Steve Bannon

Stephen K. Bannon (b. 1953) is a former Goldman Sachs investment banker, documentary filmmaker, and media executive who became executive chairman of Breitbart News in 2012 following the death of Andrew Breitbart. Under Bannon, Breitbart became the primary media platform for the alt-right and white nationalist movements, described by Bannon himself in a 2016 interview as 'the platform for the alt-right.' Bannon was named CEO of the Trump campaign on August 17, 2016 — the same day Kellyanne Conway was named campaign manager — and became White House Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor to the President following Trump's election. He left the White House on August 18, 2017. Bannon's strategic relationship to the evangelical base: 1. Civilizational framework: Bannon's worldview, which he articulated in a 2014 Vatican conference speech (delivered by video), presents Western history as a conflict between 'Judeo-Christian' civilization and its enemies — currently Islam and secular globalism. This frame maps precisely onto evangelical culture war theology while extending it to geopolitics. 2. Anti-globalism as Christian nationalism: Bannon presented international institutions (IMF, World Bank, EU, UN), multinational corporations, and globalist elites as enemies of the 'church militant' — using explicitly Catholic and Christian nationalist vocabulary while building a cross-denominational populist coalition. 3. Breitbart as evangelical media: Under Bannon, Breitbart published an enormous volume of content targeting evangelical readers — anti-Muslim content, anti-LGBTQ content, religious liberty content, and pro-life content — alongside its nationalist economic populism. Breitbart became the second-most-read news source among white evangelical Protestants by 2016, according to Pew Research. 4. The Supreme Court recruitment: Bannon understood that the Federalist Society judicial pipeline — and specifically Trump's commitment to nominate judges from the Heritage/Federalist Society list — was the key to evangelical voter mobilization. He was instrumental in ensuring that the judicial selection commitment remained central to Trump's campaign messaging to evangelicals. 5. CNP connection: Bannon addressed the Council for National Policy in August 2016, shortly after joining the campaign — signaling to the CNP's network of evangelical leaders and major donors that the Trump campaign understood and would serve their priorities. Post-White House: Bannon was convicted of contempt of Congress in 2022 for defying a subpoena from the House January 6 Committee, sentenced to four months, and pardoned by Trump in January 2025. He has continued his 'War Room' podcast, which reaches several million listeners per week, many of them evangelical Christians.

Documented themes

• Christian Nationalism
• Anti-LGBTQ
• Political Strategy
• Anti-Democratic

Connections from Steve Bannon

• influenced → Council for National Policy (2016) — Steve Bannon addressed the Council for National Policy in August 2016, shortly after being named Trump campaign CEO. The CNP address signaled to the network's evangelical leaders and major donors that the Trump campaign understood their priorities and would serve them — specifically on Supreme Court appointments, religious liberty executive orders, and social conservative policy. Anne Nelson's 'Shadow Network' documents the CNP meeting's role in consolidating evangelical establishment support for Trump.
• influenced → January 6, 2021 (2021) — Steve Bannon was one of the central coordinators of the Stop the Steal information operation in the weeks before January 6. His 'War Room' podcast — broadcasting multiple times daily to millions of listeners — was the primary media infrastructure amplifying stolen-election claims, coordinating messaging across the MAGA media ecosystem, and building the audience that would converge on Washington on January 6. Bannon's explicit framing — that the certification of Biden's electors was the moment of civilizational crisis — gave the date its urgency. He was later charged with contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with the January 6 Committee investigation.
• influenced → 2016 Election: The Machine Delivers (2016) — Steve Bannon served as CEO of the Trump campaign from August 2016 through the election and was the primary architect of the strategy that fused Christian nationalist, populist-nationalist, and anti-establishment grievances into a unified electoral bloc. Bannon understood the evangelical base as the indispensable structural foundation of a Trump coalition, and he operated Breitbart as the media infrastructure that held together the different wings — paleoconservative Catholic, evangelical Protestant, and nationalist secular — under a shared civilizational threat narrative. The 2016 result was in significant part a Bannon-designed information operation.

Sources

• Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Nationalist Uprising — Joshua Green (2017), pp. 1–280
• Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right — Anne Nelson (2019), pp. 200–230
• Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation — Kristin Kobes Du Mez (2020), pp. 265–285