The story behind Trump’s most controversial advisor

Daniel Dawson
Jul 24, 2017 · 5 min read
Photo Credit: Flickr via Compfight

When President Donald Trump appointed Steve Bannon to be his White House Chief Strategist in January, a lot of people were angry.

Liberals and conservatives were mortified by the decision to give the man labelled as “the most dangerous political operative in America”, so much influence over the president. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump were too.

“I think anger is a good thing,” Bannon said to a gathering of conservatives in Washington back in 2013. “This country is in a crisis. And if you’re fighting to save this country, if you’re fighting to take this country back, it’s not going to be sunshine and patriots. It’s going to be people who want to fight.”

But who is this man whose fight to make America great again, even managed to unite Democrats and Republicans in opposition to his appointment?

Bannon served as a lieutenant in the US navy during the late 1970s and early 1980s. He enrolled in the service after graduating from Virginia Tech and within six months was promoted to officer.

“I’m a naval officer, a real naval officer,” Bannon said to roaring laughter while addressing an audience in 2011. “Not a graduate of the Naval Academy.”

His worldview slowly began to take shape in 1985 as he sat in the audience at the Pentagon, while President Ronald Reagan awarded a Medal of Honor to a Vietnam War veteran.

“I wasn’t political until I got into the service and saw how badly Jimmy Carter fucked things up,” Bannon said to Bloomberg News. “I became a huge Reagan admirer.”

After Bannon left the navy, he enrolled in Harvard University and received an MBA, graduating at the top of his class.

“Steve was certainly top three in intellectual horsepower in our class — perhaps the smartest,” classmate David Allen said of Bannon in an interview with the Boston Globe. “He combined horsepower with logical, well-structured arguments.”

After Harvard, Bannon matriculated to Goldman Sachs where he became vice president of the mergers and acquisitions division.

“Steve Bannon is one of the smartest people I know,” said Anthony Scaramucci, a former Goldman Sachs investment banker who is now the director of communications at the White House. “He’s read every book in Barnes and Noble twice. You’ve got to be very careful of him.”

Bannon eventually left the banking giant to start his own boutique media investment banking firm, Bannon & Co., which helped bankroll the hit television series Seinfeld. Bannon still receives royalties from reruns of the show, which enrages one of its former writers.

“[He’s a] raging anti-semite,” Seinfeld writer and producer Peter Mehlman told the Guardian. “[Yet he’s made] all this money off a show that’s associated with Jewish humor. That’s pretty galling.”

Bannon denies being anti-Semetic, but has reportedly made inflammatory and offensive remarks about Judaism and Jewish people.

In 1998, Bannon left his boutique investment bank, moved to Hollywood, and became a filmmaker. He received an executive producer credit for the first film he worked on, The Indian Runner, which was nominated for an Oscar. He later co-executive produced Titus, which was also critically acclaimed.

Several individuals who also worked on the films said Bannon was an absentee member, but acknowledged that neither one would have gone forward without him. He secured the funding for both.

Lionel Chetwynd, a conservative Hollywood filmmaker (yes, those do exist) disagreed with these takes on Bannon.

“I think that Steve Bannon did get a great benefit from Hollywood,” he told the LA Times. “I’ve felt this guy has a good grasp of what is going on out there.”

After his initial two film successes, Bannon began working on a biographical film about Ronald Reagan. The film was based on a book by Peter Schweizer, then Breitbart editor-at-large. Schweizer later introduced Bannon to Andrew Breitbart, the chairman and founder of Breitbart News.

The two hit it off and Bannon became an editor at the then conservative, but less controversial, news and opinion media outlet.

In 2012, Breitbart died and Bannon became the organisation’s chairman and editor-in-chief. He transformed the news outlet into “a platform for the alt-right.”

Bannon’s disdain for the Republican Party was coming to a front even before then. In 2010 he told Political Vindication Radio that the GOP needed a wake up call and that Breitbart was the media outlet that would do just that.

“What we need to do is bitch-slap the Republican Party,” he said. “We don’t believe there is a functional conservative party in this country, and we certainly don’t think the Republican Party is that. It’s going to be an insurgent, center-right populist movement that is virulently anti-establishment, and it’s going to continue to hammer this city, both the progressive left and the institutional Republican Party.”

Six years later Trump was elected President of the United States with Bannon as his campaign CEO.

After Trump’s election triumph, Bannon matriculated to the coveted position of White House Chief Strategist, making him one of the most powerful men in the political party he frequently attacked.

“We think of ourselves as virulently anti-establishment, particularly the ‘anti-‘ the permanent political class,” Bannon told the Washignton Post. “We say Paul Ryan was grown in a petri dish at the Heritage Foundation.”

Comments like these have made Bannon a popular target for other members of Trump’s White House staff, including former Republican National Committee Chairman and current White House Chief of Staff, Reince Priebus.

Bannon’s vitriolic attitude toward the GOP may have been what precipitated his meteoric rise to power, but it looks to be the same force that led Trump’s new National Security Advisor, Gen. H.R. McMasters, to remove him from the National Security Council.

Bannon and Priebus, long time foes, appeared on stage together for the first time at Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual meeting of conservative activists and politicians.

When asked what Priebus liked most about Bannon, all the champion of the institutional Republican Party could say was: “I love how many collars he wears. Interesting look.”

Written by

Writes about olive oil professionally. Occasionally blogs about football and traveling. @Cityjournalism grad. Tweet me @dmdawson91.

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