“Musk is a parasitic illegal immigrant. He wants to impose his freak experiments and play-act as God without any respect for the country’s history, values, or traditions.” Steve Bannon doesn’t hold back when I meet him in the basement of his Washington townhouse.

The triple-shirted architect of old-school Trumpian populism, briefly a White House advisor during Donald Trump’s first term, has emerged as the counterpole to Elon Musk, whose ultra-libertarian agenda has come to dominate the President’s second term. To Bannon, the billionaire X owner is more forceful and, perhaps, more dangerous than any figure on the Left. “Musk is the one with power at the moment,” he says. “The Democrats are nowhere to be seen.”

Less than a month into the Trump presidency, Musk has established himself as a core fixture in the White House. He holds news conferences in the Oval Office with his four-year-old; hosts foreign leaders in meetings that strikingly resemble head-of-state bilaterals; enjoys access to virtually every federal department; and, most importantly, has the ear of the President.

Bannon, meanwhile, must settle for a microphone. The 71-year-old’s War Room podcast beams out to hundreds of thousands of MAGA ultras six days a week — despite being purged from platforms including Spotify. In his studio, stacks of old Financial Times papers, archival documents and recording equipment are strewn across the table, overlooked by countless religious icons and memorabilia. “We have not yet begun to FIGHT,” reads one sign on his mantelpiece, beside a wooden crucifix labelled “full armor of God”. Top of his agenda: a third Trump term.

“Musk is a parasitic illegal immigrant. He wants to impose his freak experiments and play-act as God without any respect for the country’s history, values, or traditions.” Steve Bannon doesn’t hold back when I meet him in the basement of his Washington townhouse.

The triple-shirted architect of old-school Trumpian populism, briefly a White House advisor during Donald Trump’s first term, has emerged as the counterpole to Elon Musk, whose ultra-libertarian agenda has come to dominate the President’s second term. To Bannon, the billionaire X owner is more forceful and, perhaps, more dangerous than any figure on the Left. “Musk is the one with power at the moment,” he says. “The Democrats are nowhere to be seen.”

Less than a month into the Trump presidency, Musk has established himself as a core fixture in the White House. He holds news conferences in the Oval Office with his four-year-old; hosts foreign leaders in meetings that strikingly resemble head-of-state bilaterals; enjoys access to virtually every federal department; and, most importantly, has the ear of the President.

Bannon, meanwhile, must settle for a microphone. The 71-year-old’s War Room podcast beams out to hundreds of thousands of MAGA ultras six days a week — despite being purged from platforms including Spotify. In his studio, stacks of old Financial Times papers, archival documents and recording equipment are strewn across the table, overlooked by countless religious icons and memorabilia. “We have not yet begun to FIGHT,” reads one sign on his mantelpiece, beside a wooden crucifix labelled “full armor of God”. Top of his agenda: a third Trump term.

We met last Thursday, just days after Bannon pleaded guilty to skimming money from donations intended to privately fund the border wall, charges he nonetheless dismisses as “politically motivated” and “lawfare in the extreme”. But on that day he is in an ebullient mood: just before our meeting, the Senate confirmed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services. “This is a historic day,” Bannon reflects. “If you weld together the MAHA movement with MAGA and add in Hispanics, African-American men, and conservative Right-wing Asians, we have a 1932 coalition” — a reference to FDR’s sweeping first victory. He takes a long pause. “And yes, we have the tech bros too.”

Since promising, and failing, to run Musk out of the White House by Inauguration Day, Bannon’s view of the world’s richest man and his fellow “tech bros” hasn’t softened. He claims that he was willing to give Musk and his DOGE team the benefit of the doubt — “I have to give the devil his due” — for taking on the administrative state. But so far, he says, it has yielded disappointing results, as evidenced by the House panel’s budget blueprint: “DOGE is sitting there with the budget, but where the fuck are the DOGE cuts? We are 30 days away from approving a budget for the entire year with $2 trillion already baked in, and not one penny of anything that DOGE found. It’s ludicrous.”

Musk’s DOGE team has instead elected to focus on several bêtes noires of the Right: the US Agency for International Development, the Department of Education, and DEI programmes across the government. At the Department of Education alone, DOGE claims to have made nearly $900 million in cuts, but as yet — and despite Trump’s permission — it has not made a move on the Pentagon, which failed its seventh audit in a row last year.

“I notice there is a hesitancy to cross the Potomac and go to the Pentagon,” Bannon says. “I would like to see $100 billion taken off the $900 billion budget right now, which is really a trillion.” Bannon goes on to describe DOGE’s efforts as “performative”, but for now, he is not ready to dispense with Musk. “It’s pretty evident the President’s using him as an armour-piercing shell that’s delivering blunt force trauma against the administrative state.”

This is a curious posture. On the one hand, Musk is, according to Bannon, an “agent of Chinese influence”, a problem “not just to the MAGA movement, but a problem to the country”. On the other, Bannon can countenance granting Musk access to the private data of nearly all government employees. Were Musk truly a threat to America’s national security, why would Bannon not be calling for his removal? “President Trump says Musk doesn’t do anything that he’s not on top of. I take him at his word.”

That feels like a lot of trust to place in one man, but to Bannon Trump is a “providential” figure. In his mind, Trump is facing something much harder than anything FDR dealt with and as a result, he should only be compared to the two other “top-tier” presidents: Washington and Lincoln. If there is an FDR comparison to be made, Bannon thinks, it’s that Trump should get a third term. He’s “exploring” options for this, he tells me.

Bannon knows that what he is proposing is unconstitutional, but if it further ingratiates him with the President, he’ll do it. “I don’t have right now a tremendous amount of support on this legally,” he says, “but remember, I faced longer odds on many other topics in my life.” It is also what happens when you turn a president into a god: politics becomes a holy war, creating a permission structure for a “by any means” approach to governance. On what basis would he even make the argument? “I’m working on making sure they have a correct interpretation of the Constitution,” he says. “I believe that President Trump’s eligible for one more term because I think it says consecutive.” It doesn’t. As the 22nd Amendment clearly states: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.” Trump has been elected twice.

Legality aside, does the country really need another octogenarian president? “You give me a guy at 78 years old that’s coming in and working 18, 20 hours a day and dropping bombs like he’s dropping every day,” Bannon says. “Every day for me is Christmas morning, so why would we want to stop it?”

These “bombs” include turning Canada into America’s 51st state — it would grant the United States greater access to the Arctic — and acquiring the Panama Canal (a “great geostrategic move”). He also commends Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s efforts to bring an end to the conflict in Ukraine (“it’s historic”). But when it comes to Trump’s plan to “clean out” Gaza and turn it into the riviera of the Middle East, the two men don’t seem entirely aligned. There is “bigger thinking on there that, quite frankly, I don’t understand”, Bannon tells me. “He’s thinking out loud, right? He’s outside the box on so many things, we just have to trust President Trump.”

Once again, we just have to trust him.

On the question of Europe, however, Bannon is in line with the administration. A day after Vice President J.D. Vance browbeat his European counterparts over free speech and mass migration, Bannon struck a similar note. “The message was clear: Europe is no longer going to be treated like a protectorate,” he says. “To me the Atlanticists are quite frankly the most racist people in the world because they only think about white people in Western Europe and the United States. They don’t have any other broad perspective.”

There is, though, a danger in pulling too hard on this thread. Leaders like Emmanuel Macron have been calling for strategic autonomy for some time, warning the continent to not “be a vassal” in a US-China stand-off. Is Bannon not concerned that the US may be pushing Europe into Beijing’s arms? “I am worried about that,” he says, “but the Chinese have already infiltrated Europe. The British elite are totally bought and paid for.”

Singling out the new British ambassador to the US, Peter Mandelson, Bannon warms to his theme: “From our mother country that we have a special relationship with, I can’t think of a worse individual to be sent over here that hates MAGA and that’s trashed Trump.” He adds: “They send him to Fox to grovel and say that he didn’t mean what he said before, but it won’t wash. Plus he’s on the payroll of the CCP.”

On domestic policy, meanwhile, Bannon offers a more subtle critique of Trump’s plan to extend the provisions in his signature Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which reduced tax rates for corporations and individuals. “I don’t think this should be renewed at all,” he says. “I’m mad about that.” He even expresses disappointment at the rate of deportations, which, despite all the noise, is moving at a similar rate as the Obama era. “We have to deport the 10 million illegal aliens who are here. Right now, we can’t even get the criminals out of jail.”

This is, in Bannon’s mind, not Trump’s fault, but the Deep State’s — the same Deep State that stole the 2020 presidential election, incarcerated him for four months, and is now working to undo the Trump agenda. It’s a convenient foil. Blame the Deep State if something goes wrong and claim victory if Musk does his job. For this reason, Bannon is happy for the president to “wrangle” the tech bros. “The enemy of the enemy is my friend,” he says. “This country is being destroyed by the Praetorian guard of the administrative state… Elon is helping expose this.”

Though neither would care to admit it, there is a certain symmetry between Bannon and Musk. Bannon joined Trump in the final stretch of his 2016 campaign, and then took on a high position once he entered office, while Musk did much the same in 2024. Both men had their turn on the cover of TIME magazine, a moment that precipitated Bannon’s downfall from Trumpian grace shortly after.

“Sloppy Steve”, as he became known, likes to talk. He was ousted from the White House for being one of the primary sources in Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury, and was repeatedly accused of leaking while in office. This habit made him even more of a nuisance once he was out, with a recent New York Times story noting that the administration was getting “hammered by Right-wing media” almost immediately after.

All of which is to say that Bannon can cause problems if he wants to. And in making an enemy out of Musk, what may appear like a squabble between two egotistical men could spill out into open warfare. Because at the heart of this conflict is a battle over the philosophical direction of the Trump presidency and, by extension, the country. That Vance even felt the need to address this “civil war” between the “populists and techies” — which he said was overstated — nonetheless shows that the tension in this coalition is not immaterial.

Despite Bannon claiming to be in regular contact with the White House, is Musk’s presence there a sign that the techno–libertarians are winning? “Absolutely not. Look at who he has put in: Neil Ferguson at the FTC, Gail Slater on antitrust, and Mike Davis on the White House counsel,” he responds. “Trump is sending a signal to tech bros, saying, ‘You don’t own me,’ and he’s also saying, ‘I’m not buying your techno-libertarian stuff.’ That was a huge fuck you to the broligarchs.”

The populists, then, are securing enough appointments to keep Bannon happy for now. But Trump has also gutted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and crippled the National Labor Relations board — hardly pro-worker moves. There is also the looming budget, which may include cuts to Medicaid, a joint federal and state programme for people with low incomes. After we spoke, the War Room host fired out another warning shot at Musk on his podcast. “There are a lot of MAGAs on Medicaid,” he said. “I’m telling you, if you don’t think so, you are dead wrong… Just can’t take a meat axe to it, although I would love to.”

“You’re not going to win every fight,” Bannon says. “You’ve got to pick the fight you want to win.” So what happens if he loses one of those fights? He draws three red lines: China, AI, and visas. The last of these already caused a major rift in the MAGA movement shortly after Christmas — before Trump even took office — with Elon Musk threatening to go to “war” with other parts of the MAGA coalition, not least Bannon, over-expanding the guest-worker programmes beloved of Silicon Valley. It resulted in the now former DOGE executive Vivek Ramaswamy going into “witness protection” — a scalp claimed by Bannon and the MAGA base. “It shows that Trump doesn’t believe in any of this techno-libertarian stuff.”

China is a different story. Bannon describes himself as a “super hawk”, and he calls for a “hemispheric defence” against Beijing, which stretches from Greenland all the way down to Javier Milei’s Argentina. Together, this vast landmass would be a bulwark against communist influence, with tariffs protecting North America as a “premium market”. For this reason, Ukraine must sign a peace deal with Russia so that the unholy alliance of Putin and Xi does not strengthen any further.

For Bannon, though, the AI threat is greater still. At last week’s Paris conference, Vance promised a “pro-worker growth path for AI”, but the War Room host is convinced this will simply empower the Chinese state, as well as oligarchs in the US. “We have let the wealthiest people in America soar to the commanding heights of the algorithmic age with no controls,” he says. “They have created an apartheid state. You don’t have to hire any blacks or Hispanics in this country. Or even American citizens.”

Bannon worries that the rise of AI will not only take blue-collar jobs but entry-level jobs at a technical and administrative level too. “We can’t let these techno-vandals randomly hop from one core institution to another, spray-painting garbage graffiti with no intention of ever cleaning it up.” Were Musk to make further encroachments on his red lines, Bannon promises that he would “pound” him every day on the podcast.

Would Musk even care? Despite all of Bannon’s attacks, Musk has limited his response to a single tweet, describing the War Room host as “a great talker, but not a great doer”. Nevertheless, Bannon assures me that he has “pretty good political connections” on Capitol Hill and in the White House. He also claims that his recent Manhattan court case inspired new Attorney General Pam Bondi to file a lawsuit against New York over immigration, which feels like a stretch. “This is not a brag, it’s just a fact,” he says.

Still, Bannon must surely resent that he is no longer inside a movement that he helped to create. Instead, the tech bros, who had their “Damascene moment at 11pm on November 5”, are now in charge. With the Democrats in disarray, it leaves open the question of who will take ownership of the movement after 2028. “The bench is deep,” says Bannon, without naming names. He stresses, though, that future leaders from both political parties won’t be politicians, citing Stephen A. Smith, a sports TV presenter, as a contender for the Democratic Party. “Democrats will defer to MAGA-type, Trumpian personalities,” he says. “Smith has an ability to communicate to the American people.”

“New leaders are going to emerge,” he assures me. “Remember Sherman was considered a nut case. Grant was a drunk. Lincoln was a failed congressman.” Does that list include ex-convict podcasters? “No, no, no, that’s ridiculous — I’m not a politician.” Nor is Stephen A. Smith — and nor, once, was Donald Trump.