Steve Bannon knows where his bread is buttered.
The one-time Donald Trump whisperer is sucking up to his former boss’s new “co-president” Elon Musk, praising the world’s richest man for delivering Trump the White House.
“Elon and I disagree on some things, but Elon deserves his place at the table,” Bannon told Puck magazine. “He stroked a $150 million check for the ground game, which is not sexy, at the exact moment we needed it. He came in with the money and the professionals. To be brutally frank, it’s the reason we won.”
Musk has been refusing to leave the president-elect’s side ever since he poured an estimated $200 million into pro-Trump Super PACs and ran his field operations in key swing states. As thanks, Trump appointed him co-head, together with Vivek Ramaswamy, of an outside panel called DOGE that will advise the government on spending cuts.
“This is what I like about Elon Musk. He and Vivek are talking about what we’ve been preaching on the War Room for years,” Bannon gushed, referring to his daily talk show. “They are down in the trenches with the hard part of how you actually start to turn the country around. That’s what I appreciate.”
Bannon was arguably the second most powerful man in Washington at the beginning of Trump’s first term. He oversaw Trump’s surprise victory in 2016 and joined his White House as chief strategist, only to be exiled at the first sign of disagreement between the two explosive personalities.
And yet the president-elect’s longtime cheerleader has continued to hover at the margins, occasionally chatting with Trump and visiting Mar-a-Lago during the transition.
There are no plans to bring Bannon back to the White House, Puck reported, but the War Room host made it clear he still plans to bully Republican senators on Trump’s behalf if they refuse to confirm his Cabinet nominees.
“We’re all about advice and consent. We want to hear your advice, but we need your consent,” he said, which critics might argue is really not what the Founding Fathers meant. “If you fail to give it, you’re signing your political death warrant,” he added.
