Becoming Steve Bannon’s Bannon

There’s an old saw about Washington, D.C., that staffers in their twenties know more about the minutiae of government than their bosses do. Whether they wield real power is a different question. Julia Hahn, the twenty-five-year-old Breitbart News reporter who has just been named a special assistant to the President, could be a test case. Hahn is a protégée of Stephen Bannon, the White House chief strategist and former Breitbart chairman, who has been referred to as “Trump’s Rasputin.” (On Twitter, he is often called #PresidentBannon.) When Hahn wrote for Breitbart, her primary beats were immigration (she wanted less of it, especially from Muslim countries) and the perfidy of Republicans who, in her view, sold out American interests—especially the Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan. In dozens of vituperative articles, Hahn called Ryan a “third-world migration enthusiast” and a “double agent” who was secretly campaigning for Hillary Clinton.