It was one of the worst days in the short life of Donald Trump’s administration—an administration that has not known many good days. But, as it turned out, the afternoon of July 12 was the time I’d scheduled an appointment with Steve Bannon, the man who, a month later, would leave his post as the president’s chief strategist. And as I walked through the West Wing, the simmering distress was unmistakable.

In an alcove, National-Security Adviser H. R. McMaster huddled with Reince Priebus, the soon-to-be-ex chief of staff. Jay Sekulow, the public face of President Trump’s legal team, furiously checked his cell phone. While aides conferred on an outdoor patio, brows furrowed, a top White House adviser took me aside and gravely confided, “The situation is even worse than you can imagine.” But I was not there to discuss the latest bombshell: the revelation that Donald Trump Jr. had hosted a previously undisclosed meeting with some shadowy Russians. No, every other reporter in the nation’s capital was already pursuing that story.

Instead, I had come to discuss another subject entirely. And Bannon, seeing me lingering in a hallway, popped out of a conference room and shepherded me into his office—at the time a virtual command center for the Trump Revolution, just steps from the Oval. To some, Bannon—intense, brooding, and sardonic—was the intellectual architect of a stunning election upset; to others, he was a persistent dog whistle who riled up Trump’s base and America’s basest instincts. But in the White House that week, few cast a longer shadow.

“Can you believe this?!” he said, pointing to a wall of TVs with breaking-news alerts about the Russian rendezvous. Another wall served as a sort of mood board, papered with startling policy goals: “Begin removing more than 2 million criminal illegal immigrants,” “Cancel [Obama’s] unconstitutional executive action[s],” “Impose term limits on all members of Congress.” Bannon, despite the prevailing angst of the day, was engaged, gregarious, and happy to speak on the record. The reason? I was interested in a man who, in some ways, was his ideological soulmate: Peter Thiel, the elusive tech billionaire, who, far from public view, has wielded outsize clout within the new administration.

“I cannot overstate his impact on the transition,” Bannon began, describing Thiel as a hidden hand in shaping Team Trump. “You will see in the near term that Peter will be taking on new responsibilities, like intelligence.” While Trump and his communications squad may rail about Washington’s permanent bureaucracy, especially those in national-security positions, Bannon talked about having been in the trenches alongside Thiel as part of an offensive against the so-called Deep State (a term used in certain quarters, recently on the far right, to describe what they see as a force within the government, including the intelligence agencies, that consistently asserts its power in order to maintain the status quo). Indeed, as Bannon and others avowed, Thiel—a man most Americans could not pick out of a lineup—was apparently poised to assume some serious, and seriously controversial, responsibilities.

Who, then, is Peter Thiel? What are his goals? And what has he been doing sub rosa for Donald J. Trump? In search of answers, I met with an array of Thiel confidants from Washington, D.C., to New York, to San Francisco. And throughout, I kept coming back to a single scene that I had watched on TV last December.

Thiel in the lobby of Trump Tower, a week after Trump’s election victory. By Michael Graae/Dailymail.com/Solo Syndication.

The Early Adopter

The setting was a sunlit conference room in Trump Tower. The timing was pivotal: five weeks before Trump would assume the presidency. Around the table sat many of Silicon Valley’s most powerful entrepreneurs, who had gathered for what the president-elect’s team had labeled a tech summit. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Apple’s Tim Cook were there. And Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, Alphabet/Google’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Intel’s Brian Krzanich, and Elon Musk, of Tesla and SpaceX.