Reclining out on his terracotta-tiled terrace, his bare feet propped up on a worn ottoman, Steve Bannon gets a phone call. We're 2,000 miles from the Oval Office, at Bannon's Tuscan villa outside Tucson, an Italianate fountain gurgling away beside him. You might think Donald Trump's former strategist-in-chief is out of the loop these days, relegated to basking in the Arizona sun. But the call is from Alexandra Preate, a Bannon protégé who's now a top advisor to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. The stock market has just gone into a nosedive, spooked by Trump's on-again, off-again tariffs, and Preate wants to consult with Bannon on Bessent's markets-calming remarks to reporters that morning outside the White House.
"He was so brilliant," Bannon tells her. "He has got to do that every day."
Fresh out of federal prison for his refusal to talk to Congress about his role in the attempt to overturn Joe Biden's election, the man Time magazine once called "The Great Manipulator" remains an influential force in Washington. As I saw during my two days with him, Bannon, at age 71, is still crafting MAGA's message at the highest levels. He says he speaks daily with Trump's top trade advisor, Peter Navarro, who served as Bannon's cohost of "War Room," the rowdy, MAGA-fueled podcast Bannon helms twice a day, six days a week. Bessent, whom Bannon calls "my guy," and FBI Director Kash Patel are friends, and Sen. Josh Hawley, a right-wing populist, is a frequent guest on the show. Just last week, Bannon was summoned back to what he calls the "Imperial Capital" to assist the administration "on messaging for Flood the Zone" — Trump World-speak for overwhelming the president's opponents with fresh MAGA initiatives.
Prominent Democrats are also paying heed. Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, who is widely expected to run for president in 2028, featured Bannon as the third guest on his new podcast. "He's a serious thinker," says Rep. Ro Khanna, another California Democrat touted as a 2028 contender. "Bannon got it right on the challenge deindustrialization poses" to the American economy. Khanna tells me he'd be open to appearing on "War Room," which The Wall Street Journal recently called "the hottest stop in DC's media circuit."
Despite his continued influence, Bannon doesn't agree with Trump on every issue. And this time around, there's a major new player separating the two: Trump's former right-hand man is at complete odds with his current right-hand man. Elon Musk, Bannon tells me, is basically the devil incarnate. "Elon was always evil," he says. Don't get him wrong: Bannon supports what Musk is doing with DOGE, which he lauds as "a shock troop to deconstruct the administrative state." But he says there is a "very deep chasm" between him and Musk — one based not only in politics, but in spirituality. Musk, as Bannon sees it, is the embodiment of a new form of satanism. By seeking to implant computer chips in people's brains, Musk is attempting to disrupt humanity itself, a grandiose vision that is antithetical to what Bannon, a Catholic, sees as God's will.
"He's a techno-feudalist," Bannon tells me with barely concealed venom. "We are on the side of the human being."
Musk's dark plot to engineer a race of computer-enhanced superhumans has done nothing to diminish Bannon's enthusiasm for Trump. In fact, Bannon tells me he is undertaking perhaps his most ambitious project yet: ensuring that Trump wins a third term in 2028. Bannon is confident, he tells me, that Trump will carry at least 331 electoral votes next time — a triumph even greater than his victory over Kamala Harris.
How, I ask, can that happen within the bounds of the Constitution?
He's working on it, Bannon tells me.
Bannon's villa is nestled in a quiet neighborhood of ranch houses, saguaros, and mesquite trees overlooking the Santa Catalina mountains. He still spends most of his time in Washington, at a townhouse he owns behind the Supreme Court. But sometimes, he tells me, it's good to escape the unceasing procession of visitors who call on him in the capital. Besides, he can host "War Room" just as easily from here, in a small corner room in the villa.
Welcoming me to his retreat, Bannon asks why I became a journalist. I suppose journalism suited my skeptical cast of mind, I say.
"You're a dick," he says.
I'm momentarily speechless. That's a good thing, he assures me. Real journalists are always dicks.
A massive coffee table perched in front of Bannon's armchair supports four stacks of newspapers: not just mainstream periodicals like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, but outliers like The Epoch Times, a paper founded by Chinese American adversaries of the Chinese Communist Party. Where Trump professes admiration for Xi Jinping as a strong leader, Bannon, who once lived in Shanghai, views China as America's mortal enemy and dreams of a popular rebellion that will overthrow the communist regime.
A collection of books and periodicals sprawls from the table to the base of the fireplace to the kitchen counter. I leaf through "The Money and the Power," a book on the making of Las Vegas, and see Bannon's hand-scrawled circles and underlines strewn across the pages. His omnivorous reading, he tells me, is a key advantage in political strategizing, a calling in which few of his rivals are known for being avid readers. The TV on his wall is set not to CNN, which he views as aimless, or Fox News, which he dismisses as weak neoliberal tea, but to MSNBC, which he treasures as a true-blue voice he can push back against in the "War Room." "There's my girl," he says when MSNBC afternoon host Nicolle Wallace appears on the screen.
Some in Washington suspect that Bannon may be weighing a presidential run of his own in 2028. A straw poll of attendees at the recent CPAC conference placed him second among possible Republican nominees, albeit a distant second to JD Vance. But Bannon dismisses the speculation. "I'm not running for president," he tells me. He's all in for Trump to serve a third term. He's cagey on how he plans to make that happen, but he says he's working on it with legal experts he declines to name. One possibility, he says, is a so-called Article V convention, in which delegates could propose amendments to the Constitution requiring ratification by at least 38 states.
Bannon believes that another run by Trump — his fourth — would be his biggest victory ever. "I think he does better in 2028," Bannon says. The president, he predicts, would take three states he failed to win in 2024: Minnesota, New Hampshire, and New Mexico, the latter delivered by Trump's rising support from Latino voters.
If Trump can't or won't run, I ask, will you support Vance? Bannon pointedly refuses to anoint the vice president as Trump's rightful heir. If the president is not the nominee, Bannon says, he will favor an open primary for the Republican nomination.
It's time for War Room. Throughout our conversation, Bannon has been relentlessly affable. But now,...
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