Steve Bannon

Steve Bannon (born November 27, 1953, Norfolk, Virginia, U.S.) is an American political strategist, media executive, and filmmaker who served (2017) as senior counselor and chief White House strategist for U.S. Pres. Donald Trump. Despite leaving the White House amid controversy, Bannon remained an influential voice in the MAGA movement and continued to be a vocal supporter of Trump. He was widely seen as having played a key role in rallying demonstrators to come to Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021, to protest the certification of the 2020 presidential election.

Early life

Bannon grew up in a large Irish Catholic family in Richmond, Virginia. His father rose from a position as a lineman to middle management with a phone company. Bannon attended an all-male Catholic military school in Richmond before matriculating at Virginia Tech, where he earned a B.A. in urban affairs (1976) and served as student government president. After graduation he joined the U.S. Navy, becoming an officer, serving on a destroyer, and receiving a post as a special assistant to the chief of naval operations at the Pentagon. During his navy tenure in Washington, D.C., Bannon earned an M.A. in national security studies at Georgetown University. Having left the navy in 1983, he attended the Harvard Business School (M.B.A., 1985), which led to a position in mergers and acquisitions at Goldman Sachs. Specializing in media and entertainment, Bannon relocated to Los Angeles.

Entertainment finance, moviemaking, and Breitbart

After three-plus years with Goldman Sachs, he cofounded a financial firm, Bannon & Co., which focused on the entertainment industry. Among its clients were Samsung, MGM, and Polygram Records, along with Italian media magnate and politician Silvio Berlusconi. In the process of negotiating the sale of Castle Rock Entertainment from Westinghouse to Ted Turner in 1993, Bannon’s company received a stake in five television shows, including the still relatively new Seinfeld, which would eventually bring it a huge financial payoff. After Bannon & Co. was sold to Société Générale in 1998, Bannon continued to work in entertainment-related finance and acted as co-executive producer on the film Titus (1999), an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.

In 2004 Bannon immersed himself more deeply in filmmaking itself, beginning a career as a writer, director, and producer of conservative-slanted documentaries with In the Face of Evil: Reagan’s War in Word and Deed. While Bannon was growing up, his family had been oriented toward the Democratic Party, but his disenchantment with the presidency of Jimmy Carter led him to embrace Ronald Reagan and conservatism. Among the documentaries that he made were The Undefeated (2011), a laudatory portrait of Sarah Palin, and Occupy Unmasked (2012), about the Occupy Wall Street movement. During this period Bannon also developed a deep-seated contempt for financial and political elites, both those on the left and those within the Republican establishment.

In 2012 Bannon and Peter Schweizer founded the Government Accountability Institute, a nonprofit organization that mounted investigations of prominent politicians with the intention of exposing wrongdoing, and distributed the results of its investigations through mainstream publishers and other media outlets, as it did with Schweizer’s inflammatory book Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich (2015). Bannon had begun a friendship in the early 2000s with Andrew Breitbart, founder of the provocative, antiestablishment, conservative website Breitbart.com, and, when Breitbart died suddenly in March 2012 on the eve of a relaunch of the website, Bannon assumed the role of executive chairman, taking an active hand in directing Breitbart News’s editorial vision. With Breitbart, Bannon, who self-identified as a populist, provided a platform for the “alt-right” (alternative right) movement, a loose association of relatively young white nationalists (who largely disavowed racism but celebrated “white” identity and lamented the alleged erosion of white political and economic power and the decline of white culture in the face of nonwhite immigration and multiculturalism), white supremacists, extreme libertarians, and neo-Nazis. Breitbart’s critics characterized it as racist, misogynist, and xenophobic.

Association with Trump

Under Bannon, Breitbart championed the insurgent candidacy of Donald Trump for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. In August 2016 Bannon became the executive director of Trump’s then-faltering campaign and was credited with bringing discipline and a stronger focus on messaging to it. After Trump surprised the political pundits and pollsters by defeating his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, he named Bannon senior counselor and chief White House strategist. Bannon’s appointment was cheered by Trump’s extreme-right supporters but condemned by many on the left and by some establishment Republicans, who expressed fears of the influence of the far-right fringe entering the White House. In the second week of the Trump presidency, Bannon was elevated to regular membership on the “principals committee” of the National Security Council, an appointment that brought criticism from many corners not only because of his inclusion as a political strategist in security meetings but also because the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the director of national intelligence were no longer included as regular members of the committee. Early in April Bannon was removed from the principals committee in a reorganization that also reinstated the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the director of national intelligence as permanent members.

For the first half-year of the Trump presidency, Bannon’s presence was among the most influential in the administration. He was widely seen as the driving force behind Trump’s controversial decisions to remove the United States from the Paris Agreement on climate change and to impose a “travel ban” on immigration from several Muslim-majority countries. Bannon’s relentless focus on economic nationalism, however, brought him into rivalry and conflict with other key advisers to the president as well as cabinet members, most notably senior adviser Jared Kushner (Trump’s son-in-law) and national security adviser H.R. McMaster. Criticism of Bannon from outside the administration grew louder after Trump responded slowly to and then blamed “both sides” for the death of a counterprotester at a demonstration by white nationalists, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis on August 12, 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia. Many observers saw Bannon’s presence in the White House as contributing to the legitimization of far-right fringe groups like those that had rallied in Charlottesville.

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Even before the events in Charlottesville unfolded, there had been rumours of Bannon’s imminent departure from the administration. On August 16 The American Prospect published Bannon’s remarks made in a phone conversation with the liberal publication’s coeditor in which Bannon belittled other Trump advisers, dismissed white supremacist groups as “clowns,” and undermined the president’s recent bellicose warnings to North Korea in response to that country’s aggressive pursuit of nuclear weapons. On August 18, 2017, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced that “White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and Steve Bannon have mutually agreed today would be Steve’s last day,” though it was widely thought that Bannon had been forced to resign.

Almost immediately, Bannon returned to the helm at Breitbart, determined to use his position outside of government to continue advancing the agenda of Trump, with whom he still talked. Bannon also made known his intention to oust establishment congressional Republicans (including Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell) by backing the candidacies of antiestablishment challengers in Republican primary contests. He jump-started this project by actively championing the candidacy of controversial former Alabama Supreme Court chief justice Roy Moore in the Republican primary election to choose a successor for the U.S. Senate seat representing Alabama that had been vacated by Jeff Sessions when he became U.S. attorney general.

Despite Trump’s surprising support for the Republican establishment’s candidate, onetime Alabama attorney general Luther Strange, Moore won the primary. During the general election campaign in December 2017, however, allegations surfaced that when Moore was in his 30s, he had not only romantically pursued a number of teenage girls but had also engaged in improper behavior with some of them, including alleged sexual assault. Bannon prominently stood behind Moore, as did Trump, and both suffered significant political setbacks when Alabama voters rejected Moore and sent a Democrat (Doug Jones) to the Senate for the first time in more than two decades.

Far more damaging to Bannon’s political fortunes were comments that he reportedly had made about Trump’s adult children that were quoted in Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, in which White House insiders describe Trump as woefully ill-suited to serve as president. Most notably, Bannon reportedly characterized the meeting of Donald Trump, Jr., with Russians during the 2016 presidential campaign as “treasonous” and “unpatriotic.” In early January 2018 the outraged president lashed out at Bannon (whom he began calling “Sloppy Steve”), saying that Bannon had nothing to do with his presidency and that when Bannon “was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.” Bannon soon apologized for his remarks and called Trump a “great man,” but his political capital began disappearing quickly. The writing was on the wall for Bannon when Rebekah Mercer—daughter of hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, the longtime financial patron of Bannon’s political projects and part owner of Breitbart—distanced herself from Bannon’s “recent actions and statements.” By January 9 Bannon had been compelled to relinquish his position at Breitbart, and he lost his Sirius XM radio show.

Bannon subsequently became involved with We Build the Wall, a nonprofit organization that solicited donations to construct a wall along the southern border of the United States. By August 2020 it had raised more than $25 million. However, that month he and three other men were arrested, accused of defrauding donors. In 2021, shortly before leaving office, Trump pardoned Bannon.

After Trump claimed baselessly and repeatedly that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from him through voter fraud, Bannon became a key player in the efforts to overturn the results of the election, including the attempt to pressure Vice Pres. Mike Pence into delaying or blocking the certification of the election on January 6, 2021, at a joint session of Congress. Bannon’s statement during a podcast on January 5, “All hell is going to break loose tomorrow,” the day before the attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters, became only one of the reasons that he was subpoenaed to testify before the House’s Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.

Bannon initially refused to testify or turn over documents to the committee, citing his status as a former presidential adviser and Trump’s claims of executive privilege in the matter. However, the legitimacy of Bannon’s assertion was disputed because, among other arguments, he had ceased to be a part of Trump’s formal White House team years before the attack. In November 2021 Bannon’s refusal to comply with the congressional subpoena resulted in the Justice Department’s charging him with two counts of criminal contempt of Congress, offenses that promised a possible punishment of a $200,000 fine and two years of incarceration. On July 10, 2022, roughly a week before his scheduled trial, Bannon announced that Trump had released him to testify and informed the House committee that he was willing to appear before it. Less than two weeks later, however, Bannon was convicted on both of the contempt charges. On October 21 Bannon was sentenced to four months in prison and fined $6,500. In July 2024, having exhausted his appeals, Bannon finally reported to federal prison to begin serving his sentence.