Steve Bannon returned from prison after four months inside Tuesday to find the MAGA movement he left remade without him.
A new power now sits beside Donald Trump and atop the movement Bannon helped build: Elon Musk, who Bannon derided only 18 months ago as “a war profiteer who is sleeping with the enemy” and “a globalist who would take a check from Adolf Hitler himself.”
Bannon had been referring to Elon’s willingness to work with the Chinese Community Party. Musk has extensive business dealings in China as CEO of Tesla, his car company.
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He reversed that criticism Tuesday in a packed press conference at Loews Regency Hotel on Manhattan’s Park Avenue, 12 hours after being released from FCI Danbury in Connecticut, a low-security federal prison.
Musk, Bannon said in response to the Daily Beast’s questions, had “gone through a great awakening” to become “one of the strongest supporters of the MAGA movement.” He commended Musk as “an American” who has done “something very smart” by putting money behind MAGA’s “grassroots organizations.”
Only 18 months ago, in March 2023, Bannon criticisms of Musk were unbound. Musk, he said then on a podcast, was not only “not an American nationalist–he’s not even an American.”
On Thursday he kissed the ring.
Bannon, who spent seven months in Trump’s White House as his chief strategist in 2017, spoke like a displaced kingpin as he called for Trump to take to the air on election night before the result is declared so he could “explain” the result to the American people.
He reiterated that the 2020 election was stolen, saying “I will never back off that.”
But his devout commitment to that untenable position of Trump’s does not appear to have rewarded him. He said he would not be speaking at Trump’s rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania, later—and is not scheduled to join his old boss over the final week of the campaign.
Musk spoke at Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday as the penultimate speaker before Trump.
The press conference, which Bannon was pleased to note featured questions from New York magazine and the Wall Street Journal, was momentarily interrupted by the antics of Rob Potylo, a comic who Bannon’s handlers nearly threw out of the event before it started.
Potylo, who had told Bannon’s team he was with pro-Trump YouTuber Tim Pool, interrupted the event in the guise of “Robby Roadsteamer.”
“Steve, I’m wondering when’s the next insurrection, and can we storm the Burger King after this?” Potylo asked, mocking Bannon’s claims to be “a political prisoner” and bewildering the room of journalists.
He was soon led out of the event but won the day online, with a clip of his intervention dominating search results for Bannon’s presser on X, a platform owned by Musk.
Bannon—whose podcast, Bannon’s War Room, slipped down the U.S. charts in his absence—is now operating in a media sphere controlled by a man who thinks him “evil” and a fool.
The Trump campaign is also in new hands, run by two extremely well-paid operatives—Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles—who have no apparent use for him.
Bannon told journalists that he had spoken to Trump after his release, but he provided no detail on what he would be doing over the final week of the campaign besides “getting out the vote.”
He attacked Kamala Harris' “politics of joy” as he recast himself as a champion of the Black and Hispanic men he met during his stint in prison.
“She is failing to connect with minority men, Hispanic and African-American men,” he claimed of Harris. “They understand what the scam is. They understand that this administration purposely let in millions of illegal alien migrants to drive down labor costs.”
He declared that the “politics of race” was ending, and so too was the “politics of gender.” Both would soon be replaced, he said, by a “politics of money” that will make the supposed populist revolution of the MAGA movement far greater than it already is.
