Civics With Steve Bannon: Lessons From the Big House
“Everything you need to know about business or politics can be learned from Godfather I and Godfather II,” inmate 05635-509 told the assembled group of prisoners in Danbury Federal Correctional Institution.
The inmate in a khaki prison-issued shirt and pants with an elastic waist to accommodate his girth — Steve Bannon — was serving a four-month term for contempt of Congress in the lead up to the 2024 election. To pass his time this fall, he was teaching a weekly civics class to a roomful of felons, according to multiple sources (Bannon has declined all interviews while in prison). The purpose of such classes, as stated in the prison’s handbook, was to provide the tools for inmates to “reintegrate into today’s world,” but Bannon’s class seemed like more of an opportunity for Donald Trump’s constituency of imprisoned admirers to gather and commune with one of the former president’s most loyal acolytes — not to mention a celebrity.
In his manic way, the former Trump White House strategist took his role seriously, underlining key words on the whiteboard at the front of the dull, nondescript room, circling important concepts multiple times with his marker and then lurching nearer to his audience to share urgent truths. In this class, Bannon wanted to impart his deepest understanding of the essence of American society, as he sees it. The murder and bribery and sexual deviance and fratricide of Francis Ford Coppola’s vision of American moral collapse provided the perfect example of Bannon’s notion of the world — with Michael Corleone’s corrupt acquisition of a casino license in Nevada providing a parable for how government really works.
Every Tuesday afternoon this autumn, according to sources who wished to remain anonymous, 50 or so inmates crowded into a room at Danbury FCI to hear the words of wisdom of a man who claimed to still have the ear of Trump. Often overflowing with supplicants, half of the inmates in attendance were Black, the rest a mix of white and Hispanics in the low-security camp set in the wealthy rolling hills of Connecticut; some were drug dealers, some fraudsters, with a sprinkling of sex-crime offenders, as well as a convict from the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump supporters attempted to block the certification of Joe Biden’s election win; the majority of the motley crew seemed to be strong Trump supporters.
Aiming for insights worthy of a great thinker, Bannon noted that America had been founded on the principles of the Roman Republic, citing the inherent terror of kings and emperors that is omnipresent in the Constitution. A few of the pupils wondered if the country would be better off with a king, a sentiment that appeared to be surprisingly widely held in the prison seminar; it was the “only way to get things done,” came the mumblings from some inmates. To Bannon’s surprise, the Jan. 6 rioter convict disagreed, saying that turning America into a dictatorship wasn’t for the best.
“Wasn’t that what you were trying to do on Jan. 6?” Bannon asked, eliding his own alleged complicity in the events of that day. “To make Trump king?”
“No,” the inmate said, attempting to clarify that he believed Trump’s baseless claims that the election had been stolen from him. “I was there to protest the lack of an investigation.”
In prison, Bannon was very solicitous of authority, precisely as you might imagine Trump or his cohort of swaggering tough guys — such as Elon Musk, J.D. Vance, Kash Patel — would behave when confronted with the realization that there was a serious chance of receiving an actual punch in the face. Gone were Bannon’s smirk, his two or three layers of shirts and scruffy five-day beard, as was the aristocratic-grunge insouciance, all replaced with a clean shave, standard-issue prison garb, and eagerness to flatter his fellow inmates.
“You are smarter than 95 percent of Americans,” Bannon told his pupils, adding that they were the smartest group he’d ever taught, including, it would seem, his MAGA minions. He asked questions and called on inmates to pose their own queries, in the manner of his alma mater Harvard Business School, followed by a peppering of his views on contemporary events as the campaign unfolded.
Taylor Swift is not a pop star, Bannon said: She’s the leader of a cult and should terrify Trump.
“Money is not courageous,” Bannon offered. “Money is cowardice. Money wants stability.” He added, “The wealthy aren’t taxed enough.”
“Watching Fox is like watching professional wrestling,” Bannon opined, expressing his hatred for the Murdoch family. “They want you to focus on phony things, the shiny toys.”
There were a few liberals in the class, including one who objected to Bannon’s repeated use of the term “illegal aliens.” The lecturer quickly and apologetically switched to “illegal immigrants.” Bannon said that corporations loved the flow of immigrants as a way to keep wages low, prompting a foreign-born inmate to offer his view that the only hard-working immigrants are Haitians because they have no choice but to try to better themselves — while many other immigrants came to America with the intention to sell drugs.
“I hate to say it, but Americans are lazy sometimes,” the foreign-born immigrant said.
“Respectfully,” replied an American-born inmate, “it’s our country to be lazy in.”
Another student lamented that Biden’s supposedly lax border policies had deflated the price of a brick of cocaine, from $28,000 to $12,000. Bannon said that if he lived in a poor and violent country, he would be doing the same thing — trying to immigrate to America, regardless of the laws and borders.
Bannon then posed a question, in the manner of the Socratic method: Were you better off in 2019 when Trump was president, he asked an oversized inmate.
“I can’t really say,” the man replied. “I was selling drugs.”
“Trump’s 34 felony convictions have taken some of the sting out of being a felon,” Bannon sighed, offering solace to his brethren.
PRISON IS BASED ON brutalist, enforced order, but Bannon glorified in global disorder, like discarding the American dollar as the fiat global currency with no real plan for a replacement other than returning to an imaginary past — Make America Great Again — when Bannon’s father could provide for his large family on the wages of a phone-company foreman. A government shutdown was coming over the federal budget, Bannon said with evident relish, asserting that the national debt shouldn’t be raised by a penny, again citing his Godfather precedent as the best way to resolve issues — with offers that couldn’t be refused.
Displaying a penchant for grandiosity, Bannon humble-bragged that he was the “P1” referred to in the indictment against Trump for conspiracy to defraud the United States on Jan. 6, as The New York Times had recently reported. Bannon then claimed that Winston Churchill had been just another blowhard like himself, until World War II broke out, and the British prime minister’s dire predictions of a looming global conflict turned him into a hero — inviting the inference that it was only a matter of time until Bannon, too, was vindicated and became a towering figure of history. His soliloquy was part of his call for “victory or death” in the coming election — the incitement to violence not a particularly civic virtue, but no one in authority in the prison protested.
This was followed by Bannon’s stated belief that he was only sent to prison as payback from Attorney General Merrick Garland — characteristically depicting himself at the white-hot center of an abnegation of the rule of law, rather than as an alleged conspirator against the certification of election, contemptuously refusing to answer questions about his complicity in an attempt to overthrow the duly-elected government of the United States.
“You’re going to be the target of a massive investigation,” Bannon had warned Attorney General Garland on the eve of reporting to prison. “You’re going to go from the Supreme Court to prison.”
Standing before two score and 10 prisoners, Bannon couldn’t help but exult in his importance in the outside world. He’d recently spoken to Trump, he let them know, an idle boast that he’d used the prison’s recorded phone system to catch up with his former boss. Vanity Fair had just published a feature on Bannon, he told his audience, illustrating his civic virtue by calling for his “army” to do battle no matter who wins in 2024. Bannon added that he was scheduled to appear on CNN when he was released — hardly the reception likely awaiting the inmates.
Adding to his analysis of the press, criticism that perhaps meant little to his pupils, Bannon weighed in on 60 Minutes, given the controversy over Trump’s refusal to participate in the ritual of appearing on the show in the days before a presidential election, as well as the show’s Kamala Harris interview, which Bannon and his fellow inmates had watched on the communal television. Bannon told the prisoners that Trump had refused to appear on 60 Minutes not because he might appear incoherent or say something disqualifying (if such a thing were possible). The former president didn’t trust the show to fairly and honestly edit a three-hour conversation into a 15-minute segment, Bannon argued — exactly as Trump’s campaign had claimed. Bannon then boasted, unable to resist the temptation to preen in front of a group of men flattered by his very presence, by claiming that he had been able to command a videotape of the full unedited three-hour interview when he had been profiled on 60 Minutes in 2017.
Only one other 60 Minutes subject had successfully made such a demand, Bannon claimed, a remarkable assertion offered with no evidence.
“Guess who?” Bannon asked.
“Ronald Reagan,” came one reply.
“Richard Nixon,” offered another, the prisoners imagining a figure powerful enough to be able to force CBS to comply with such a demand.
“Those are good guesses,” Bannon allowed. “But, no, it was John Gotti.”
IN LATE OCTOBER, as his freedom loomed, Bannon told his class that his forthcoming release had been mentioned on CBS. In the dreary fluorescent-lit room, certificates were handed out to all by Bannon personally, the pieces of paper awarded for their attendance, each signed by Bannon and marked with an eagle holding a branch of justice, along with the Latin motto Qui Pro Domina Justitia Sequitur, which translates to words that might surprise Bannon: “The Attorney General prosecutes on behalf of Lady Justice.”
“I better not see these on eBay,” Bannon warned his acolytes.
Bannon then polled the class on who they thought would win the election, with Trump receiving a substantial majority of this particular focus group. Bannon asked one student who had abstained why he hadn’t voted. The inmate said he considered the race tied, and an animated discussion ensued about the possibility of Trump using military force against “the enemy within” to enforce his will if he won — or lost and succeeded in overthrowing the election result. To this, Bannon said that the Constitution strictly forbids the use of military force against American citizens.
“You might need to remind Trump that he can’t do it,” the abstaining inmate said, referring to Bannon’s looming reunion with his former boss.
Bannon’s smirk had returned.
“Why would I want to do that?” he asked.
Guy Lawson is a longtime Rolling Stone contributor. His most recent book is “Hot Dog Money: Inside the Biggest Scandal in the History of College Sports.”
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