Bannon's Warning About Megyn Kelly Revealed

Stephen K. Bannon warned Roger Ailes that Megyn Kelly was going to be a problem—and Ailes, at first, did not take him seriously, a new book reveals in the course of multiple explosive sections over two chapters.

Bannon is the former executive chairman of Breitbart News Network who went on to become the CEO of President Donald Trump’s successful campaign and now White House Chief Strategist in Trump’s administration. The revelations about Ailes and Kelly—which recount Breitbart News’s coverage critical of Kelly’s performance at the first GOP presidential primary debate in August 2015 in Cleveland, Ohio—come in a new book by Bloomberg’s Josh Green titled Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency.

In Chapter 8, Green writes about how the GOP base had a vehemently anti-Fox News reaction to Kelly’s performance in that Cleveland debate, in which she badgered Trump with over-the-top questions. Green writes:

Bannon and the Breitbart editors had the same reaction and immediately turned on Megyn Kelly, with a fusillade of negative articles. She became the newest Breitbart narrative: the back-stabbing, self-promoting betrayer-of-the-cause. And Breitbart became the locus of pro-Trump, anti-Fox conservative anger. Between Thursday night, when the debate took place, and Sunday evening, Breitbart published twenty-five stories on Kelly, and the site’s editor in chief, Alex Marlow, went on CNN to accuse Fox News of ‘trying to take out Donald Trump’ and staging ‘a gotcha debate.’