Will Bannon return to the MAGA circle?
Steve Bannon speaks after being released from the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut. Credit: AP/Eduardo Munoz Alvarez
Possibly the biggest news of this preelection week for the Trump administration-in-waiting was the release from prison of Steve Bannon.
Bannon, 70, immediately took to the airwaves to stump for his ex-boss, Donald Trump. In the collective MAGA imagination, the reflexive spin is that his incarceration was persecution. In the realm of fact, however, Bannon served a not-too-hard four months in the low-security Danbury, Connecticut federal prison for contempt of Congress.
A jury found Bannon guilty for the valid reason that he refused to sit for a deposition by a House committee on the well-grounded and perfectly legal mission of exploring the pro-Trump Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.
Trump prompted a lethal riot that day based on the extreme lie that he didn’t lose the election. Bannon, who had been advising Trump by phone beforehand, not only refused to be deposed by the panel but wouldn’t provide documents about his role in trying to fix the election results.
Now Bannon’s MAGA sorcery has started up anew, transforming his image into that of a martyr at least for the few seconds that ordinary Americans might bother to pay attention to his story.
"I’m finally out of being a political prisoner," Bannon said at his news conference Tuesday. "I think you can see today I’m far from broken."
Remembering Bannon's past might offer clues to his next act, whether or not his liege returns to the throne. Bannon is one of the old members of the circle sticking to the destructive "stop the steal" fiction of 2020.
Maybe he and the other big MAG-tivists have nowhere else to go. It has been a long journey since 2016. That year, Bannon burst on the scene in the guise of being Trump’s political guru, his rumpled genius, and his ideological coach.
Early on, Bannon proclaimed Trump’s drive to destroy, not reform, selected American institutions and norms. "I'm a Leninist," Bannon told The Daily Beast back in 2013. "Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that's my goal, too." Vladimir Lenin, that is — leader of the Bolsheviks who established the Soviet Union.
Bannon's grand visions and intellectual pretenses fell into irrelevance while he was on the White House payroll as chief strategist and senior counselor to the president. He told a writer that he thought Donald Trump Jr., having met with Russians during the first campaign, stumbled into the "treasonous" and "unpatriotic." The dish on Hillary Clinton the Russians allegedly offered never emerged. Bannon was banished for the disloyalty.
Trump started mocking Bannon as "Sloppy Steve" after some more trash-talking from his former aide, accurate or not. "Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind," Trump posted on social media. The billionaire benefactors of Bannon’s political operations, the Mercers on Long Island, cut ties with him.
By 2020, Bannon had bigger troubles. He was accused of defrauding contributors to an organization called "We Build the Wall" that raised millions of dollars. On his last day in office, Trump pardoned Bannon — who now faces New York State charges based on the same set of facts. State cases are beyond a president’s pardon powers.
Whether Bannon can expand his influence on the political right again depends, like much else, on the election’s outcome. While Bannon’s career isn’t worth much voter attention, it’s emblematic of who might be wielding that old MAGA magic.
Columnist Dan Janison's opinions are his own.
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.