Who Is Steve Bannon? 13 Things to Know About Trump’s New Political Guru

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Policy + Politics

Who Is Steve Bannon? 13 Things to Know About Trump’s New Political Guru

REUTERS/Eric Thayer

The right-wing firebrand at the center of the Trump campaign shakeup is chief of the ultra-conservative website Breitbart News, a former banker at Goldman Sachs in New York and a longtime confidant of the Republican presidential nominee.

Related: New Trump Campaign Team Suggests Even More Chaos to Come

Here are 13 things you need to know about Steve Bannon, many of which were contained in a Bloomberg Businessweek cover story last October entitled “This Man Is the Most Dangerous Political Operative in America:”

1. He’s rich, a one-percenter who lives in a 14-room townhouse in Washington, D.C., and runs Breitbart in the basement.

2. He is co-founder of the Government Accountability Institute, a conservative research nonprofit.

3. He was born into a working-class, Roman Catholic family in Norfolk, Virginia.

4. He served in the Navy, and at one point was a special assistant to the chief of naval operations.

5. He graduated from Virginia Tech and has a master’s in national security from Georgetown.

6. He got an MBA at Harvard.

7. He worked in leveraged buyouts at Goldman Sachs in New York.

8. He launched a small investment firm in 1990 that specialized in media and was bought out by Societe Generale about eight years later.

9. He gets royalties from Seinfeld reruns, having received a stake in the show as part of a business deal.

10. He worked as an executive producer in Hollywood and also wrote and directed a political documentary about Sarah Palin, The Undefeated, that was commercially released in 2011.

11. He fired legendary Hollywood agent Mike Ovitz.

12. He has a radio show on SiriusXM.

13. His daughter Maureen went to West Point and served in the 101st Airborne.

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