Steve Bannon, former Trump White House adviser and host of the flagship MAGA media show War Room, goes to federal prison today for failing to comply with a congressional subpoena issued by the House January 6 committee. He is sentenced to serve four months.

Bannon deserves to be held responsible for flouting the law, but prison will not solve our Steve Bannon problem. For the past decade, his style of politics — featuring conspiracy theories, racist fearmongering, and disinformation — has reigned over right-wing media, even as his own standing in Donald Trump’s circle has risen and fallen. That does not stand to change over the course of his incarceration.

To be sure, War Room will suffer without him in the short term. For the past several years, the show has been the center of the MAGA media universe, and neither his proposed list of guest hosts nor his ragtag staff will be able to supplant his relentless work ethic and talent for far-right messaging. While it’s possible he’ll get messages out through other media figures, his ability to communicate will surely be diminished during this period, and that is a blow to his movement.

In the timeline of Trumpism, however, four months is a drop in the bucket, and to suggest this brief change to the War Room lineup will substantially improve the political environment somehow is tragically shortsighted. Consider the longer arc of Bannon’s career during the Trump era.

We all know Bannon for his flamboyant style in the early days of Trump; coming from far-right outlet Breitbart, he was a key vector of amplifying racist anti-immigrant extremism as chairman of the 2016 campaign and later as the (short-lived) chief strategist of his administration. After flaming out of the White House, he started War Room and used it as a platform to saturate Trump’s base with the lie of a stolen election in 2020, which resulted in a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. This legacy clearly lives on through the persistent election denial of Trump and the Republican Party.

Less attention, however, has been paid to what Bannon has been up to between January 2021 and today, and how he’s used to remake the GOP in his image.

It began with the “precinct strategy,” an effort Bannon spearheaded on the show to get his audience to sign up as precinct committee members. According to The Washington Post’s Isaac Arnsdorf, “in the years since the 2020 election, the precinct strategy has driven thousands of new Republican activists” to volunteer in these low-level roles, forcing out veteran Republican party officials “who were anything less than completely faithful to Trump and his election denial, smoothing his path back to the Republican nomination.”

And who’s to say the road ends there? Bannon has said that the War Room audience would embrace more Trump terms after 2028. “Of course, our audience, hey, three, give me three, I’ll throw in a fourth, right? What’s this Barron thing? Don’t skip Don Jr.,” the host told his biographer Josh Green during the May 21 edition of War Room.

A key strategy that War Room and Trump have in common is the campaign to turn the American justice system into MAGA’s public enemy No. 1. As Trump’s legal problems have piled up since leaving office, he’s lashed out daily, and War Room has been a key platform amplifying this narrative of a corrupt justice system intent on political persecution.

“Biden’s fingerprints are on all four of these criminal prosecutions” against Trump, Bannon told the Article III Project’s Mike Davis on April 30, presumably referring to special counsel Jack Smith’s two criminal cases against the former president, Fani Willis’s prosecution of election interference in Georgia, and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s hush money case.. Bannon’s smears against Bragg and a prosecutor who worked under him named Matthew Coangelo resulted in House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) sending a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland seeking “information and documents related to Mr. Coangelo’s employment.” Bannon called the judge overseeing Trump’s civil fraud trial in New York a “Nazi.” After Trump was indicted in Georgia for his role undermining the 2020 election results, Bannon described it as “lawlessness”: “They will do anything, they will break any law, they will destroy any institution, they will do anything to defeat Donald Trump.” And when Mar-a-Lago was searched by the FBI in August 2022, Bannon said it was part of a plot to assassinate Trump.

More recently, he’s begun casting himself as a victim of “lawfare” as his case has progressed.

“I am a political prisoner,” he told ABC’s Jon Karl.

On his show: “It’s a political war.”

And Bannon doesn’t just diagnose the “lawfare” problem as he sees it, whether on behalf of himself or Trump. He also offers a path forward, and that is how retribution came to be such a salient theme in this election.

When Trump announced his 2024 campaign last March in Waco, Texas (a symbolic location to the far right), the former president promised his followers: “I am your warrior, I am your justice … I am your retribution.” Even without Bannon hosting War Room, retaliatory persecution of law enforcement and political opponents will be a major narrative for the MAGA movement, and Bannon has been instrumental in setting that tone.

Here’s a very limited selection of his missives promising vengeance from just the past few months:

• Bannon threatened Garland: “You're going to be a target of a massive investigation. You're going to go from the Supreme Court to prison.”
• He promised “teams” that will “go after the criminals and the traitors in the deep state.”
• Bannon said a second Trump administration will launch investigations of journalists for trying to “destroy the American republic.”
• He called Trump’s political opponents “enemies and traitors to this country” who should be “very worried” about retaliation. 
• “We’re going after you. The hunted are going to become the hunters,” Bannon warned on April 24.
• At this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, Bannon said Trump will “drive the vermin out of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.,” adding, “Some of our folks may say justice in this case is retribution. I will let that be defined as we go forward.”

The right-wing movement has a plan to actualize this vision. Called Project 2025, it's an initiative organized by The Heritage Foundation and embraced by Bannon that would provide policy and personnel to the next Republican presidential administration. The effort involves more than 100 partner organizations, and the plans outlined in its nearly 900-page policy book — titled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise — represent a major threat to democracy. Project 2025 has been in development for years, and Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts has specified that its framework will carry forward “for the next century in the United States,” well beyond the term of Bannon’s incarceration.

Among its wide-ranging policy goals, Project 2025 seeks to radically reshape federal law enforcement for the benefit of a conservative strongman; its chapter on the Department of Justice, written by a former Trump official, states that “anything other than a top-to-bottom overhaul will only further erode the trust of significant portions of the American people and harm the very fabric that holds together our constitutional republic.”

Project 2025 is the Trump movement’s vehicle for enacting Bannon’s vision of retaliation, which goes far beyond what’s in the Mandate for Leadership.

“On the spectrum of MAGA,” he recently told NBC News, “I would say President Trump is a moderate in our movement. And I think the MAGA movement is shifting day by day to the right.”

Under a second Trump presidency, not only would the administration likely draw on the Project 2025 framework, but it would also be under pressure from Bannon and his supporters to go significantly further.

So while Bannon’s visibility temporarily fades as his sentence begins, his worldview remains and continues to pose a significant threat to democracy.

Journalist Jennifer Senior, who wrote an explosive profile of Bannon in 2022, made an astute observation to this point in a recent conversation with The Bulwark’s Tim Miller, another worthy observer of War Room. Senior said that Bannon’s goals to weaponize his prison term transcend Trump, that Bannon sees himself “as the head of some other grassroots movement” entirely complementary to the former president but also decidedly independent.

“I don’t think he thinks he’s martyring himself, even though he says publicly that it’s on the movement’s behalf,” she explained. “I think there’s some part of it that he thinks it’s on his own behalf, that his own listeners are going to be energized by this.”

I agree. Through his own purported self-sacrifice, which is really just a predictable outcome of a legal problem he created for himself by refusing the House January 6 committee's request for documents and testimony, Bannon is building a foundation of support from Trump’s base to fall back on that is unique to him — a new facet of the MAGA movement that can survive on its own.

So while accountability for Bannon in the limited manner of a prison sentence for two misdemeanors is, in my amateur view, appropriate, it’s far from a triumph over the fascistic tendencies of the Trump movement that he has been so instrumental in actualizing. It’s hardly even a temporary reprieve.



“Pray for our enemies,” Bannon told his faithful MAGA audience in a recent broadcast, “Do not write a letter to me at all — it will not be read.” What to do instead? “I want you to get to work. This is all about victory.”