The Strategist: at home in DC with Steve Bannon

William Cash | Issue 1 | Magazine, Washington

From the Archive

Steve Bannon Campaign Hashtag Digital — *Steve Bannon talks to media during the 'Sovereignism v Europeanism' in Rome. (Photo by Alessandra Benedetti - Corbis/Getty Images)*

In an exclusive from DC, William Cash finds Steve Bannon in combative form as he reveals what he’s learnt about strategy from Thucydides

The media mythologising of presidential or Downing Street campaign managers – from James Carville to Lynton Crosby – is hardly a new phenomenon. It’s only the failures who don’t manage to get a documentary made about their efforts. When it comes to political mavericks, nobody has higher billing than Steve Bannon, the man who put Trump in the White House in 2016. With its chinoiserie mural wallpaper, and old-fashioned American Revolution rifle over one fireplace, Bannon’s Washington home – located just behind the Supreme Court, and dubbed the “Breitbart embassy” – could be a southern lawyer’s home in the upper-middle class suburb of Richmond, Virginia, where Bannon was born. So what is it about these larger-than-life mavericks that makes them campaign winners? What is the fire in the belly that drives a man like Steve Bannon, who the media has caricatured as a modern-day media Savonarola. What’s the man himself really like? “We’re in a war,” Bannon tells me as we sit in his dining-room ...

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