Devil’s Bargain

by Joshua Green Penguin 288pp £16.99 The Week Bookshop £14.99

Joshua Green’s Devil’s Bargain is an account of the relationship “at the heart” of Donald Trump’s White House, said Ben Macintyre in The Times: that between the president and his “foul-mouthed”, “flip-flop-wearing” chief strategist, Steve Bannon. Bannon was brought in to “galvanise” Trump’s “ailing” campaign three months before last November’s election. But long before that, Trump had come to rely on the former naval officer and Goldman Sachs banker for “inspiration and guidance”. Many of Trump’s policies were inspired by the “anti-immigrant, Hillary-bashing” Breitbart News website, which Bannon ran until 2016. And Green reports that it was Bannon who argued, against received opinion, that it would be a disaster for Trump to “tone down” his rhetoric. Instead, he advised, “let Trump be Trump”. In his “balanced” and “informative” book, Green argues that an “unspoken deal” underpins the alliance: in exchange for getting Trump into the White House, Bannon imposed his “fully formed, internally coherent world view” on the president. This is the “devil’s bargain” of the title.

The “notoriously shambolic” Bannon wasn’t an obvious fit for Trump, said Toby Harnden in The Sunday Times. Bannon looks “like someone preparing to spend a night on a park bench”, while Trump is a “well-groomed germophobe” who detests slobs. And while Trump was born into wealth, Bannon was raised in a working-class Catholic home in Richmond, Virginia. Yet the two are “in sync” about many things, said Lloyd Green in The Guardian, such as the voters’ discontent with the status quo, and “white working-class antipathy towards immigration, Islam and liberal identity politics”. Green’s “fact-filled” and “breezy” book pulls the curtain back on this “symbiotic relationship”.