Steve Bannon got out of prison exactly a week before Election Day. He was released before dawn and immediately headed to a remote studio to tape War Room, his podcast and streaming show, so as to waste no time getting back to his audience, the MAGA faithful. He had been in prison for almost four months for defying a subpoena related to the Jan. 6 insurrection; he had much to say.
In the immediate aftermath of the 2024 presidential election, I found myself thinking of Bannon, and how validated he must feel. It’s hard to tell from exit polling what the whole story is behind Donald Trump’s win—we won’t have better data for months—but signs point to a substantial shift rightward among Latino and Black men, scrambling Democrats’ ideas of who was reliably in their voting bloc. Most of the entire country shifted right, in fact. Perhaps it pointed to a new kind of Republican coalition.
As the man who constructed the intellectual framework of the MAGA movement, Bannon had for years preached the importance of building a populist message with broad appeal across many demographics. His ideal GOP would keep its focus on battling the “elites” rather than get distracted by culture-war squabbles; scorn squeamish centrists too afraid of violating democratic norms to shake up or burn down the governing institutions; and reject the old ways of conservatism in favor of extreme isolationism. This, he prophesied, would lead to an unbreakable coalition that could fundamentally reshape the nation’s politics for the next half-century.
During the first Trump administration, when Bannon had for a time served as the White House’s chief strategist, he indeed battled with the centrists and the establishment Republicans who slow-walked the president’s most chaotic plans; during the years after, he plotted a triumphant return of the MAGA movement. Now that he has that return in his sights, now that Republicans will have control of all three branches of government—now that the MAGA movement actually has the power Bannon has so long dreamed of—what will Trump do with it?
Thus, on the Wednesday after the election, I donned headphones and began a journey: one week of listening to War Room. This was no small venture. Bannon’s show airs for four hours a day, with a break in the middle, every day except for Sunday. I had over 20 hours to consume. But I had to know what Bannon, the architect of what had come to pass, would say about where he was going.
In the days following the election, the excitement on War Room was palpable. There was plenty of crowing about the greatness of the MAGA movement. There was praise and accolades for Trump as a kind of historic Great Man—a spiritual descendant of Washington or Lincoln or even the Roman patrician Cincinnatus. There was fevered speculation about who would staff the next administration. (“I’m getting tired of winning already,” Bannon said after Trump announced that Stephen Miller would be deputy chief of staff for policy.) And there was gloating about the horror and disappointment of the libs.
“You’re all in the fetal position,” Bannon said Monday morning, addressing the left. “So I’m going to give you something to really suck your thumbs about: We are in charge.”
I entered War Room because I wanted insight into how MAGA is thinking about its expanded coalition and its fight against any emerging liberal resistance in the coming Trump term. What I found myself more struck by was the extent to which Bannon is gearing up for a fight within his own party. The architect of MAGA sees victory, but he also sees weakness everywhere.
To Bannon, this is a time of potential peril: The party could set itself on the path for decadeslong power—but only if it has learned to heed the lessons he’s offering.
War Room does not air on YouTube; the show was kicked off the site in 2021 for spreading misinformation. But you can still find it (still spreading misinformation) on podcast apps, on Rumble, on Gettr, on the television channel Real America’s Voice, and on its website.
I chose to experience it on Apple’s podcast app, where its thumbnail art still features sinister pandemic imagery. But to get the full effect, I periodically checked in on the live video feed on the website. There, the perpetually unkempt Bannon, with his mane of silver hair, layered shirts, and Army-green barn coat, welcomes his guests via video feed from a desk in front of a fireplace mantel strewn with Roman Catholic iconography and a sign that reads: “There are NO conspiracies, but there are NO coincidences. —Stephen K Bannon.” (Note: Bannon and War Room did not respond to requests for comment.)
His show, usually filmed from a studio in his Capitol Hill row house basement, often opens with a clip from MSNBC before Bannon launches into a monologue countering or mocking the liberal hand-wringing. He’ll occasionally display a chart or some merchandise he’s promoting. Every once in a while, his border correspondent will roll footage of crowds of migrants. But mostly his show is bare-bones: angry patriots speaking into mics.
When I first tuned in, the day after the election, the content seemed predictable, almost boring. Bannon congratulated his audience and celebrated that they and everyone who worked so hard to stop the steal had made Trump’s victory “too big to rig.” “What you have accomplished will be written about in history books for decades and decades to come,” Bannon declared. “This is full-spectrum dominance.”
But by the evening segment, Bannon was already looking ahead. He reminded his viewers of Trump’s promises: the president-elect would investigate the Department of Justice officials who had investigated him; he would purge government departments of liberal civil servants; he would deport millions of people.
The celebrations were punctuated by ads, reminders, in an abrupt tonal shift, of the fear and anxiety that animates Bannon’s audience. Birch Gold, one of his top sponsors, urges viewers to invest in gold because elites “want to use technology behind bitcoin for their own Orwellian purposes” in order “to dominate the economy by getting everyone to use central-bank currencies, which they control.” A prepper company offers emergency food kits, with sinister warnings: “The unthinkable continues. Most Americans know something is very, very wrong. The people in charge keep telling you that everything’s fine and to stop noticing. But you know better.” A tax service promises to help with your IRS problems; a debt-management service offers to protect you from creditors.
Often, Bannon will toss the mic, virtually, to his 23-year-old co-host Natalie Winters, a blond Californian who has a side business selling a girlish right-wing clothing line. (This includes stickers that say “America First” in the Barbie font and T-shirts that read “Set Boundaries, Build Walls.”) Five years ago, she was kicked out of her sorority at the University of Chicago for transphobic commentary. During the week I listened to War Room, she joked at least a couple of times about Democratic activists being ugly; Bannon, who is 70, refrains from criticizing people’s looks.
At first, listening to the show, I was amused by the contrast. I heard Winters mock Democratic men for not paying on dates, and she joined Jack Posobiec, another right-wing activist, in jesting that liberal women on TikTok are on the wrong side of the “hot/crazy matrix.”
Bannon, on the other hand, generally gives the sense of being above the most vile aspects of the culture wars or petty attacks. He will violently declare his enemies “revolting” or tell the “scumbags” at the Pentagon to “put it where the sun don’t shine.” But he also tends to acknowledge the intelligence and competence of certain enemies, profess admiration for the talents of certain (assumed-liberal) news reporters, and reserve his most scornful tone for the elites in power. Amid my hours of listening to his co-host and guests, this cooler tone often felt like a respite from Winters’ monologues. For example, Bannon’s musings on the 4B movement, in which women refrain from sex with men as a form of political protest, included framing it as comporting with the themes of Lysistrata and the rejection of traditional society. Winters declared that these women’s “concept of masculinity is forcing men to sit in a cuck chair and watch their country be destroyed.”
Still, after adjusting to Winters’ more caustic style, I came to see her as a faithful internet-inflected iteration of Bannon’s particular politics—Gen Z Bannon, even. “We sell ourselves short, I think, when we spin the issue merely as ‘Oh, it’s trannies in women’s sports,’ ” she said during a discussion of gender. The real issue, she explained, was an economic one: The liberal order was assaulting traditional gender norms because plummeting birth rates benefited “the corporations that want massive immigration, the globalist organizations like the United Nations, the World Economic Forum.” The logic was fully in line with Bannon’s own pet conspiracy theories about the elites.
It’s hard to know how many people are tuning in to War Room; there are no publicly available metrics. And it’s worth noting that the War Room team has an inconstant relationship with Trump’s inner circle. Bannon himself was cast into the wilderness for a period in 2018 after Trump, angered over reports that Bannon had insulted Trump’s children, attacked him as “Sloppy Steve.” Just last week, J.D. Vance publicly called a top executive of War Room a “mouth breathing imbecile.” But Bannon’s own reputation as a committed leader of the populist cause that propelled Trump to the White House twice has secured him a loyal audience that includes far-right legislators and influential MAGA friends alike. Those friends have helped War Room retain political relevance—and keep his powers of persuasion in motion.
In the week I listened to the show, I heard Boris Epshteyn, a top Trump adviser, congratulate Bannon as a “warrior.” William McGinley, Trump’s choice for White House counsel, declared that the War Room posse “really delivered the victory.” Scott Bessent, Trump’s treasury secretary pick, went on the show to pitch major bank deregulation in the next term. Kash Patel, who’s in the running to be FBI director, came on to discuss the importance of overhauling the leadership of the intelligence agencies. Rudy Giuliani made an appearance, calling for a special counsel to investigate the “weaponization of government” during the Biden administration. Mike Davis, a Trump aide and online troll who is advising the president-elect on judicial picks, went on a number of times to discuss basically anything Bannon felt like grouching about.
Bannon keeps his audience up to date on internal Republican jockeying for influence and highlights his preferred people; urges viewers to make their opinions known to the power brokers; and pushes his guests to articulate how their MAGA dreams will actually play out.
“How should that investigation commence?” Bannon pressed Erik Prince, the Blackwater founder, in a Nov. 12 episode after the latter spoke at length about the need to launch investigations into DOJ officials and NGO workers who supported migrants coming across the southern border. “Because we really want action, action, action. We want to take it from the theoretical to the practical.” (Prince’s lackluster answer: Trump should order his acting attorney general to do it.)
As time went on, as I listened to Bannon on my work commute and while folding laundry, it became clear to me that when it came to action in the second Trump era, Bannon has three concrete goals. First, and most important, the mass deportation of every immigrant lacking permanent legal status who arrived during the Biden administration. This is key to his entire philosophy, and what he sees as the crucial differentiation that sets right-wing populism apart from left-wing populism: Immigrants, along with elites, are the scourge of working-class people, according to Bannon. It’s a broadly nativist pitch: Elites bring immigrants into the country to take jobs from working-class people, but immigrants should not be spared any mercy for unwittingly stealing jobs from real Americans. Bannon urged Trump to appoint a “deportations czar” to lead the campaign. Winters, at one point, dismissed the Republicans who focused on “immigrant crime” as thinking too small. “We’re not just removing criminals,” she said on a Saturday morning show. “We’re removing a monolith, a group of people who really are the antithesis of the populist agenda that undergirds the MAGA movement.”
Bannon’s second goal is to slash any federal government entity that would stand in the way of what Trump wants to do. Many of his guests agreed: career civil servants should be scrutinized, pockets of liberal resistance expunged, entire departments and even agencies wiped out. The intelligence agencies, the Justice Department, the “administrative state” all needed to be cleansed. Bannon cited as inspiration President Javier Milei of Argentina, while suggesting that Trump get rid of the Department of Education entirely. “We’ve got to purge the rot,” Bannon said on a Monday morning. “Maybe we’ve got to get rid of the FBI and build some other federal police force. Maybe we’ve got to deconstruct a bunch of the CIA. That will all come.”
Third, Bannon wants investigations into the “deep state” for its crimes against Trump. This element of the to-do list is Bannon’s most charged—he can’t seem to decide if he is proposing prosecution for the sake of justice or retribution. (A sampling of his comments: “Screw yourself, we’re not interested in a group hug”; “We live by grudges and vendettas”; and “You will pay a price for that. It’s called justice, rough Roman justice.”) One of Bannon’s primary proposals is to establish a special counsel to investigate special counsel Jack Smith, who led independent federal investigations into Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 insurrection and his handling of classified documents. In Bannon’s words: “The hunted are about to become the hunters.”
Bannon has no tolerance for weakness on any of these three issues. And that means that on War Room, the battle for the heart of the Republican Party is just as urgent as the battle against the Democrats, if not more so. Bannon and his guests had choice words for the prominent lobbyist Jeff Miller (“head of the swamp brigade”), ousted Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (“desperate for relevance”), Trey Gowdy (“a clown” and “dumb as a brick”), and Mike Johnson (“arguably worse [failures] than anything we’ve seen out of the Senate.”).
During the vote over the Senate majority leader, Bannon was incensed that Sen. Rick Scott, the MAGA pick, lost out to John Thune, whom Bannon called a “McConnell puppet.” Bannon rallied his viewers to inundate their senators with calls demanding that the vote record be publicized so that they could see exactly who had voted against Scott.
“We didn’t come all this way—this audience didn’t put their shoulder to the wheel—to have the victory become a Pyrrhic victory by putting someone like Thune in,” Winters said. Lambasting Republican senators, she added: “These people are the backbone, the epitome, of the right-wing resistance.”
Bannon’s great victory on election night was over not the Harris campaign but the idea that Republicans needed to moderate their stances on immigration and far-right isolationism. As long as Trump keeps people out, keeps the country out of wars, stops funding others’ wars, cuts taxes, institutes tariffs, and encourages “traditional family structures,” Bannon believes that prosperity will return to the lower and middle classes.
“Don’t you understand the historical moment we’re in?” Bannon asked the afternoon after the election. “To get past race and past gender and past religion and past ethnicity and past color? To get down to it? That’s the beginning of what last night was.”
He mocked Romney’s loss in 2012 and how Republicans had concluded that the party had leaned too hard right on immigration. “‘It couldn’t be the neoliberal, neocon policies of the Republican Party—that couldn’t possibly be it,’” Bannon said sarcastically, with audible satisfaction.
Exit polling on Latino voting is still disputed; some data analysis found that while Latino men did shift rightward, a majority still voted for Harris. (Also, Latinos are not a demographic monolith.) But as Bannon understands it, where Trump succeeded was in conveying a dire situation to Black and Latino men: Millions of “illegal alien invaders” had flooded the country “from the moment Biden took office.” These new Republican voters, Bannon said, had correctly realized that Biden, Harris, the progressive left, the “corporations, and the Wall Street barons” had allowed immigrants into the country to create the cheapest wages possible—to “basically … crush the Black and Hispanic working class.”
Bannon’s time in prison, too, seems to have strengthened his confidence in this analysis, if he lacked any before. “The young Black men and the young Hispanic men in that prison told me, … There’s no way she can win,” he said on a Wednesday afternoon segment. “They’re not prepared to vote for the old. Kamala Harris represents a Democratic Party that has not delivered for their interests.”
Richard Baris, a MAGA blogger and occasional War Room guest, said on the Wednesday evening show, “I see nothing but opportunity here,” noting that he’d happily trade one National Review type for “five Black guys and four Hispanic guys.”
A question Bannon asked was how Democrats would respond. Would they continue to hold on to established ways? Or would they swing toward their own version of populism? “We don’t need to help them with their autopsy,” he concluded.
There is a glimmer of something universal in what Bannon says and feels about how much of the world is controlled by elites. That (as others before me have pointed out when assessing right-wing populism) is what makes it dangerous. Whereas liberal populists often push for more government intervention and regulation to make the lives of working-class people more sustainable, Bannon remains singularly fixated on getting rid of the most vulnerable people in American society. “We’re not amnesty people,” Bannon said. The closest I ever heard him come to expressing any kind of empathy for immigrants whose lives he wants to uproot is when he called them “victims” and “pawns” in a “very deadly and dangerous game.”
Bannon’s entire worldview is also so tied up in misinformation that it’s impossible to extract a platform separate from it. His show, which was found to be one of the leading sources of misinformation during the COVID pandemic, has continued to churn out false claims about the 2020 election. Even with the 2024 victory, Bannon saw only further proof that the Democrats meddled four years ago to prevent a similar outcome. “We are not going to back off the adjudication of the big steal,” Bannon vowed the day after the election.
I am sure the 2020 election will start to feel less topical as time passes, but this belief—treated as a hard fact, conclusive evidence of the deep state’s power—will continue to be cited as evidence, alongside fresh new examples of villainy, as a reason to distrust all facets of a functional government. Democrats are not just rivals in a democratic competition for America’s identity but crooks who need to be countered with similarly underhanded tactics.
Discussing one MSNBC segment after the election, Winters scoffed at the idea that Democrats were upholding democratic norms by conceding. “They were patting themselves on the back because they weren’t doing a Jan. 6–type riot,” she said. “No, what you guys are attempting to do is so much worse and so much more quote-unquote antidemocratic.” She was referring to the efforts from liberal groups to resist authoritarian actions and mass deportations. Within this conspiratorial mentality, any liberal resistance to Trumpism is not a form of participation in the political system—it’s evidence of campaigns strategized by self-interested elites.
On Bannon’s show, viewers are warned that nongovernmental agencies, supposedly funded by liberal dark-money groups, will wage the “information warfare” element of the resistance.
He also predicts that the Biden administration will tank the economy to create chaos for Trump. Worse, Biden will maximize, till Inauguration Day, the number of immigrants who come across the border in order to establish a “point of contact” for the resistance.
The mainstream media, who Bannon said he hopes are cast to the “fifth and sixth row” of the White House briefing room to make space for “new media” and “alternative media,” are similarly a force to contend with. “We saw what the media hurled against us in 2016, right?” Winters said in a discussion of “dark money” in politics and getting rid of immigrants. “The scary sob stories of the children and the little grandma. It is up to us to win the narrative battle.”
The good news for them is they’ll have more tools this time. In the past eight years, the courts have become increasingly conservative. McGinley, who will be Trump’s White House counsel, promised on the Friday afternoon show that all the “bureaucratic tactics” the leftovers from the outgoing Obama administration deployed are “not going to work this time. We are going to be prepared.”
Bannon hates the left, there’s no question, but his focus now seems to be on the “RINOs” whom he and his allies see as a threat from the inside. In 2023 Bannon pushed for Kevin McCarthy’s ouster as speaker of the House, which came through the work of his loyal ally Matt Gaetz. Bannon has more recently moved on to fighting for his camp’s control of the Senate.
Speaking on Bannon’s show on Monday evening, Peter Navarro called Thune and John Cornyn, the final two Republican candidates for Senate majority leader, “bad, bad, anti-Trump dudes.” Posobiec called on the War Room audience to “dig up receipts” on Thune and Cornyn and warned viewers not to trust solid red-state Republicans who “put on a cowboy hat and they’ll walk around, post some video of ‘Oh, I’m shooting a six-shooter, I’m one of you’ ” because they’ll “go in the Senate and they start cutting deals with the lobbyists.”
“I know people want to relax and celebrate and pop wine corks and pop the champagne, but it’s not time for that,” Posobiec said on Tuesday morning, a week after the election. “It’s time to do the work. Because if you don’t do that, the MAGA agenda, the America First agenda will be stolen under you like a rug.”
Bannon has also personally urged his audience to call in and complain about the establishment Republicans, saying, “This is unacceptable. These people are trying to block President Trump and what President Trump’s trying to do.”
Bannon has been careful to voice an exception for Trump’s Cabinet picks, noting that while he thought Susie Wiles wasn’t “perfect” as chief of staff, Trump deserved to “have a say.” (“It’s a very imperfect world we’re in, posse,” he said, sounding a strangely conciliatory note. “Even when we win, sometimes we don’t win.”) It was Congress he distrusted. The Senate, he insisted, was the “bastion of the donor class.”
This is where Bannon can apply pressure. He can set his listeners on to harassment campaigns. He can give most far-right legislators a platform and flatter and sway troublemakers, urging them on to wage ugly internecine battles. The Republican Party, the people who put millions in funding and endless hours of labor into the 2024 campaign, reelected Bannon’s populist hero. But that doesn’t mean he’ll work with them.
Sign up for Slate’s evening newsletter.
