It is no surprise that Steve Bannon has picked Butterworth’s. In spite of opening only last year, the quirky French-style bistro is already the Maga crowd’s preferred watering hole. Bannon, whose Capitol Hill townhouse is a few blocks away, is something close to its patron saint.
Having been Donald Trump’s original explainer, godfather to US nationalist-populism and an evangelist to its far-right western siblings, he could hardly be less. Bannon’s former protégé, Raheem Kassam, a British alt-right journalist, who was once an adviser to Nigel Farage, is co-owner. Republican senators, Maga influencers and members of Trump’s administration come here to be seen. Yet its decor is a million miles from Mar-a-Lago’s Gulf bling.
Amid tasselled lampshades, faux-faded wallpaper, a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II and dangling pots of ivy is a corner table where my lunch guest always sits — “Bannon’s nook”, the manager calls it. Low-key jazz, almost soporific, is playing.
At the next table a portly young man in a bow tie is talking earnestly to his lunch partner about Opus Dei’s YouTube presence. Not your average DC conversation, I muse. Bannon wanders in on time from the late June sauna outside. Trump’s former chief strategist, now the self-appointed keeper of the Maga flame with his daily War Room podcast, is dressed in his usual all-black jacket, shirt and trousers.
At 71, Bannon’s weather-beaten visage has seen better days. It has also seen worse. He spent four months in jail last year for contempt of Congress, having refused to co-operate with its inquiry into the January 6 2021 assault on the US Capitol. He escaped more jail time by pleading guilty to fraudulently diverting funds for his We Build the Wall non-profit. His spell in jail put him off meat, which he gave up for almost a year. “It was what you serve animals,” Bannon says of prison food. Did you complain, I ask naively. He laughs: “Prisons are not looking for customer feedback.”
I want Bannon’s Iran feedback. We meet a few days after Trump’s 30,000-pound bomb strikes on Iran’s enrichment sites. Bannon did his best to stop Trump from giving the order during a one-hour Oval Office session they had two days before Trump went ahead. Although Bannon is coy about how often he speaks to Trump — emphasising instead how often the US president watches clips from his broadcast — he remains firmly in Trump’s orbit.
Sometimes they speak. Bannon thought he had helped tilt Trump against the strikes. America joining Israel would reignite the “forever wars” that Trump promised to end. There was growing talk of a fracture between those such as Bannon, who opposed any US military action in the Middle East (the “restrainers”), and those urging regime change in Iran (the “neocons”).
Speculation over a split in Trump’s coalition has faded since then. To Bannon, Trump’s “one-and-done” strikes count as a win. What changed your mind, I ask. Bannon buys Trump’s claim that Iran’s nuclear programme has been “obliterated” — in spite of highly varied intelligence. “The ‘12-day war’ is a massive victory — we defeated the neocons and the Israel First crowd,” he says. “I am a huge supporter of Israel, but this thing has from the start been about Israel taking all the decisions.” I am sceptical. What makes you think Trump’s strikes were the end of US involvement, I ask.
We pause as the waiter arrives to take our orders. There is only sparkling water available. “What kind of establishment are you running here?” Bannon jokes. A bottle of still is duly found. I have a Diet Coke. I know better than to suggest wine. Bannon hasn’t touched alcohol in decades. He suggests we share starters of beef-tallowed french fries and the duck hash. The latter arrives with a large fried egg on top. “I’m an Irishman, so I need my potatoes,” says Bannon, digging for the carbohydrate amid the duck and egg. He alternates between that and the french fries.
I remind Bannon that he was going to tell me why he thought the Iran war was over. Bannon reaches for a movie analogy. As a former Hollywood investor (he still draws royalties from the cult sitcom Seinfeld) film references keep cropping up. Israel has been running a “MacGuffin”, he says. What is that, I ask. He explains that it is a device that drives the narrative flow but is irrelevant to the plot. The falcon plays no role in the classic The Maltese Falcon, for example.
Israel’s MacGuffin is Iran’s nuclear programme, says Bannon. In line with US intelligence, he believes Iran was no closer to breakout than before. Israel’s true plot was regime change, he says. Benjamin Netanyahu, in other words, was “playing” Trump. Now Trump, in Bannon’s view, has played Israel back by bringing the hammer down on Iran’s sites then imposing a ceasefire.
“What I was upset about was that the Israelis got us into this — it was their intel and their sense of urgency,” Bannon says. Among the first targets of its strikes were the Iranian officials with whom Trump was trying to negotiate a deal, he adds. “That looks more like decapitation to me.”
I’m still confused. If Trump knew he was being played by Israel, why did he oblige? A nattily blue-suited man from Alabama interrupts us. “Great interview with the coach (Tommy Tuberville, an Alabama Republican senator),” he says. “Can we meet tomorrow?” Bannon politely deflects him. “Let’s get together on the phone,” he says. Bannon’s phone keeps ringing during our lunch. He never picks up. “People who know me know I don’t answer the phone,” he says. I nudge him back on to Trump and Iran.
Menu
Butterworth’s
319 Pennsylvania Ave SE, Washington DC, 20003
French fries $12
Duck hash $21
Steak and eggs $28
Merguez sandwich $21
Complimentary still water, Diet Coke and double espressos
Total (including tax and tip) $111.30
Bannon explains that Trump’s real threat, and America’s, comes from China. He expounds on the Edwardian view of geopolitics as a “world island”, in which the power that dominates Eurasia controls the globe. Today’s real theatre is the Pacific, he says. Any Middle East war, especially one goaded on by what Bannon calls “Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News war propaganda machine”, would be a distraction.
Explain to me again how bombing Iran means America is pivoting to the Pacific, I ask. “Israel’s first strikes killed all (many of) the negotiators,” Bannon says. “Steve Witkoff (Trump’s chief negotiator) had more Iran talks on the books. Now they’re dead. Jesus, is the negotiating team the first that you go for?” He adds that Trump’s B-2 stealth bombers came from the western Pacific base in Guam, which sent a message to China (in fact, the B-2s flew direct from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri; those in Guam were decoys).
Still unsatisfied, I suspect that Bannon’s aim is to cement Trump into his declaration of closure. Bannon adds that the Israelis and Fox have been trying to “upsell” Trump on regime change by saying that some of Iran’s nuclear apparatus survived America’s bunker-busting bombs. That would open the door to mission creep. “Whatever Murdoch and Bibi (Netanyahu) want you to think, Trump obliterated Iran’s programme,” Bannon insists. “Now they’re trying to upsell him. ‘Now that you’ve bought the car, can we interest you in power steering?’”
What makes you so sure Trump isn’t interested in the power steering, I prod. “I believe him when he says the war is over.” The waiter is back. Although anchored with carbs, our lunch is not one-and-done. I request the Merguez sandwich, which consists chiefly of house-made lamb sausage. Bannon picks the steak and eggs. “I just want to try it,” he says. “You’ll tell your readers I didn’t finish it, right?” Bannon says he reverted to red meat a month ago because he was feeling anaemic.
I raise Iran one last time. What gives you confidence Tehran will now abandon its nuclear ambitions? Bannon elides to Fox. He reminds me that Murdoch threatened to make Trump a “non-person” following the January 6 assault. The media tycoon is no more Trump’s friend today than he was then, in Bannon’s view. “Fox should be investigated as breaching Fara (Foreign Agents Registration Act) — it’s pure war propaganda,” he says. “You’re literally running the Iraq playbook again. It took 18 months to build the Iraq narrative. On Iran it was 18 hours.”
Sensing that Bannon conceals no master key to Trump’s philosophy of war, I switch topic. Two days before we meet, Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old American Muslim, came from nowhere to trounce the Democratic grandee, Andrew Cuomo, as Democratic nominee for New York’s mayoral race.
Mamdani’s triumph is the sharpest jolt to the Democrats since Trump’s defeat of Kamala Harris last November. What is the meaning of Mamdani, I ask Bannon. I add that Mamdani’s diagnosis of New York’s affordability crisis sounds quite similar to Bannon’s description of America’s. The two seem to agree on 70 per cent. “Fifty per cent,” Bannon corrects. “That’s still a lot.”
Such as what? “Politics today is all about authenticity,” he replies. “Mamdani’s campaign was today’s equivalent of Barack Obama’s. He was walking down grocery aisles chatting on TikTok.” He accepted every interview request and relied on grassroots organising. Cuomo had name recognition, his campaign raised almost $40mn and secured Bill Clinton’s endorsement. His appearances were curated.
“The traditional Democratic party is dead,” Bannon says. “Mamdani blew it up.” Do you share the conservative view that an unabashed socialist and supporter of the Palestinian cause is a gift to Trump? Bannon shakes his head. “You shed more tears for answered prayers than unanswered prayers,” he replies. “Mamdani can bring people out . . . Populism is the future of politics.”
I am curious how being housed with criminals affected Bannon’s theory of populism. I could not lose the image of Bannon heading to jail with a Financial Times under his arm — not an everyday sight. Bannon sees this paper as the high priest of globalism. What initially drew him to populism was his investment in video games in the late noughties. That opened his eyes to an online universe of politically untapped testosterone, much of it rageful. If politics is downstream of culture, as Bannon believes, how did jail time affect his outlook?
Bannon offers me a portion of his barely touched steak, which I decline. Steak is not my thing, I say. It no longer seems to be Bannon’s either. He says there were 84 men in his prison section, which had just two showers. The Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut, was built almost a century ago and is at overcapacity. “I was 70 years old when I went in and it was so dangerous,” he says. “If I’d not been to military school and then gone into the navy I might have failed . . . It’s incredibly disorienting, steel doors, controlled moves. Every second of every day you have to be totally focused and aware. For example, never talk to a cop (prison guard) on your lonesome.”
To keep himself occupied, Bannon taught civics. He says his students were thirsty for knowledge. His focus was the US constitution. Evidently, Bannon’s pedagogy came with a Maga stamp as he keeps referring to the US president’s Article II powers, which he interprets “maximally” as giving Trump autocratic licence.
Bannon says the thing that struck him most was Hispanic and African-American disdain for the Democratic party. “They hate the Democrats,” he says. “They know the party is run by the credentialled classes, who are effete and have rich donors, and then unionised plebs at the bottom for whom they pretend to care.”
Although Bannon’s observation is characteristically sweeping — a big majority of Black voters and just over half of Hispanics voted for Harris — his trendline is not wrong; Trump is picking up a lot more non-white voters than before. Either way, Bannon is now an enthusiast for prison reform. Roughly a quarter of his fellow inmates were non-violent drug offenders, he estimates. None deserved to be locked up.
Since his release, Bannon has teamed up with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and Peter Navarro, a Trump trade adviser who also did time, to push for sentencing and prison reform. “Jail was a huge influence on me,” Bannon says. Most of his students agreed with him that America’s liberal elites and Wall Street are pro-immigration because they like the wage competition. “If it’s a choice between incarceration and deportation, I choose deportation,” Bannon adds.
Pithy though Bannon’s trade-off sounds, I suggest it’s a false one. I point out that many people accept Bannon’s message about the unfairness of the US economy in a similar way they do of Mamdani’s. Just as Bannon respects Mamdani’s methods but loathes his remedies, a leftist would share Bannon’s rage against plutocracy but revile his policies.
Quite apart from the gross injustice of suspending habeas corpus, as Bannon keeps urging, does he really think that trashing America’s right to due process would fix its economic woes? It seems like a lethal red herring. I also volunteer that his 2020 “stolen election” conspiracy theory sounds even more nuts. “I have to show you the evidence,” Bannon says mock-conspiratorially. You sound tongue-in-cheek, I say. “No, no, I was just trying to be polite because I know you’re a sceptic,” he replies.
We have both ordered double espressos. “Ah a real coffee,” says Bannon with the conviction of an ex-con. I feel it would be remiss not to raise Trump’s “big beautiful bill” that favours plutocrats at the expense of Bannon’s blue-collar followers. It pays for tax cuts largely with deep inroads into Medicaid and food stamps. Shouldn’t Elon Musk be happier with the bill than Bannon, I ask. “Who?” says Bannon in mock surprise about Trump’s estranged former first among equals. “Look, I detest the tech bros,” he says. “But we’re in a coalition.”
Bannon does not seem up for a Musk-bashing session, although he recently labelled the South African billionaire an illegal immigrant who should be deported. He has also urged Trump to investigate Musk’s alleged drug use.
Will Trump run for a third term in 2028? Bannon vows that Trump will not only run but win, although he refuses to elaborate on how that would be legally possible. Overtalking my incredulity, Bannon insists that he needs to “tell FT readers something they don’t want to hear”. His message is that Trump is America’s third world-historic leader. The first was George Washington, who founded the republic. The second was Abraham Lincoln, who saved it. Trump is now giving it rebirth. “Trump’s not leaving,” Bannon says. “He’s going to be in your head for a long time.” On this, he and I can agree.
More than two hours have passed. It is time to rejoin the inferno outside. “Did I deliver?” Bannon asks as we are exiting. I have been chatting to one of liberal democracy’s biggest demons. My reply is cut short by a passer-by who asks him for a selfie. Bannon’s chauffeur-driven SUV purrs close by. Jail is very much in his rear-view mirror now.
Edward Luce is the FT’s US national editor
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