The downfall of Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s philosopher king

Steve Bannon, the American president’s combustible former chief strategist, has gone down in flames, accused of milking a political fund for personal gain. It’s not the end we’d have expected, says Jane Lewis.

Steve Bannon © JOEL SAGET/AFP via Getty Images
(Image credit: © JOEL SAGET/AFP via Getty Images)

News that Donald Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, has been arrested and charged with fraud is bound to have ruffled a few feathers. Bannon may be yesterday’s man in US politics, but he still sits at the centre of a global “spider’s web of rightwing activists and politicians”, says Tortoise Media. Along with three others, Bannon is accused of milking the $25m “We Build the Wall” fund, says The New Yorker – allegedly “siphoning” off more than $1m from donations made by hundreds of thousands of Americans, and “hiding payments through a shell company”. Bannon denies the charges.

A taste for the high life

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.