Biographer Michael Wolff recalled in a new post an exchange with Steve Bannon, the former campaign manager and strategist for President Donald Trump, who now hosts his own streaming show, in which the two men tried to figure out how Trump was so easily controlled by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In his latest column, Wolff observed that Trump continues to excuse Putin regardless of his behavior, with no real understanding of why. He added that it's a puzzle even for his close advisors, like Bannon. Wolff said that he and Bannon watched Trump's 2018 news conference with Putin in Helsinki, in which Trump had his private meeting and then announced that Putin said he had nothing to do with the 2016 election.

According to Bannon, Trump looked like "a beaten dog" as he stood next to Trump.

"Bannon often ran through all the scenarios, financial and sexual, that might have put Trump’s b—s in Putin’s grip, but always concluding that, this being Trump, there was no grift or deviancy that he couldn’t wave away," Wolff wrote. "Were the pee tape to have actually surfaced, Trump, with practiced innocence, would merely say: 'I don’t know who that is. It isn’t me. Look at that, not me at all. Fake news.'"

Bannon even joked to Wolff that Putin might have the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School transcripts and was threatening to go public. Wolff called it "one humiliation" Trump may not be able to handle.

Yet, Trump continues to take every opportunity to defer to Putin. The latest is an effort to buy a tiny amount of diesel fuel from Russia and fork over $4 billion for Putin's ongoing war, despite sanctions on Russia.

Wolff thinks some of it is Trump's payback for the Russia investigation during his first term. Trump was never investigated, but 34 people and three companies were convicted after that investigation. Trump and his allies demanded a special counsel investigate the investigators of the Russia probe. There was nothing they could do other than get one low-level FBI lawyer to admit to a single count of making a false statement. Special counsel John Durham could not secure any other convictions for crimes in Mueller's Russia probe.

Wolff thinks that even revenge is secondary to his real goal: money.

He recalled speaking with Jeffrey Epstein, the trafficker and former friend of Trump's, who died in prison in 2019. Trump was notorious for filing for bankruptcy over failed business ventures. He filed for bankruptcy six times for five companies. So Trump reached a point where few banks were willing to lend him money anymore.

“Here was the advent of the parallel, unbanked economy,” Epstein said in a discussion with Wolff.

“Donald and I,” Wolff recalled Epstein laughing, “certainly understand the opportunity.”

"Remember, nobody wanted to deal with Donald. Why would you? My God," Epstein told Wolff.

Wolff explained that "all this sketchy money—and the sketchy money was suddenly rivaling the legit money—needed people who weren’t asking questions. Sketchy money needed sketchy partners."

So, Trump tried to snag a piece of the Putin empire.

So far, Trump has profited between $2 and $4 billion in his second term. Wolff said White House officials told him Trump is aiming for $20 billion by the time he leaves office.

"And he’d probably like to put in place deals that, when he returns to Mar-a-Lago, can generate for the Trump family $100 million," Wolff said.

It might be why his sons created a new crypto bank, World Liberty Financial.

Reporter Chris Whipple penned a column for Vanity Fair about Vice President JD Vance and his political transformation at Yale Law School, prompting The Bulwark's Sam Stein to question how Vance's relationship will likely unfold for the 2028 presidential election. Whipple made it clear, he thinks Trump will "destroy" Vance "come next year."

Speaking on the Wednesday podcast, Whipple said that when people in the White House were still talking to him, he recalled Vance defending Trump's remarks about the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

"He told me, 'No! The media got that totally wrong!' I don't know what the media got wrong about Trump referring to 'very fine people on both sides' who were marching with neo-Nazis with tiki torches chanting 'blood and soil,'" said Whipple.

"But I think Vance is in a really difficult, fraught position because, as one person put it to me on background, at a certain point he's going to start to get traction," Whipple said. "Vance is, if he is indeed the frontrunner, he's going to start to run ads. He's going to start to have rallies. People will pay attention. Trump will not be able to stand that. Trump will not be able to share that spotlight. And come next year, he will destroy him. He will take him down."

He added that he's spoken with Steve Bannon about Vance as well and Bannon agrees that it won't go well.

"Bannon told me that he thinks this relationship is only going to go south in a hurry," Whipple said.

Stein questioned whether there's any relationship that Trump has "in politics that hasn't eventually gone south" at one point.

"I mean, there's no amount of, you know, loyal. The loyalty is usually in one direction and you can be one of the great suck-ups of the world. You can acquiesce as much as you possibly can, but eventually those relationships go south," Stein said.

"Almost inevitably, almost inevitably," Whipple agreed.

The other question Stein asked was whether Vance cares about anything other than his own advancement.

"It seems to me there are two schools of thought about JD Vance. One is that we've already discussed, which is the notion that he's a cynical opportunist who will just go with the wind. But the other school of thought is that he is unlike Trump, who has no convictions or beliefs and is transactional about everything," said Whipple.

"Vance is actually a true believer in a post-Trump MAGA ideology, a worldview that is more authoritarian, and is in fact a kind of Catholic theocracy. And it goes back to this guy, Patrick Deneen at Notre Dame," Whipple said.

He noted that both Vance and Peter Thiel both have been influenced by Deneen. Thiel is searching for a more apocalyptic, anti-regulation world than a church-run state. He argues that an “Antichrist” could emerge as a seemingly benevolent global authority that uses fears about AI, climate change, nuclear war and safety to centralize power, restrict technology and impose a one-world government.

"That's a real worry about Vance — is that he actually believes in this stuff. And that he has the intellectual shock troops in place," Whipple said. "But there are people who think that Vance is actually a true believer in something that is much more ideological than MAGA."

Stein doesn't buy it. He said that a person "can't go from secretly advising Jake Sullivan on how to clean up the 'deplorables' so that Trump won't win, to now believing in this stuff. Like, something seems a little bit off-kilter."

Whipple thinks both options could also be true.

Prominent MAGA pundit Steve Bannon ripped into a Trump official he previously championed, per The Hill, chastising him for touting statistics that "nobody believes" and demanding he go further.

Bannon previously served as an influential top aide during President Donald Trump's first campaign and the early months of his first term, and remains a major voice in the MAGA movement by way of his "War Room" podcast. One of the second-term appointees that Bannon championed was FBI Director Kash Patel, who also emerged from the world of far-right podcasts.

Now, however, Bannon appears to be growing displeased with Patel's performance in the job, taking him to task for touting statistics about crime levels during a recent "War Room" episode.

"Kash, I love you brother, but I don’t want to hear any more statistics about how crime’s coming down, crime’s coming down, all that," Bannon said, adding that "nobody believes" what he is claiming.

"Nobody believes the crime statistics anyway, I’m sorry," he continued. "They still don’t feel comfortable walking down a street in Memphis [or] these other places, unless they see the National Guard... I don’t want to hear any crime statistics, I just don’t. It’s not going to move the needle, it’s not going to matter in any voting. Let’s have some urgency, let’s light a fire.”

Bannon further urged Patel to start getting "perp walks of the deep state" if he wants to make serious progress at the FBI. The Hill noted that this comment referred to the notion of an "unproven network of operatives within the federal government that supporters of Trump believe has sabotaged him for years."

The outlet also laid out a fuller picture of the crime statistics Bannon dismissed, which other experts have touted as signs of a remarkable nationwide downturn in violent crime, a trend that long preceded Trump's entry into the White House.

"Violent crime in the U.S. was down 9.1 percent in the U.S. from March 2025 to February of this year, according to the FBI," the outlet explained. "That includes robberies dropping by 19.1 percent, murders declining by 18.7 percent, rapes decreasing by 7.2 percent and aggravated assaults dropping by 6.9 percent. Property crime, meanwhile, dropped by 12 percent during the aforementioned time period, the FBI reported. Motor vehicle thefts decreased by 21.6 percent, while burglaries and larcenies dropped by 15.7 percent and 9.5 percent, respectively. Those declines followed a decrease in violent crime by 9.3 percent and in property crimes by 12.4 percent from 2024 to 2025, according to the FBI."

Although Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) is now 84, he continues to have a major influence on Millennial and Generation Z candidates. And one of them — 29-year-old Melat Kiros, backed by Sanders — ousted 15-term U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette in a Democratic congressional primary in Colorado on Tuesday. Kiros isn't the only self-described "democratic socialist" to win in recent weeks, and as MAGA Republican Steve Bannon sees it, the victory of Kiros and others is a major warning sign for the GOP.

During an interview with Politico, Bannon — host of the "War Room" vodcast and former White House chief strategist in the first Trump administration — argued that the lesson from the recent wave of "democratic socialist" victories is that Republicans need to lean more heavily on right-wing MAGA populism, not move away from it.

Bannon told Politico, "We are facing a new politics. We're seeing the dying of the old politics before us. You're seeing it burn to the ground before you."

Too many traditional conservatives, Bannon stressed, are clinging to the Republican Party's "old politics" even though GOP voters have moved on.

After democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City, Bannon argued that his victory underscored the populist angst many voters are feeling — and that angst, he said, was also evident in Kiros' upset on Tuesday.

"The establishment has finally awakened to, it's not New York City, it's not inner-city Manhattan, it's not just the immigrants or the illegal aliens in the boroughs — this is going to be nationwide," Bannon told Politico. "Yes, clearly, it's Denver. It's one of the more liberal cities, but it's still the American West. It's still Colorado. When I went and talked to donors about what was coming, they laughed in my face. They said, 'You don't understand Democratic politics, you don't understand that (former New York Gov. Andrew) Cuomo has $40 million, that Cuomo has the New York Post and the New York Times endorsements. He's got all the big Jewish organizations, he's got the Catholic Church, he's got the firemen, he's got the cops, he's got every endorsement.' And I said, 'I don't care about that. What Mamdani has is, today, 1000 people canvassing, going door-to-door in the boroughs — in Queens, in the Bronx and in Brooklyn, that's what's going to determine this.' And they just laughed and said, 'We have $40 million, and Fox loves us.' And Cuomo got smoked."

The "consultant class of the Republican Party," Bannon argued, is being "caught off guard" by democratic socialists who are showing that they have a strong ground game.

"To beat Mamdani," Bannon told Politico, "you have to have intense, ongoing and massive voter engagement. You also have to get out your core base even more. The only thing that's going to save the Republicans is a massive turnout of the lower propensity, lower information Trump voters — already Trump voters — at presidential election-type numbers in these congressional districts to save the House, otherwise you're going to get overwhelmed…. You have to come up with solutions. The Republicans don't know how to respond…. We are facing a new politics. We're seeing the dying of the old politics before us. You're seeing it burn to the ground before you."

Bannon continued, "Artificial intelligence, the oligarchs and the threat of these kinds of Marxist jihadists — it's going to redefine politics, and he who is prepared to take it on, you're going to see the rise of these people. If you are playing the old politics of tax cuts and wars everywhere and doing the bidding of Israel, let me be blunt — you're finished. I just keep telling people, it's a flashing red light, and the (Senate Majority Leader) John Thunes of the world and (House Speaker Mike) Johnson better understand that the old politics are gone."

There may be nobody -- perhaps not even Donald Trump himself -- who embodies the degeneracy of what used to be called conservatism like Stephen K. Bannon. That the "War Room" host still exerts influence over the American and international right as a media personality, political strategist and power broker indicates just how empty of moral character that movement truly is.

Like dear leader Trump, Bannon owes his prominence and prosperity to a pervasive atmosphere of impunity. Every day, in an era of burgeoning scandal on every front, both of them test its limits -- and have yet to find any at all.

What the Epstein files have lately revealed about Bannon, however, as disclosed in hundreds of emails between him and the predatory financier, is so depraved as to be almost unbelievable. In the face of these damning documents, the former Trump campaign manager has offered mutterings and excuses that scarcely even amount to a denial.

Not only did Bannon begin to execute a costly "op" with Jeffrey Epstein to rehabilitate the latter's image -- which ended only with his arrest by federal authorities in 2019 -- but they conspired politically together on various subsidiary plans both in the U.S. and Europe. Desperate for Bannon's help, Epstein financed his travel and connected him with potentates and politicians around the world. He paid Bannon hundreds of thousands of dollars to tape a dozen or more hours of "documentary" interviews that were evidently meant as media training, in anticipation of Epstein's prosecution.

All absolutely damning when assessed in the context of Epstein's vile assaults on girls and women, as well as his apparent financial crimes. Yet what seems most appalling so far, and most illustrative of the enveloping corruption, was their joint plotting against Pope Francis, whose liberal gestures toward gays and lesbians, migrants, Muslims and the global poor had enraged the self-styled "traditionalists" of the Catholic Church.

Together Bannon and Epstein aimed to produce a documentary film exposing the culture of hypocrisy and concealment surrounding homosexuality in the church, based on a 2019 French book "In the Closet of the Vatican." Bannon met with the book's author several times in Paris, where he also met Epstein, who had an apartment there.

With Epstein as the executive producer, Bannon predicted that the movie would wreak cataclysmic damage on the papacy and his other political adversaries, from Beijing and Brussels to Chappaqua. "Will take down Francis. The Clintons, Xi, Francis, EU -- come on brother," he wrote, encouraging Epstein (who would soon be dead).

Stop and ponder for a moment what Bannon was attempting to engineer. He wanted to produce a movie, with the help of a monstrous pedophile who had victimized hundreds of children, which would destroy the reputation of the Holy Father and perhaps many others equally without blame. And aside from the political benefit to his hard-right allies, Bannon no doubt hoped to bank a substantial profit.

It isn't easy to imagine a more sinister project. By comparison, Bannon's swindling of the suckers who financed his "We Build the Wall" nonprofit and his phony indictment of the humanitarian Clinton Foundation look quaint.

Now a few of Bannon's longtime enemies in the MAGA movement -- including Elon Musk and Roger Stone, rather dismal characters in their own right -- have leaped to attack him over these reports. Presumably Musk would like to distract attention from his own cameo role in the files, including his solicitation of an invite to "the wildest party" on Epstein's Caribbean island. And the scorpion-like Stone is merely stepping on a perceived rival, as he always does.

Yet there are many self-proclaimed Catholics and Christians in Trump's orbit, MAGA influencers and conservative pundits who should have something to say about these appalling revelations. Why have we not heard from JD Vance, vice president of the United States, a fairly recent Catholic convert and a MAGA nationalist like Bannon, who spends so much of his time blathering on social media? Why haven't we heard from Peter Thiel, the ultra-right gay billionaire and Epstein buddy who lectures about the "Antichrist" among "woke Democrats"?

Indeed, very few of our moral arbiters on the right have felt moved to speak up about Bannon -- just as they remained silent when his coconspirators in the "wall" scam served prison terms, while he skated with a presidential pardon.

The most apt summation of this MAGA mountebank appears in a video recently released among the Epstein files, which was shot for that aborted documentary.

Bannon asks Epstein, "Do you think you're the devil himself?"

"No," Epstein retorts. "But I do have a good mirror."

Many well-known conservatives, from Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) to veteran Washington Post columnist George Will to former Deputy White House Press Secretary Sarah Matthews, are saying that if far-right Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton becomes the GOP nominee in that state's 2026 U.S. Senate race, the seat could be in play for Democrats. And that's saying a lot, as Texas hasn't had a Democratic U.S. senator since 1993.

President Donald Trump, so far, hasn't endorsed either Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), the incumbent, or his ultra-MAGA challenger Paxton in that primary. But some of Trump's allies are having a bitter argument over it.

Chris LaCivita and pollster Tony Fabrizio, two major GOP operatives and Trump allies, are supporting Cornyn. But "War Room" host Steve Bannon, Politico Playbook reports, is "going all-in for Ken Paxton and slamming Trump's top campaign aides for backing John Cornyn."

LaCivita is calling Bannon out. In a text to Politico Playbook, LaCivita wrote, "associating with Senator Cornyn is better than being a lacky (sic) for Epstein."

That comment, Playbook's Adam Wren notes, was an "apparent reference to Bannon’s newly surfaced ties to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein."

Bannon told Playbook, "My belief is the Trump team should have stayed out of this race, absolutely. ... The Paxton situation is critical, because he has been the MAGA guy since Day One. He is a symbol of the heart of the grassroots MAGA movement."