At 9.39am on 18 February, Steve Bannon walked into his basement studio in Washington DC, placed three iPhones on the table, hoisted the blinds and started ripping newspapers out of plastic packets: the Washington Times, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal. His television show, WarRoom, which appears on the cable channel Real America’s Voice, was due to go live in 21 minutes. “Have [you] got a map yet?” he demanded of his young producer like a Napoleonic marshal. “I want the Western Hemisphere and eastern Europe.”
The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, was in Saudi Arabia, meeting with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, drawing lines on a map of Ukraine as they discussed a possible deal to end the war. Rubio told the press there were “incredible opportunities to partner with the Russians, geopolitically, on issues of common interest”. Bannon wanted his team to prepare a map for the upcoming episode of WarRoom to illustrate what he called “hemispheric defence”: the Trump administration’s plan to end the war in order to pivot to the coming war with China. “It’s all part of a piece,” he told me. The nationalist broadcaster and former senior adviser to Donald Trump believed his years-long ambition was within reach: a partnership between the United States and Russia.
Bannon’s studio is in a townhouse near the Supreme Court. We sat around a dining table strewn with old newspapers and books. Mandate for Leadership – better known as Project 2025, a blueprint for Trump’s second administration written by the Heritage Foundation think tank – was on a side table. A sign on the mantelpiece read: “We Have Not Yet Begun to Fight”. Bannon held up his phone with a picture of the map his team had prepared and snapped at his producer: “This is called a map of the world – not the Western Hemisphere.”
Bannon’s self-image is both tribune of the people and elite intellectual. He is a voracious reader. “The biggest strategic advantage I have in this city is that I’m very well read,” he told me. Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation of the Odyssey lay under some papers on the table. Wilson’s lean verse sought to recast the epic poem in contemporary English, without the colonial tropes of older versions. Robert Fagles’ classic translation, for instance, uses the word “savage” to describe the cyclops where Wilson’s does not. Bannon prefers Fagles’. “The differences are amazing,” Bannon enthused. “Hers is more cinematic, and more modern in a ‘jump, boom’ [way]. His is more masculine.”
Looking up from one of his phones, Bannon said: “People don’t understand the Pacific Ocean.” He was talking about the map again. Bannon becomes fixated on whatever is in front of him. “When you look at the globe with just the Pacific, it takes up the entire globe. You can’t see any land. This is the brilliance of the hemispheric defence,” he continued. “This is the brilliance of what happened in Saudi Arabia yesterday.”
“Saudi Arabia was a mini-Yalta,” he said. In February 1945 Franklin D Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin met in Crimea to carve postwar Europe into spheres of influence, creating the world over which the Cold War would be fought. This time, however, Bannon thinks the Riyadh summit presages cooperation between the US and Russia. “It was all about a framework to finally put together the two allies in World War II,” he said. “Ukraine is a sideshow… That’s why I met [Aleksandr] Dugin in 2018. This has been my obsession. It has to happen.” Before I could ask what he meant, Bannon’s microphone was switched on and the show began. “It is Tuesday February 18, year of our Lord 2025…”
Dugin, once known as Vladimir Putin’s court philosopher, is a prominent advocate of Russian imperialism and the conquest of Ukraine, though it is unclear how influential he remains. In November 2018 Bannon secretly met him for eight hours in a luxury hotel in Rome. As chronicled in Benjamin Teitelbaum’s 2020 book War for Eternity, Bannon and Dugin came together because they are both adherents of traditionalism, an esoteric anti-modern spiritual philosophy. (“Modernity, to me, has been a disaster, right?” Bannon told me. “Culturally, it has been a disaster.”) Traditionalism states that progress is a dangerous myth. Yet for Dugin, it is the US that is the bulldozer of tradition. The country’s devotion to universalism, human rights and democracy along with its global muscle is a threat to other nations’ social and political traditions. China, in Dugin’s world-view, is the bulwark against US hegemony. Bannon was in that hotel room in Rome to convince Dugin otherwise: that Russia and America are partners in the same Judaeo-Christian civilisation. China, not the US, he argued, was the engine of flattening globalisation. He proposed an alliance between the two nations in order to confront this threat from the east.
Liberal democracy seems to mean little to Bannon compared to the American working class’s spiritual advancement – which is vaguely defined among traditionalists but rooted in a rejection of materialism, consumerism and progress. Bannon was born to a working-class, Democrat-supporting, Irish Catholic family in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1953. He became a naval officer before heading to Harvard Business School and then on to Goldman Sachs, where he began funding films and documentaries in Hollywood.
By 2010, Bannon thought his purpose in Hollywood was to “weaponise film” by merging populism and art. Today he applies that same strategy to news. He thinks the news only cuts through when filtered through an ideology; it’s how viewers can make sense of the overwhelming and politically fragmented world. That is why he respects MSNBC, the US’s most progressive cable news channel. He sees someone like the ultra-progressive presenter Rachel Maddow as his opposite number. “It’s information warfare. They are the best,” he told me. “They do such an amazing job of breaking down Maga and Trump every night.” Contrast that with CNN, which aspires to impartiality, and therefore is “irrelevant”.
But does the WarRoom matter? Does Bannon’s opinion still shape the administration? After losing a power struggle with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, during the president’s first term, Bannon left the White House in August 2017. Traders at the New York Stock Exchange reportedly cheered when the news was announced; critics often blamed Bannon for Trump’s nationalism and sympathy for the alt-right. Yet Bannon stayed loyal to Maga. Last year he spent four months in prison for refusing to give evidence to the congressional committee into the 6 January riot.
Today his ideas are more significant than his lack of title. The administration is stocked with Bannon allies: the Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, was a WarRoom contributor before taking office, and reportedly took the Maga influencer and Bannon’s colleague Jack Posobiec to Ukraine with him in February to discuss the peace deal. Bannon is also known to reprimand current officials. He recently yelled down the phone at the Office of Management and Budget director, Russ Vought: “You’re [Elon Musk’s] boss,” he told Vought, urging for even deeper cuts to government spending than those the Tesla CEO and Trump adviser was pushing for. “Tell him to go f**k himself. We look like idiots.”
“I’ve got young staffers over at the White House right now,” Bannon told me. “We’ve lost five or six people [who] are going into the administration.”
Bannon is already calling for Trump to stand for a third term even though the constitution forbids it. When I challenged him on this he lashed out. “How do you know? Are you a constitutional scholar? Are you a constitutional scholar?” he repeated. “By the way, if we lose that fight, we lose it. But I think until people have told us that Trump ’28 is not reasonable, then we ought to try to pursue it,” he said. “A guy like Trump – a Washington, a Lincoln, a Trump – comes along every 100 years.”
The next day, Bannon hosted a training day, called the “Force Multiplier”, for his followers in a conference centre just outside DC. The attendees – there were a few hundred in the room – tune in to his show each day, sharing in Bannon’s obsessions and obeying his orders to lobby senators, surveil supposedly corrupt election officials and build local chapters. Bannon calls his “WarRoom Posse” the “tip of the spear”. A montage from a music video later played on the projectors: crusaders charging infidels, pro-Palestine protesters tearing down the US flag, Notre Dame burning and drag queens on swings. It was the eve of the Conservative Political Action Conference (Cpac), the right’s annual influential gathering, where Trump and JD Vance were due to speak.
After breaking for lunch, Bannon and I retreated to the far corner of the room. His three bodyguards stood around us as a small crowd gathered hoping for a selfie. “This is human agency, right?” he told me, gesturing to his followers. “This is democracy. This is why we’re going to win in 50 years.”
His hair was shaggy and grey. He was wearing a black overshirt under his ragged, brown Barbour jacket – a costume crafted for his anti-cosmopolitan tirades. The news that Trump had called Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky a “dictator” had just been announced on stage by Posobiec. To Bannon’s delight, the audience stood up to applaud the news. “We detest Zelensky,” Bannon told me. “The creeps that run this country – the deep state – and all of Hollywood and Davos slobbered all over this guy, including some conservative media. We caught a lot of the grief at the beginning [of the war] from the neocons, et cetera, saying that: ‘Oh, he’s like Churchill.’ This guy’s not like Churchill!”
Bannon swats away the idea that he should, as a nationalist, respect Ukraine’s right to negotiate its own ceasefire. They had their chance to settle with Russia at the start, he said, referring to negotiations in 2022 which would have left Ukrainian territory in Russian hands. “This is a much bigger discussion now between the United States and Russia,” he said, pausing to put a mint in his mouth. “This is a reframing – geopolitically. The reason I met Dugin in Rome in ’18 was exactly this: we have to have some sort of partnership or strategic understanding [with Russia].”
An alliance? “An alliance is going to take a long time, but something to pull the Russians out of this strategic alliance they’ve got with the Chinese Communist Party. That’s everything. If we can undo that, that will change the course of the 21st century.”
The Chinese Communist Party is the ultimate enemy of the Judaeo-Christian civilisation in Bannon’s world-view. “Dugin doesn’t understand, I don’t think fully, that the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t respect the Russian people,” he said. “I think there’s a higher probability there is a shooting war between Chinese and the Russians than there is that China goes into Taiwan.” That same day, on the alt-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s podcast, Dugin said: “Russia is not the enemy of [the] United States.” Bannon’s long-held plan to ally with Dugin seemed to be coming to fruition.
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Bannon scoffed at the idea that Europeans are genuinely concerned about the threat from Russia. If they were truly worried, why spend so little on defence? He told me numerous times that most of Europe did not fight with America during the Second World War apart from the Russians – and the British.
Bannon has a conflicted affection for the UK. Britain, in his eyes, is deluded about its decrepit military, relative financial poverty, and failing state capacity. At one point during a commercial break in the WarRoom studio, he turned to me and said forlornly: “It’s so pathetic, England. God, I love England – it’s so f**ked up.” This affectionate disdain inflected his cutting response to Keir Starmer’s proposed plan to deploy British troops to Ukraine, which he called “irrational”. “You guys can’t afford to put a lot of combat troops as a security guarantee in Ukraine. Somebody’s got to sit down – like the Chancellor of the Exchequer – and walk him through the financial condition of the United Kingdom,” he said. He rejects the idea that Britain could spend 3 per cent of its GDP on defence, as Mark Rutte, the head of Nato, recently suggested was needed. “You’re one of the ones that’s always been consistent, a long-time ally. But you guys can’t afford to go to 3 per cent.
“Your national healthcare system is under water right now… The British army can’t take a position in Ukraine, and you certainly can’t pay to underwrite it from the British Treasury. You don’t have the money, the resources. So you need to start focusing back on England and embrace it. I just think it’s insanity.”
He shifted his attack on to Boris Johnson, whom he calls a “war criminal”. Bannon said there should be a House of Commons inquiry into Johnson’s support for Ukraine at the start of the war. “Boris Johnson didn’t go over there and just freelance. As crazy as Boris Johnson is, he believed he was speaking for somebody.” Was Bannon suggesting Johnson scuppered a peace deal in the early days of the war on orders from the Biden administration? I pressed him repeatedly, but Bannon refused to clarify. “I don’t know what it is. I just know what I saw, and I want to get to the truth,” he said. Bannon also thinks Johnson wasted Brexit, which he supported: “Boris and these guys tried to make it Singapore-on-Thames because they’re all globalists and they’re all f**king yuppies.”
Bannon said he has long “loved Nigel”, meaning Farage, whom he called “his guy”. But he also thinks the Reform leader is a “saloon Thatcherite”. “It’s not like he and I agree really on anything,” Bannon said. Their views diverge in a way that mirrors Farage’s recent falling out with Musk over the latter’s support for Tommy Robinson, the hooligan founder of the nativist English Defence League. Bannon also supports Robinson, claiming he provides a necessary “street-dog element” and has “some rough edges, but directionally, what they’re fighting for is not wrong”.
It was Farage who introduced Bannon to the man who became his favourite European politician on the left: Maurice Glasman, the founder of Blue Labour, a communitarian group sceptical of progressivism and rampant free markets. “Nigel came up and said, ‘This is the smartest guy in politics in Great Britain,’” Bannon said. He said he likes that Blue Labour is “talking about humans [and] human agency” and described the group as “potential allies”. Bannon looks warmly to the day when Britain has a genuine “populist nationalist party”.
Rumours started spreading around midday on 20 February that Elon Musk would speak at Cpac. He is the most powerful figure in Trump’s second administration. But to Bannon, Musk is the embodiment of evil – a “techno-feudalist” who wants to implant computer chips into people’s brains through his company Neuralink, creating a superior caste of modified Homo sapiens. Musk and Bannon’s civil war could be one of the defining stories of this administration.
Musk’s surprise appearance at the conference meant that Bannon’s own speech was delayed. When Musk came on stage, wielding a chainsaw above his head, he was received like a rock star. His scrambled sentences led to online speculation that he was on drugs, but it did not seem to offend the adoring audience. The media, too, considered Musk the main attraction and most left the auditorium once he was done.
Afterwards, Bannon walked tentatively on to stage. “How did I draw the card to follow Elon Musk?” he said. “I’m just a crazy Irishman.” And then Bannon went on to deliver his riposte. He preached that history would only remember Trump and the Maga movement, while lieutenants such as he and Musk would be forgotten. Bannon’s mantra is that the spiritual soundness of the working class is what defines Maga. But his speech aspired to more than raising morale. Each sentence dripped with martial imagery. He called for the 6 January rioters to be enthroned in opera boxes at the Lincoln Center and the elites who usually sat there to be sent to a “DC gulag”. His support for the rioters made his call for the Maga movement to grab their muskets seem real. At one point, he appeared to deliver a Roman or Nazi salute (an echo of Musk’s Trump inauguration stunt) which instantly received condemnation from around the world. Bannon is the Maga movement’s guru and he was conjuring up the future.
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After the speech, we climbed into a black Chevrolet SUV headed to a party in Bannon’s honour. One bodyguard sat in the back and one in the front. Bannon was on a comedown from the adrenalin of speaking. He wanted to reminisce about his time in London in the 1990s, when he would drink port and fine wine with other bankers from lunch until the early morning in White’s, Stringfellows and Annabel’s before catching a flight back to his home in Los Angeles to coach his daughters’ basketball team on Saturday morning.
We got out of the car, the doors to Butterworth’s bar swung open and Bannon was received with applause. People sipped cocktails called “the Force Multiplier” and “the Badge of Honor”. One man at the bar told me the last time he was in DC was for the 6 January riot – an inside job, in his view. Bannon and his follower’s views violate the line between metaphor and reality, between symbolism and facts. What did this man think about the violence in Bannon’s speech? “It’s [just] imagery, but if it comes to protecting our constitutional rights – we have our guns.”
The party rocked on around us. People got drunk and one man fell up the stairs. Laura Loomer, the anti-Islam influencer who once said the White House would “smell like curry” if Kamala Harris won, huddled with a small group. A young man in the crowd did a Roman salute, laughing with his friend. Afterwards, Kari Lake, the perennial Maga candidate yet to win an election, took the microphone. “I want to see the hands of our strong alpha men,” she shouted. “You’ve got the DNA of our founding fathers. You’ve got to stand up and save our country!”
A friend turned to me and said: “You know they are cosplaying – they don’t really mean it.” Perhaps not. But Bannon does.
I returned to the same bar a few days later for a brunch Bannon had organised. He spied me across the room and waved. He started laughing and then straightened his arm into a Roman or Nazi salute. He turned to one of his fans and said, “I’m f**king with him.”
We went to a table which his bodyguards closed off from the crowd for our final interview. He picked up a slice of crispy bacon and put it in his mouth. “Are you not going to have anything?” he asked self-consciously. What Bannon did at Cpac put his speech in the spotlight, just as he intended. He denied it was a salute. “It’s a f**king wave at the end” of the speech, he said, meant “to jack up” the crowd.
I asked Bannon what he thought of fascism. “Terrible,” he said, “because it’s totally hierarchical.” He added: “I’m an anti-elite, an anti-racist.” He gestured to the room: “You’ve got coming together every ethnicity, every religion, every race – boom! – in the sovereign will of the people. That’s powerful and it can’t be beaten. I am anti-modernity [because] it leads to the atomisation of society.”
But how could Bannon be an American nationalist and at the same time yearn for a return to a pre-modern world? America is a product of the Enlightenment. Bannon disagreed, arguing America can be the place to perfect what ancient “Athens, Jerusalem and Rome” represented without the ideals of the Enlightenment.
You can’t understand Bannon’s propagation of conspiracy theories – such as that the 2020 election was stolen – unless you understand that he is using conspiracy theories to serve what he sees as the spiritual needs of the working class. They function as foundational myths in Bannon’s populist nationalism. The imprisonment of 6 January rioters, for instance, can be twisted into a story about the state persecuting ordinary people for their political beliefs. The theory’s followers have created rituals, choirs and communes. “J6ers”, as they are known, are transformed into martyrs.
That is what liberals misunderstand and why their appeals to facts fall flat. Truth is a modernist idea. “It’s a spiritual war,” Bannon said. As he was speaking, I remembered his WarRoom reporter saying on that first day in the studio: “Our conspiracy theories are better than [the left’s] conspiracy theories.” It’s all of a piece. This is Steve Bannon’s war on modernity.
Note: This article was updated on 14 March 2025. An earlier version incorrectly referred to Emily Wilson’s verse translation of the Odyssey as prose.
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This article appears in the 26 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Britain in Trump’s World