Working out of—and living in—the town house Breitbart rented on Capitol Hill, Bannon became one of the growing number of notable Tea Party figures in Washington, the Mercers’ consigliere. But a seeming measure of his marginality was that his big project was the career of Jeff Sessions—“Beauregard,” Sessions’s middle name, in Bannon’s affectionate moniker and evocation of the Confederate general—among the least mainstream and most peculiar people in the Senate, whom Bannon tried to promote to run for president in 2012.
