The classic books about presidential campaigns don’t fixate on chronology. They only use chronology—the run from primaries to conventions to debates to the election—to tell a bigger story, one that transcends the campaign.
Five books fall into this category. Teddy White’s The Making of the President in 1960 wasn’t about the campaign everyone saw but about what JFK and his team did beyond public view. That should sound familiar. Since then, it’s become the basic formula for campaign stories.
Tim Crouse exposed how big-time, big-ego reporters operated in 1972 in The Boys on the Bus. Jeff Greenfield’s The Real Campaign explained the 1980 race from the level of the conservative issues that helped elect Ronald Reagan, not the personality parade the press had focused on. In What It Takes, Richard Ben Cramer used the 1988 campaign to examine the traits and psychological makeup needed to win the presidency. And then there was Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72—a fantastic trip never to be duplicated.
These books are classics because they’re different from what nearly everyone else wrote. They’re all still read decades later. Will that happen with Joshua Green’s book about the 2016 campaign, Devil’s Bargain? It has already hit the top of the nonfiction bestseller list. But classic? Time will tell.
Devil’s Bargain tells a story of two people: Donald Trump and Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist for the final three months of the campaign. But Bannon is the star. Trump merely plays a supporting role.
Green, a political writer for Bloomberg Businessweek, insists that Trump wouldn’t have won without Bannon. This has irritated the president, who doesn’t like to share credit. His ire surely played a part in Bannon’s exit this August from the White House, where he’d been top strategist and a chronic pot-stirrer.
One year earlier, when Bannon officially joined the campaign in August 2016, it was already in chaos, as campaigns often are. But at the White House, Bannon generated chaos all by himself in his crusade to keep Trump from drifting away from the issues—immigration, trade, nonintervention overseas—he had run on.
Bannon soon had enemies. Gary Cohn, for one: Trump’s chief economic adviser is a Democrat who was said to be in line for the same post in Hillary Clinton’s White House had she won, and he clashed with Bannon on a range of economic policies. Two of the president’s closest advisers, his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner, aren’t on Bannon’s page socially or ideologically. And then there are the generals—John Kelly, the current chief of staff, and H. R. McMaster, the national security adviser. To put it mildly, they aren’t fans of Bannon’s brand of nationalism, which stresses staying out of overseas wars and crises. Last week, Trump sided with the generals and ordered 4,000 more troops to Afghanistan. The timing of that decision and Bannon’s departure was no coincidence.
Bannon had never worked in a presidential campaign before joining Trump’s team. But he’d been advising Trump for several years and persuaded him to emphasize the Southern primaries. The strategy worked, especially after Bannon engineered Senator Jeff Sessions’s endorsement of Trump. Sessions is now attorney general.
Bannon, 63, isn’t Trumpian in style. “He looked for all the world like someone preparing to spend the night on a park bench,” Green writes. When he appeared on stage for Trump’s victory speech, he hadn’t shaved. And his background is very different from Trump’s, too: traditional Catholic, Virginia Tech, U.S. Navy officer, Goldman Sachs, Hollywood, conservative filmmaker, Breitbart News. Only his Breitbart work aligned him with Trump.
Yet Bannon provided Trump with “two great services,” Green writes, “services without which Trump probably wouldn’t be president.” First, Bannon “supplied Trump with a fully formed, internally coherent worldview that accommodated Trump’s own feelings about trade and foreign threats, what Trump eventually dubbed ‘America first’ nationalism.”
Second, Bannon created and delivered to Trump “an infrastructure of conservative organizations that together would work, sometimes in tandem with mainstream media outlets,” to stop Hillary Clinton from becoming president.
The most effective of Bannon’s efforts was a two-year project in which a research team analyzed the finances of the Clinton Foundation. The result was Clinton Cash, a 2015 book by Peter Schweizer that carefully documented tales of corruption. “The book dominated the national political conversation for weeks on end, doing more to shape Clinton’s image in a negative way than any of her Republican detractors could.”
Trump grabbed the corruption theme enthusiastically, dubbing his opponent “Crooked Hillary.” In the campaign’s final months, the crowd chant “Lock her up” that first erupted at the Republican convention would become “a mainstay of Trump’s rallies, as popular with audiences as his greatest hit, ‘Build the Wall,’ ” Green writes. Trump supporters began to wear “Hillary for Prison” T-shirts at rallies. With Bannon egging Trump on, corruption became Trump’s chief attack against Clinton in the campaign’s closing phase; he even accused her of corruption practically face-to-face at a televised Catholic charity dinner.
Green recounts Bannon’s influence not just on the campaign but on Trump personally. (Trump “loved the guy,” says Sam Nunberg, a Trump campaign aide. Bannon’s populism intensified Trump’s own instinctive populism. And reading the Bannon-run Breitbart News informed Trump’s “political vocabulary,” Green writes.) But what elevates Devil’s Bargain above the normal run of campaign books is Green’s portrait of Bannon’s personality, his character, his thinking. The book is especially good in its depiction of its subject’s eclectic intellectual life. Bannon is a voracious reader. He spent a decade studying the world’s religions. He practiced Zen Buddhism briefly. He became a declinist. He was drawn to the work of René Guénon, an early-20th-century French philosopher and occultist. Green quotes Guénon as saying that in the face of secular modernity he wanted to “restore to the West an appropriate traditional civilization.”
Bannon shares that desire. “Everywhere Bannon looked in the modern world, he saw signs of collapse and an encroaching globalist order stamping out the last vestiges of the traditional,” Green writes. “Bannon’s response to the rise of modernity was to set populist, right-wing nationalism against it.” And that led him to Trump.
If Bannon made Trump president, Trump made Bannon famous. He is now a major player in politics and the media, with big things on his mind. “I feel jacked up,” he told THE WEEKLY STANDARD in his first post-White House interview. “Now I’m free.” At Breitbart, he’s free to reopen battles he lost at the White House. “We’re about to rev that machine up. And rev it up we will do.” His former boss was his first target: Breitbart blasted the president’s decision to send more troops to Afghanistan and warned against compromising on immigration. Day after day, we’ll hear from Bannon, only this time in full public view.
Fred Barnes is an executive editor at The Weekly Standard.
