks, following the now infamous letter from then-FBI Director James Comey that resurrected Clinton’s email scandal. Trump’s data team, Green reports, labeled these voters “double-haters” who despised both candidates equally. However, if the Comey letter ultimately gave these voters the reason they needed to vote against Clinton, Devil’s Bargain shows that the plot to make Clinton look unviable went back decades.

