Steve Bannon and Donald Trump have had their ups and downs. Bannon helped secure Trump’s electoral victory, but also frequently angered the president, including by calling his daughter Ivanka “dumb as a brick.” Trump fired Bannon from his chief strategist post in 2017, dubbed him “Sloppy Steve,” and declared that Bannon “not only lost his job, he lost his mind.” At the moment, it seems that Bannon is back in the president’s good graces. But even that didn’t spare the political strategist from a backhanded, comically-untrue jab: In a tweet posted Friday, Trump called Bannon one of his “best pupils.”

The faint praise was doled out in response to Bannon’s Friday appearance on CNBC. In the interview, Bannon asserted that presidential candidate Joe Biden “is not going to be able to stand up to the withering assault of Donald Trump,” and that in watching the debates he didn’t “see anybody on those stages either night that’s going to come close to taking out Donald Trump.” Trump, who loves praise and reportedly receives twice-daily briefings filled with fawning social media posts and positive news stories about his presidency, approved of Bannon’s performance.

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Nice to see that one of my best pupils is still a giant Trump fan. Steve joined me after I won the primaries, but I loved working with him! pic.twitter.com/jRpmdrGYTB — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 2, 2019

By all accounts, of course, their relationship was almost totally the inverse, with the more politically fickle Trump serving as a student of Bannon’s ardent far-right nationalism. Bannon cultivated Trump’s affection for nationalist icon Andrew Jackson, gave reading assignments to the Trump team, and was so famously influential in the White House that the president reportedly became annoyed at the frequency with which Bannon was described as administration’s policy mastermind.

And though he didn’t officially join the future president’s campaign until August 2016, Bloomberg’s Joshua Green, who authored a book on the two men, told NPR he didn’t think that "Donald Trump would have been elected president" without Bannon’s guidance.

But even though Trump is in many regards more a student of Bannon’s than the other way around, Bannon clearly learned something very important during his time in the administration—with Trump, a little sycophancy goes a long way.

Gabrielle Bruney Gabrielle Bruney is a writer and editor for Esquire, where she focuses on politics and culture.

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