Joshua Green’s Election Account Ignores ‘The Russia Story,’ Goes Straight to #1

Joshua Green’s tell-all book on President Donald Trump and White House Chief Strategist and former Breitbart News Chairman Steve Bannon’s path to the White House shot straight to number one on the Amazon bestsellers list on Tuesday, the day of its release.

Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency, is notable for its omission of Russia in its comprehensive account of Green’s experiences on the campaign trail with Trump. Green covers, in depth, the convergence of personalities, ideological tendencies, activists, strategists, and die-hards that went into taking down Hillary Clinton and delivering the biggest presidential election upset in living memory.

Nowhere did he think necessary to mention supposed Russian interference in the election, Russian collusion with the Trump campaign, Russian sourced opposition research on Clinton, or any of the other mainstream media canards that came to dominate American political news only long after Pennsylvania was called on November 8, 2016, delivering the White House to Trump.

As Breitbart News’s Joel Pollack notes:

Last Sunday, Green evidently tried to make up for the “Russia gap” in his forthcoming book with an article in the New York Times claiming that Breitbart News had created a “mass hallucination” among Republicans, convincing them that Russia had not influenced the election. But his heavily-researched book gives the game away: there were many interesting and unexpected factors in Trump’s surprise presidential win, but Russia was not one of them.

The astounding success of Green’s book indicates a strong public interest not in hysteria over the ill-defined “Russia story” but genuine observations of a historic campaign. While doubtless written from Green’s perspective as a member of the much-maligned left-leaning mainstream press, Devil’s Bargain is crafted with an honesty and candor sorely lacking in that world as the first seven months of Trump’s term in office has passed with the news cycle dominated by speculation and innuendo.

If nothing else Green’s success shows there is a continuing hunger for honest accounts of the 2016 campaign and public fascination with the characters, Bannon chief among them, who made it historic.