Devil's Bargain Quotes

“Bannon thrived on the chaos he created and did everything he could to make it spread. When he finally made his way through the crowd to the back of the town house, he put on a headset to join the broadcast of the Breitbart radio show already in progress. It was his way of bringing tens of thousands of listeners into the inner sanctum of the “Breitbart Embassy,” as the town house was ironically known, and thereby conscripting them into a larger project. Bannon was inordinately proud of the movement he saw growing around him, boasting constantly of its egalitarian nature. What to an outsider could look like a cast of extras from the Island of Misfit Toys was, in Bannon’s eyes, a proudly populist and “unclubbable” plebiscite rising up in defiant protest against the “globalists” and “gatekeepers” who had taken control of both parties. Just how Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty figured into a plan to overthrow the global power structure wasn’t clear, even to many of Bannon’s friends. But, then, Bannon derived a visceral thrill anytime he could deliver a fuck-you to the establishment. The thousands of frustrated listeners calling in to his radio show, and the millions more who flocked to Breitbart News, had left him no doubt that an army of the angry and dispossessed was eager to join him in lobbing a bomb at the country’s leaders. As guests left the party, a doorman handed out a gift that Bannon had chosen for the occasion: a silver hip flask with “Breitbart” imprinted above an image of a honey badger, the Breitbart mascot. — Bannon’s cult-leader magnetism was a powerful draw for oddballs and freaks, and the attraction ran both ways. As he moved further from the cosmopolitan orbits of Goldman Sachs and Hollywood, there was no longer any need for him to suppress his right-wing impulses. Giving full vent to his views on subjects like immigration and Islam isolated him among a radical fringe that most of political Washington regarded as teeming with racist conspiracy theorists. But far from being bothered, Bannon welcomed their disdain, taking it as proof of his authentic conviction. It fed his grandiose sense of purpose to imagine that he was amassing an army of ragged, pitchfork-wielding outsiders to storm the barricades and, in Andrew Breitbart’s favorite formulation, “take back the country.” If Bannon was bothered by the incendiary views held by some of those lining up with him, he didn’t show it. His habit always was to welcome all comers. To all outward appearances, Bannon, wild-eyed and scruffy, a Falstaff in flip-flops, was someone whom the political world could safely ignore. But his appearance, and the company he kept, masked an analytic capability that was undiminished and as applicable to politics as it had been to the finances of corrupt Hollywood movie studios. Somehow, Bannon, who would happily fall into league with the most agitated conservative zealot, was able to see clearly that conservatives had failed to stop Bill Clinton in the 1990s because they had indulged this very zealotry to a point where their credibility with the media and mainstream voters was shot. Trapped in their own bubble, speaking only to one another, they had believed that they were winning, when in reality they had already lost.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“Breitbart’s genius was that he grasped better than anyone else what the early twentieth-century press barons understood—that most readers don’t approach the news as a clinical exercise in absorbing facts, but experience it viscerally as an ongoing drama, with distinct story lines, heroes, and villains. Breitbart excelled at creating these narratives, an editorial approach that lived on after his death.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“For all his early-morning bravado, Bannon sounded as if he still couldn’t quite believe it all. And what an incredible story it was. Given the central role he had played in the greatest political upset in American history, the reporter suggested that it had all the makings of a Hollywood movie. Without missing a beat, Bannon shot back a reply worthy of his favorite vintage star, Gregory Peck in Twelve O’Clock High. “Brother,” he said, “Hollywood doesn’t make movies where the bad guys win.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“And then Trump delivered one final importunement to the crowd. “Go to bed!” he told them. “Go to bed right now! Get up and vote!” On Election Day, Trump’s forecasting model indicated that he probably wouldn’t make it. Some of his advisers said his odds of victory were 30 percent; others went as high as 40 percent. At least one adviser said, “It will take a miracle for us to win.” And then the world turned upside down.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“Ivanka spoke up: “My father has something big to tell you.”  “What’s that?” Murdoch said. “He’s going to run for president.” “He’s not running for president,” Murdoch replied, without looking up from his soup. “No, he is!” she insisted. Murdoch changed the subject. Trump nursed the slight for months, seething at the indignity. “He didn’t even look up from his soup!” he’d complain. The insult weighed heavily on him, and it made Fox News a perennially fraught subject.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“After Pope John Paul II permitted limited use of the Latin-only Tridentine Mass, which was banned by the Second Vatican Council, the elder Bannons became Tridentine Catholics. “When [the Roman Catholic Church] first started allowing it in the mid-eighties,” Steve Bannon recalled, “we left our parish that we’d been in for years and went and joined St. Joseph’s in Richmond, which offers a Tridentine Mass.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“Trump’s campaign was built on stoking xenophobic impulses,”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“of Clinton’s close aides, who had saved some of Clinton’s e-mails on Weiner’s laptop. Having declared the Clinton e-mail case closed in July, when he delivered an unprecedented public rebuke of her “extremely careless” conduct, Comey now told Congress that he was reopening the Clinton investigation. Ever since The New York Times broke the news on March 2, 2015, that Clinton used a personal e-mail account and private server as secretary of state, risking exposure of classified documents to hostile foreign powers, the subject of her e-mails had stalked her campaign, fusing with the damaging”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“Arthur Robinson, who lived on a sheep ranch deep in the Siskiyou Mountains of southern Oregon, decided to challenge the longtime Democratic congressman, Peter DeFazio. Calling Robinson a “research chemist,” while technically accurate”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“outset of the election cycle, I’d approached the job of”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“Asked at the 2014 Vatican conference about the racist element found in many far-right parties, Bannon replied that “over time it all gets kind of washed out.” He seemed to regard it as an unavoidable evil, a kind of way station on the path to populist triumph.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“By exhuming the nationalist thinkers of an earlier age, Bannon was trying to build an intellectual basis for Trumpism, or what might more accurately be described as an American nationalist-Traditionalism. Whatever the label, Trump proved to be an able messenger.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“Bannon’s a political entrepreneur and a remarkable bloke,” Farage said. “Without the supportive voice of Breitbart London, I’m not sure we would have had a Brexit.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“If Bannon was bothered by the incendiary views held by some of those lining up with him, he didn’t show it. His habit always was to welcome all comers.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“Politics is downstream from culture”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“Milken, a Jew who wore an ill-fitting toupee, was initially shunned, and later despised, by the old money firms with their WASP lineage and culture of restraint. But it was Milken who ultimately prevailed by storming their fortresses and upending their business....More than anything, Milken was a kind of spirit animal who fired the imagination and showed just how far you can go if you stopped worrying about appearances and seized opportunity. His lesson was never forgotten.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“And yet Trump was hardly dissuaded. His habit always was to quiz anyone and everyone about what they thought, whether or not that person could claim any expertise on the topic at hand. In Trump's mind, then, Steve Wynn's opinions about politics and how to shape it were every bit as valid and worth listening to as those of a seasoned political consultant.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the storming of the presidency

“Facts get shares; opinions get shrugs.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“Trump grew incensed at the popular notion that Bannon was the one really running the show—that he was, as an infamous Time cover put it, “The Great Manipulator.” Soon afterward, Bannon was unceremoniously demoted, though he kept his job and clawed back to a position of influence.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“At heart, Trump is an opportunist driven by a desire for public acclaim, rather than a politician with any fixed principles.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“Trump’s self-conception as the all-powerful Apprentice boss blinded him to a fundamental truth of the modern presidency: that the president needs Congress more than Congress needs the president.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“Trump’s White House was plunged into chaos and scandal from which it has not recovered—and may never. Bannon, the imaginative reconceiver of U.S. politics, hung streams of paper listing Trump’s “promises” from the walls of his West Wing office.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“In the shell-shocked aftermath of the election, President Obama, looking shaken, appeared in the White House Rose Garden to deliver public remarks intended to project a sense of calm—a sense, really, that the basic stability of the country remained intact. “The sun is up,” Obama said. “I know everybody had a long night. I did as well. I had a chance to talk to President-elect Trump last night—about 3:30 in the morning, I think it was—to congratulate him on winning the election.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“The last few days have proven to be pivotal in the minds of voters with the recent revelations in reopening the investigation of Secretary Clinton,” it read. “Early polling numbers show declining support for Clinton, shifting in favor of Mr. Trump,”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“And then the bombshell landed. Early in the afternoon of Friday, October 28, James Comey, the director of the FBI, sent a letter to Congress announcing that new evidence had emerged in the case relating to Hillary Clinton’s e-mails.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“On the first business day after Manafort’s firing, Trump put out a statement intended to reframe the race: “Hillary Clinton is the defender of the corrupt and rigged status quo. The Clintons have spent decades as insiders lining their own pockets and taking care of donors instead of the American people. It is now clear that the Clinton Foundation is the most corrupt enterprise in political history. What they were doing during Crooked Hillary’s time as Secretary of State was wrong then, and it is wrong now. It must be shut down immediately.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“by installing Bannon, Conway, and later Bossie, Trump was handing the reins of a half-billion-dollar political enterprise to a seasoned team of professional anti-Clinton operatives. These three figures from the Republican fringe, and the menagerie of characters they brought with them, were suddenly in charge of running a major-party presidential campaign—against an opponent, Hillary Clinton, whom they’d been plotting to tear apart for the better part of twenty-five years.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“If you were looking for a tone or pivot, Bannon will pivot you in a dark, racist, and divisive direction,” said the GOP consultant Rick Wilson. “It’ll be a nationalist, hateful campaign. Republicans should run away.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“Stuart Stevens, who ran Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. “Trump is a nut, and he likes to surround himself with nuts. It’s a disaster for the Republican Party.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

“Manafort’s ouster extinguished the last vestige of hope for Republicans praying that Trump would at last pivot to a more statesmanlike approach.”
― Joshua Green, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency