“We’re Gonna Smoke This F–ker Out”: Inside Steve Bannon’s MAGA Mutiny That Brought McCarthy’s House Down

“Look at this fruitcake.”

Saturday, September 30, 2023, was a perfect fall day in Washington—sunny, seventy-two degrees—and Steve Bannon was spending it in the basement of his townhouse, the old Breitbart Embassy, now the command center for the MAGA movement, with the lights off and the shades drawn. His famous podcast studio was in the next room, but he was not on the air now. He was watching C-SPAN, as the House of Representatives was about to vote on a last-minute stopgap measure to avert a government shutdown. Bannon had stayed up the night before watching the debates until three or four a.m., and monitoring comments and chat rooms to see the real-time reaction from his War Room audience. Now he was glued to the proceedings again, as Connecticut congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (a Democrat) appeared across his giant TV screen, wearing a yellow blazer and scarf, chunky rings and oversized glasses, a shock of purple in her cropped black hair.

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“I love it,” Bannon said. “She’s so great. We highlight her every time she’s on. She’s so radical. And she looks like something from the Addams Family, right? She’s smart as shit. But dude, I just—here we go…”

“It’s really not so clean a continuing resolution as it has been portrayed,” DeLauro said on the TV, speaking about the seventy-one-page bill to keep the government open that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was now rushing through to a vote. “This strikes the member pay prohibition, in effect giving members a pay raise,” she said. “Now let me just explain…”

“Whoa! You see how good that is?” Bannon reacted, as if the TV were screening a movie and he was the director. “That’s a great shot right there.”

Bannon sat at a glossy wooden dining table surrounded by stacks of books (The Case for Christian Nationalism by Stephen Wolfe; an oral history of the Trump presidency called The Method to the Madness; March to the Majority by Newt Gingrich; Unafraid: Just Getting Started by Kari Lake), a poster of Rudy Giuliani, and a bust of Bannon himself. He put his feet up, clasped his hands and rested them atop his paunch. He was, in a black collared button-down over a black T, the image of a scofflaw, an American classic, like the Outlaw Josey Wales: convicted criminal, sentenced to four months in prison for defying a congressional subpoena. But he had yet to serve a day, since the judge had suspended his sentence while he exhausted his appeals. All the while, he was forging ahead with his project to transform the Republican Party into an institution for the MAGA movement.

“Our audience does not hate these people,” Bannon said of DeLauro and the Democrats. “They don’t think they’re Americans. But they hate the RINOs. So right now, when they hear that, they’re like, ‘Fucking burn it down! McCarthy gave himself a pay raise!’”

McCarthy had won the speaker’s gavel in January after a humiliating fifteen rounds of voting. His difficulty was a direct result of the party’s shortcomings in the midterms: with no red wave to deliver a commanding House majority, McCarthy had no room to lose even a handful of votes. If there was one Republican pleased with that outcome, it was Matt Gaetz, the Florida congressman whose self-professed devotion to Trump extended to taking his call during sex. Bannon saw Gaetz as one of the few House Republicans who could actually be effective; and Gaetz had told Bannon, in the summer of 2022, one floor up in this same townhouse, that he didn’t want a twenty-seat majority—he wanted a five- or eight-seat majority, because then he’d have more leverage.

The Republicans had ended up with an eight-seat majority, so Gaetz and a handful of other agitators used their leverage to impose painful conditions on McCarthy’s leadership. They demanded that he pass twelve separate appropriations bills to fund different parts of the government, rather than forcing everyone to accept a single, comprehensive, up‑or‑down package—a process change that the hardliners hoped would empower them to force steep spending cuts. And if McCarthy failed on this commitment, a mere five members could call for his ouster, through a maneuver called a motion to vacate. “The drama that happened in the fight in January, the speaker fight—it was over the most obscure shit in the world,” Bannon said. But the War Room posse couldn’t look away. “People were into it, and now they understand how important the rules are. We’re having a civics lesson here. We’re exploding, and the reason we’re exploding? We’re really getting into the granular, and people can’t get enough of it.”

In the nine months since, the House had passed four individual funding bills and moved two more out of committee. That left six to go, and the Senate still hadn’t taken up any of them. Now they were out of time: the government was set to run out of funding at midnight on September 30. McCarthy was asking for a forty-five-day extension. Bannon was rooting for a shutdown. Without the support of Gaetz and the other Republican hardliners, McCarthy would have to rely on Democratic votes to pass his extension. And that, to Gaetz and Bannon, was unforgivable. It would be the last thing McCarthy ever did as speaker.

The Democrats were stalling for time while they reviewed the text of McCarthy’s bill and decided whether to support it. DeLauro used her floor speech to call out the Republicans for sneaking a congressional pay bump into the bill. “Page seven, line thirteen,” she said. “In essence, what they have done is provide themselves with a pay raise.”

“See how good she is?” Bannon said.

“Come on!” House Republicans objected from around the chamber, complaining that DeLauro was breaking the House rules by disparaging them directly. The presiding Republican, Steve Womack of Arkansas, banged his gavel.

“See?” Bannon chuckled.

“The gentlelady will suspend,” Womack interjected. “The chair would like to remind his colleagues that, in keeping with the proper decorum on the floor, please direct your comments to the chair.” Bannon translated: “Don’t bring up when you caught us giving us a pay raise!”

DeLauro then passed off the podium to the Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries of New York. The Democrats stood to clap and cheer. “And Nancy right in back of him,” Bannon observed. “Isn’t that a great optic?”

“I rise today to have a conversation with the American people,” Jeffries began.

“How good is this?”

“We want to talk about why we are here at this moment on the brink of a shutdown that was entirely unavoidable—”

“No, avoidable,” Bannon corrected him.

“—and has been brought to us by the extreme MAGA Republicans—”

Bannon slapped the table with delight.

“—who have decided that, rather than pursue the normal legislative process of trying to find common ground—not as Democrats or independents or Republicans, but as Americans—they want to threaten the American people with a shutdown, to try to drive their extreme agenda down the throats of the American people.”

“So good!” Bannon beamed. “He’s framing this perfect for him. They’ve got their narrative: ‘extreme.’ Very effective. Compare him to fucking McCarthy. Can McCarthy stand up and do that?”

He looked at his phone, reviewing the online chatter. “People are fired up right now. ‘The evil deal…’ It’s just all on McCarthy. They’re just shitting on McCarthy nonstop. It’s constant.” He said he had a hundred fifty thousand people in chat rooms right now, twenty-five thousand people watching last night at three in the morning (figures that could not be independently verified).

“This audience is so savvy now on this shit. Think about this: the MAGA movement, the base of the Republican Party being focused on appropriations bills? The Tea Party never got to this level.” The passion had been there—the anger. But what had the Tea Partiers been so angry about? The GOP’s biggest donors came in and tried to make the Tea Party about small government and deregulation. But that hadn’t been the point at all. “And that’s why the Tea Party evaporated,” Bannon said. “You know why they never got to this level? The Kochs and the people that put the money up to drive it didn’t want it to get to this level.”

He was reminded of another book he’d read, back in 2004: What’s the Matter with Kansas? by Thomas Frank. “Hugely influential on me,” Bannon said. “He makes the case that the Kochs and these people throw out these cultural issues to get the working class that support the Republican Party totally voting against their own economic interest. He’s one hundred percent correct.” The book was actually a left-wing critique: Frank argued that the hollowing out of middle America was the fault of laissez-faire economic policies enacted by Republican officials who got elected by tricking voters into caring more about culture war issues such as abortion, homosexuality, gun control, and evolution. Frank went on to become a supporter of Bernie Sanders, and he’d noticed years earlier that Bannon was filching his ideas. He could point out that Donald Trump was just another example of a Republican politician hood‑winking working-class voters, channeling their social grievances into achieving policies that benefited the ultra-wealthy.

But then Bannon would just blame the RINOs and globalist interlopers, like Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, National Economic Council director Gary Cohn, and Trump’s son‑in‑law Jared Kushner. “The fights we had in the Roosevelt Room, over trade policy and tariffs, were the most vicious in the White House,” he said. “I mean, there was almost punches thrown.” This defense of Trump’s record was non-falsifiable: everything good he accomplished was true MAGA; everything else was someone else’s fault. Still, it helped explain why Bannon spent so much more time ragging on Republicans than Democrats. To be clear, he thought the Democrats were total phonies, too, when it came time to make good on taxing the rich and helping the working class. But they were off doing their own thing—whereas the Republicans were the ones standing in the way of Bannon’s plans. “The first guys that we gotta take down is the Republican Party,” he said. “We haven’t done that yet. We’re getting there. Trump’s our instrument. We’re getting there. We’re not there yet. We’re getting there.”

Bannon was not formally or extensively advising Trump, but he loved what he was hearing out of the candidate. Three nights earlier, Trump had delivered a prime-time speech in Michigan, a state that his campaign hoped to win back in 2024. “I’m here tonight to lay out a vision for a revival of economic nationalism,” Trump had told a cheering crowd outside Detroit, from a podium with a campaign placard rendered, instead of in the usual, friendly white on blue, in a stark white on black. “The Wall Street predators, the Chinese cheaters, and the corrupt politicians have hurt you. I will make you better. For years, foreign nations have looted and plundered your hopes, your dreams, and your heritage, and now they’re going to pay for what they have stolen and what they have done to you, my friends. We’re going to take their money. We’re going to take their factories. We’re going to rebuild the industrial bedrock of this country like it used to be.” Bannon thought it was the best speech he’d heard since Trump’s first inaugural, “American Carnage.” “That was a throwdown,” he said. “That was a tightly argued case for economic nationalism. That’s not a Republican speech. It’s a populist speech: a populist, economic nationalist speech. It’s a shot across the establishment’s bow that the second term is going to be ten‑X more aggressive on the implementation of policy than the first. I think we’re going to do a hundred times more in the second term.”

Policy wasn’t the only way Trump was planning to be more aggressive in a second term. He was already privately telling advisers and associates that if he returned to the White House, he wanted to sic federal law enforcement on his critics. Among the people he specified wanting to prosecute were some of his own former aides: his former chief of staff, John Kelly, who said Trump called dead service members “suckers”; his former attorney general, Bill Barr, who defied Trump on the 2020 election and called him “a very petty individual who will always put his interests ahead of the country’s”; the former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Mark Milley, who used his farewell address to affirm, “We don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator”; and his former defense attorney, Ty Cobb, who said, “America must be better than Trump to survive.” Trump had demanded prosecuting his enemies before, but Kelly would ignore him until he moved on. A second term would be different. People like Kelly wouldn’t be around. Instead, Trump would surround himself with people like Jeffrey Clark, the former Justice Department official who’d wanted the agency to claim it found “significant irregularities” in the 2020 election. For a second Trump administration, Clark was developing a plan to invoke the Insurrection Act on Inauguration Day, empowering Trump to deploy the military against civil demonstrations.

The day after Trump’s speech in Michigan, Biden had gone to Arizona to deliver a fresh warning about MAGA extremism. “I’ve met now with over a hundred heads of state of the nations of the world—everywhere I go, they look and they ask the question, ‘Is it going to be okay?’” he’d said. “There is something dangerous happening in America now. There is an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs in our democracy: the MAGA movement. Not every Republican, not even a majority of Republicans, adhere to the MAGA extremist ideology. But there is no question that today’s Republican Party is driven and intimidated by MAGA Republican extremists.”

Bannon thought the speech played to Biden’s strengths, but only because the MAGA extremism attack was all he had: he couldn’t run on the strength of his own policies, because people weren’t feeling the benefit in their own lives. “The bottom is actually falling out. And Biden is a perfect representative of that,” Bannon said. “The way he speaks, it doesn’t grab people. Trump goes right to the solar plexus. He goes right to the heart of the matter. It’s an emotional connection. I can understand where they’re saying, ‘Hey, are either one of these guys fighting for us?’ Whoever captures that feeling, and I think the MAGA movement’s doing it—whoever captures that feeling, with workers throughout the country, that’s the coalition that you put together for—you could govern the country for fifty years.”

He turned his attention back to the TV. “Are we doing the thing now?” Yes, the House was voting. “We could definitely get rolled here.”

And just then, in case Steve Bannon might have looked like nothing more than some grumpy old man shouting at the TV in his basement on a sunny, seventy-two-degree afternoon, his phone buzzed.

“So what’s the word?” he answered.

On the other end of the line, a breathless tenor delivered a report on the latest maneuvers inside the Capitol. “It looks like the Senate will wait for the House,” Matt Gaetz told Bannon over the phone, “after which you’ll see it signed into law. And then all we’re waiting for then is basically, once that puppy’s signed into law, we go drop the motion to vacate.”

“Perfect,” Bannon said. “That’ll be tomorrow or Monday? ’Cause they’ll sign it tonight.”

“Motion to vacate Monday, probably,” Gaetz said.

“OK, perfect,” Bannon said. “Let’s come in hot. That’s perfect…We’re gonna smoke this fucker out. We got him.”

“He has put on the floor a bill with Democrats…used Democrats to advance Joe Biden’s agenda…”

“And Pelosi. It’s perfect. It’s perfect. It’s awesome…How many no’s will it have?…Womack and these guys can’t be that nuts…We gotta primary that fuck…Unreal…”

“Is it better if I do it alone? Is it better if I get one of my proxies to do it?”

“No, it’s historic. You gotta drop it.”

“Should I go alone or should I have like—”

“No, you should go down with your Praetorian Guard.”

“Five, six, seven?”

“Yes, but you drop it…OK, cool. I’m around. Bye.”

The next day, Gaetz would go on CNN to publicly announce his plan to topple McCarthy, plunging the House back into chaos, with no one having close to enough votes to become the new speaker.

After three weeks and three failed speaker nominees, Republicans would elect Mike Johnson, a little-known Louisiana back‑bencher. After the 2020 election, Johnson had recruited 125 colleagues to sign a Supreme Court brief arguing to overturn the results. The DNC would swiftly attack the new speaker as an “election denying, anti-abortion MAGA extremist.” The Biden campaign, picking up the theme, would announce, “MAGA Mike Johnson’s ascension to the speakership cements the extreme MAGA takeover of the House Republican Conference.” That night, Trump would chime in with a social media post, cheering, “MAGA MIKE JOHNSON!”

Whether the MAGA Mike branding would work with someone so obscure, and whether the MAGA Republican attacks would work for Democrats in an election with Trump’s name on the ballot, and the impact of multiple indictments and maybe even convictions of Trump—there was no way to predict. For now, Bannon hung up the call with Gaetz and watched the votes appear on his TV. “Come on, baby,” he said as the no’s ticked higher. “Just give me ninety-two, ninety-three…” A few months earlier, there’d been seventy Republicans against raising the debt limit. Every vote more than that was a win. “It’s not bad,” Bannon said. “I’m in high cotton.” The final tally was ninety-one, a pick‑up of twenty-one.”

“Are we gonna have some losses?” he said. “Fuck yes. We’re going to get fucking rolled. And we may get rolled today. But that’s OK. At every defeat, there’s enough seeds of other victories that are there. People just gotta stay on it, understand that we’re winning more than we’re losing. That’s why—a revolutionary vanguard. This has happened before in human history, right? We have to take over and we have to rebuild it. Remember, it’s a Fourth Turning. We have to rebuild these institutions. That’s not my job. That’s all to come. I’ve got a task and purpose. That’s for others behind me and others that are at the vanguard of taking this on and tearing it down to rebuild. It will have to be rebuilt. That’s gonna be huge. We’re not going to be rebuilding any time in the foreseeable future. We’re going to be taking things apart.

“They say Trump’s a divider. This is what I keep saying on the show—what’s my mantra? One side’s going to win, and one side’s going to lose. No compromise here. You’re at one of those deciding moments. You can’t compromise. One side’s gonna win, and one side’s gonna lose. We can’t unite with these guys. Tell me what’s to unite around. There’s nothing to unite around. They believe in a complete different theory of government, a complete different theory of the republic than we do.”

He stood up. “I gotta go back to work here,” he said. “We gotta figure out next steps.”

Excerpted from FINISH WHAT WE STARTED: The MAGA Movement’s Ground War to End Democracy by Isaac Arnsdorf. Copyright © 2024 by Isaac Arnsdorf. Available from Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc., New York, N.Y, U.S.A. All rights reserved.