“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.
“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 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 ’s cover line proclaimed him—was pulling the strings of the first.
