This is an interesting book about the Trump campaign
and the collusion between Donald Trump and Stephen Bannon. The author is a
liberal, but tries to be as objective as possible throughout the narrative. But
yes, the book is ultimately an attack on The Donald and Honey Badger, something
to be kept in mind when reading it. Overall, I think “Devil's Bargain” is a
good complement to the recent pro-Bannon book “Bannon: Always the Rebel”. Both
give good insights into Bannon's character, while Trump's still remain
something of an enigma.
Joshua Green's main weakness is that he *just can't comprehend* how Trump could *possibly* have won the elections in the first place. He can't free himself from the notion that somehow, this is all a gross anomaly or mistake, soon to be corrected by Whiggish History. This leads Green to downplay the structural crisis in the United States (obvious to a disinterested observer) which makes a populist insurgency literally inevitable. The only way to explain Trump's upset victory is then to blame it on Bannon, the svengali and evil genius of the Trump Train. This may explain Green's obsession with the Irish-American fire-breather. (I say this with the reservation that I never read anything else by this particular author!)
That being said, Bannon *is* several magnitudes smarter than the run-of-the-mill conservative operative. In many ways, he isn't a run-of-the-mill operative to begin with. Bannon's genius seems to be the ability to influence very different audiences all at once. Green admits that Bannon took a largely fact-based approach to Bill and Hillary Clinton's corruption, and was good at getting the media to write about it, or even pursue the leads further. At the same time, Bannon's website and de facto campaign organization Breitbart (which he took over from its founder Andrew Breitbart) specializes in outrageous headlines, celebrity scandals and an immoderate commentary section. Bannon realized the potential of the gamer subculture roughly ten years before Gamergate, eventually appointing the flamboyant homosexual Milo “tech editor” of Breitbart. Milo was, of course, immensely popular with this demographic. The gamers must have been a universe apart from the Tea Party, where Bannon also made his influence felt by promoting Sarah Palin as a possible presidential candidate in 2011-2012. Despite his curious personal philosophy, in this book described as a fusion of Christian mysticism and Traditionalism, Bannon isn't sectarian. Instead, he has an ecumenical approach to everyone to the right of the mainstream except the most obvious fringe people (no Chemtrails or Roswell aliens at Breitbart). In many ways, the Trump campaign was a coalition of exactly the forces Bannon had tried to influence/unite from the start: working class populists, Tea Party conservatives, free speech libertarians, and “alt-right” trolls on Twitter and elsewhere on the web.
It's interesting to note that Bannon had been cultivating Trump for about four years before the New York City billionaire made his announcement to actually run for the presidency. The two men clicked immediately, both being aggressive “honey badgers” and alpha males. Bannon apparently tried to school Trump ideologically, and may have been instrumental in turning him against immigration. It's also obvious that Bannon was an informal advisor to Trump long before he became the formal campaign manager. Indeed, Trump's platform strikes me as “Bannonite” from the start. Of course, Trump himself must have been shrewd enough to realize that America First nationalism is a potential election winner, otherwise he would never have conversed with Bannon in the first place. While the author never says so, I get the impression that Trump might have used Paul Manafort mostly to strong-arm the Republican convention, something Manafort is apparently good at. With Trump officially nominated as GOP candidate, he no longer had any need for the petty oligarch, more or less firing him on the spot.
As presidential advisor, Steve Bannon tried to use the same tactics as he had during the election campaign: “shock and awe” to swiftly disorganize and weaken the opposition. This explains the aggressiveness of the Trump Administration from day one. Here, however, the honey badger failed. The bureaucracy, courts and Deep State are too entrenched for one man with a website to topple. The fickle and opportunistic Trump, who probably lacks a real philosophy, no longer saw any need for Bannon's economic nationalism and populism. Bannon himself eventually resigned and went back to Breitbart. It will be interesting to see what lessons he will draw from the failure of populism to decisively influence the Trump presidency. One is certain: he is not passive. Since the book was published, Bannon has been systematically promoting conservative and populist challengers to official Republicans in GOP senatorial primaries and the like, obviously as a dress rehearsal for a broader challenge in the mid-term elections scheduled for 2018. His old buddy Donald might live to see another upset, this time against his own tendencies to compromise with the party establishment…
Originally posted on November 19, 2017. Clearly, I overestimated Bannon´s "genius"...
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