Then, this spring, Bannon and Corey Lewandowski, an early 2016 campaign advisor who had remained a Trump loyalist and courtier, had joined forces when the 2020 campaign was overwhelmed by COVID and BLM protests to lobby for the ouster of not only Brad Parscale but also Jared Kushner, and for Lewandowski and Bannon to return to run the reelection effort. It is almost impossible to characterize the negligible level of chance that Trump would ever have ousted his son-in-law or, for that matter, countenanced Bannon’s return in any capacity. (Better to lose than to have to give credit to Bannon for winning.)

That summer, Barr’s Justice Department—with, according to some, the encouragement of the president’s son-in-law—had indicted Bannon for skimming money from a not-for-profit company he had joined to raise money to actually build a border wall (not incidentally showing up Trump, whose own wall still lagged). For Kushner and various others in the West Wing, dedicated in their hatred of Bannon, this indictment was a kind of double insurance that the president, beyond even his ire toward Bannon, would not ever allow him back.

But Bannon, who had befriended Giuliani (whom he had previously and publicly described as drunken and senile), became in the hours after the election a fervent believer in the stolen vote and in the wilder versions of how it had happened. Bannon’s podcast, focused on an audience of one, but with a large actual audience, too, became a platform for almost every one of the outliers who had gathered around the election challenge.

The president, who had not spoken to his former chief strategist since shortly after Bannon left the White House in August 2017, was now back on the phone with him, taking strategic advice.

There was perhaps some logic here, at least from Bannon’s point of view. Bannon was one of the original authors of Trump populism. While personally ridiculing the world of conspiracies, he nevertheless prided himself on being able to propagate the kind of narrative that, by its very labyrinthine qualities, draws in an engaged and credulous audience. Elections, with their thousands of unknown hands, far-flung control, opaque counting, and with the close margins in swing states, were an obvious new gold standard of conspiracy—one that Trump, more than anyone, now believed in.