Steve Bannon at the 2023 CPAC conference, in National Harbor, Maryland. Mark Peterson/Redux It was a Tuesday morning in May and the mood on War Room , Steve Bannon’s twice-daily talk show, was characteristically grim. “The pre-kinetic part of the Third World War is happening,” the thrice-indicted former Trump advisor declared, alleging that the Chinese Communist Party, Qatar, and George Soros were secretly conspiring to seed unrest on college campuses.
Standing up at his desk in a cramped West Palm Beach studio, dressed in a black button-down shirt over another black shirt, his gray hair swept up dramatically like a paranoid Beethoven, Bannon warned that things were about to get worse. “If you think times are tough now, you ain’t seen nothing yet,” he said. But there was some good news for those who stuck around.
MyPillow’s Mike Lindell was about to join him. And he was offering a great deal on socks. When Bannon reported to a federal prison in Connecticut on Monday to serve a four-month sentence for contempt of Congress, it brought an end, at least for now, to his tenure as the daily host of one of the most influential programs on the political right.
Launched during the first Trump impeachment in 2019, War Room has aired for the last four years on Real America’s Voice, a fledgling right-wing channel that has become a destination for conservatives who are fed up with what Bannon calls the “Murdoch News Network”—Fox News. Even as his legal troubles mount.
