Bannon: Back and Back Big

“Paleoconservatives aren’t pussies.”

As editor of The American Conservative, I feel honorbound to extract an explanation on my interview subject’s recent utterance to the New York Times: “Conservatives are pussies.” The one and only former White House chief strategist stabbed in further: “I’m a hard-core populist. I’m a hard-core nationalist. I’m not a conservative. …The Republican Party is a bunch of [expletive]. They’re controlled opposition.” 

He clarifies he means “Conservative, Inc.,” the business and policy classes of Republican politics, not TAC’s founding stock. 

It’s been four-and-a-half years since I’ve seen Steve Bannon. In the basement of his fabled Capitol Hill townhouse on a midwinter Saturday afternoon, Bannon seems the same, maybe better. He’s sharper and fiercer—that is, more Steve Bannon than I had remembered. He says it’s the time in prison that shows. 

“Focus” is what losing liberty teaches you, he remarks. 

Bannon had called me after a recent appearance on Tucker Carlson’s program, where I denounced a dishonest effort to fumigate some of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s new hires and bemoaned any lurch toward war with Iran. Though seen by some as a philosopher, Bannon is quietly more of a trafficker of ideologies, and information, than a settled mind or stone tablet. He expresses ambiguity about the Pentagon controversy, before perhaps more controversially asserting that maybe the famed Chicago international relations guru John Mearsheimer hasn’t gotten anything wrong, including his 2007 book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.  

I’ve known Bannon since August 2017. He hoovers up ideological debate and the day’s events, then blends it all into his trademark, working-class Irish Richmond smack talk. Midway through our three-and-a-half hour sit-down, Bannon dispatched an aide to retrieve a Washington Post from Union Station. It had been missing that morning. The ex-Goldman man maintains an Eighties’ banker’s table setting—more phones than hands, and a hard-copy media digest befitting a head of state. When he texted me further in the succeeding days, I had half expected to be woken up to a call a la Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: “Money never sleeps, pal.”

The initial haggling is about food. We’re almost entirely alone, but Bannon works a hazy cavalcade of subordinates over the hours by phone and text. Quickly enough, brunch from Butterworth’s appears. The spot has been recently written up in the Post and the Wall Street Journal as the smaller, younger heir in spirit to the old Trump Hotel in Penn Quarter. The grub is strong, but Bannon is more than usually exultant. You wouldn’t serve the food in prison to animals, he says, and Bannon (a workaholic teetotal) relishes his dish as only a freed and strange breed of ascetic can. 

Bannon is not poor. His outlaw worldview and appearance masks the reality that he has spent a hard-charging life at the winners’ table. His mechanism is more hedge-fund manager than washed-up politico. (At one point, he privately castigates an ex-aide for indolence.) It’s not altogether clear, but there’s talk of more property to come in Washington; a house sold in Connecticut; multiple properties in Arizona; a place in Montana that he never sees (no reliable reception to broadcast his prominent War Room show); houses in Los Angeles that he’s either renting out or lost to an ex or got Californian justice in the recent infernos. “I love California,” the longtime Angeleno and lifelong showman says.  

But whatever riches feel like almost an afterthought or distraction: With President Donald Trump and the Republicans back in the saddle, it’s going to be Washington almost all the time for the foreseeable future. There’s a girlfriend. Then he sort of shrinks from the term, because he hardly sees her. 

We dive in. 

Bannon remains “a super hawk” and “leader of the super hawks” on the China issue, but he says he’s “in both camps” (those favoring confrontation versus those inclined toward restraint) when asked what to do about it. When pressed, Bannon appears on the verge of denouncing Matt Pottinger, the former National Security Council aide who resigned after the January 6, 2021 attacks, because “he had every opportunity to stick with us.” 

Pottinger is not (yet at least) back for Trump tour two, but remains influential. He recently wrote in the neoconservative Free Press that, should true-blue foreign policy realists and restrainers triumph, “Trump’s strength in the Western Hemisphere could portend weakness in Europe and Asia.” 

Bannon emphasizes that Pottinger had been hired in the brief tenure of National Security Advisor Michael Flynn (for whom Bannon seems to retain much affection) because he was whip-smart. Bannon caveats that he admires that Pottinger was sanctioned by China, along with other Trumpworld figures like himself and the former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.   

But Bannon gets headlines because he’s sui generis and surprising—not because he’s a carefully choreographed, garden-variety thinker like those in his long shadow, the mob of intellectual dwarfs only a stone’s throw away in Northeast Washington’s influence organs. Few, if any, “super hawks” on the China fight want a cut in Defense spending, as Bannon does. (It is hopefully making more sense why he feels he is in “both camps” now.) 

And Bannon, of course, isn’t afraid of a stemwinder jeremiad that could be spoken verbatim by a character in a 2000s geopolitical thriller like Traffic or Syrianna. 

“The problem of the apparatus that controls us—and we are controlled by an apparatus—is that it’s financed by Wall Street,” says Bannon. “And it has its information, Big-Tech arm in Silicon Valley. But between [famed Michael Moritz firm] Sequoia Capital, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley, they’re partners of the [Communist Party of China]. They’re partners with them. … They’re totally, inextricably linked.” Bannon intones that “we have to break the sociopathic overlords on Wall Street, and we have to break the apartheid state in Silicon Valley.”

“We have an oligarchy,” Bannon says, a term usually reserved for left-wing commentators. “We have a tech-feudalist oligarchy—it’s pretty obvious.” It’s a vintage version of the man who a decade ago told the ex-Communist Party USA member Ronald Radosh at a Washington party, “I’m a Leninist.”

What is eerie about Trump II in the early days is that it is in many ways, at last, a resumption (and marked improvement on) the governing spirit that disappeared when Trump dispensed with Bannon in summer 2017. 

“The Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over,” Bannon told the Weekly Standard (RIP) seven-and-a-half years ago. “We still have a huge movement, and we will make something of this Trump presidency. But that presidency is over. It’ll be something else.” 

Long before the political rise of Trump, when Bannon was a more surreptitious man on the move, Bannon told Radosh in 2013, “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal, too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”

Perhaps particularly for Trump and Bannon’s haters, that description today doesn’t feel that far off. “I am the guy who came up with the idea of deconstructing the administrative state,” Bannon reminded me of the campaign plank that once felt wild-eyed and peripheral to the Trump project to many (including for many in what critics might today call “Populist, Inc.”). But while Bannon is no libertarian (his open feud with San Francisco’s right wing makes that clear enough), he clearly marches to the beat of his own drum. 

The period in which Bannon started talking like this, the gammy Obama second term from 2013–2017 and just before, is also an epoch of greater historical emphasis of late. “After Obama’s reelection, what I picked up [on], it started in 2013: when things really started to unravel,” the venture capitalist Marc Andressen told the Hoover Institution’s Peter Robinson recently. 

Privately, other major Silicon Valley figures have pinpointed 2014, when Japanese heavy SoftBank began investing heavily with Northern California firms, as the year when America tech, and San Francisco, began going off the rails. (Today, for what it’s worth, President Trump heralds SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son’s investments in the United States).

Behind the scenes, Bannon still talks a lot more about Sarah Palin, whom he wanted to challenge Mitt Romney for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, and “Andrew,” that is, Breitbart, the founder of Breitbart News, than folks might imagine. Bannon assumed the chairmanship of the slasher political newsite upon his friend’s sudden death in March 2012, and in many ways, that succession made Bannon. 

But, unusually for him, Bannon seems almost doleful about the period, and plays up its importance.  

Bannon finds the August 5, 2011 episode of Real Time With Bill Maher of particular, historic hilarity. The lineup that night? Bannon (then by far the least famous and billed as a “Palin biography filmmaker”); the former Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers Christina Romer; Neil DeGrasse Tyson; the journalist Joan Walsh, who would go onto to become Hillary Clinton’s most vicious adherent in the press; and a chef called Anthony Bourdain. 

Bannon says Bourdain, off camera, was a total Kennedy assassination obsessive (the subtext here being he would have relished the contemporary raft of declassification ordered by President Trump). I ask him who the world-famous, late documentarian and celebrity had believed was behind it all. Bannon looks at me like it’s a stupid question: the CIA, quite obviously.   

Back to the present, Bannon singles out fellow Trump supporters like Andressen for his verbal flamethrower. He is perhaps tactically cutting back on his hatred (a little bit) for Elon Musk, who seems near all-powerful with Trump, and finding a new foil. And though Bannon’s style is more battle-axe than scalpel, subtle points of emphasis are a reminder of the power game behind the scenes. 

When Bannon’s War Room became an instant smash hit in late 2019, he said an aide told him he was “back from the dead.” For a fervent fan of the man, or a more casual observer of politics, the idea that Bannon ever left the scene over the last decade would seem comical. But there are these subtle reminders that things with Trump once got pretty dicey.

Which is why Bannon’s current crusade is important: Trump is seemingly allowing him to go to war with some of his allies, like Musk and Andressen, and it’s not fully clear why—or where that is going. Eventually, presumably, there will be a succession crisis for Trump’s job in 2027 and 2028. Bannon seems certain to make himself a voice in that struggle—and, let’s just say, he doesn’t exactly rule out to me that he could be a player outright himself.    

But perhaps appropriate for all the Lenin talk, we take a sharp left—to prison.

“It’s not so much my thinking” that has changed, Bannon says. “It’s that you feel very empowered coming through that environment, which is very dangerous at 70 years old. You just say, ‘Hey, that clock’s ticking.’” Bannon is optimistic but cynical, almost like the model political “gladiator” of the type he has tried over the years to train in Italy. “This thing,” he says of the state of the country, “[it’s] so obvious what’s happening. And it’s only going to get worse. So let’s have a throwdown. Let’s just do it right now.”

Bannon is bullish on the “MAHA” (Make America Healthy Again) movement, anchored around Robert F. Kennedy Jr., seeing it as almost a parallel institution to broader MAGA. Bannon, who is citing his age more, says he came to appreciate the power of the American pharmaceutical and biotechnology complex starting in the Covid-19 era. But he says it’s been building—the tension between the “health” industry and Trump, and Bannon’s own distaste for its leading figures—for years. 

Bannon cites one particular anecdote as proof of the scientific establishment’s supposed imperiousness. When Trump took over in 2017, Bannon said Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health, “runs Congress.” Collins “wouldn’t even come up to see Trump” at first when Trump was president-elect, claims Bannon. “I got Collins to [finally] to see Trump. It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t like one call.” 

Bannon says that figures like Collins “get the money in the budget, and then they spread it out to every Congressional district.” If one combined the money with the imprimatur Americans often assign to doctors and scientific officials, the United States was ripe for an initially docile reaction to lockdown mandates, Bannon seems to be arguing. “That’s when I realized: That’s the administrative state.”

But elsewhere, for the purposes of his anti-monopoly push, Bannon hails government officials, even openly liberal ones.

I press him on Lina Khan, the former chair of the Federal Trade Commission of whom both Bannon and Vice President J.D. Vance have spoken favorably. I raise the quiet critique that many on Khan’s staff were said to be dyed-in-the-wool leftists, or quite “woke,” figures with whom he and the vice president would vociferously disagree in many arenas. 

Bannon doesn’t care.  

“Lina Khan would spit on the floor” in his presence, Bannon says. “She’s not a Steve Bannon fan.” But “she is the fiercest person we’ve had in a long time at FTC [or] Justice that believes in entrepreneurship” and smashing big business.    

I make a point of asking Bannon for his evaluation of Bernie Sanders, noting that many of Trump’s early supporters, anti-system voters, had been primary voters for the Vermont senator in 2016 and even 2020. “Zero,” Bannon says. And then the refrain: “He’s a pussy.” 

“To take the Clintons on? It’s a fucking gun fight. They’re the mafia. Hillary Clinton’s as hard as anyone. Bill Clinton’s a clown, though he’s smart politically, don’t get me wrong. She’s as hard and tough a globalist as you’re ever going to meet. That woman is a stone cold killer. If you’re going to go after her,” you have to be ready for it—Bernie Sanders wasn’t, Bannon argues. “Why was I selected for the 2016 campaign? I hadn’t been in a campaign office in my life. I had been at Breitbart hammering Clinton for years. … We’d been after the Clintons as globalists.” 

On other matters, Bannon is coolly agnostic. “It’s a mess,” Bannon says of the budget situation, noting the numbers of voters in MAGA “who are having babies on Medicaid.” Bannon concedes of certain machinations out of the early term—including a budget office memo that caused major disruptions in Trump’s first full week in office—“maybe it wasn’t perfect.” Bannon then reiterates his desire to cut Defense first. “You have to do Defense.”

Bannon attacked Senate Armed Service Chair Roger Wicker’s proposal to have American defense spending at 5 percent of gross domestic product. 

“You can’t do 5 percent of GDP,” Bannon says. 

A native Southerner, Bannon attacks “the cardinals,” which is Bannonspeak for hawkish Republican Senators, from a particular sectional angle. “It’s the Armed Services Committee. And it happens to be all Southerners, virtually. …Southern military tradition. And they were smart: they put all the stuff down there, and created a bloc. This is why you’ve got an aircraft carrier named after [the longtime Mississippi Senator] John Stennis.” Wicker is from Mississippi.     

Bannon veers from hawk to restrainer depending on the issue. Take Russia and Ukraine, where Bannon is strident and forceful that the war must end. “I totally oppose it,” Bannon tells me of a white paper written by the current Ukraine special envoy, Keith Kellogg, and the former John Bolton official Fred Fleitz. Coated with a heavy slick of flattery for Trump, the document authored for the well-connected America First Policy Institute states bemoans “the Biden Administration’s risk-averse pattern in the armament of Ukraine” among other observations (some reasonable). 

In restraint circles, the stated Kellogg policy is generally considered the “escalate to de-escalate” strategy that thinkers such as Mearsheimer think is likely to take place. And it is something of a volte-face for Kellogg, who took the GOP Convention stage in 2020 attacking endless wars. In that speech, Kellogg said Fleitz’s former boss, Bolton, was “an architect of failure. … He had his own agenda. He pushed his own agenda. … Is John Bolton a liar? Yes, he is.”  

“I got a lot of time for General Kellogg,” Bannon says now. “On this one, and I think it’s because of the pressures around town, I think he’s dead wrong. If you say ‘one hundred days,’ you’re going to be there for a hundred years. You have to get out.” 

Bannon continues: “We have to be adamant about this. Because good men like Keith Kellogg are now talking about ‘hundred days, this, and maybe a ceasefire in April, and maybe another thing in May.’ Once you get there: look at Nixon [and Vietnam]. You just get drawn into it.” 

“We can’t be part of this,” an animated Bannon says. “We have to cut the funding off now, immediately. We have to tell people we want a ceasefire, immediately. OK? … We have to get in a room, immediately. And we have to let whatever deal happens, happen—immediately.” 

Bannon calls the war “two Slavic entities slugging it out.” 

And the reconstruction? “I think it has to be European troops—I think it has to be European money,” he says. “There should not be an American nickel that goes until we have rebuilt Appalachia and Los Angeles.”

We close on a light note: religion and prison.

I ask Bannon why, although he is heavily associated with religion and perhaps quite affiliated with traditional Roman Catholicism, he doesn’t seem to talk about it much. Most recently, Bannon has used his Christianity as a point of distinction with the “transhumanists” of Silicon Valley. But does Bannon think the country is rapidly secularizing, and is he honing his pitch for new audiences? How important is this topic to him, really?   

“It’s got to be infused into your work,” Bannon says of religion. “It’s got to be infused into your line of work. And if you’ve got to tell people all the time about it all the time, to me, that’s self-defeating. Let them see it in your works and actions.” 

Bannon does get philosophical now: “If you think about it: why are you here in this point in time? Or all the times and ages of man? … If you believe in God, why did divine Providence choose you for this place and time? And that’s what you have to think about as your agency.”

Prison “emboldened me,” Bannon says. He notes that he is hesitant to speak about it (I’m not sure he has to any other reporter). “If I’m making it through here at 70 years old, there’s nothing that can hold me back—nothing.”

Bannon reported to Danbury Prison in Connecticut in mid-summer last year. I asked him how he actually heard that President Joe Biden had exited the race after extreme Democratic Party pressure (Biden’s disastrous debate performance had occurred in the final days of Bannon’s freedom in late June 2024). “Well, there is television,” Bannon says wryly. 

Now at liberty, Bannon watches MSNBC and CNN. “Because we try to deconstruct it. And it does the best job of covering MAGA,” he says. “I never watch Fox, because it’s TV for stupid people. It’s just ridiculous talking points from the [Republican National Committee]. But in prison, when it is available to watch, they all watch Fox.”

“It’s Fox. You cannot not watch Fox,” Bannon says of the jailhouse television menu.

Bannon said he mostly avoided it even there, though: “I refused to watch it.” 

Bannon said he still had email. “You can spend an hour online. Then you have to spend fifteen minutes off. And then you can be back on. … You can do it from 6 in the morning until 10 o’clock at night.” Bannon noted, as in his liberation sermon at New York following his release, that he also had a job teaching civics to fellow inmates. 

“In a federal prison,” Bannon says. “You’re treated like an animal. The purpose is to treat you like an animal. It’s not to rehabilitate you. It’s to break you. … It’s incredibly violent, because of the drugs. It’s incredibly violent because the young prisoners [take to drugs out of despair] … You can never really be by yourself. … All moves are controlled.”

“At every moment in prison—sleeping and awake—you have to be so focused,” Bannon says. “Just that practice of focus, it’s almost like a zen practice. It’s very empowering.”

“I had a great experience,” Bannon claims extraordinarily. “It was very uncomfortable. And it’s made to be uncomfortable.” 

“One thing you might not know about prison is there are no chairs,” Bannon riffs. “You have a steel slab that you sleep on in your cell—and a tiny little mattress. No pillow. Really no blanket. … And your toilet’s right there. So you have no privacy. And, you know, a couple of showers for 84 guys. … So the whole thing’s to break you. And you look at the chairs. And there’s a little plastic chair in your cell. … And you have a couple of those in the TV room, and you have a couple of those in the chapel.”

Bannon’s empathy for his fellow inmates still on the inside (he says he’s still in contact with many of his “friends”) is plain: “You, as a human being, as a 25-year-old man, for the next 20 years of his life, you will never sit in a chair. Over in the education room where I taught, there’s a little school desk where you could put a 5-year-old. But there are no chairs. Cops sit in chairs. Administrators have chairs. There are no chairs for inmates.”

As the afternoon draws to a close, I realize we have barely spoken about President Donald Trump. His presence, not even two weeks into this new administration, is simply ambient in Washington now, and especially in conversation with someone like Steve Bannon. Any sign of friction between the two has vanished, like two partners who have settled into a mutually beneficial flow. 

“Donald Trump’s a savage,” Bannon says, staring me down. And then we move on.