STEVE BANNON'S SECOND TERM

Within seven days, he GOT OUT OF PRISON and helped WIN A PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION. Now it's time for war.

- ANDREW RICE

A LITTLE AFTER 3 A.M. on October 29, one week before the election, Steve Bannon walked out the gates of FCI Danbury, a low-security federal prison in Connecticut.

He was wearing the only personal clothes he had: his workout outfit, a baggy gray sweat suit. He carried a few plastic bags jammed with papers and some commissary items he was keeping as reminders: a bowl, a spoon, a plastic coffee mug. For four eventful months, Bannon-a man of constant chaotic action-had been penned up as he served a sentence for contempt of Congress. Bannon's daughter Maureen, who had run his multi-platform media company in his absence, had come to greet him. She threw her arms open wide outside the prison's razor-wired fence. Later that morning, she would post a photo of their reunion to X along with the message "LET'S FUCKING GO!!!!" That afternoon at a packed press conference at the Loews Regency on Park Avenue, Bannon declared, "Victory is at hand." Twenty pounds lighter than when he went inside, he was in his old uniform-multilayered black shirts, cargo pants, leather boots, Barbour jacket-and back to his old bluster.

"I think you can see today that I am far from broken," he said. "I have been empowered." Behind him stood a pair of bodyguards and an extremist welcoming committee.

(Notables in attendance included Raheem Kassam, a British right-wing media figure; Naomi Wolf, the feminist turned anti-vaxx polemicist; and Erik Prince, the mercenary-company founder.) Bannon was delighted to entertain questions from the press. He said he was in the best shape of his life and thoroughly unreformed.