President Trump’s top aide Steve Bannon was so worried House Speaker Paul Ryan would steal the nomination from Trump that he launched a campaign to smear him ahead of the GOP convention, according to a new book.
The thought of Ryan taking the nomination from Trump apparently “sent Bannon into a panic of his own,” Bloomberg Businessweek correspondent Joshua Green writes in, “Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency.”
Green’s work chronicles the careers of Trump and Bannon, how the two came together and the eventual rise of the alt-right.
“Any study of Trump’s rise to the presidency is therefore unavoidably a study of Bannon, too,” Green writes.
It also details much of Bannon’s work as the head of Breitbart News and how he used it as a vehicle to promote his antipathy of the Clintons along with eventual destruction of Trump’s political rivals, including Paul Ryan.
Green notes that Bannon did not hide his hatred of Ryan, often going on expletive laced trades in Breitbart’s Washington, D.C., headquarters. According to one account Green highlights, Bannon once called Ryan a “a limp-dick motherfucker who was born in a petri dish at the Heritage Foundation.”
The book also details how Gov. Christie Christie, R-N.J., fell out of favor with Trump over an election night phone call he orchestrated with President Obama and how Paul Manafort was ousted as campaign chairman.
In one tense exchange, Green says Trump scolded Manafort over a New York Times report that characterized him as inarticulate in the wake of negative attention Manafort received for his work on behalf of Ukranian politicians with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“You think you’ve gotta go on TV to talk to me?” Trump screamed at Manafort. “You treat me like a baby! Am I like a baby to you? I sit there like a little baby and watch TV and you talk to me? Am I a fucking baby, Paul?”
The exchange supposedly took place before Bannon was brought on as campaign CEO and Kellyanne Conway was hired as campaign manager.
