Bloomberg Businessweek reporter Joshua Green has been covering former Breitbart chairman and now senior White House advisor Steve Bannon for a long time. Now, he has a new book out called Devil’s Bargain, which chronicles Bannon’s role in Donald Trump’s surge to the presidency.
According to reviews, the book is filled quite a few juicy inside details about clashes between personalities in the White House. Green writes that during the spring of 2016, talk was brewing of a contested Republican convention when it became apparent that Trump could win the GOP nomination. Some people had suggested House Speaker Paul Ryan as an alternative nominee if a contested convention were to take place.
“One fleetingly popular scenario to stop Trump from becoming the nominee was for GOP delegates to coalesce around a white-knight alternative at the party convention in July,” Green wrote, according to The Huffington Post.
It was a development that set Bannon “into a panic,” prompting him to begin “plotting an all-out war to stop Ryan, of whom he was both fearful and dismissive — sometimes within the same sentence.”
At one point in the book, Green says Bannon called Ryan a “limp-dick motherfucker who was born in a petri dish at the Heritage Foundation,” referring to the conservative think-tank which influences Ryan’s fiscal policies.
Speaking to CBS News, Green said Trump would not have won the presidency without Bannon.
“I think if you tortured Bannon, he wouldn’t answer that question. But my answer to that question is no, I don’t think he could have. Bannon’s efforts, specially the book ‘Clinton Cash,’ which Bannon helped mastermind, really tarnished his opponent in a way that she never fully recovered from.”
“And then on the flip side his ability to keep Trump focused on Clinton in the homestretch of the race, and then you have the James Comey revelations, and suddenly Trump was able to pull ahead. I give Bannon a lot of credit for having helped Trump do that.”
Featured image via Gage Skidmore
