Bannon, Steve (Stephen Kevin Bannon), 1953–, American political strategist, financier, and media executive, b. Norfolk, Va. After serving as an officer in the U.S. navy (1976–83), he worked as an investment banker, then as a film executive, producing several conservative documentaries. A founding board member (2007) of Breitbart News, a stridently conservative website, he was named its chairman in 2012, and it subsequently became more populist and nationalist. Bannon also cofounded (2012) the Government Accountability Institute, a conservative research organization. In 2016 he left Breitbart to head Donald Trump's presidential campaign. After Trump's election, he served as White House chief strategist until Aug., 2017; he then returned to Breitbart, but left it in Jan., 2018. His attempts to influence European politics, including joining in the relaunching (2018–19) of The Movement, a right-wing populist organization based in Brussels that sought to have an effect in the 2019 European Parliament elections, have not been successful. In 2020 he was charged with fraud relating to the siphoning off of funds donated to a nonprofit for building a Mexican border wall; he was pardoned in 2021 by President Trump.
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