Steve Bannon tells me why Elon Musk is 'evil' — and his vision for Trump 2028
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, as showtime approaches, he barks at Will, his 21-year-old production assistant, over some unresolved camera issue. "I don't want bullshit," he tells Will. "I don't want spin." Will is clearly accustomed to such scoldings and takes it in stride. So, he has a temper, I scrawl in my notebook.
To look at Bannon and his happy-hour red nose is to think, drinker. And he was, in earlier chapters of his life in finance. But his "boozer" days ended, his younger brother, Chris, tells me, when Steve realized he could be far more productive if he laid off the sauce.
Bannon takes his hands off his ample belly and points to his black sneakers. "These are my prison shoes," he tells me. "I wear them every day."
Most of today's morning show is wonky and kind of boring: an analysis of whether Democrats will shut down the government, an interview with economics writer Spencer Morrison about his new book, "Reshore: How Tariffs Will Bring our Jobs Home and Revive the American Dream." But Bannon concludes the show with a spectacular detonation: an unscripted, full-throated rant over "the $350 billion of your money" — he repeats the number several times — that the United States has spent to help Ukraine combat Russia's invasion. Bannon shows a MSNBC clip of Washington Post columnist David Ignatius defining America's national interest as keeping Ukraine "European" and out of Putin's clutches.
"This is insanity!" Bannon bellows. "We don't give a damn about whether Ukraine is European!" Ignatius, he declares, "is the spokesman for the Central Intelligence Agency." And the liberal media, as always, is the true enemy. "There's blood on the hands of MSNBC!" Bannon thunders.
The show over, Bannon immediately becomes subdued again. As we chat on the terrace, I call him out on the $350 billion figure, which Trump also uses. It's a fake number — an exercise in raw demagoguery. On this very day, Trump's own State Department is releasing a statement saying the United States had provided $66.5 billion in military assistance to Ukraine since Russia's 2022 invasion, and about another $20 billion has been disbursed in other aid.
Bannon shrugs. Whatever the correct number is, he says, it's a lot.
As unprecedented as it is to have someone with a felony conviction serving as president of the United States, it's equally rare to have a leading political strategist who has spent time behind bars on the president's behalf. Bannon was released in October after completing a four-month sentence for contempt of Congress at a low-security prison in Danbury, Connecticut. In February, he pled guilty to defrauding donors who contributed over $20 million to build a border wall, but received no jail time. He's extremely proud to have served time. Sitting in his comfy living room armchair, he takes his hands off his ample belly and points to his black sneakers. "These are my prison shoes," he tells me. "I wear them every day."
I ask him what prison was like. "Yeah, I don't want to talk about it too much," he says. "Too personal."
Then he proceeds to talk about it. He wasn't sent to a "camp," he stresses, but to a true prison, "massively overcrowded" with hardened drug offenders. Standing in line one day to return to his cellblock, he saw a prisoner shanked in the rib cage, his skin ripped open, "blood everywhere. It turns out he was a rat."
Bannon's military training, including his time on a cramped Navy destroyer, helped him get through the confines of prison life. No one threatened him, he tells me. "You've got to be very tough. My attitude was just like my attitude every day. I don't give two fucks. And you're not going to fuck with me. Right?"
It wasn't all grim survival mode. Bannon, a graduate of Georgetown's School of Foreign Service and the Harvard Business School, was asked to teach a class. So the man who tried to stage an insurrection offered a course on the rule of law. "We went back to the founding documents of the country," he says. He had his students read Alexander Hamilton's "Report on Manufactures" — dear to Bannon's heart for its appeal to turn the United States into an industrial powerhouse "independent" of foreign nations.
"It's interesting," he says of his course. "They had seats for 25. My class always had 50 people in it. It was oversubscribed. These people thirst for this information."
In prison, he also tried to convince viewers of the "White TV"— the Black prisoners controlled a second screen, the Hispanics a third — to watch MSNBC. No dice. They insisted on Fox News.
He was released a week before Trump's victory. "I came out more empowered than ever," Bannon says. "Tougher, more focused," he stresses. "Your dedication has to be to the mission."
Bannon works virtually around the clock. On the second day of our time together, I join him in the War Room for the cold open at 7 a.m. He fell asleep at 9 p.m. after watching MSNBC, he tells me, and has been up since 1 a.m.
"War Room," which often cracks the list of top 10 politics podcasts on Apple, is a platform for conspiracy theorists. The flamboyant election denier Mike Lindell advertises his MyPillow products on the show. On this morning's episode, Mary Holland, an ally of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., attacks the measles vaccine as potentially dangerous to children, even as a measles outbreak in Texas has already killed an unvaccinated 6-year-old. "Fuck no, not in a zillion years," Bannon tells me, when I ask whether he took the COVID vaccine. "Poison." I push back, but he dismisses me as a brainwashed tool of Big Pharma. "Bobby is doing a great job," he says. His other guests today include Jack Posobiec, who spread the lie that Democratic bigwigs were operating a pedophilia ring out of a Washington pizza parlor, and Laura Loomer, who shared a video claiming 9/11 was an "inside job." Spotify banned the show in 2020 and YouTube in 2021.
Later, after his afternoon show, Bannon repairs to his armchair. He looks fried, and says as much. I tell him I can't tell when he's serious with his routines and when he's just acting up, to troll the libs. He denies he does anything as a troll. Yes, he assures me, he is serious about having the J6 Choir — a music group composed of insurrectionists turned prisoners — perform at the Kennedy Center. He'd like to have all of the J6 families there, seated in the "elite boxes," and he's hopeful Trump would attend.
Then we come back to Musk. In February, the Times reported, Trump ordered Bannon to halt the attacks on Musk and said he wanted the two men to meet privately and work out their differences. I ask Bannon whether Trump is trying to referee between him and Elon. No, he says, Trump has more important things to do. Musk, returning fire, has lashed out at Bannon, calling him "a great talker, but not a great doer."
I tell Bannon that I get his dispute with Musk over the H-1B visa program, which Bannon sees as a globalist scam that denies rightful jobs to American workers. But what, in his mind, accounts for Musk's evilness?
"He's a transhumanist," Bannon says. "Elon's piece is tied with actually taking your phone and putting it inside your brain."
Transhumanism is an intellectual movement that advocates enhancing humans through technology, in order to protect them against existential crises ranging from pandemics to artificial intelligence. Musk has said the ultimate aim of his brain chip company Neuralink — which today focuses on helping quadriplegics control computers with their thoughts — is to merge humans with AI so the species doesn't get "left behind."
Bannon, like Musk, is a disrupter — but he draws the line, apparently, at disrupting God.
Bannon believes we are unprepared for a near future when humanity is divided between those who have a brain-enhancing chip and those who don't. "It is a massive, massive leap for humankind," he tells me, "and we won't be the same people on the other side. We're not ready as a society, we're not ready as a culture." He rises from the chair and hands me a book on the coffee table. "Dark Aeon: Transhumanism and the War Against Humanity." It was published by War Room Books, an imprint of Skyhorse, in 2023. The tome, which features a forward from Bannon, accuses the "cyborg savior Elon Musk" of being the embodiment of "satanism with a brain chip." Bannon, like Musk, is a disrupter — but he draws the line, apparently, at disrupting God.
Afew days after I depart Arizona, Bannon texts me. If I want to understand "War Room" and his leadership style, he tells me, I need to watch "Twelve O'Clock High," a 1949 World War II movie starring Gregory Peck as Brig. Gen. Frank Savage. In it, Savage assumes command of a bomber group and whips the demoralized soldiers into men, placing the needs of the mission above the well-being of any individual trooper He goes on hazardous bombing runs himself. But his zeal comes at a cost: By the end of the movie, he suffers a mental breakdown. "Gen. Savage turns out to be human," I say to Bannon. "Frail."
"He did exactly what he had demanded from his men," Bannon replies. "No exemption. It broke him — as he knew it would if you commit to 'maximum' effort."
I suggest to Bannon that his method is the inverse of Carl von Clausewitz's famous dictum, that war is a continuation of politics by other means. In Bannon's world, politics is the continuation of war by other means.
"Nailed it," he responds. And for Bannon, the battles, the shifting alliances, never seem to cease. Where Bessent is "my guy," Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, the former chief of Cantor Fitzgerald, is the "crazy man," he tells me. It seems one is either with Bannon or against him.
Bannon derives his power, ultimately, from two sources. The first is the following he commands among his "War Room" posse, as he calls his followers. But it's possible his legions aren't prepared to follow him into every battle. He wants the United States to go to war, if need be, to defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion — a position directly at odds with his overriding imperative to put an end to America's global empire. Yet a recent poll found that barely a third of Republicans would support sending US troops to Taiwan. Bannon may be ready to lead the charge, but he's likely to find himself with few troops at his disposal.
The second source of Bannon's power stems from his ability to influence the man he went to prison to protect. As Bannon sees it, he is winning his war for populism. Tariff walls are going up; federal programs are coming down; America First is the slogan of the hour. But plenty remains to be done, and Trump may prove an obstacle to some of his goals. Bannon doesn't just want to kill the H-1B visa program; he aims to impose a moratorium on all legal immigration, a stance Trump has not embraced. The president also appears poised to deepen America's involvement in Ukraine, through a minerals deal that Bannon opposes and a possible acquisition of its power plants. I mention a news report that the Democratic Republic of Congo offered Trump access to minerals of value to Musk and other high-tech barons, in exchange for US military help to put down an internal rebellion. A good idea, I ask Bannon? "No," he says.
Yet Bannon insists that Trump is a truly transformational president, on par with Washington and Lincoln. On our second day, after he finishes the morning podcast, Bannon heads to the kitchen, where he brews big cups of espresso and toasts bagels for the two of us. As we eat standing up, he tells me of his first meeting with Trump, back in 2010. At the time, with Barack Obama still in his first term, Trump was mulling a presidential run. Bannon, eager to advance the cause, walked Trump through the history of American populism — only to have the future president offer a correction.
The word is "popularism," Trump said.
No, Bannon explained, it's populism.
But Trump, who liked his own rendition better, would not be moved.
Paul Starobin is the author of "Putin's Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia."
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