How Steve Bannon guided the MAGA movement’s rebound from Jan. 6
shroud of black mesh fence closed around the bright marble colonnades of the U.S. Capitol campus. The twelve‐foot barrier, topped with razor wire and guarded by troops in combat fatigues with flak vests and long rifles, had sprung up to secure the seat of government after it was overrun by a mob of Trump’s supporters trying to stop the formal certification of his electoral defeat. Whether the fortifications were too much or too little, they were clearly too late. Their effect now was to sever the federal office buildings from the adjacent neighborhood of Capitol Hill, a picturesque historic district of low, colorful row homes. In the basement of one of these townhouses, Stephen K. Bannon was about to take to the airwaves. Seated in his podcast studio, Bannon looked, as usual, under-slept and over-caffeinated, but on this morning, the first Saturday in February 2021, his beady eyes were bright with excitement. He wore chunky black headphones that swept back his long gray mane until the tips grazed the epaulets of an olive‐green field jacket. This MAGA Che Guevara look was new for Bannon, a transformation from the preppy layered collars that he used to wear in 2017 to his West Wing office, which he’d called “the War Room.” If White House strategist to podcast host sounded like a fall from grace, for Bannon it was more of a return to form. He was in his natural mode, playing a role that came easily to him: the outside agitator with a huge online following. This same basement, years earlier, had been the headquarters of Breitbart News, the rising voice of reactionary right‐wing nationalism, rebranded for an online generation as “the alt‐right.” Official Washington, Democrat or Republican, didn’t know what to do with Bannon when he showed up, with his scruffy neck and multiple shirts. Bannon relished that air of foreignness, dubbing this townhouse the “Breitbart Embassy.” Fittingly, the upstairs rooms were decorated as if for a state visit, with yellow brocade curtains, crystal chandeliers, filigree mirrors and white stars dotting a dark‐blue rug running up the stairs to a Lincoln‐themed bedroom. It was in those rooms, during a book party in November of 2013, that Bannon had once announced, “I’m a Leninist.” (Little, Brown and Company) “What do you mean?” asked his shocked interlocutor, a historian at a conservative think tank across town. The historian, Ronald Radosh, was all too familiar with Lenin’s contributions to the ledger of human suffering. Lenin’s most influential and enduring innovation, laid out in his 1902 treatise, “What Is To Be Done?,” was the revolutionary party: an institution for organizing society not according to competition or merit, but rather based on adherence to an ideology. “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too,” Bannon answered. “I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”
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