It’s not easy to stay in Donald Trump’s good graces. But throughout the years, Steve Bannon, host of the popular right-wing War Room podcast, has continued to prove an indispensable voice for the former president, saturating the airwaves with pro-MAGA propaganda while galvanizing Trump’s base into action. On the latest episode of Inside the Hive, Puck national correspondent Tina Nguyen and Washington Post national political reporter Isaac Arnsdorf discuss how the infamous and canny GOP strategist helped Trump come out of his postelection hibernation, whether Bannon is more bark than bite, and why his impending time behind bars could put a polish on his MAGA bona fides. “It’s amazing clout,” Nguyen says of Bannon’s prison sentence, “for someone in MAGA world in these MAGA times with a MAGA audience.”
In the episode, Arnsdorf—whose book on the MAGA movement was excerpted by Vanity Fair in April—takes listeners back to early 2021, when the former president was still licking his wounds after his 2020 election loss. “Trump kind of disappeared for a while. He was kind of in political hibernation. And it was not at all clear that his primacy in the party would remain and that we would get back to this place where he’s the nominee again,” he says. “Bannon was a huge part in making that happen, kind of stepping into that power void and making himself an indispensable voice of the movement and helping Trump supporters process what had just happened on January 6. And Bannon helped shape that—an understanding of why they lost and what they needed to do about it to make a comeback.”
Elsewhere, Nguyen explains how Bannon carved out a unique niche for himself in the MAGA-verse with his podcast. “War Room is basically his live streaming fiefdom,” she says. “What’s smart about his reach, rather than, I would say, pretty much every other large MAGA personality that’s tried to put their content out there, is that he doesn’t really care too much about money and he kind of works on a schedule that is very uniquely his own. I think he was one of the first right-wing media figures to truly understand the reach that one could have with a podcast like his. And basically—yeah, it’s everywhere at this point, and it’s been quite effective. He goes to where the audience is—rather than, say, Fox or Tucker Carlson trying to draw the audience to them.”
