Stephen K. (Steve) Bannon is best known as campaign manager and later senior White House Advisor of US President Donald Trump, as well as former editor-in-chief of Breitbart News. Less well known is Bannon's work as a filmmaker, producing nine documentary film-pamphlets between 2004 and 2016. From In The Face of Evil (2004) to his most recent film Torchbearer (2016), Bannon sketches a grim profile of a world on the brink of disaster, beset by economic crisis, secular hedonism and Islamist fundamentalism.

Bannon describes his work as a form of “kinetic cinema”, which, as he puts it, “aims to overwhelm an audience,” and is inspired by the work of Sergei Eisenstein, Leni Riefenstahl, and Michael Moore. His films explicitly showcase the manifold dangers faced by his ideal of Christian free-market nationalism. In Bannon’s films, "strong" leaders such as Ronald Reagan, Sarah Palin, and Donald Trump, emerge as the sole defenders of Christian faith, military might, family values and economic nationalism. Looking back, it can be argued that what is now known as “Trumpism” was decades in the making in Bannon’s propaganda work.