Former White House adviser Steve Bannon is set to take a lengthy summer vacation from riling up the far-right on behalf of his former boss. A federal judge ordered Bannon to report to prison on July 1 to begin a four-month sentence that he’s managed to dodge for almost two years. It’s an order that is set to neutralize one of the MAGA movement’s most influential bomb-throwers and propagandists until right before Election Day — and Bannon has nobody but himself to blame for it.
Bannon has spent the last several years seeming very confident despite spending so much time on the wrong side of the law. He was charged with allegedly duping true believers into donating money to the “We Build the Wall” organization in 2020; then-President Donald Trump issued Bannon a pardon on the way out the door in 2021. He then defied a subpoena from the House Jan. 6 Committee, earning him two counts of contempt of Congress.
None of this has softened Bannon’s commitment to amplifying the most incendiary far-right lies about mass election fraud to his listeners.
A jury found Bannon guilty in July 2022, and he received his four-month sentence that October. If he’d reported to serve out his sentence in November, he’d have been out of prison for over a year by now. Instead, he chose to appeal his case, arguing that Trump had invoked executive privilege, preventing him from complying with the congressional subpoena, and that his lawyer at the time had told him it was fine to blow off Congress. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia disagreed, upholding Bannon’s conviction in May.
None of this has softened Bannon’s commitment to amplifying the most incendiary far-right lies about mass election fraud to his listeners. Nor has he shown anything resembling remorse or shame for his actions. On his “War Room” podcast on Thursday, just hours ahead of the hearing where he learned his fate, Bannon was laughing as he told his guest, “I have a previously scheduled event that I’m going to have to punch out [until] 5 to 7 o’clock tonight.” He rightly assumed that he wasn’t about to be told to proceed directly from the courtroom to a jail cell. But once he is in custody, it will be a few months before he’s able to record more episodes.
That would be a relatively minor inconvenience for most podcast hosts of the world. But it’s through the “War Room” that Bannon has managed to regain relevance after a rollercoaster ride that’s taken him in and out of Trump’s inner circle. After helping engineer Trump’s long-shot win in 2016, Bannon took a job in the White House, where he was one of the main facilitators of the chaos that embodied the early days of the administration.
Bannon was bumped from the West Wing after just seven months in his job when backlash to the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, required a far-right scapegoat. But that just prompted him to return to his roots as a reactionary media gremlin, launching his podcast in the same basement where he used to run Breitbart Media. It’s the same podcast that he used to rile up Trump’s supporters after the 2020 election and feed them false hope that things could still turn out differently if Congress had the will to act. He encouraged those listeners to be in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, the day that the House and Senate would meet to certify the Electoral College’s ballots.
That’s four months where Bannon will be offline, unable to help lay the groundwork to reject a Trump loss.
In the aftermath of the attack on the Capitol that day, Bannon was briefly persona non grata as Trump was seen as defeated — emphasis on briefly. The chaos of 2020 had “done the preliminary work of undermining institutions and creating a receptivity to a new faith,” journalist Isaac Arnsdorf wrote in his book, “Finish What We Started: The MAGA Movement’s Ground War to End Democracy.”
“Now it was up to Bannon to transform the defeat of January 6 into the galvanizing moment for the next phase of the MAGA movement," he wrote. It's a mission that he's managed to achieve with distressing success among Trump's still loyal base.
In theory, Bannon could keep trying to push his appeal up the chain, first to the full appeals court, then the Supreme Court. But that hasn’t worked out very well for fellow former Trump adviser Peter Navarro, who is currently serving his own sentence for defying a congressional subpoena. I somehow doubt that the Supreme Court will be more willing to step in on Bannon’s behalf than they were for Navarro, having rejected his petition without a hearing.
Even if Bannon chooses to take that route, U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols has ordered that he be behind bars. That’s four months where Bannon will be offline, unable to help lay the groundwork to reject a Trump loss. He’s sure to come back in full force, entirely unabashed or chastened by his experience, when he’s released just five days ahead of Election Day. It’s also entirely likely that he manages to find a guest host for the “War Room” podcast in the weeks before he must report to prison, one who will help paint Bannon as a martyr to the cause. But that same martyrdom could have been bestowed upon him much sooner if he’d only accepted his fate.
That’s not to say, though, that we won’t hear from him at all during those months. After all, he’s got a date in September with the same New York City judge who presided over Trump’s conviction. Bannon faces state-level charges for defrauding his supporters in the same scheme that Trump pardoned him for back in 2021, where if found guilty even Trump’s re-election won’t be able to help him. But try as he might to stay relevant, these four months of imprisonment will be time that he won’t be in full force during the most crucial window before voting begins.
