In the War Room with Steve Bannon

Donald Trump won the 2020 election,” Steve Bannon pronounces. “Of that there is not even a question."

Obviously you expect me not to agree with you, I say. “Of course I expect you not to agree with me,” he says. “And I’m also not looking for you to agree with me. And I also don’t give a fuck who in the mainstream media agrees or disagrees with me.”

And so off we go—about this and about Covid (the Bannon view: “It’s 100 percent a bioweapon—fucking not even a question”) and about vaccines (“I would never in ten million years get this vaccine,” Bannon says, and asks if I would; I simply hand him my vax card, which he looks at with apparent amazement: “I’ve never . . .”) and about what I view—but naturally Bannon doesn’t—as his incessant anti-Semitic dog-whistling. At one point, he rhapsodizes about the range of information available to people these days.

Or misinformation, I say.

“A wide range of information,” he counters. “One man’s misinformation may be somebody else’s Holy Grail, right?”

I hardly agree—this seems a terrifying equivalence to me—but he’s already on to something else.

We are sitting out back of a home Bannon has near Tucson on the last day of July. The conversation is interrupted by a call on his cell. Here, for the record, is how Bannon says hello: “What the fuck don’t you understand about one o’clock?” The caller is Peter Navarro, who worked in the White House on economic issues throughout the Trump administration. Navarro went missing for this morning’s prerecorded episode of Bannon’s mouthpiece TV show and podcast, War Room, when Bannon was expecting him to pick apart Ron DeSantis’s new speech on economic policy. Bannon’s soon making nice but, as he often does, led with the loud.

Call over, he’s soon back in the flow. When I ask him what he wants people to think of him, he offers up the manifesto of a valiant, tireless warrior.

Asked about the potential for history to judge him wrong about everything, Bannon said, “That will be impossible.”

“I don’t care,” he replies. “Whatever they think. You’ve got so much time in this vale of tears, right, to use your agency. And you’ve got to be able to look in the mirror every day and just say, I’m leaving it all on the field, and I’m nonstop, all that. And whatever they think, they think. Remember, as much as I’m hated by—and/or dismissed by—the mainstream media or the Left, I’m much more hated and dismissed by the Republican establishment. Hated. Hated. So I don’t care. History is going to be the judge. Remember, over time history judges things very differently. There are people today that are heroes that were looked at as goats. I mean, look at Oppenheimer. It changes over time. So I think you just got to do what you have to do and let the cards fall where they may. I can look at the results. I can see what’s happening. I see how we’re changing American political history. We’re ascending. We’re getting bigger.”

And what if history decides you were wrong about everything?

“That will be impossible.”

We continue this back-and-forth, which somehow seems both necessary and futile, for more than three hours, then take a break for the day. As for what happens later that evening, how you choose to interpret it may depend on how you feel about science and meteorology and the vagaries of energy flow; on how you feel about chance and numbers and the random play of improbable events; on how you feel about the existence or nonexistence of God and His interventionist tendencies; on how you feel about fate and symbols and auguries. And, of course, on how you feel about coincidences.

These, anyway, are the facts:

Bannon goes to bed early. Around eight o’clock in the evening, he is awoken by what sounds like an explosion. (“Dude, I’m telling you, we thought the house had blown up. I’ve never had, even on my Navy ship—I’ve never been that direct a hit.”) Right outside the front door of Bannon’s house, just to the left as you enter—and precisely above War Room’s makeshift Arizona studio—stands a date palm, maybe forty feet high. A lightning bolt had hit the palm’s trunk, just above the height of the roof, and flames are now climbing both upward to the fronds and down the trunk.

“That entire beautiful palm was literally lit up like a torch,” Bannon tells me. “It was raining fire.”

One problem with hating pretty much everything Steve Bannon says and everything he stands for is that it might be exactly what he wants. “I hope they say I’m a devil,” he’ll tell me. “I hope they say I’m a fucking demon. I could give a fuck less. All I want to do is win.” Another is that maybe such dilemmas are a distraction, masking more crucial questions. For instance: Is Bannon truly someone forever playing the game several levels above and ahead of the rest of us, his every ambiguous zig and zag calculated to further a majestic master plan? Or is he actually just one more big-talking huckster, brazenly improvising whatever he can with whichever tools he can muster, making it all up as he goes? Or—maybe the most chastening possibility of all—might it be that in our modern-day runaway world of increasingly fractured and divided truths, there’s no longer a meaningful difference between the two?

Bannon’s past offers contradictory clues. He launched himself into most people’s consciousness as the unkempt, take-no-prisoners agitator who took over Donald Trump’s faltering presidential campaign in August 2016. After Trump defied most predictions by winning the election that November and Bannon was appointed chief strategist in the White House, a notorious Time magazine cover story suggested that Bannon might be the second-most-powerful man in the world. The implication was that Bannon—“the great manipulator,” as Time’s cover line proclaimed him—was pulling the strings of the first. Six months later, in circumstances that remain disputed, Bannon was gone. Since then, he has hovered hazily in the middle distance. Looked at through one lens, he is the radical Right’s great ideologue, propagandist, and strategist, orchestrating both overtly and covertly a global agenda that is currently focused on bringing Donald Trump back to the White House before fundamentally reordering American society. Looked at through another, that’s exactly what he needs people to think as he wages the endless uphill battle for relevance and influence.

Whatever he is, he’s not lazy. War Room typically broadcasts live twenty-two hours a week, preaching a version of America crafted to horrify anyone not swept along with its relentless presentation of a country at the precipice’s edge, time running out unless enough good people inform themselves of the truths being hidden from them, then organize themselves to resist. To an outsider’s ears, it is not just the supposed truths, and the cavalcade of what are presented as supporting facts, that can seem at best unfamiliar, at worst poisonously inaccurate. This is a world with a whole disorientating language of its own. Here—to get a sense of both the substance and cadence of this upside-down world—is a selective glossary:

The Keebler Elves: Bannon’s disdainful collective term for the other candidates running against Donald Trump for the Republican nomination. Bannon, as an all-in Trump advocate, agitates against what he depicts as a pointless competition, a needlessly divisive distraction, and a waste of resources given that, in his way of seeing, the end result is already inevitable.

Bannon often embraces harsh criticisms—that he’s “a cancer,” for example, or that he has no conscience—as a kind of proof of purpose.

The Biden crime family: It is an article of faith in this world not just that Hunter Biden’s international business relationships embodied an extensive, calculated corruption and criminality, one that has been systematically covered up by the Democratic and judicial establishments, but also that President Biden and other members of his family knowingly participated in, and received large sums of money from, these relationships, and that the president is consequently compromised in his dealings with sundry foreign powers.

Judas Pence: Another inviolable article of faith in this world is that the 2020 election was stolen. For those who believe this, pretty much everything that ensued was part of a valiant fight for truth, a fight in which they were betrayed on January 6, 2021, by Vice President Pence’s supposed failure to prevent the certification of the 2020 vote.

Lawfare: A further article of faith is that all of the current legal proceedings against Donald Trump are coordinated charges that have been concocted to prevent his return to power, and that in this the judiciary is controlled and steered by the Democratic establishment in what amounts to an act of warfare by putatively legal means, i.e., lawfare.

The Uniparty: Bannon expresses as much, if not more, disdain and hate for the Republican establishment as for Democrats. In his vision, the two share so many common interests in the status quo that they resist in lockstep the kinds of radical changes Bannon believes are needed, effectively operating in the shadows as a single united party (an idea, Bannon points out, once explored in the writings of Gore Vidal).

TV for stupid people: Bannon’s routine term for his hated Fox News, which he considers “an insidious cancer inside the conservative movement.”

“No coincidences”: A phrase regularly invoked in reference to a sign in Bannon’s Washington studio that reads, “There are NO conspiracies, but there are NO coincidences. Stephen K. Bannon”—a convenient rhetorical back door to what often seems exactly like conspiratorial thinking.

The sunlit uplands: The term Bannon often throws out—generally, as with all these terms, without explanation—to denote a happier place we will eventually find ourselves at the end of the necessary turmoil he aims to instigate. The phrase is borrowed from a famous speech given by Winston Churchill in 1940 to inspire the British people in their fight against Hitler.

That is the sound of War Room. There are often, however, soft words about one particular subject. “We’re getting the best Trump right now,” Bannon told his audience this morning. “I can tell you, having had the honor and privilege of working with the president since 2016, when you meet, when you see him now in private, this is the best Trump we’ve ever had: on point, focused, on fire, take-no-prisoners, understands exactly what the task and purpose is.”

Later, Bannon and I retire once more to his Arizona back patio for further conversation. A fountain burbles behind us; hummingbirds flit around. Lizards skitter across the ground. At one point a hawk flies by. “They keep the rats away,” he says, “so God bless them.” He continues where he left off on the show: “Here’s why I tell people, donors and all these guys. I said, You’re missing the point. You may hate Trump. You’re stuck with Trump. There’s nobody, while Trump’s breathing, that they’ll vote for.”

Engaging in discourse with—and writing about—someone like Steve Bannon presents a peculiar challenge.

Last year, in The Atlantic magazine, Jennifer Senior wrote an extensive and compelling profile that forensically unpicked the ways she saw Bannon “attempting to insert a lit bomb into the mouth of American democracy.” Senior referred to his “industrial-grade bullshit” and “straight up megalomania” and to his War Room show as “a mighty river of ordure.” In her story, a chorus of former colleagues fingered Bannon as “a con man” and “a cancer,” someone who “stumbled into the MAGA movement as a way to make money and to get fame and fortune” and who “may well be mentally unstable, in a frightening, disturbing kind of way,” even someone who could be legitimately compared—“we have seen his sinister form before”—to Hitler. Though the article also respectfully strained to convey something of the world as Bannon sees it, I presume that most Atlantic readers consumed it as a devastating takedown.

Though, as it turns out, not all of them.

“I thought that was terrific,” Bannon tells me. “I thought it was a great piece.”

It’s hard not to let it get into your head, this imperviousness. It’s not just that Bannon seems impervious to the most obvious lines of attack; it’s that he seems to relish and feed off them. Here is CNN’s Jake Tapper speaking of this world: “And where do people like that go to share the big lie? MAGA media. . . . I wish, I wish in my soul, that any of these people had a conscience.” And why am I so familiar with this quote? Because it is part of the montage that begins every episode of War Room, a montage that is generally followed by fresh media snippets from the previous twenty-four hours, frequently showcasing full-on, pointed—and often, to my ears, effective—mainstream eviscerations of the latest events and tendencies in what we might call Bannon-Trump world. You might expect the targets of such critiques to ignore or sidestep them; instead, Bannon leans into them, as though he considers them testimonials, as proofs of purpose. For instance, one day in August he’ll play a long clip from Morning Joe of Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski taking apart the duplicitous logic of the Right, culminating in Scarborough saying, “They know it’s a lie. They really do. They know it’s a lie. They know the game they’re playing. . . . They can never just say, ‘It’s wrong that he stole nuclear secrets and no president or former president has ever done that in American history.’ ‘It’s wrong that he tried to overthrow a presidential election.’ ” And then the broadcast cuts to a clearly delighted Bannon, smirking. “This was a gem,” he tells his audience. “They’re just in full meltdown.” The front Bannon presents, whether as astute tactics or bluff, is: Agree with us and we fly. Attack us, deride us, scorn us, demean us and we soar.

This article appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of Esquire
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Not long after Bannon left the White House, he was contacted by the documentarian Errol Morris. Back in 2003, Bannon had attended the American premiere of The Fog of War, Morris’s artful (and Oscar-winning) interrogation of Robert McNamara’s role in the debacles of the Vietnam War, at the Telluride Film Festival. “It’s one of the things that motivated me to really want to be, eventually, a documentary director,” says Bannon. (One of the many strands of Bannon’s earlier career—sometimes depicted as a triumphant restless visionary journey through a dazzling array of disciplines, sometimes as a textbook example of how a man who talks the right kind of game can keep failing upward—is his role as the maker of ambitious proselytizing right-wing documentaries.) “The nonlinear way he told the story just blew me away. Plus the fact that McNamara still didn’t quite get it, right?” Later, Bannon saw The Unknown Known, Morris’s 2013 film about Donald Rumsfeld: “I thought that was a disaster for Rumsfeld. I thought it exposed all the things that people had thought about him, of how he’s so certain on stuff—just like McNamara—and it’d get you in these horrible situations, right?” As Bannon remembers it, Morris now proposed making a film about Bannon that would be the third in this series, and Bannon’s response was this: “I said, Look, Robert McNamara and Rumsfeld, those guys are world historical figures. I’m some schmendrick that ran a little news site”—before taking over the Trump campaign in 2016, Bannon had been in charge of the right-leaning website Breitbart News—“and I spent a couple months at the White House. There’s no film there. And he goes: Let me determine that.”

On the surface, the strangest thing about Bannon’s account of this film’s genesis is his apparent lack of worry about being the third panel of a triptych, slotted in alongside Morris’s coruscating portrayals of McNamara and Rumsfeld. The resultant film, American Dharma, was anchored around excerpts from fifteen or so hours of Morris interviewing Bannon. “I made the movie ultimately because I was interested in Steve Bannon—or, if you like, the nature of Steve Bannon’s evil,” Morris tells me. “I’ve always been interested in difficult characters, in morally compromised characters, and Bannon didn’t seem to me in any way outside of that interest.” To its maker, it was perfectly clear what the movie showed. “American Dharma, properly considered, is a warning,” Morris says.

Bannon’s reaction to the film will, by now, come as little shock. “I thought it was fantastic,” he tells me. “If you look at Rumsfeld and McNamara, you come out and understand how they got us into these debacles and still don’t understand what they did. Well, I think there’s no doubt in that film Stephen K. Bannon fully understands exactly what he has helped wrought and is quite comfortable taking 100 percent accountability for that.”

Perhaps more surprising—and perhaps a bellwether of the increasingly intolerant ways in which storytelling around divisive and controversial subjects is nowadays judged—was how many commentators saw American Dharma as sympathetic to Bannon, and unacceptably so. For whatever it was worth, in the interviews Morris gave to promote the film he allowed less room for doubt, talking of “Bannon’s sadism” and “almost diabolical destructiveness,” his “smokescreen of bullshit” and “world of real nastiness.” Morris warned that Bannon “is not a moron but he is a cynical bastard, and no one, absolutely no one, should turn their back on him” and noted that he might be “one of the most dangerous men in the world.”

Bannon tells me that he considers these last two observations compliments.

The morning after the lightning strike, Bannon stands outside his house, surveying the damage, alongside a man who has come to work out what should be done about it. The fire department arrived last night in about six minutes, extinguishing the flames, but the top half of the trunk is blackened and embers litter the ground. The palm tree, Bannon is told, is dead and must be removed. Bannon asks whether they can replace it with one of the same height.

“Maybe a little bit shorter?” the man proposes. Bannon seems disheartened by this suggestion. The man points out that, in time, the new tree will grow.

“Okay,” says Bannon, “but how long does it take to grow that high? I won’t be around that long.”

Bannon was in the orbit of the January 6, 2021, insurrection—he spoke with former president Trump that morning and evening—but he hasn’t elaborated on his involvement.

When we return to the back patio—the temperature will peak at 102 today, but Bannon is in his usual two collared shirts over a T-shirt—we further discuss Donald Trump. From the outside, his alliance with Trump has sometimes looked less than straightforward. Bannon concedes that he was not an easy fit with what was required in his abbreviated time in the White House. “Look, I’m incredibly headstrong, I got that,” he says. “And I want you to be a partner if you kind of agree with where we ought to go.” Immediately after his departure, he and his former boss remained in contact—when Bannon gave a high-profile interview about his experiences to 60 Minutes, Trump called him and was, says Bannon, “very positive.” A schism became apparent a few months later, in January 2018, when Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury, an intimate account of the Trump presidency’s early days, was published. Bannon appeared to be a key source, and his views of Trump and others around him were not always flattering. Trump put out a statement denouncing Bannon—“when he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind”—then followed up with a tweet referring to “Sloppy Steve Bannon, who cried when he got fired and begged for his job. Now Sloppy Steve has been dumped like a dog by almost everyone. Too bad!”

“That’s a great line,” says Bannon when I cite the “cried when he got fired” sentence. “It’s a great line. I’ve got an older brother, so I know how people say things. I think if you asked President Trump today, he would say that was quite an exaggeration.”

Did you cry?

“No. God no. I resigned. I wasn’t fired. I resigned.”

Bannon argues that he has always been a loyalist. He points out that after January 6, 2021, most people peeled away, assuming that the Trump era had come to an end, but Bannon never did: “I had a lot of people call me, say, ‘It’s over, and you’re a smart guy, and you can help drive this into a positive way.’ I said, ‘That’s not a positive way. You’re just surrendering. I’m never going to stop. You scratch me and you just get a hardheaded mick.’ ” (Bannon often refers to his Irish family heritage in this way, usually in the context of resilience, hotheadedness, and stubbornness.) “ ‘It’s just the way I’m built. And we’re not going to stop. And I can see, if we hold, that Trump’s going to return to the White House.’ People fucking laughed at my face.”

Two and a half years later, with Trump the presumptive Republican nominee, that laughter has subsided. And as for his actual relationship with Trump now, Bannon says this: “I don’t want to talk about the specific conversations, but we speak pretty frequently, yeah. . . . It’s normally about what’s happening on the show and the clips and the poll numbers and what’s happening at the rallies.”

Given those words, and also bearing in mind the impression of personal intimacy with Trump I’ve heard Bannon convey to his War Room audience, what I will now relate might be taken as evidence of just how strange and unconventional the deep bond running between Trump and Bannon is. Though it could also, if you are so minded, be used to question its nature, or even its very existence.

On April 28, 2023, Bannon filmed a live episode of War Room from the library of Mar-a-Lago, a special to promote the vainglorious new coffee-table book Letters to Trump. The broadcast began with Bannon speaking with the book’s publisher, Sergio Gor. About fifteen minutes in, well ahead of the agreed schedule, Trump appeared off camera and greeted Bannon. “He starts smiling: ‘My Steve!’ ” Bannon recounts. The show cut to an ad break, and when it returned, Trump was in the interviewee seat, answering Bannon’s questions.

All very unremarkable, you might think, except for one astonishing aspect: By Bannon’s own account, this moment was the first time he and Trump had met in the flesh since Bannon left the White House in August 2017, almost six years earlier.

Bannon fills me in on how things proceeded that day. How afterward Trump invited him to stay for dinner, and though at first Bannon demurred, Trump insisted. And how they were then joined by Melania. Bannon describes the ensuing reintroductions: “He goes, ‘Steve . . . Melania.’ I go, ‘First Lady, so great to see you again. Haven’t seen you in a long time.’ She goes, ‘I always liked you, Steve.’ And I go, ‘I know, Melania, you and I, we hate the same people.’ And she laughed. A very knowing laughter.”

I ask Bannon whether he wants to give me a list, assuming he’ll sidestep, but he doesn’t entirely.

“Listen,” he says, “it’s no doubt we had some hard feelings with Jared and Ivanka and others. . . .”

At dinner, he says, they all talked, and sitting there at the table, Trump DJed from his iPad.

“He knows Melania hates it when he’s DJing,” Bannon notes.

There has since been a second meeting between Bannon and Trump, on July 19, before a screening of the movie The Sound of Freedom at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. Bannon says that he spoke with Trump for about twenty minutes beforehand and also had a long conversion with Jared Kushner, one he presents as a rapprochement.

One day, we go on an outing. The many twists of Steve Bannon’s early career have been well-documented but are nonetheless littered with curiosities, and the site of one of these lies a half hour or so north of where we are. Biosphere 2 was completed in 1991, a self-contained, domed system of different environments in which a group of people would be enclosed for extended periods of time and studied as they tried to subsist. At the time, what seemed like a weird futuristic experiment was an object of intense media coverage and some controversy, and in 1993 an investment banker was brought in to rationalize parts of the operation. This was Steve Bannon, who ended up running the project for about two years, along with a team including his younger brother Chris.

Chris is still involved, and today the three of us are heading up there. Steve has lost his glasses, so Chris drives. In the front, they talk about sharing a bedroom in their home in Richmond when they were young and reminisce about the local band they loved to see all the time, Steel Mill—“played at my high school, at the prom,” says Bannon. Steel Mill being Bruce Springsteen’s band before he had a recording contract. (This tracks. In his autobiography, Born to Run, Springsteen describes how Richmond became Steel Mill’s second home, where they built up a following and even “got hired for school events.” It was, Springsteen wrote, “one of the two places where we could make a buck.”) And then Bannon’s off, talking about seeing the Dead in ’73 and New Riders of the Purple Sage. On the Biosphere 2 property, before Chris Bannon gives me a tour (the Biosphere itself, part research site, part tourist attraction, is now run by the University of Arizona), we first go to the ranch house where Steve Bannon lived for two years in the 1990s—without, as he notes, air conditioning—and continue our conversations. I’ve told Bannon I want to talk to him about Michael Wolff’s books. Over a series of publications—2018’s Fire and Fury, 2019’s Siege, 2021’s Too Famous (and, to a lesser degree, 2021’s Landslide)—Wolff could be seen as the great chronicler of Steve Bannon, though perhaps not always of the man Bannon would now wish people to see.

The discussion gets puzzling right from the start. When I ask Bannon when he first met Wolff, his response is “After I left the White House? I don’t remember.” When I press that Wolff was clearly around him before that, Bannon offers a second, very specific date—that it was when Wolff and Kellyanne Conway did an onstage interview about the first hundred days of the Trump administration, which was on April 12, 2017. This perplexes me, but for now I decide not to challenge him further on it. Likewise, when I read Bannon a summary Wolff has written of their interactions—“We logged hundreds of hours of conversation together in Trump Tower, the White House, the frat-style accommodations he occupied on Capitol Hill, the luxury suites he favored when he was in New York, during a trip to Europe we took together, and over dinners at my house in Greenwich Village”—Bannon says, “Ridiculous,” adding, “I have ex-wives I haven’t spent hundreds of hours with.” (Bannon has been married three times—his eldest daughter, Maureen, works mostly behind the scenes at War Room—but says that these days he has no ongoing romantic relationship. “I’ve directed my chakras in a different direction,” he says. “I’ll be seventy shortly. I got a window here to have an impact.” In this regard, he mentions something that I can’t get out of my head. He tells me that even years ago, when he’d interview people for his own firm, his second or third question would be about their personal life. He says that it didn’t matter what they actually said: If they spoke for more than sixty seconds in response, they wouldn’t be hired.)

As Bannon tells me that he has read none of Wolff’s books, I quote to him some relevant passages. I do so less in the expectation that the 2023 version of Bannon is likely to reaffirm the opinions that Wolff reports he once had and shared, more in trying to understand how his present role and his relationship with Trump may—or may not—transcend this material. For instance, there’s this passage from Siege: “But Bannon also believed that if you could get around Trump’s repellent character, intellectual deficiencies, and glaring mental health issues, you ought to be able to see that Trump was being savaged—with the powers that be trying to run him out of office—for doing much of what he had been elected to do. Trumpism, in fact, was working.”

“I haven’t heard these,” Bannon responds, “and I think the reason that you haven’t heard these is that people realize it’s nonsense. It’s just Wolff trying to sell books. Is anybody out there in the media right now, anybody out there in the Republican staff, anybody out there, either lovers of Trump or haters of Trump, that don’t understand that I am Trump’s closest ally?”

Author Michael Wolff has written extensively about Trump. When Bannon appeared to be a key source in Wolff’s 2018 book Fire and Fury, about the early days of the Trump presidency, Trump took to calling his former advisor “Sloppy Steve Bannon.”

At one point, as I read him a series of further examples of how Bannon was said to have, as Wolff summarized in 2021, “conducted a riotously entertaining monologue about Trump and his family’s stupidity, avarice, incompetence, and corruption,” Bannon protests that if all this were true, “Why would Trump and I be this close today?” Which is, indeed, in all kinds of ways, the question.

The most explicitly damning material comes from the later books, but it was Fire and Fury that drew Trump’s “Sloppy Steve” pushback and so whose contents Trump presumably has some knowledge of. One passage—which I also read back to Bannon—strikes me as particularly relevant, again not so much for what it says about Trump’s capabilities (a debate that has its own life out in the world) but for how Trump might feel about someone who has questioned them like this: “Steve Bannon was telling people he thought there was a 33.3 percent chance that the Mueller investigation would lead to the impeachment of the president, a 33.3 percent chance that Trump would resign, perhaps in the wake of a threat by the cabinet to act on the Twenty-fifth Amendment (by which the cabinet can remove the president in the event of his incapacitation), and a 33.3 percent chance that he would limp to the end of his term. In any event, there would certainly not be a second term, or even an attempt at one. ‘He’s not going to make it,’ said Bannon at the Breitbart Embassy. ‘He’s lost his stuff.’ ”

“No,” Bannon tells me. “I don’t remember saying that.”

I mention other sources I’ve come across that seem to echo, and attribute to Bannon, something of the same idea. One is a quote I read in an interview with the 60 Minutes producer Ira Rosen, promoting a book he had written, referring to how Bannon had told him about Trump showing signs of early-stage dementia and raising the genuine possibility that because of this, Trump might be removed from office by the Twenty-fifth Amendment.

“Nonsense,” says Bannon when I relay what Rosen said. “Total nonsense. And I’ve never talked to Rosen, ever, except for the 60 Minutes interview, ever.” Bannon further argues that for that 60 Minutes interview, he had agreed to answer questions on anything—if he had said this to the show’s producer, why didn’t they ask about it in the interview? “No, I certainly never had that opinion. I don’t ever remember expressing it. President Trump—look how sharp he is today. I don’t remember anybody ever questioning his ability to perform the office.”

I ask him how he feels, if so, about a story like this being out there.

“It’s irrelevant. Nobody talks about it. Trump knows it’s bullshit. I didn’t even know he’d written a book. Have you heard anybody talk about that? Listen, I sell books—just the mention of Bannon and you can make whatever. . . . This is why, if I had to chase down every . . . remember, I’m an anti-Semite, I’m a white nationalist . . .”

And, for now, we talk of other things.

Whatever Bannon did or didn’t once say about him, his proximity to Trump and his ideas has certainly had marked legal consequences. Bannon was somewhere in the orbit of the events of January 6, 2021. He was part of strategic Washington hotel discussions in the days before and spoke to Trump both in the morning and evening of January 6, but beyond that he has refused to clarify much further. Whether out of abstract principle or contrariness or because he had secrets he didn’t want to tell, Bannon refused to comply with a subpoena to testify before the select committee investigating January 6. He was subsequently charged with contempt of Congress, found guilty, and sentenced to four months in prison, a verdict he is appealing.

Bannon at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in 2022. He routinely fosters the notion among his followers that he is close with former president Trump.

That is not the only legal peril he has been facing. In August 2020, Bannon was one of four men accused of diverting funds from a nonprofit, We Build the Wall, established to raise money for the private construction of barriers on the U. S.–Mexico border. If Bannon expected support from a president neck-deep in reelection maneuverings, none was forthcoming. “I didn’t like that project,” said Trump when the news of Bannon’s arrest broke. “I thought that was a project that was being done for showboating reasons.” (Bannon blames others for this: “That’s what Jared had told him. . . . Knowing the facts as he knows them now, he’s, I think, very supportive.”) Bannon’s three codefendants are now in jail. And Bannon? On Trump’s final day in office, he was pardoned.

I ask Bannon how he got the pardon.

“I have no idea,” he avers. “It was just him.”

You must have advocated for it.

“No, never.”

Really?

“No. Never advocated.” Bannon adds that he believes Rudy Giuliani may have brought it up “of his own volition.”

But you must have been pleased for it to happen?

“Sure. Definitely. There’s no doubt about that. I think that’s President Trump. I think he can think these things through.”

Why do you think he did it?

“I think he did it because he knows I’m an honest guy.”

Not that the whole affair is behind him. In September 2022, Bannon was indicted on state charges, which are unaffected by a presidential pardon, related to the same events. He claims to be unworried. “I have no doubt I’ll be exonerated at trial,” he says. “I never took one penny from this.” Likewise, when it comes to the four-month sentence he already faces, he professes to be “100 percent confident” that he will never serve any time. He talks about all these legal matters as though they’re just bothersome, minor paperwork errors that will be corrected in due course. It’s hard to determine how much of this is smart strategic thinking and clearheaded analysis, how much is unanchored self-belief, and how much is pure bluff.

Those things Bannon told me in Arizona, when pushing back against people who had reported comments he had made in earlier times about Trump . . . afterward, I can’t figure them out. Did he think I wouldn’t check further? Had he really reshaped the past in his memory to better fit the present? Does he genuinely think none of it really matters? Or did he just think that handling these questions as he did was the best tactic, however strong or weak his hand?

Either way, much of what he said that was checkable seems to have been wildly far from the truth. First, Michael Wolff. Bannon had eventually indicated to me that his initial contact with Wolff came in April 2017, in the first hundred days of the Trump presidency. Many of the details contradicting this are in Wolff’s books, and I also spoke with Wolff to clarify things further. Wolff describes first encountering Bannon at the Orlando airport in early 2016, when it was Bannon, who was still running Breitbart News, who recognized and approached Wolff. That summer, soon after Bannon took over the Trump campaign, he invited Wolff up to Trump Tower. “I probably saw him three or four times that fall,” Wolff says; they carried on speaking throughout his time in the White House. “I liked him,” says Wolff. “I mean, he was an enormous pleasure to spend time with. He could not have been more open, more accessible—a better source and better company.” When I tell Wolff that Bannon pushed back against the notion that they had logged hundreds of hours of conversation over the years, he says, “Well, it’s all on tape.” He confirms that he heard Bannon’s disparaging summary of Trump’s chances, and of Trump having lost his stuff, directly from Bannon. “Oh yeah, many times,” Wolff says. “I mean, possibly he’s convinced himself otherwise. I don’t know. As I say, I have not spoken to him in some amount of time, but he’s come to make his money off of a different point of view. He knows where his bread is buttered. He plays a role. I mean, in a sense, when I was with him he was just playing a different role. At the time, he was the apostate Trump, the clear-eyed person, and all of the other people were incredible sycophants.”

Then there’s Ira Rosen, the 60 Minutes producer whom Bannon claimed to barely know, telling me he only ever spoke to him for the 60 Minutes interview. I get hold of a copy of Rosen’s book, Ticking Clock: Behind the Scenes at 60 Minutes. The story it tells is so at odds with what Bannon professed that it is staggering. Rosen explains how he first met Bannon when working on a 60 Minutes story about insider trading in Washington—this was back in 2011—and how Bannon subsequently became someone he would meet up with periodically when Bannon was in New York. Rosen would trawl for gossip about Fox’s Roger Ailes while Bannon “encouraged me to do stories about the Washington swamp.” Immediately after Bannon took over the Trump campaign, Rosen, too, was invited up to the campaign headquarters. In his book, Rosen details some of their interactions and conversations, noting in passing that he and Bannon have exchanged more than a thousand text messages.

In 1993 Bannon, then an investment banker, was hired to help run Biosphere 2, near Tucson, a domed system of man-made environments where humans can practice subsistence. His brother, Chris, is still involved.

As for what Rosen says that Bannon told him about Trump’s purported dementia? One very good reason this didn’t form part of the substance of Bannon’s 60 Minutes interview is that these exchanges took place in the weeks and months afterward. Here is what Rosen wrote: “His criticism of Trump privately to me took on a different tone. He believed Trump was suffering from early-stage dementia and that there was a real possibility he would be removed from office by the Twenty-fifth Amendment, where the cabinet could vote that the president was no longer mentally capable of carrying out his duties. Bannon began to push that story hard. Bannon said that the president had no attention span, didn’t read, and now doesn’t listen. He said Trump repeats himself a lot, telling the same story minutes after he told it before.” In the book, Rosen describes how he sent Bannon an extract from a David Brooks column in The New York Times recounting that a group of senators recently meeting with Trump had seen “a president so repetitive and rambling, some thought he might be suffering from early Alzheimer’s,” and that Bannon texted back, “You need to do the 25th amendment piece . . . BTW brother I never steer u wrong.” I call up Rosen, who reaffirms that all of this is documented.

After I leave Arizona, Bannon texts me intermittently, but the tempo increases as the battle toward a possible government shutdown nears. “Next couple of weeks going to be crazy nasty,” he predicts. “Toxic and Lit.” Reading his texts and watching his shows, I find it difficult to determine how much he is reporting on events and how much he may be playing a role in orchestrating them. (He certainly often seems to know what is going to happen next well before it happens.)

A couple days before the shutdown deadline at the end of September, I visit Bannon in Washington. He returned from Arizona earlier that week. The burned-up palm tree, he updates me, has been taken down—“It broke my heart,” he says—but he’s still resisting its replacement by a shorter tree. He wants one the same size. He chooses to offer the following troubling analogy: He was always adamant that they should have built back the World Trade Center towers exactly where they were but one foot taller. “I want my palm tree,” he says.

We are in the Breitbart Embassy, just a couple blocks from the Capitol. (Bannon has War Room studios in various homes, but this is the principal one.) As ever, he is personally affable in a way that offers an almost baffling contrast to so many of his words and opinions. It’d be convenient to assume that this is all a front, that he is working me, but while I certainly don’t discount that component, for the most part I think that’s too easy an explanation. Whoever Steve Bannon in messy aggregate actually is, I don’t think you can begin to understand him without acknowledging that this version—the often considerate, genial, self-deprecating, open-to-other-opinions one—is, maybe confoundingly, a real part of him, too.

I expect today’s conversation to be awkward. After we spend maybe an hour scuffling back and forth on other matters, I move to the lengthy list of statements and disavowals he made in Arizona that don’t seem to tally with what I’ve since found. Regarding his interactions with Michael Wolff, Bannon initially reiterates that he first met Wolff when he was in the White House but when pressed now recalls an earlier encounter the previous fall when Wolff was writing an article for The Hollywood Reporter. But we reach an impasse over many of the opinions and words Wolff describes and quotes Bannon as saying. “You have to come to your own assessment,” Bannon eventually declares. “You’re the writer. This shouldn’t be a tough one you have to struggle with. Two people have very different opinions.”

I know, but one of them has got the quotes and the documented record of it, and I find it very hard to get past that.

“Then you’re going to have to write that that’s true and that I’m lying to you and I misled you. I don’t have a problem with that.”

Okay.

“This is not an existential moment.”

It feels to me that what he is saying here is something like this: People like you are hung up on the quaint idea that it’s truth that always matters the most. Sure, it has its uses, but in the big picture—and especially when things really heat up—it’s often way down any sensible list of priorities.

When I move on to Ira Rosen and remind Bannon what he told me about only speaking to Rosen around the 60 Minutes interview, he immediately says, “Yes,” agreeing with himself. I explain that Rosen’s book gives a very different impression. “I don’t care what he says in his book,” Bannon retorts. I press on regardless.

Would you agree that you were constantly texting each other?

“I don’t remember that. So he’s got the text?”

Yeah. He says he has more than a thousand texts.

“Are they in the book?”

Some of them.

“I don’t remember.”

Are you saying they don’t exist?

“I’m saying I don’t remember being in constant contact with Ira Rosen.”

It feels obvious to me that here and elsewhere Bannon is navigating a careful, evanescently thin line: repudiating what he can and then otherwise saying that he doesn’t remember, whether or not these are things someone could credibly fail to remember, rather than fully calling anyone a liar, with all the awkward new doors that might open.

When I remind Bannon that Rosen’s name first came up, back in Arizona, when I read him Rosen’s quote about the Twenty-fifth Amendment, Bannon protests with renewed confidence as he did before—grounds for repudiation!—that if this were true it would have been asked about in the 60 Minutes interview. When I point out that this all took place after that, Bannon recalibrates his defense. “How did I have that then?” he says, as though he was suddenly so removed from Trump world that he would have had no means of judging anything like that about his former boss. “I didn’t speak to Trump for years,” he says. “That’s ridiculous.” (Aside from the fact that this contradicts both the general impression he has given me and others and his description to me of the call Trump made to him in Hong Kong after the 60 Minutes interview, Bannon is on more formal record stating otherwise. When he was interviewed by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence investigating purported Trump ties to Russia, on January 16, 2018, he was asked how many times he had spoken with Trump since leaving the White House. At first he answered, “I don’t remember,” but when pressed, “Is it more than ten?” he replied, “Yes.”)

I say that Rosen claims to have all of this documented and read to Bannon his own text about the Twenty-fifth Amendment.

“Okay, well, then you’ll have to go with . . .” He pauses. “I don’t remember that. And I don’t remember having that relationship with Ira Rosen.”

A couple minutes later, Bannon tries a different tack. “Haven’t you been in the same situation as those two guys? Have I told you anything untoward to the president? That’s a yes-or-no question.”

I agree that he has not.

“Okay, fine,” he says, as though a point has been proved.

I suggest that the real takeaway is maybe that he used to share a lot of uncareful thoughts with people and that he’s learned not to do so.

Trump speaks by phone to Russian president Vladimir Putin from the Oval Office on January 28, 2017, accompanied by, from left, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, Vice President Mike Pence, and Bannon, then the White House Chief Strategist.

“Then you’re going to have to write it how you have to write it,” he says. “We just have a disagreement. I think I’ve been very straightforward. Did we put any restrictions on this at all? You’re going to write what you’re going to write. You will lay out your case about Steve Bannon the way you see it. It’s your perspective. I have no problem with that. I’m not sitting here trying to talk you out of it: ‘Oh, please don’t . . .’ You just got to do what you got to do. Can I say something else? It’s also—it’s meaningless. But you ought to write it as you see it.”

I ask him to explain what he means by “it’s meaningless.”

“Because everybody knows that my loyalty to this movement and to him are unquestioned. If you look at the demonstrable record, there’s not even a question of who’s gone out of their way to support Trump the man and Trump the politician and the Trump movement. That’s just irrefutable fact. A couple of guys saying, ‘Hey, he said this, he said this’? That’s fine. I disagree with that. I don’t remember it. I don’t remember having long relationships with Michael Wolff or with particularly Ira Rosen. But I feel quite comfortable with my place in history, juxtaposed to what I’ve accomplished and what we’re accomplishing here. I feel pretty damn good.”

He says this as though it should, or even could, prove that the other stuff—the leaking and the careless trash-talking—is not true. (Bannon likes to use false binaries as a rhetorical device.) But of course they can both be true, and I suspect that they probably both broadly are. I try to return to the main reason, weeks ago, that I was asking about any of this—its effect, or otherwise, on his relationship with Trump. I begin by saying that although perhaps Trump is not aware chapter and verse of all this stuff that’s been published—at which point Bannon interrupts.

“Oh, he knows it,” says Bannon. “Trust me. Anything has been published, they have put under his nose many times.”

We talk about different ways someone like Trump might view all this, and I float the possibility that Trump might allow someone like Bannon back in but that one’s card is nonetheless marked permanently, and one would never really be trusted. Bannon surprises me by allowing this possibility.

“It may be,” he says. “It may be. Time will tell on that.”

Both in Arizona and in Washington, Bannon seemed keen that I should speak with Trump. Esquire sent the former president a series of questions about his and Bannon’s relationship but received no response.

By now I’ve spent a couple months watching War Room every day. I don’t agree with much, and I sometimes worry that I’m getting desensitized to thoughts that in clear fresh air would horrify me, but there are parts that I can just about see as fair’s-fair strong partisan advocacy. When it comes to issues like immigration and the war in Ukraine and the debt ceiling, while one might strongly dispute much of what is presented as fact, and the conclusions reached, these are nonetheless real, difficult quandaries where there exist good reasons for sensible, thoughtful people to disagree. Sometimes, though—a lot of the vaccine stuff, for instance—it just seems to me like crazy conspiratorial nonsense. Likewise the way in which disasters of almost any kind—the fire in Maui, the war in Israel, for instance—are opportunistically grabbed, with what seems to me as sickening glee, as notional proof of tendentious, and again often conspiratorial, government malfeasance. And every now and again what is broadcast seems just so nasty and vengeful and wrongheaded that I feel soiled just watching. As an example, there’s a recurrent subtext, dog-whistled but perfectly transparent, often when child trafficking is being discussed, that intimates in true QAnon style that some broad coalition of the Democratic and Hollywood establishment consists of pedophiles. Both what is being said and the manipulative if-you’re-smart-and-paying- attention-you’ll-know wink are repellent.

As accustomed as I become to all this, sometimes my reactions take me by surprise. One Wednesday in mid-September, Bannon launches into a sustained invective against Merrick Garland that, somehow, seems to step so far, heedlessly and recklessly, over any line. It’s the words themselves—“he is a purely evil individual . . . and he will pay for the evilness when we imprison him”—but also how insensibly and self-righteously angry Bannon seems. It makes good enough sense for Bannon, from his perspective, to disagree with Garland, and also to question whether Garland’s every decision is made in good faith. And I certainly doubt that Garland is without his flaws. But this attack just seems both wildly poisonous and, in its scale and certainty, empirically wrong. As Bannon himself says, history reveals. I suppose history could endorse Bannon’s view, but all my instincts are that there is no sensible reason for thinking this to be true, wherever you stand politically—and that to proclaim this, never mind potentially inspire people to act on its basis, goes unacceptably beyond fighting one’s corner.

At one point during our conversation in Washington, Bannon challenges me. “Do you think I believe this?” he asks, meaning what he advocates sitting here in the War Room studio. I explain, quite honestly, that I have thought about this question a lot. And then I tell him how shocked I was by the Merrick Garland diatribe.

“I think Merrick Garland is evil. I shocked you?”

Yes, it really shocks me. Not only do I think you’re wrong; I think it’s disgusting that you think that.

“Okay. Okay.”

I can’t believe that there’s anything that you know that gives you the prerogative to think that.

“Why do you say that? All the facts are out there of what he’s done. Look, he’s overseen rolling up of a thousand of these people. This one guy we talked about yesterday is three years hadn’t gone to trial. That’s pure evil of what he’s done about the J Six thing. Pure evil.”

That’s not evil. The whole thing was a complete shit show, and the rule of law is slowly working its way through it.

“It’s not the rule of law. Upgrading to terrorism charges?”

There’s plenty to argue about there. I think Garland is trying to do his job. Evil? I don’t agree at all.

Florida Republican Matt Gaetz (second from left, next to Tennessee Republican Tim Burchett), speaks to reporters in October 2023 during maneuverings over the House speakership. Gaetz, who made efforts to win concessions for MAGA Republicans, was a frequent guest on Bannon’s show during the chaotic run-up to a potential government shutdown.

“This is the unbridgeable gap in the country. They think we’re evil. I saw last night! They think we’re building the Confederate army. That’s on MSNBC. That’s their belief. We’re building the Confederate army. They think we are pure evil. They think we’re racist. They think we’re domestic terrorists. They think we’re insurgents. This is what they think. And we think they’re evil. And you’re not going to bridge that gap.”

But that’s a tragedy.

“Why is it a tragedy?”

Because in those terms, I think that you’re both wrong. (That is to say, insomuch as Bannon’s extreme characterization of the “other” side is accurate.)

“Okay. You’re a reasonable man in the middle. You can weigh in measuring—you’re a kindhearted person, you think both sides are wrong. It’s like Ecclesiastes. It’s just not your time. I hate to say it: It’s just not your time. It’s us versus them. They hate us and we hate them. One side’s going to win here. And it’s going to get ugly. It’s going to get messy.”

In the days around and after my Washington trip, Bannon becomes far more visibly at the center of things.

Even so, the looming end-of-September shutdown at first seems to play like something of a humiliation for him. His preference seemed to be for a disorderly shutdown, or at the very least for there to be major concessions to the MAGA wing. His show has been filled with those like Matt Gaetz maneuvering for this, and Bannon appears to be deeply involved in the strategizing. Then, on the final afternoon, Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy makes a last-minute deal with the Democrats. The tempo of Bannon’s texts had been increasing, but after that, contact dries up and I assume that he is smarting. Gaetz has consistently said, and Bannon has echoed loudly, that if McCarthy did anything like this, Gaetz would move for McCarthy’s removal. Now Gaetz must either back down and look weak or press ahead, but the conventional wisdom is that his bluff has been called and he will be put in his place. Either hardcore MAGA Republicans will blanch at taking this final step or the Democrats will passively or actively move to allow McCarthy’s survival; Gaetz will be isolated as an extremist renegade.

I’m traveling, so I don’t learn the result of the vote at the time. Not for another six minutes, anyway, when my phone pings with a two-word text from Bannon: “Told Ya.” McCarthy has gone, Congress is in turmoil, and things have played out Bannon’s way. By the end of the week, Bannon is back on the front cover of The New York Times, photographed in mid-broadcast, jabbing the index finger of his left hand to drive home a point.

Still, after that, it zigs and zags back and forth. Candidates opposed by Bannon, candidates supported by him, crash and burn all the same. After two weeks of this, I text him, asking what way he sees out of this chaos. Or, I add, is the chaos okay?

His answer comes back immediately.

“Chaos,” he writes, “is our friend.”

This, of course, is just a skirmish. Just a minor messiness. When the MAGA–friendly Mike Johnson eventually prevails as Speaker, I get a sense that for Bannon this is less a major victory than a fruitful bit of low-level agitation. The real mess, the real chaos, the real if-you-tear-it-down-they-will-come rupture . . . if Steve Bannon has his way, and he seems hell-bent on doing so, that is still to come.