Steve Bannon’s Mental Asylum | Compact

On July 1, Steve Bannon, former adviser to President Donald Trump, entered Danbury Federal Correctional Facility to begin a four-month sentence for contempt of Congress. In an interview a few weeks earlier, Tucker Carlson had asked Bannon, “How do you plan to spend that time?” Bannon responded that he viewed it as “service to his country,” adding that he has a regimen to keep him mentally healthy: “I do a lot of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the various spiritual exercises that come from the Catholic Church.”

This exchange reminded me of a conversation I had with Bannon. I followed him for about two years after he left the White House in 2017, trying to understand more deeply his intellectual trajectory and follow his mostly secret conversations with far-right thinkers around the world. We interviewed him for more than 20 hours on the record, and well over twice as many off the record, and we still keep in touch. We once discussed a time when he was confined to a small space, stressed, and had no control over his schedule. It was when he was serving on a Navy destroyer in 1980. He also got through the day with “spiritual practices,” which he confided to me were not from Catholicism, but from Buddhism, Hinduism, or even Theosophy. He hid this from his colleagues and superiors on the ship, for fear that someone would think him “a weirdo.”