MAGA Populism for Sale— How Trump Sided With The Billionaires And Tech Bros Over Bannon

MAGA Hollow Rage… A Fight Bannon Can’t Win

Replaced by Musk

Bannon is hanging onto whatever waning influence he has with the Trump Regime by his fingernails. His War Room podcast is still very popular with the MAGAverse but, whether he knows it or not… he exists at Trump’s sufferance. And by picking a fight with Elon Musk— just the way he picked a fight with Jared and Ivanka last time around— he is now aT Trump at arm’s length. He keeps insisting he’s winning a fight with the billionaire tech bros, even though it’s a fight from which he was eliminated in the first round. His fascist idealism and ideological MAGA purity will never match Musk’s billions… not with Trump calling the shots.

Yesterday, Avery Lotz reported that Bannon is telling people that he sees the presence of billionaire CEOs and tech moguls at Trump’s inaugural events “as a white flag of surrender from ‘the oligarchs.’” That’s true in some cases. In others, though, it’s a sign of Trump having sold his regime to them, especially in the case of Musk and Thiel and maybe even in regard to enemies-no-more Bezos and Zuckerberg. Unlike Bannon, these guys bought places around the tables as the doddering Trump’s collaborators. Bannon, by contrast, has been relegated to the political wilderness, shouting from the sidelines. His clueless declaration to Corriere della Sera that he “will have Elon Musk run out of here by Inauguration Day” and that Musk is a “truly evil guy” is now a punch line for jokes— at Bannon’s expense— at all over DC, Austin and Silicon Valley.

Now he’s insisting the tech billionaires are “there as supplicants… They’re not there as oligarchs. I look at this and I think most people in our movement look at this as President Trump broke the oligarchs, he broke them and they surrendered.” Meanwhile Musk has an office in the White House complex and Bannon… doesn’t.

As he senses his influence dissipating, his hatred runneth over. After serving his prison term this past summer and fall he’s referring to Zuckerberg, who has helped funnel millions of dollars into Trump’s inauguration and pocket as “a criminal... That guy will flip on President Trump and he'll flip on us in the second. When it's convenient for him, he will flip.”

Bannon’s hatred for the tech elite has always been central to his ideology, but it’s now tinged with the desperation of a man who knows he’s losing. His dreams of ideological purity are being bulldozed by Trump’s transactional politics. For all his rhetoric about defeating the “oligarchs,” Bannon has become a spectator, watching helplessly as the billionaires he despises take the very seat of power he once hoped to command.

The irony, of course, is that Bannon’s own populist movement helped create this reality. By elevating Trump, a man whose loyalty is always for sale to the highest bidder, Bannon has unwittingly opened the floodgates for the very forces he rails against. Musk, Thiel, and others aren’t just tolerated by Trump— they’re courted, celebrated, and handed the reins of influence. For them, the MAGA movement isn’t about ideological purity; it’s a business opportunity, a chance to profit off deregulation, cronyism and the erosion of public institutions.

Bannon’s bluster about “breaking the oligarchs” is particularly hollow when juxtaposed with his own past. This is a man who once worked for Goldman Sachs, helped finance Hollywood blockbusters, and cozied up to the Mercers and far-right European billionaires. His populism was always a veneer, thin enough to be pierced by the transactional ruthlessness of the Trump era. Now, he’s left to rage from the sidelines, his influence reduced to fiery rhetoric on a podcast that preaches to an increasingly insular choir. Meanwhile, the billionaires he detests are reshaping America in their image, using the very regime he helped bring to power as their tool. The tragedy for Bannon is that he can’t see the fight is already over— and he lost.

So did Ramaswamy apparently.