Devil's Bargain

A book of the year for Waterstones, the Daily Telegraph, The Times, the FT, and the Irish Independent. The instant #1 New York Times bestseller. From the reporter who was there at the very beginning comes the revealing inside story of the partnership between Steve Bannon and Donald Trump the key to understanding the rise of the alt-right, the fall of Hillary Clinton, and the hidden forces that drove the greatest upset in American political history. Based on dozens of interviews conducted over six years, Green spins the master narrative of the 2016 campaign from its origins in the far fringes of right-wing politics and reality television to its culmination inside Trumps penthouse on election night. The shocking elevation of Bannon to head Trumps flagging presidential campaign on August 17, 2016, hit political Washington like a thunderclap and seemed to signal the meltdown of the Republican Party. Bannon was a bomb-throwing pugilist whod never run a campaign and was despised by Democrats and Republicans alike. Yet Bannons hard-edged ethno-nationalism and his elaborate, years-long plot to destroy Hillary Clinton paved the way for Trumps unlikely victory. Trump became the avatar of a dark but powerful worldview that dominated the airwaves and spoke to voters whom others couldnt see. Trumps campaign was the final phase of a populist insurgency that had been building up in America for years, and Bannon, its inscrutable mastermind, believed it was the culmination of a hard-right global uprising that would change the world. Any study of Trumps rise to the presidency is unavoidably a study of Bannon. Devils Bargain is a tour-de-force telling of the remarkable confluence of circumstances that decided the election, many of them orchestrated by Bannon and his allies, who really did plot a vast, right-wing conspiracy to stop Clinton. To understand Trump's extraordinary rise and Clintons fall, you have to weave Trumps story together with Bannons, or else it doesn't make sense.