Steve Bannon

Stephen Kevin Bannon (born November 27, 1953) is an American media executive, Republican political strategist, pundit and former investment banker. He served as the White House's chief strategist for the first seven months of President Donald Trump's first administration before Trump fired him. He is a former executive chairman of Breitbart News. Since 2019, Bannon has hosted the War Room podcast.

Bannon was an officer in the United States Navy between 1977 and 1983, then worked for two years at Goldman Sachs as an investment banker. In 1993, he became acting director of the research project Biosphere 2. He was an executive producer on 18 Hollywood films from 1991 to 2016. In 2007, he co-founded Breitbart News, a website which he described in 2016 as "the platform for the alt-right". In the mid-2010s, Bannon was a vice president of Cambridge Analytica, a firm that collected data on millions of Facebook users, without their informed consent, for use in Trump's campaign and Brexit, in some cases spreading fake news. Later knowledge of this data breach prompted the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal.

In 2016, Bannon became the chief executive officer or CEO of Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and was appointed chief strategist and senior counselor to the president following Trump's election. As chief strategist, Bannon urged Trump toward an anti-establishment platform and clashed frequently with other Republicans as well as fellow staff members Reince Priebus and Jared Kushner. He left eight months later and rejoined Breitbart. In 2018, after his criticism of Trump's children was reported in Michael Wolff's book Fire and Fury, he was disavowed by President Donald Trump and left Breitbart. After leaving the White House, Bannon opposed the Republican Party establishment and supported insurgent candidates in Republican primary elections. Bannon's reputation as a strategist was questioned when former Alabama Supreme Court chief justice Roy Moore, despite Bannon's support, lost the 2017 United States Senate election in Alabama. Bannon had declared his intention to become "the infrastructure, globally, for the global populist movement". Accordingly, he has supported national populist conservative political movements around the world, including creating a network of far-right groups in Europe. Bannon advised Jeffrey Epstein, the financer and convicted child sex offender, on media relations just prior to his arrest on sex trafficking charges and death in prison in 2019.

In 2020, Bannon and others were arrested on federal charges of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and money laundering connected to the We Build the Wall fundraising campaign. According to the indictment, the defendants promised contributions would go to building a U.S.–Mexico border wall, but instead enriched themselves. Bannon pleaded not guilty. Trump pardoned Bannon, sparing him from a federal trial, but did not pardon his codefendants. Federal pardons do not cover state offenses, and in 2022, Bannon was charged in New York state court with fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy in connection with the campaign. In February 2025, Bannon pleaded guilty to fraud and was sentenced to three years of conditional discharge.

Stephen Kevin Bannon was born November 27, 1953, in Norfolk, Virginia, to Doris (née Herr), a homemaker, and Martin J. Bannon Jr., who worked as an AT&T telephone lineman and as a middle manager. He grew up in a working-class family that was pro-Kennedy and pro-union Democrat. He is of Irish and German descent. Much of his mother's side of the family settled in the Baltimore area. Bannon graduated from Benedictine College Preparatory, a private, Catholic, military high school in Richmond, Virginia, in 1971, and then attended Virginia Tech, where he served as the president of the student government association. During the summers he worked at a local junkyard.

In 1976, he graduated from Virginia Tech College of Architecture and Urban Studies with a bachelor's degree in urban planning. While serving in the navy, he earned a master's degree in national security studies in 1983 from Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. In 1985, Bannon earned a Master of Business Administration degree with honors from Harvard Business School.

Bannon was an officer in the United States Navy from 1977 to 1983; he served on the destroyer USS Paul F. Foster as a surface warfare officer in the Pacific Fleet, and afterwards as a special assistant to the chief of naval operations at the Pentagon. Bannon's job at the Pentagon was, among other things, handling messages between senior officers and writing reports about the state of the Navy fleet worldwide. While at the Pentagon, Bannon attended Georgetown University at night and obtained his master's degree in national security studies.

In 1980, Bannon was deployed to the Persian Gulf to assist with Operation Eagle Claw during the Iran hostage crisis. In a 2015 interview, Bannon said that the mission's failure marked a turning point in his political worldview from largely apolitical to strongly Reaganite, which was further reinforced by the September 11 attacks. He recounted,"I wasn't political until I got into the service and saw how badly Jimmy Carter fucked things up. I became a huge Reagan admirer. Still am. But what turned me against the whole establishment was coming back from running companies in Asia in 2008 and seeing that [George W.] Bush had fucked up as badly as Carter. The whole country was a disaster."

After his military service, Bannon worked at Goldman Sachs as an investment banker in the Mergers and Acquisitions Department. In 1987, he relocated from New York to Los Angeles, to assist Goldman in expanding their presence in the entertainment industry. He stayed in this position with Goldman in Los Angeles for two years, and left with the title of vice president.

In 1990, Bannon and several colleagues from Goldman Sachs launched their own company Bannon & Co., a boutique investment bank specializing in media. In one of Bannon & Co.'s transactions, the firm represented Westinghouse Electric, which wanted to sell Castle Rock Entertainment. Bannon negotiated a sale of Castle Rock to Turner Broadcasting System, which was owned by Ted Turner at the time. Instead of a full adviser's fee, Bannon & Co. accepted a financial stake in five television shows, including Seinfeld, which was in its third season. Bannon still receives cash residuals each time Seinfeld is aired. In 1998, Société Générale purchased Bannon & Co.

In 1993, while still managing Bannon & Co., Bannon became acting director of the earth science research project Biosphere 2 in Oracle, Arizona. Under Bannon, the closed-system experiment project shifted emphasis from researching human space exploration and colonization toward the scientific study of earth's environment, pollution, and climate change. He left the project in 1995.

On August 17, 2016, with 88 days until the 2016 presidential election, Bannon was appointed chief executive of Donald Trump's presidential campaign. Bannon left Breitbart, the Government Accountability Institute and Cambridge Analytica, to take the job. Shortly after he had assumed the chief executive role, the chairman of the Trump campaign, Paul Manafort, was dismissed.

On November 13, following Donald Trump's election to the presidency, Bannon was appointed chief strategist and senior counselor to the president-elect. His appointment drew opposition from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Council on American–Islamic Relations, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Democratic Senate minority leader Harry Reid, and some Republican strategists because of statements in Breitbart News that were alleged to be racist or antisemitic. However, a number of prominent politically conservative Jews defended Bannon against the allegations of antisemitism, including Ben Shapiro, David Horowitz, Pamela Geller, Bernard Marcus of the Republican Jewish Coalition, Morton Klein, the Zionist Organization of America, and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach.

Alan Dershowitz at first defended Bannon, saying there was no evidence he was antisemitic, but then in a later piece stated that Bannon had made bigoted statements against Muslims, women, and others. The ADL stated "We are not aware of any anti-Semitic statements from Bannon." Bannon had referred to French National Front (now National Rally) politician Marion Maréchal-Le Pen as "the new rising star".

On November 15, 2016, U.S. representative David Cicilline of Rhode Island released a letter to Trump signed by 169 Democratic House representatives urging the president-elect to rescind his appointment of Bannon. The letter stated that appointing Bannon "sends a disturbing message about what kind of president Donald Trump wants to be", because his "ties to the White Nationalist movement have been well documented"; it went on to present several examples of Breitbart News's alleged xenophobia. Bannon denied being a white nationalist and said, rather, that he was an "economic nationalist".

On November 18, during his first interview not conducted by Breitbart Media since the 2016 presidential election, Bannon remarked on some criticisms made about him, saying, "Darkness is good: Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That's power. It only helps us when they get it wrong. When they're blind to who we are and what we're doing." The quote was published widely in the media.

Bannon's employment in the White House ended on August 18, 2017, less than a week after the August 11–12, 2017, Charlottesville Unite the Right rally which degenerated into violence and acrimony. Whereas members of both political parties condemned the hatred and violence of white nationalists, neo-Nazis and alt-right activists, The New York Times noted that Trump "was the only national political figure to spread blame for the 'hatred, bigotry and violence' that resulted in the death of one person to 'many sides'." The decision to blame "many sides" was reported to have come from Bannon. The NAACP released a statement saying that while they "acknowledge and appreciate President Trump's disavowment of the hatred which has resulted in a loss of life today", they called on Trump "to take the tangible step to remove Steve Bannon – a well-known white supremacist leader – from his team of advisers". The statement further described Bannon as a "symbol of white nationalism" who "energized that sentiment" through his position within the White House.

Some sources stated that White House chief of staff John F. Kelly asked Bannon on August 18, 2017, to submit his immediate resignation in lieu of being fired. Bannon, however, stated he was not fired but rather submitted his two-week resignation notice on August 4, 2017. He reminded The Weekly Standard that he had joined then-presidential candidate Trump's campaign on August 14, 2016, and said he'd "always planned on spending one year", but that he stayed a few more days due to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

In an official statement, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said: "John Kelly and Steve Bannon have mutually agreed today would be Steve's last day. We are grateful for his service and wish him the best." The same day, Breitbart News announced that Bannon would return to the site as executive chairman. Several weeks after his departure it was reported that Trump still called Bannon using his personal cell phone and was only calling when chief of staff Kelly was not around. The Washington Post reported in October 2017 that Trump and Bannon remained in regular contact.

In January 2018, upon the publication of Michael Wolff's book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, which attributed many controversial and inflammatory statements to Bannon, Bannon and Trump became estranged and were widely seen as enemies. The book quoted Bannon as saying that Ivanka Trump was "as dumb as a brick"; that the meeting among Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, and agents of Russia was "treasonous"; and that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller would cause Donald Trump Jr. to "crack like an egg on live television". Bannon also warned that investigators would likely uncover money laundering involving Jared Kushner and his family business loans from Deutsche Bank.

In his 2019 book Siege, Wolff wrote, "Trump was vulnerable because for 40 years he had run what increasingly seemed to resemble a semi-criminal enterprise," then quoted Bannon as saying, "I think we can drop the 'semi' part." Wolff wrote that Bannon predicted investigations into Trump's finances would be his political downfall, quoting Bannon as saying, "This is where it isn't a witch hunt – even for the hard core, this is where he turns into just a crooked business guy, and one worth $50 million instead of $10 billion. Not the billionaire he said he was, just another scumbag."

During the November 5, 2020, edition of his webcast, Bannon called for the beheadings of Anthony Fauci, the government's top infectious diseases expert, and FBI director Christopher Wray. Bannon said that if it were up to him, after beheading Fauci and Wray, "I'd put the heads on pikes" and display them outside the White House "as a warning to bureaucrats" who dared oppose Trump. By the end of the day, Facebook and YouTube had deleted the video from their platforms, and Twitter had permanently banned his account for glorifying violence. Mailchimp also disabled Bannon's email newsletter. The next day, Bannon was dropped by a lawyer who had been defending him against federal charges of fraud.

On January 9, 2021, Rudy Giuliani appeared on War Room, accusing Democrats of stealing the recent presidential election and blaming them for the storming of the Capitol. Hours later, YouTube removed both the podcast channel and another one called "Trump at War – A Film by Stephen K. Bannon", citing a "violation of YouTube's Terms of Service".

Bannon has described himself as a populist and nationalist.

Lebanese-American author Nassim Nicholas Taleb, neoreactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin and conservative intellectual Michael Anton have been pointed out as three of the main influences in Steve Bannon's political thinking. Political theorist and philosopher Edmund Burke has also been described as a major influence on Bannon's ideological outlook. According to The Guardian in January 2018, Bannon's ideology is similar to that of Stephen Miller, Tucker Carlson, Benny Johnson, Raheem Kassam and Matthew Boyle, the latter two having been protégés of Bannon at Breitbart.

Despite being arrested on federal charges of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and money laundering in connection with the We Build the Wall fundraising campaign in August 2020, in an interview, Bannon told journalist Michael Lewis in February 2018, "We got elected on Drain the Swamp, Lock Her Up, Build a Wall. This was pure anger. Anger and fear is what gets people to the polls." He added, "The Democrats don't matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit."

A self-described economic nationalist, Bannon advocates for reductions in immigration and restrictions on free trade with China and Mexico. He has been described as a white nationalist but rejects the description. He generally believes in reducing the size of the federal bureaucracy, declaring at the Conservative Political Action Conference he favored the "deconstruction of the administrative state".

In May 2025, Bannon voiced opposition to a bipartisan proposal that would expand anti-BDS laws punishing the boycott of Israel.

Bannon has been married and divorced three times. He has three adult daughters. His first marriage was to Cathleen Suzanne Houff. Bannon and Houff had a daughter, Maureen, in 1988 and subsequently divorced.

Bannon's second marriage was to Mary Louise Piccard, a former investment banker, whom he married in April 1995. Their twin daughters were born three days after the wedding. Piccard filed for dissolution of their marriage in 1997.