The adult-education program at Federal Correctional Institution Danbury needed a civics teacher. Conveniently, a new prisoner with a history of intimate involvement in American politics—inmate No. 05635-509—needed a work assignment. And that is how Steve Bannon, the man who stood accused of helping orchestrate an effort to undermine American democracy and to overturn a presidential election, found himself on the federal payroll making 25 cents an hour teaching civics to fellow convicts.

Bannon’s class met up to five days a week, with as many as 50 inmates showing up for the sessions. Whether that impressive attendance had more to do with Bannon’s lectures or the sweltering summer heat is anyone’s guess—the classes were held in one of the only buildings at Danbury with air-conditioning. In class, he taught the story of the American founding, referencing both The Federalist Papers and the writings of the anti-Federalists who believed that the Constitution gave the federal government too much power. His lesson plans described how the growth of what Bannon calls the administrative state betrayed America’s founding principles. After one class on the evils of the Federal Reserve and the national debt, Bannon says one of his convict students raised his hand to ask, “And they say we’re the criminals?”

The 70-year-old former chief strategist for Donald Trump had been found guilty on two counts of contempt of Congress. His crime: defying a subpoena and refusing to cooperate with the congressional committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol. For four months, he would be housed in a two-story cellblock with 83 other men, all of whom shared two showers. Bannon’s willingness to serve time rather than cave to Nancy Pelosi cemented his status as a towering figure in the MAGA movement. “I am proud to go to prison” if that’s what it takes “to stand up to tyranny,” he’d told reporters on the day he showed up to serve his sentence.

Danbury is not the kind of prison where you would typically find someone like Bannon. But because he had another pending legal issue—he later pled guilty to one felony-fraud count in New York related to a fundraising campaign—he could not be sent to one of the minimum-security prisons, sometimes referred to as “Club Fed,” where inmates live relatively comfortably. Bannon wants you to know that he was locked up with hardened criminals in a real prison.

From the July/August 2022 issue: American Rasputin

Just a couple of weeks after his release, I sat down with Bannon in the cluttered living room of his townhouse on Capitol Hill. We spoke for nearly three hours about his time in prison. It was a dialogue that started with a phone call the day he was released, in late October 2024, and continued over dozens of telephone interviews as the former inmate resumed his role as one of Trump’s most important outside advisers. As we talked about Trump’s return to power, our conversations often came back to Bannon’s experience behind bars.

“I wasn’t in a camp like that pussy Cohen,” Bannon told me, referring to Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen. Danbury is, in Bannon’s words, “a rough place”—“a fucking low-medium security with gangbangers and fucking drugs and stabbings.” Soon after he arrived, he told me h