Adapted from The Best People: Trump's Cabinet and the Siege on Washington by Alexander Nazaryan. Copyright © 2019. Available from Hachette Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group Inc.

WASHINGTON — He has been training populists in Italy and fomenting revolution in Belgium. He has been down in Texas, building a wall. But these have all been halting projects, placeholders. The real question is whether Steve Bannon will be back by Donald Trump’s side in 2020, after a two-year exile from Trumpworld.

That could happen, at least according to Trump himself. “I’ll tell you one thing,” Trump said when I asked him about Bannon in February, during an Oval Office interview. “I watched Bannon a few times, four or five times over the last six months. Nobody says anything better about me right now than Bannon. I don’t know.”

Bannon, of course, was the mastermind who took over a faltering Trump campaign in August 2016, guiding it to improbable victory. He then served as Trump’s chief political strategist in the White House, only to be forced out by Trump’s second chief of staff, John Kelly, in a move that a plainly exhausted Bannon seemed to almost welcome after months of battling the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, the president’s daughter Ivanka Trump and, well, pretty much everyone else.

Bannon’s banishment, though, did not truly begin until January 2018, when journalist Michael Wolff published his book Fire and Fury about the Trump administration. A main source for Wolff, Bannon was on the record deriding Trump’s two favorite children, Donald Jr. and Ivanka. The president didn’t exactly turn the other cheek, branding his former consigliere “Sloppy Steve” on Twitter. Just a few days later, he was summarily removed from the chairmanship of Breitbart News, the right-wing news organization that had made a bracing case for Trump in 2016.

Since then, Bannon has waged a faltering war on the Republican establishment and has continued to foment a populist movement in Europe, where he has spent much of his time in the last year, returning only occasionally to the handsome Capitol Hill townhouse known casually as “the Breitbart Embassy.”

The estrangement could be nearing an end, however, now that the 2020 presidential election is nearing and Trump may need Bannon to rile the conservative grassroots once more, as he did in 2016. At the very least, Trump’s anger at the man once branded “The Great Manipulator” on the cover of Time magazine — a cover image impossible to avoid at Breitbart Embassy — appears to have entirely dissipated.

“I think Steve wants it,” says Sam Nunberg, a former close Trump adviser who later worked with Bannon.





When we spoke, Trump dismissed the comments Bannon made to Wolff, describing Fire and Fury as a “phony book.” We did not speak about Siege, Wolff’s second book on Trump, because it had not yet been published. Bannon was Wolff’s main source in the book. He too reports that “rumors” of a rapprochement have circulated in Washington.

A person close to the White House who was previously a member of the administration said that he had “noticed” Trump recently “softening” toward Bannon. “I want to say yes, but then he does stuff that hurts his own cause.” This person, who asked for anonymity in order to not imperil professional relationships, says that Trump was upset that Bannon cooperated with Wolff on Siege, but not nearly as upset as he had been with Fire and Fury. (The White House declined to comment on the record for this story.)

“He will never be back in an official capacity,” the White House insider adds, “but if he’s smart, he could get back into good graces.”