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October 30, 2024 - 6:45pm
Steve Bannon emerged from federal prison this week looking ready to reclaim his role as MAGA’s chief strategist — but, at least for now, nobody seems to be hiring. Donald Trump’s former advisor, fresh from a four-month jail stint for defying a Congressional subpoena, launched straight into a marathon War Room podcast episode that pointed more to his current outsider status than any immediate return to power.
Bannon’s performance followed a familiar playbook: expansive claims about campaign strategy, warnings of election chaos, and positioning himself as the ultimate MAGA soothsayer. He spoke confidently about everything from Elon Musk’s importance to the coalition to Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s endorsement, as if he had been orchestrating moves from a command centre rather than languishing in a prison cell. The reality is far more modest — Trump appears not to have meaningfully engaged with Bannon since 2020, when he notably remarked that “Steve is much better not being involved.” Prior to that, after booting Bannon from the White House in 2018, the then-President observed that “when [Steve] was fired, he not only lost his job: he lost his mind.”
The episode functioned as an audition tape of sorts, with Bannon thread-weaving among various MAGA factions. He hosted Trump-adjacent figures such as Charlie Kirk and Jack Posobiec while carefully avoiding direct claims about any current special relationship with the GOP candidate himself. His prison time has given him a fresh angle, and he’s now positioning himself as someone who can speak to working-class black and Latino males — whom he claims “despise Kamala Harris” — and help move the movement “beyond race”. Simultaneously he is laying groundwork for potential post-election chaos with talk of “preventing state nullification of results”.
The spectacle would be almost amusing if it weren’t so revealing about MAGA’s current power structure. Bannon, once Trump’s populist sherpa who helped shape a real-estate developer into a cultural warrior, now finds himself reduced to hosting a roadshow of secondary players. His immediate pivot to election conspiracy theories upon release suggests less a strategic genius and more a man desperately seeking relevance in a movement which has evolved beyond him.
This all-hands-on-deck rhetorical approach also showed in Bannon’s post-release press conference, where he veered between claiming empowerment following incarceration and making juvenile taunts at Nancy Pelosi, whom he blames for his confinement. When not railing against a weaponised Justice Department, he kept returning to his newfound insights about minority voters, highlighting his interactions with Puerto Rican and Dominican inmates as if collecting DEI credits.
The timing of Bannon’s release, just a week before the election, might seem politically fortunate. But it mainly serves to highlight how far he’s fallen since his days as chief strategist in the West Wing. In 2017, his Time magazine cover as “The Great Manipulator” preceded his first fall from grace with an image-conscious Trump. Today, his responsibilities seem to consist primarily of ensuring his podcast can merit guest appearances from the actual MAGA insiders.
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SubscribeWow, what a heartless shallow review.
Maybe he wishes he were Bannon?
Agreed, also it seems typical of MSM views, missing the point of Bannon these days which is not mastermind but gadfly.
How about Bannon as a guy who was harassed amd jailed for doing exactly what democrats in similar situations do with impunity. He was never “the guru” of MAGA. He is a voice among many. He is yet another of Trump advisors, attorneys and close supporters targeted for destruction by democrats.
Why is author obsessing about an alleged has been?
Four years ago, he could reliably present himself as the intellectual architect of a new America First populism.
And still can. It was thanks to the ideological underpinning with which Bannon provided Trump, until that point just a carpetbagging opportunist, which put the latter in the White House in 2017. Most of the4 language that Trump uses now in relation to China, the globalists, their warmongering and the Deep State, comes ultimately from Andrew Breitbart via Steve Bannon.
Bannon is one of many right? Credit to the current conservative movement in America which might have some infighting, but recognizes that there is no one leader (except for Trump, at the moment, due to his immense visibility).
Bannon is looking healthy!!!!
What is it with you people and the orange complexion?
We racist-sexist-homophobes go with the fascist conspiracy theory that the J6 House committee was improperly constituted and was all about pushing he narrative that Trump & Co. were engaged in “armed insurrection.” On this theory, Steve Bannon was a political prisoner.
Well, let’s see. Bannon’s WarRoom livestream gets thousands of real time viewers per day. Bannon has cogently and explicitly framed his efforts as building a nationalist populist movement. Nationalist populist sentiment is solidifying across the West.
But, no, Bannon is a has-been.
And ignore the big news tip Bannon gave any curious journalist paying attention: based on his encounters with other inmates the DOJ is working quite effectively to nullify one of the most significant criminal justice reforms in recent history, the federal First Step Act. Not so long ago Democrats ran on “end mass incarceration” and now, Get Trump sentiment compels them to see that mass incarceration continues.
What do small men write about? Other men doing big things.