By Guardian - David Smith- Mon 24 Jun 2024 11.00 BST - Meet the election operator - Charlie Kirk

Welcome to the War Room, where the classical, contemporary and conspiratorial nourish Steve Bannon’s grand vision of himself as a historical figure. Each day he holds court in this basement on Capitol Hill to plot not only Donald Trump’s return to power but the next American revolution.

It is not your typical man cave. Christian iconography. A bust of Julius Caesar. A painting of John Paul Jones, the revolutionary war naval officer. A book, The Russian Revolution by Richard Pipes, sitting on a crowded desk. A sign resting on the mantelpiece declares: “There are no conspiracies, but there are no coincidences.” Screens, microphones and other podcasting paraphernalia sit above piles of books and newspapers, namely the Financial Times and New York Times.

“I was a paper boy so I love papers,” explains Bannon, picking up his phone as he continues: “You can’t read it on here. It’s not the same. First off, one of the most important things is the editorial choices. Very important how they place it, how they do it.”

The 70-year-old – once featured on the front of Time magazine with the headlines “The Great Manipulator” and “Is Steve Bannon the Second Most Powerful Man in the World?” – is constantly thinking about the media and shaping narratives. He believes that he wields more influence through his War Room show, which launched in October 2019, than he did working on Trump’s first election campaign or during a brief, ill-fated spell as White House chief strategist.

His impact on the 2024 election is about to be severely disrupted: Bannon must report to prison by 1 July to serve a four-month sentence for defying a subpoena from the congressional committee that investigated the 6 January 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol. That means he should be back on air just before the 5 November presidential election.

But jail, he insists, doesn’t worry him. “If I go to prison, I go to prison,” he says in an interview given before a federal judge confirmed that Bannon must turn himself in. “I was on a navy ship for four years at sea.”

The former navy lieutenant, Goldman Sachs banker and Hollywood film producer, who grew up in a working-class Irish Catholic family in Virginia, has been variously compared to Thomas Cromwell, Rasputin and Joseph Goebbels. In person, wielding a mug of coffee, he is affable, bombastic and garrulous.

A question about how Bannon defines “Make America great again” (Maga) leads to a stream of consciousness that touches on “salt of the earth” guys he knew in the navy; Robert Clive, the British soldier and administrator; the American civil war (“Lincoln was an ultranationalist”); and today’s struggle between a credential class and the citizens denied a seat at the table.

“What the ruling class in our nation should fear is President Trump’s audience, from Wildwood, New Jersey, to South Bronx to Miami to Charlotte,” he says. “The commonality is that American citizens who work their ass off – the whole country depends on them – of every race and ethnicity don’t think they’re at the table and they don’t think anybody except Trump wants them at the table. Trump not only puts you in the room, he puts you at the head of the table and that’s why they [the elites] hate him and that’s why they have to destroy him.”

Despite his instinctive antipathy towards online media, Bannon starts each morning with the Guardian, Financial Times and Times of London, then turns to the American press. His logic: “If you really want to follow the right and Trump and Maga, you can’t go to Fox or Newsmax because they don’t cover it. There’s no other site out there that covers it. You’ve got to go to MSNBC or the Guardian.”

As he speaks, MSNBC is playing on a giant TV above the fireplace of an adjacent room. War Room’s conservative audience laps up clips of liberal hosts such as Rachel Maddow, just as the comedian Jon Stewart has long titillated Daily Show viewers with contraband from the Fox News universe. Bannon reasons: “You’ve got to understand where your enemies are and how they’re framing the narrative to understand the contemporary world and to be effective.”

War Room has been described by the Washington Post as “a far‐right Meet the Press”, a reference to the NBC network’s long-running, agenda-setting political talkshow. It broadcasts live for 22 hours a week on various platforms including radio, Rumble and Real America’s Voice, a new pro-Trump network.

Bannon claims that it is invariably number two in the political podcast charts behind Pod Save America, hosted by a group of former aides to Barack Obama, and benefits from a lack of competition on the right. But how many people are consuming it is unknown.

With evident pride, Bannon says the show does not talk down to its listeners and viewers but serves up a unique combination of politics, geopolitics, capital markets and macroeconomics. “What we try to do here is raise the bar higher than they can reach it, so the audience has to stretch,” he adds.

“I don’t try to have a mass audience; I never have. We’re very focused on activists or people who will become activists because you have to build a vanguard. The old Republican party wanted a vanguard like [William F] Buckley with smart Ivy League guys writing for the National Review and going to cocktail parties; that might have worked then but we’re in a different era today.”

Headquartered just 500 yards from the supreme court, War Room is less Republican, Bannon says, than a platform for the grassroots of the populist nationalist movement. Madeline Peltz, who monitors emerging rightwing media trends at the watchdog Media Matters for America, says by phone: “One of the things that makes Steve Bannon different from his fellow travellers is he doesn’t turn his nose up at any segment of the American population.

“He folds in absolutely anyone who’s willing to hear him out. Whereas on the left you see a lot more infighting, Steve Bannon is looking always to expand the coalition, to expand his audience. He has unique eye for that and knack for that.”

But the show’s sway over Republican politics cannot be overestimated. It has hosted guests including Elise Stefanik, the number three Republican in the House of Representatives, and other future leaders.

Close to Bannon’s desk sits a copy of Project 2025, the near 900-page blueprint for a second Trump presidency – including a Bannon-esque dismantling of the administrative state – produced by the Heritage Foundation, a thinktank just a few minutes’ walk away. “I keep my bible right there,” Bannon says admiringly. “It shows you that he has a vast group of people that want to work with him. The left is in total and complete meltdown.”

From attacking Trump’s impeachment to draconian border security (“I’m 100% for mass deportations day one”), from baseless vaccine conspiracy theories to slashing military funding to Ukraine, War Room is an incubator of policies that worm their way into Republican orthodoxy months or years later.

“We get on an idea and we drive it,” Bannon says. “We think through narratives we’re working on and we think how we’re going to place people and how they’re going to come on and what we’re going to talk about. What’s the narrative engine of this? We do a ton of work to make sure that we’re not wrong on things.”

Factcheckers disagree. Last year a study by the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington found that almost 20% of War Room episodes contained a false, misleading or unsubstantiated statement, making it a bigger spreader of disinformation than any other political podcast.

Peltz adds: “War Room is on four hours a day, five days a week, and two hours on Saturday. It is an endless stream of nonsense and the overwhelming volume of the content allows him to just throw spaghetti at the wall and one thing sticks, the other thing doesn’t stick. He’s very heavy on apocalyptic innuendo and very light on details.”

One of Bannon’s litmus tests for Republicans is the 2020 presidential election. Despite Trump losing more than 60 lawsuits challenging the result, and despite William Barr, the then attorney general, stating that the justice department uncovered no evidence of widespread voter fraud, the War Room host regards Biden as a “totally illegitimate” president.

“We’re the railhead of the big steal every day, with every aspect of it, and we take pride in it,” he says. “I’m adamant. There shouldn’t be anybody in the Trump campaign or the RNC [Republican National Committee] in a paid position that does not believe to the marrow of their bones that the 2020 election was stolen. If you don’t believe that, to me, you miss the point of where we are and why we’re here.”

Bannon, former head of Breitbart News, describes the unwillingness of Fox News and other media to touch the subject of the 2020 election as “a psyop”. He claims credit for opinion polls that show a majority of Republicans think Biden did not win a free and fair election. “It’s War Room, it’s a couple of other podcasts and look how we’ve changed the numbers. Why? Because we’re relentless. I will never back off that.”

Will he commit to accepting the result of the 2024 election, irrespective of the winner? “We’re going to have to go through it line by line and make sure. It’s got to be certifiable, chain of custody, legitimate votes from American citizens. If we do that and those votes are there I have no problem if they win, but we’re not going to answer now ‘Yes, we’re going to do it’, because we don’t know, we’re not there yet and it’s going to be hard fought. Nobody’s asked Democrats that if Trump wins.”

Trump inspired the mob to storm the Capitol, admires the likes of Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un and has joked about being a dictator on “day one”. But Bannon dismisses the notion that he poses a fundamental threat to democracy. “You look at the first three years of peace and prosperity, he was anything but a dictator. He was more inclusive in talking to people.”

Noting Trump’s recent campaign stops with construction workers and firefighters and a rally that drew thousands in Wildwood, New Jersey, he continues: “Those are probably low-information voters who love the guy and see the guy’s not a dictator, or are nostalgic for their lived experience. You see that he’s anything but an authoritarian figure.

“Also, the anti-democracy stuff’s not working. They can’t sell it. They’re going to try something else but they can’t sell that so just go look at reality.”

Much ink has already been spilled about how, with guardrails off and lackeys at his side, Trump’s second term would be more radical and inimical to democracy than the first. Bannon isn’t buying it. In his view, Trump is actually holding even more extreme forces at bay.

“President Trump is actually a moderate in the Maga movement,” he says. “He’s a very kind-hearted, big-hearted guy. He’s a hotel[ier], he’s greeting people, he would be the first person to reach out, like he was the first person in ’16 to reach out.

“To the right of President Trump? Not so kind-hearted. We’re very focused and we’re to the right of him because it’s just not his nature to be as far rightwing as we are. We love him, he’s the head of our movement but what comes after Trump is a much bigger shockwave to the liberal establishment and to the progressive establishment that basically controls the country.”

By way of example, Bannon lists a variety of conservative authors and pundits who, though not normally considered “Maga”, united in fierce condemnation of Trump’s criminal conviction in New York and called for vengeance. He foresees the right burying its differences and joining forces to defeat the status quo.

“That’s what’s after Trump. You’re seeing it now. It’s getting bigger every day. We’re ascendant with everything that’s going on. It’s like the Catholic church was in eastern Europe or it’s like in China. When groups are suppressed and everything is done to debank them and suppress them, they come together in a more unified method and put aside their own differences to fight a common enemy.

“We have a common enemy and that is the deep state and the progressive left, Wall Street and the tech oligarchs that run this country and turn it into not a constitutional republic. We’ve put aside a lot of our differences to organise for that fight.

“Now we have people that are Never Trumpers that are coming to our cause and seeing what we’ve been saying for a long time. Yeah, you see what? We weren’t crazy. You see what’s actually happening? That’s what is building every day and getting more powerful.”

One of those would-be avengers, the rightwing media personality Megyn Kelly, recently called for Bannon to take command of Trump’s campaign. His imminent incarceration puts paid to that idea, and he faces a separate trial on charges that he duped donors who gave money to build a wall along the US-Mexico border, but he says he would not take the job anyway.

“The role here is much more important. This [the campaign] has nothing to do with strategy any more. It’s so obvious what has to happen and it’s nuts and bolts. This is all execution – ’16 wasn’t like that.”

Bannon helped write Trump’s inaugural address about American carnage, but their relationship is nebulous. His team sends clips of War Room to the former president every day. On occasion Trump responds with handwritten notes saying things like “attaboy” or “this is outrageous”. But does Bannon still speak with Trump often?

“I don’t want to talk about all the conversations, but I stay in contact with the president enough that there is no separation between the War Room and President Trump. If you watch the War Room, you’ll see a lot of stuff pop up in the speeches and what he’s put up on Truth Social.

“He has a phrase, ‘my people’, and his people have never really had a media platform that’s also interactive, where they can participate and push out stuff. Fox is very passive and very traditional Republican. They always take the neocon line; there’s never a war they didn’t like. They only even covered the border because of ratings.”

Bannon has now reached an age when most people are considering retiring; instead he is facing prison and nurturing monumental ambitions that transcend a mere presidential election. Why? “Look, I gave eight years of my life as a young man to service of the country,” he explains. “I come from a working-class family that had two sons go be naval officers and grandchildren went to West Point and serve in the military.

“This is service to the country. I came from a relatively humble background, the greatest people on earth, and those people deserve a shot. I believe in this country, I believe in those people and I believe in the little guy throughout the world. It’s a calling and I love it. I couldn’t think of any other way to spend my time. I’ll do this till I go out of here boots first.”