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- Steve Bannon married his first wife, Cathleen Houff Jordan, in the '80s. Bannon's first marriage was kept relatively private, as the former executive chairman of Breitbart News hadn't yet made a name for himself at the time.
- Bannon's second marriage with Mary Louise Piccard was short and reportedly violent. Bannon married his second wife, Mary Louise Piccard in 1995, and their marriage only lasted two years, ending in alleged violence in 1997, according to Heavy.
- Nine years after splitting with Piccard, he married his third wife, Diane Clohesy. Almost a decade after his seemingly nasty divorce with Piccard, Bannon tied the knot with Diane Clohesy in 2006.
Nov 15, 2016 · Bannon made Cathleen Houff Jordan his first wife. The former couple became parents of one daughter, Maureen. The couple ended in divorce at some point, not many details about their relationship are known.
Bannon has been married and divorced three times. He has three adult daughters. His first marriage was to Cathleen Suzanne Houff. Bannon and Houff had a daughter, Maureen, in 1988 and subsequently divorced. Bannon's second marriage was to Mary Louise Piccard, a former investment banker, in April 1995.
- Overview
- Early life
- Entertainment finance, moviemaking, and Breitbart
- Association with Trump
Steve Bannon (born November 27, 1953, Norfolk, Virginia, U.S.) American political strategist, media executive, and filmmaker who served (2017) as senior counselor and chief White House strategist for U.S. Pres. Donald Trump.
Bannon grew up in a large Irish Catholic family in Richmond, Virginia. His father rose from a position as a lineman to middle management with a phone company. Bannon attended an all-male Catholic military school in Richmond before matriculating at Virginia Tech, where he earned a B.A. in urban affairs (1976) and served as student government preside...
After three-plus years with Goldman Sachs, he cofounded a financial firm, Bannon & Co., which focused on the entertainment industry. Among its clients were Samsung, MGM, and Polygram Records, along with Italian media magnate and politician Silvio Berlusconi. In the process of negotiating the sale of Castle Rock Entertainment from Westinghouse to Ted Turner in 1993, Bannon’s company received a stake in five television shows, including the still relatively new Seinfeld, which would eventually bring it a huge financial payoff. After Bannon & Co. was sold to Société Générale in 1998, Bannon continued to work in entertainment-related finance and acted as co-executive producer on the film Titus (1999), an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.
In 2004 Bannon immersed himself more deeply in filmmaking itself, beginning a career as a writer, director, and producer of conservative-slanted documentaries with In the Face of Evil: Reagan’s War in Word and Deed. While Bannon was growing up, his family had been oriented toward the Democratic Party, but his disenchantment with the presidency of Jimmy Carter led him to embrace Ronald Reagan and conservatism. Among the documentaries that he made were The Undefeated (2011), a laudatory portrait of Sarah Palin, and Occupy Unmasked (2012), about the Occupy Wall Street movement. During this period Bannon also developed a deep-seated contempt for financial and political elites, both those on the left and those within the Republican establishment.
Under Bannon, Breitbart championed the insurgent candidacy of Donald Trump for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. In August 2016 Bannon became the executive director of Trump’s then-faltering campaign and was credited with bringing discipline and a stronger focus on messaging to it. After Trump surprised the political pundits and pollsters by defeating his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, he named Bannon senior counselor and chief White House strategist. Bannon’s appointment was cheered by Trump’s extreme-right supporters but condemned by many on the left and by some establishment Republicans, who expressed fears of the influence of the far-right fringe entering the White House. In the second week of the Trump presidency, Bannon was elevated to regular membership on the “principals committee” of the National Security Council, an appointment that brought criticism from many corners not only because of his inclusion as a political strategist in security meetings but also because the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the director of national intelligence were no longer included as regular members of the committee. Early in April Bannon was removed from the principals committee in a reorganization that also reinstated the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the director of national intelligence as permanent members.
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For the first half-year of the Trump presidency, Bannon’s presence was among the most influential in the administration. He was widely seen as the driving force behind Trump’s controversial decisions to remove the United States from the Paris Agreement on climate change and to impose a “travel ban” on immigration from several Muslim-majority countries. Bannon’s relentless focus on economic nationalism, however, brought him into rivalry and conflict with other key advisers to the president as well as cabinet members, most notably senior adviser Jared Kushner (Trump’s son-in-law) and national security adviser H.R. McMaster. Criticism of Bannon from outside the administration grew louder after Trump responded slowly to and then blamed “both sides” for the death of a counterprotester at a demonstration by white nationalists, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis on August 12, 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia. Many observers saw Bannon’s presence in the White House as contributing to the legitimization of far-right fringe groups like those that had rallied in Charlottesville.
Even before the events in Charlottesville unfolded, there had been rumours of Bannon’s imminent departure from the administration. On August 16 The American Prospect published Bannon’s remarks made in a phone conversation with the liberal publication’s coeditor in which Bannon belittled other Trump advisers, dismissed white supremacist groups as “clowns,” and undermined the president’s recent bellicose warnings to North Korea in response to that country’s aggressive pursuit of nuclear weapons. On August 18, 2017, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced that “White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and Steve Bannon have mutually agreed today would be Steve’s last day,” though it was widely thought that Bannon had been forced to resign.
Almost immediately, Bannon returned to the helm at Breitbart, determined to use his position outside of government to continue advancing the agenda of Trump, with whom he still talked. Bannon also made known his intention to oust establishment congressional Republicans (including Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell) by backing the candidacies of antiestablishment challengers in Republican primary contests. He jump-started this project by actively championing the candidacy of controversial former Alabama Supreme Court chief justice Roy Moore in the Republican primary election to choose a successor for the U.S. Senate seat representing Alabama that had been vacated by Jeff Sessions when he became U.S. attorney general.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
May 18, 2024 · Stephen married two times before Diane – to Cathleen Suzanne Houff who gave birth to his first daughter Maureen in 1988, but the two divorced shortly afterwards.
Steve Bannon was initially married to Cathleen Houff Jordan. After his divorce from her, he married Mary Piccard in 1995. His second marriage also ended in a divorce in 1997. He then married Diane Clohesy in 2006, but they divorced in 2009. He has three daughters from his first two marriages.
Steve Bannon has been married and divorced three times: to Cathleen Houff Jordan (their daughter, Maureen, is a West Point graduate); to fellow investment banker Mary Louise Piccard (married in 1995 and divorced in 1997; they had twin daughters); and to Diane Clohesy (marriage date unclear, divorced in 2009).
