Steve Bannon
Stephen (Steve) K. Bannon
Credentials
- MBA, Harvard University.[1](javascript:void(0))
- MA, Georgetown University.[2](javascript:void(0))
- Bachelor’s Degree, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.[3]
Background
Steve Bannon is the former Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor to President Trump, a role that BBC news wrote gave him a “direct line to President Trump.” Trump initially appointed Bannon as campaign CEO in August, 2016, and then appointed him to the White House position following his victory. Bannon was dismissed from his White House position in August, 2017.[4]
Bannon was formerly the Executive Chair of Breitbart News, a far-right news website that Bannon described in 2016 as the “the platform for the alt-right.” He took a leave of absence from Breitbart while working on Trump’s campaign, and after Trump’s election announced his resignation.[7]
After losing his position in the Trump administration, Bannon announced he would return to Breitbart. “I’ve got my hands back on my weapons,” Bannon told the Weekly Standard. “I am definitely going to crush the opposition. There’s no doubt. I built a f***ing machine at Breitbart. And now I’m about to go back, knowing what I know, and we’re about to rev that machine up. And rev it up we will do.” On January 9, 2018, Bannon announced he would be stepping down from Breitbart News reportedly forced by onetime patron Rebekah Mercer and after remarks attributed to Bannon in a new book questioning President Trump’s mental fitness.
Bannon worked at Goldman Sachs as an investment banker after serving as an officer in the U.S. Navy for seven years. In 1990, Bannon & Co., a boutique investment bank specializing in media. He briefly worked in the entertainment business, obtaining stakes in five television shows including Seinfeld.[13]
After selling off Bannon & Co., he briefly worked as an executive producer of movies including Anthony Hopkins’s 1999 Oscar-nominated Titus. He produced a number of movies including a documentary on Ronald Reagan titled In the Face of Evil , as well as Fire from the Heartland: The Awakening of the Conservative Woman, The Undefeated (on Sarah Palin), and Occupy Unmasked.
Bannon is the Executive Chairman and co-founder of The Government Accountability Institute (GAI), a conservative nonprofit investigative research organization that conducted research for the 2015 book Clinton Cash and received significant funding from the Mercer Foundation (Rebekah Mercer is also a GAI board member). GAI maintains ties to a range of conservative groups including Citizens United, the American Conservative Union, Young America’s Foundation, and the Hoover Institution, through its key staff and board members.
Breitbart News
When Andrew Breitbart passed away in 2012, Steve Bannon took over as the head of Breitbart News, a group Bannon described as “virulently anti-establishment, particularly ‘anti-‘ the permanent political class.”
“We call ourselves ‘the Fight Club.’ You don’t come to us for warm and fuzzy,” Bannon told The Washington Post.
Breitbart was supportive of Trump in the election, with one November 2015 piece calling him the “John Wayne” of politics, saying “we should thank God that Trump is in this race. […] He will set back the destruction of America.”
Breitbart as been accused of becoming a mouthpiece for the alternative right, or “alt-right.” A March, 2016 Breitbart column described the movement as having “a youthful energy and jarring, taboo-defying rhetoric.” The Southern Poverty Law Centre called it “a loose set of far-right ideologies” with the preservation of “white identity” at its core.
Bannon himself, when interviewed by Sarah Posner of Mother Jones at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in July 2016, said ”We’re the platform for the alt-right.”
Former Breitbart editor-at-large Ben Shapiro, who had quit the news site “when it became clear to me that they had decided that loyalty to Donald Trump outweighed loyalty to their own employees.” Shapiro wrote in The Daily Wire:
“Andrew Breitbart despised racism. Truly despised it. With Bannon embracing Trump, all that changed. Now Breitbart has become the alt-right go-to website, with [technology editor Milo] Yiannopoulos pushing white ethno-nationalism as a legitimate response to political correctness, and the comment section turning into a cesspool for white supremacist mememakers.”
MediaMatters reported that Breitbart Editor James Delingpole has called NOAA scientists “Talentless low-lives who cannot be trusted,” while most scientists, businesses, and politicians supporting action on climate change are “abject liars.” Delingpole went as far as calling climate action advocates “eco nazis,” “eco fascists,” and “scum-sucking slime balls.” He also cited studies from the industry-funded Heartland Institute to claim that “global warming is good” and “co2 is our friend.”
MediaMatters also documented some of the most outrageous headlines that appeared on Breitbart News during Bannon’s tenure there:[
- “Bill Kristol: Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew”
- “World Health Organization Report: Trannies 49 xs Higher HIV Rate
- “Big Trans Hate Machine Targets Pitching Great Curl Schilling
- “Sympathy for the Devlis: The Plot Against Roger Allies—And America”
- “There’s No Hiring Bias against Women in Tech, They Just Suck at Interviews”
- “Gabby Giffords: The Gun Control Movement’s Human Shield”
- “Planned Parenthood’s Body Count Under Cecile Richards Is up to Half a Holocaust”
- “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy”
- “Physician: Mainstream Media ‘Strangely Silent’ About Hillary Clinton’s Health”
- “Roger Stone: Huma Abedin ‘Most Likely a Saudi Spy’ with ‘Deep, Inarguable Connections’ to ‘Global Terrorist Entity’”
- “How Donald Trump made it Cool to be Gay Again”
- “Lesbian Bridezillas Bully Bridal Shop Owner over Religious Beliefs”
- “After the Pulse Club Massacre, it’s Time for Gays to Come Home to Republican Party”
- “The Solution to Online ‘Harassment’ Is Simple: Women Should Logg off”
- “Hillary Clinton’s Muslim Brotherhood Problem”
- “Teenage Boys with Tits: Here’s My Problem with Ghostbusters”
- “Exclusive—Kimberly Guilfoyle Blows up Gretchen Carlson’s Allegations against Roger Ailes: ‘The Truth Should Matter”
- “Trump 100% Vindicated: CBS Reports ‘Swarm’ on Rooftops Celebrating 9/11”
- “Donald Trump Praises Breitbart’s Washington Political Editor Matthew Boyle: ‘Very Good Reporter’”
- “Data: Young Muslims in the West Are a Ticking Time Bomb, Increasingly Sympathizing with Radicals, Terror”
- “Racist, Pro-Nazi Roots of Planned Parenthood Revealed”
- “Breitbart News Posts Factual Headline About ‘Race War’ Double Murder, Internet Melts Down”
- “NAACP Joins Soros Army Plotting DC Disruptions, Civil Disobedience, Mass Arrests”
- “Exclusive—Donald Trump Plans to Continue GOP Legacy of Leading on Women’s, Civil Rights against Racist, Sexists Democrats”
- “6 Reasons Pamela Geller’s Muhammad Cartoon Contest Is No Different from Selma”
Mercer Family Connection
The Mercer family provided the initial $10 million to help Steve Bannon start up Breitbart News. Since then, the site has become very successful, outdoing the Huffington Post, and ranking as the 29th most popular site in America, The Guardian reported.
Rebekah Mercer is a funder and board member of the Government Accountability Institute (GAI), a conservative nonprofit investigative research organization founded by Peter Schweizer and Steve Bannon.
Stance on Climate Change
November 2016
E&E News reported on how Steve Bannon might shape Donald Trump’s views on climate change, noting how the Breitbart News Network has handled climate change coverage:
“Climate change” isn’t real in the Breitbart News Network, and often, though not exclusively, appears in scare quotes, as does “global warming.” NOAA and NASA are full of fraudulent scientists peddling a “cynical exploitation of mass crowd hysteria,” according to Bannon’s chief climate change columnist, and wind turbines are “bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes,” E&E News reported.
The noted climate change skeptic James Delingpole, who Bannon hired to run *Breitbart’*s office in Britain as Executive Editor, wrote in The Spectator:
“One of his [Bannon’s] pet peeves is the great climate-change con. It’s partly why he recruited a notorious skeptic like myself.”
“Basically,” Delingpole added, “we won.”
December 2, 2015
While hosting the December 2, 2015 edition of the SiriusXM radio show Breitbart News Daily, Bannon declared that the Pope has “fallen into this hysteria” about climate change. Pope Francis’s encyclical on the environment calls for reduced fossil fuel use in order to help the world’s poor.
In the radio show, Bannon interviewed theologist Thomas D. Williams on the encyclical. Bannon said “a lot of practicing Catholics” were “quite confused” by the encyclical, and stated to Williams:
“You mentioned the fact that he has got advisers around him that really crafted this message and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences has been overrun by what you call cultural Marxists.”
Williams responded that the Pope’s encyclical is “closely aligned to a redistributionist mentality” and about poorer countries “looking for handouts under the guise” of reducing carbon emissions, to which Bannon replied:
“Yes. That’s the climate justice.”
2010
In a 2010 speech at a Tea Party event in New York City, Bannon said global warming was a “manufactured crisis” (starting at [4:38] in his speech), Quartz reported:
“The accumulated debt in all levels of our society pose an immediate, existential threat to America. […] Now, unlike the manufactured crisis of global warming and healthcare, this is a true crisis.”
1995
In a 1995 interview for C-SPAN about Biosphere 2, as Mother Jones noted, while he was consulting for the project Bannon seems to support climate change concerns:
“A lot of the scientists who are studying global change and studying the effects of greenhouse gases, many of them feel that the Earth’s atmosphere in 100 years is what Biosphere 2’s atmosphere is today,” Bannon explained. “We have extraordinarily high CO2, we have very high nitrous oxide, we have high methane. And we have lower oxygen content. So the power of this place is allowing those scientists who are really involved in the study of global change, and which, in the outside world or Biosphere 1, really have to work with just computer simulation, this actually allows them to study and monitor the impact of enhanced CO2 and other greenhouse gases on humans, plants, and animals.”
Key Quotes
May 31, 2016
The following are excerpts from a Radio interview for Breitbart’s radio program on Sirius XM Patriot where Bannon questioned Trump economic adviser, Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation, who had just published a book, Fueling Freedom: Exposing the Mad War on Energy. InsideClimateNews reported that the interview also gave a look at Bannon’s views on energy policy:
“We could be energy independent,” Bannon said in the interview. “There is an American renaissance, and an industrial renaissance in front of us, if we can just get the government out of our way.”
“Whether you believe in alternative energy or not, one thing we can tell you for a fact—whether it works or not, that’s all to be seen in the progress of time—it’s up to its neck in crony capitalism,” said Bannon. “The venture capital guys getting bailed out, the private equity guys getting bailed out, subsidies for these things.
“Why [have] the Republicans not had a more full-throated saying, ‘No, we’re just going to shut this stuff down. We don’t care if the president vetoes it or not, but we’re not going to fund this continual madness?
“And by the way it is madness, at least according to your book, this alternative energy which really tries to compete with dollars for fossil fuel,” Bannon said to Moore.
Moore countered by saying, “I’m not against renewable energy. I’m just against taxpayer subsidies.”
November 12, 2013
Speaking with The Daily Beast’s Ronald Radish at a book party held in his Capitol Hill townhouse on Nov. 12, 2013, Bannon said:
“Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”
Key Deeds
January 2018
Bannon stepped down from his position as executive chairman of Breitbart News. Bannon’s moved followed criticism from President Donald Trump, after statements Bannon reportedly made about Trump and the Trump family in a new book. Bannon reportedly had asserted that Donald Trump Jr. had been “treasonous” in meeting with Russians and calling Ivanka Trump “dumb as a brick.” President Donald Trump replied that Bannon had “lost his mind.” In a written statement, Trump said that Bannon had “very little to do with our historic victory” in the 2016 election, and was “only in it for himself.”
According to the full written statement, republished at CNN, Trump said:
“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. Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating seventeen candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican Party.
“Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn’t as easy as I make it look. Steve had very little to do with our historic victory, which was delivered by the forgotten men and women of this country. Yet Steve had everything to do with the loss of a Senate seat in Alabama held for more than thirty years by Republicans. Steve doesn’t represent my base — he’s only in it for himself.
“Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was. It is the only thing he does well. Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped write phony books.
“We have many great Republican members of Congress and candidates who are very supportive of the Make America Great Again agenda. Like me, they love the United States of America and are helping to finally take our country back and build it up, rather than simply seeking to burn it all down.”
After the excerpts from Bannon in Michael Wolff’s new book, Fire and Fury, mega-donor Rebekah Mercer publicly rebuked Bannon for his reported statements about the president.
“I support President Trump and the platform upon which he was elected,” Rebekah Mercer said. “My family and I have not communicated with Steve Bannon in many months and have provided no financial support to his political agenda, nor do we support his recent actions and statements.”
November 21, 2017
Speaking with The Daily Caller’s Michael Bastasch, the Heartland Institute’s CEO Joseph Bast described Bannon as “an important channel for us [Heartland] to the White House.” Bast added that “It’s changed with Steve Bannon leaving.” According to Bastasch, Bannon and Bast regularly talked about executive orders to combat climate policies and urging Trump to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement.
November 2017
According to The Guardian’s analysis of The “Paradise Papers,” a trove of millions of leaked documents detailing information on offshore accounts, Bannon’s “Clinton Cash” was partially funded by offshore money. Mercer was director of eight Bermuda companies listed in the papers
The Guardian outlined how the Bermuda companies “appear to have been used to legally avoid a little-known US tax of up to 39% on tens of millions of dollars in investment profits amassed by the Mercer family’s foundation, which funded Bannon’s book [Clinton Cash] and a who’s who of conservative groups, along with a $475m retirement fund for the staff of Mercer’s hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies.”
August 22, 2017
Climate change denier Marc Morano, speaking with Ezra Levant at The Rebel, described Bannon’s departure from the White House as a major loss for climate change deniers.
Morano: “We’ve lost a major voice. Now, you’re right, Scott Pruitt’s a great voice. Energy Secretary Rick Perry has been a great voice, but it doesn’t change the fact we’ve lost a major skeptic in the White House with influence and power. You guys remember, personnel is power.”
Levant: “That’s a good point. And, as you they say, personnel is policy as well. […]”
Morano also described his experience while working in the U.S. Senate for Senator James Inhofe. Morano said that he was told by members of his own staff in the Environment & Public Works Committee to “lay off” of pushing climate change skepticism because it was affecting their ability to get jobs, “because Inhofe was being painted as an extremist for denying global warming.”
“It matters. People don’t want to stand up to the Washington establishment because it means jobs, it means money, it means reputation. And that is why the loss of someone like Bannon has a big impact.”
August 18, 2017
A White House spokesperson announced that Bannon would be leaving his position at the White House, The New York Times reported.
“White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and Steve Bannon have mutually agreed today would be Steve’s last day,” the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said in a statement. “We are grateful for his service and wish him the best.”
According to the Times, Bannon’s critics called for so-called nationalists working in the West Wing to be fired after outrage regarding Trump’s insistence that “both sides” were to blame for the violent events in Charlottesville. Trump previously said that he refused to guarantee Bannon’s job security, however defended him as “not a racist” and “a friend.”
Axios reported that Bannon would return to Breitbart News.
“He’s going back to Breitbart News […] he plans to go ‘thermonuclear’ is the word they’re using against the more moderate elements of the White House, the ones that have come to be known as the globalists, the president’s economic advisor Gary Cohn,” Axios Executive Editor Mike Allen told CNBC.
Hours after Bannon’s departure became public, Breitbart announced the return of their “populist hero.”
“The populist-nationalist movement got a lot stronger today,” said Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow. “Breitbart gained an executive chairman with his finger on the pulse of the Trump agenda.”
Speaking with the Weekly Standard, Bannon said that his departure from the Trump Administration had been voluntary:
“On August 7th , I talked to [Chief of Staff John] Kelly and to the President, and I told them that my resignation would be effective the following Monday, on the 14th,” he said. “I’d always planned on spending one year. General Kelly has brought in a great new system, but I said it would be best. I want to get back to Breitbart.”
Bannon also told the Standard that his departure had been slightly delayed due to events in Charlottesville.
“I’ve got my hands back on my weapons […] I am definitely going to crush the opposition. There’s no doubt. I built a f***ing machine at Breitbart. And now I’m about to go back, knowing what I know, and we’re about to rev that machine up. And rev it up we will do.”
Bannon also spoke with Bloomberg News after his departure from the White House:
“If there’s any confusion out there, let me clear it up: I’m leaving the White House and going to war for Trump against his opponents – on Capitol Hill, in the media, and in corporate America.”
Bloomberg also noted that Bannon had met with hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer to discuss future plans.
March/April, 2017
The New York Times reported that Bannon’s financial statements, among disclosures by Trump administration staff members, revealed that he had received more than $1 million from the conservative network that included at least $500,000 from entities connected Robert Mercer and Rebekah Mercer.
In addition to the $191,000 Bannon recieved from Breitbart News, he also received $125,333 from Cambridge Analytica, the data firm that worked for Trump’s campaign and whhich also had major backing to the Mercers.
