Bannon is an amateur masker. While he didn’t give Time any quotes for its “manipulator” story and the photograph of him on the cover had been shot for a different reason three months earlier, he has spent plenty of time talking off the record with political reporters, too little of it actively tamping down his legend.

He wasn’t vigilant enough about patrolling the way his allies inside and outside the administration deified him in their own murmurings to the media, which included the nugget that colleagues awed by his knowledge called him “the encyclopedia.” He didn’t grasp that you can’t be “the encyclopedia” if your president is barely a pamphlet, and didn’t see the traps that would have been obvious to a Washington insider.

He didn’t grapple with who Trump really is. Trump’s allegiances are fickle. His attention flits. His compass is popularity, not any fixed philosophy, certainly not the divisive brand of populism and nationalism that Bannon was trying to enforce. Bannon insisted on an ideology when Trump cares more about applause, and what generates it at a campaign rally isn’t what sustains it when you’re actually governing.