Washington’s Foremost Con Artist

By James Kirchick

Sunday, March 15, 2026

 

One of the more annoying, yet little noticed, journalistic habits developed during the first Trump administration was practiced by seemingly every reporter assigned to interview Steve Bannon. The 2016 Trump campaign CEO and populist stalwart fashions himself something more than a mere political hack; he is, by his own estimation, a serious thinker. No profile of Bannon was complete without mentioning at least one massive book that he was reading, usually a biography of a major historical figure.

 

“Bannon is a voracious reader,” a writer for Vanity Fair reported in 2017, “who sometimes stays up until dawn powering through books, obscure journals, and news articles, scrawling notes in a pocket-size green diary as he goes (during our trip he used downtime to read a Robespierre biography).” The following year, while being interviewed by a writer for the Spectator, Bannon boasted that he had read his interlocutor’s biography of Mussolini. Knowing his audience, Bannon made sure to have “books about Adolf Hitler and World War II” conspicuously placed on his bed stand when the correspondent from Der Spiegel paid him a visit; lest that factoid insufficiently emphasize his “Prince of Darkness” image, he made sure to brandish a biography of the pro-Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger as well. For Newsweek, Bannon’s tome of choice was a biography of Lawrence of Arabia, and in a 2019 documentary, it was the second volume of Carl Sandburg’s three-part biography of Abraham Lincoln.

 

“Being powerful is like being a lady,” Margaret Thatcher once said. “If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.” This observation applies to many character traits, erudition prominent among them. People who reveal what college they attended within seconds of meeting you are not nearly as smart as they think they are, and the same can be said of a public figure who just happens to have a massive tome of Metternich situated prominently on the desk in his five-star hotel suite or a biography of Napoleon peeking out of his satchel whenever a journalist is in the vicinity. So predictable were Bannon’s transparent attempts at self-aggrandizement that I began to fault the credulous journalists repeatedly taken in by the ruse more than the gasbag mountebank perpetrating it.

 

Donald Trump has a rightly deserved reputation for coining nicknames for people he seeks to demean—“Crooked Hillary, “Little Marco,” and “Low Energy Jeb” are some of the more notorious. But few of Trump’s sobriquets ring truer than “Sloppy Steve,” which Trump bestowed on Bannon after firing him from his job as White House chief strategist nine months into his first administration. Wherever he goes, no matter how formal the function, Bannon looks like a slob. He has a bizarre practice of layering collared shirts, which are invariably wrinkled and stained. He has a case of rosacea rivaled only by some members of the Kennedy Family. Perpetually unshaven, he looks like he spends his days at the OTB and his nights sleeping in his car. While he was working in the White House, Bannon’s slovenliness was a recurring topic of conversation; Trump would tell him that he looked homeless and needed a shower.

 

Washington, as the wags say, is Hollywood for ugly people, and so it isn’t the sloppiness of Bannon’s physical appearance that stands out. “Sloppy” also encapsulates his career as a putative movement leader. Peel back the multiple layers of collared shirts and what you find is a thief, a liar, and a fraud.

 

From his perch at Breitbart.com and later during his management of Trump’s first presidential campaign, Bannon played a highly influential role making the construction of a border wall the signature issue of the MAGA movement. Which is what makes his pilfering of more than $1 million from a nonprofit organization founded to deliver on that promise so indicative of his low character. In February 2025, Bannon pled guilty in a Manhattan criminal court to a single felony count of defrauding donors to We Build the Wall, an effort to construct a privately funded barrier on the border with Mexico. (Trump had already pardoned Bannon on federal charges related to the charity in the final hours of his first term.) Bannon had partnered in this dubious endeavor with a motivational speaker and another man who made energy drinks containing “liberal tears.” Befitting a national populist, Bannon was arrested on the yacht of Miles Guo, an exiled Chinese businessman who was later jailed for running a $1 billion fraud scheme.

 

The revelation that Bannon was lining his own pockets under the guise of raising private funds for public works undermines the notion that he is some sort of political Svengali. A more accurate description is Oliver North without the sex appeal and Max Bialystock without the charm.

 

The most important thing to understand about Bannon is that he’s fundamentally an unserious person. More a performance artist than anything else, he delights in playing the foil to the “Davos class.” Nothing fulfills Bannon so much as telling a room full of liberal cosmopolitans that they are smug and out of touch, and he has entered into something of a sadomasochistic relationship with elite institutions looking for someone “authentic” to “explain” populism to them. The outrage he invokes among progressives is good for his image, adding a frisson of danger to his empty words. In 2018, New Yorker editor David Remnick rescinded his offer to interview Bannon at the magazine’s annual festival when staffers complained and other speakers dropped out in protest. The following month, a group of Bloomberg employees remonstrated when the news organization’s editor in chief interviewed Bannon on stage in London.

 

In May 2025, during an appearance at the Financial Times festival in Washington, Bannon declared that “President Trump will serve a third term.” Bannon knows that won’t happen, but he cares more about the Pavlovian response he elicits from neurotic liberals than he does for the truth. He repeated the nonsense prophecy two months later while being interviewed for the FT’s popular Lunch With… feature. Alternating between a plate of beef-tallowed French fries and duck hash, Bannon delivered a string of pronouncements designed to aggravate the paper’s liberal readership. As they exited the restaurant, Bannon sidled up to the writer. “Did I deliver?” he asked mischievously.

 

It’s this lust for relevance, this need to feel like one of the Great Men of History whom he purports to read so much about, that explains Bannon’s cozy relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. The late financier was everything Bannon supposedly hated: a billionaire who made his fortune in the markets, extremely well-connected among the jet-set crowd, the very model of a “globalist.” None of that stopped Bannon from offering himself up to the convicted sex offender as a provider of “media training” to repair his tarnished public persona. “First we need to push back on the lies; then crush the pedo/trafficking narrative; then rebuild your image as philanthropist,” the grifting Bannon wrote. According to the New York Times, Bannon’s name appeared nearly every day in Epstein’s inbox or text messages in the six months leading up to his arrest in July 2019.

 

Epstein apparently saw through Bannon’s imposture. Asked by an associate why Bannon would align himself with the likes of Miles Guo, Epstein responded, “Someone has to fund his nonsenses.” It may have been the most perceptive thing Epstein ever said. According to the Times, a spokesman for Bannon said that he “did not get deeper into” the subject of Epstein’s treatment of women “in 12 hours of interviews but planned to address it later on.” Alas for Bannon, there was no “later on.”

 

Bannon’s latest act is playing a supporting role in the campaign being waged by Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Candace Owens, and other right-wing performance artists to sever America’s alliance with Israel and defame American Jews. Nine years ago, Bannon told the Zionist Organization of America that he was “proud to be a Christian Zionist.” Today, he rants about the “Israel First crowd,” proclaims that the Jewish state is “not an ally” of the United States, and conducts sympathetic interviews with Trita Parsi, widely recognized throughout Washington as an unregistered foreign agent of the Islamic Republic of Iran. In January, Bannon said that Trump’s threat to intervene in Iran if the regime killed protesters was “straight from the Samantha Power and Hillary Clinton playbook.”

 

Bannon is now threatening to run for president in 2028. If his previous works are anything to go by, it’s an endeavor likely to be a fount of financial corruption, political skullduggery, and reputational self-mutilation. Former Republican Representative Matt Gaetz, a Bannon ally whose chemically modified face is as superficially maintained as Bannon’s is left to molder, giddily told Axios that “the Bannon campaign will merge the foreign policy of Rand Paul with the tax policy of Elizabeth Warren.” It’s hard to summon a political platform less appealing than this, its emetic mix of isolationism and socialism so befitting the man immortalized as Sloppy Steve.