No one leaves Donald Trump’s orbit unscathed, regardless of whether they are family or help. In less than two years, Trump cycled through three campaign managers and countless staffers. Only Steven K Bannon succeeded in melding the biological imperative of letting “Trump be Trump” to a winning general election strategy.

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.

Bannon’s top billing in the book’s title is telling. As Green frames things, Trump “seemed to recognize” that it was “Bannon alone” who could get Trump elected.

Although 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”. 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?”

Both men intuited the electorate’s discontent with the status quo and a slumbering animus toward Hillary Clinton. The two men were also in sync with white working-class antipathy toward immigration, Islam and liberal identity politics. The wall became their metaphor, “America First” their creed. Correctly, the book characterizes Trump’s campaign as a cause, in contrast to Clinton’s second failed bid for the presidency.

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.

Bannon emerges as an iconoclast and would-be revolutionary, Trump the moneyed vandal from Queens

Green makes clear that Bannon’s and Trump’s biographies were far from identical. Trump grew up as the son of a New York City real estate mogul. Bannon was raised in a traditional Catholic working-class home in Richmond, Virginia. Trump never wore a uniform as an adult, Bannon was a former officer in the US navy. Most of all, Bannon was intellectually curious and valued tradition, while Trump lacked a “political philosophy” and cared about little. Bannon emerges as an iconoclast and would-be revolutionary, Trump the moneyed vandal from Queens who also expected to be seated at the best table at Manhattan’s toniest restaurants.

Devil’s Bargain also captures snapshots of the other actors who strove to be part of Trump’s tableau. Kellyanne Conway, Reince Priebus and Sean Spicer make unflattering appearances. Conway is caught badmouthing the candidate’s chances and playing the sycophant. Priebus and Spicer are seen preparing for the post-election knife-fight that would have ensued had Trump lost. Not much has changed.

Green depicts Chris Christie, New Jersey’s governor, as impervious to larger realities. On election night, Christie actually tried to interpose himself between Barack Obama and Trump by offering his own cellphone as the medium for Obama’s congratulatory call. To which Trump replied: “Hey, Chris, you know my fucking number. Just give it to the president.”

The author also recalls the profanity-laced verbal beatdown that Trump himself administered to Paul Manafort, the man Bannon displaced at the helm of the Trump campaign, right before Manafort’s August 2016 dismissal. Distraught over a New York Times piece that portrayed the campaign as lost at sea, Trump humiliated Manafort in front of the campaign’s senior advisers in a scene straight out of Goodfellas. Trump tore into Manafort, shouting: “You think you gotta go on TV to talk to me … You treat me like a baby! Am I like a baby to you … Am I a fucking baby, Paul?” So, Joe Pesci has become the commander-in-chief. As if.

In hindsight, Green is nothing but prescient. In October 2015, Green profiled Bannon and labeled him the “most dangerous political operative in America”. Green was on the mark. In the same piece, Bannon also made his disdain for the Bushes, Clintons and dynastic politics clear. Ironically, it is Trump who conducts himself as the most dynastic of presidents. His White House is an unvarnished extension of his family and business.

Devil’s Bargain is straightforward, fact-filled and breezy. The reader knows that he’s being let in on the secret, even as the author imparts what he has learned without drama or hype. Green’s readers may also recall that the campaign gave him pre-election access to its data and polling operations, which Green then shared in his news reports. Consistent with Green’s approach of previewing his information, the book’s description of the “Breitbart Embassy” in Washington DC first appeared in Green’s October 2015 profile.

Like anyone else who is not Trump’s daughter Ivanka, Bannon has come to earn Trump’s ire. In April, Trump cut Bannon down a notch, saying he was just “a guy who works for me”, reminding the world Bannon had “joined the campaign late” and that he, Trump, was his “own strategist”. Yet with Jared Kushner, Ivanka’s husband and a one-time Bannon ally, embroiled in scandal, and Trump seemingly incapable of getting out of his own way, Bannon has regained some of his luster.

During the campaign, Bannon shared that Trump’s “back-up strategy” was to “fuck [Clinton] up so bad that she can’t govern”, adding that if Clinton “gets 43% of the vote, she can’t claim a mandate”. Although Clinton lost the election, she out-polled Trump 48%-46%, netting nearly 3m more votes. Six months in, the White House is mired in nonstop controversy, Trump’s legislative agenda is on a respirator and the wall remains invisible.

Watching this administration’s course unfold, it seems Bannon could just as easily have been talking about Trump and his demonstrable incapacity to govern.