‘You haven’t seen anything’: Trump loyalist Bannon prepared for new levels of hostility

If serving time in federal prison is supposed to make an offender remorseful, it failed in the case of Steve Bannon. Comprehensively. Not because the former chief strategist for Donald Trump enjoyed his four months of incarceration for contempt of Congress for refusing to testify to a committee investigating the January 6, 2021, mob that ransacked the Capitol.

“It’s hard, it’s physically hard,” he told me on Sunday (Australian time), four days after his release from prison in Danbury, Connecticut. “It’s a dangerous place for a 70-year-old.”

Illustration: Dionne Gain

But, he said, while “most 70-year-olds get stuck in a rut, only dealing with one type of person, for me it was the complete opposite. It was my wake-up call. I got through it, and it was empowering. I’m more jacked-up than ever, more energised than ever.”

To do what? He spoke to Trump by phone as soon as he was free, he said, and immediately threw himself into his work running “the activist wing of the MAGA movement” through his daily podcast, War Room. He resumed broadcasting on the day of his release.

The podcast, which he called “the biggest platform of the MAGA movement” with 1.03 million followers on Rumble, had mobilised hundreds of thousands of volunteers to help with getting out the Republican vote and supplying poll monitors for the election, he said.

Katherine Doyle, a White House reporter for NBC News, an outlet considered unsympathetic to Trump, wrote of Bannon in July that “among the pundit and governing class – and particularly among die-hard political junkies – he is a behemoth”. Now, Bannon said, “I have a higher profile and more power than ever.”

Prison clarified the stakes for Bannon. His sentence was an example of the way Democrats are “weaponising the government” against Trump supporters, he said. Bannon is now calling on every member of the MAGA movement to be prepared to make the same sacrifice: “I tell people, ‘If you’re not prepared to go to prison, don’t think that you’re going to be at the forefront of this movement to take our country back’,” he told me. “The only way you’re going to do that is to be up in their grill, so they want to put you in prison.”

Asked what he might ask MAGA followers to do that could put them at risk of prison sentences, Bannon didn’t answer directly but cited cases where Trump supporters – including himself – have been imprisoned by the courts. The point seems to be that MAGA followers need to be loyal to Trump no matter what, even at the cost of doing time in prison.

But Bannon said he’s not whining; he’s ebullient at the imminent victory at the polls: “All the Democrats talk about is democracy, democracy, democracy. We’re about to give them a democracy suppository on Tuesday [election day in America; Wednesday, Australian time].”

He said the Trump campaign had persuaded all the voters it needed; now it needed only to make sure they turned out to vote: “All we need to do is execute.”

By contrast, Bannon said, Kamala Harris was “still flying around, going to black barber shops in Philadelphia; she’s still trying to persuade suburban women and college-educated women to support her”.

Four weeks ago, he said, Harris had multiple “pathways” to accrue victory in enough states to win the necessary 270 electoral college votes to clinch the presidency. “We’ve narrowed that down and now she’s only got one pathway, through the Blue Wall [states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan]. We’ve got her cornered. This is what we wanted.”

Polling in those three states shows support for each candidate within the margin of error at 50:50. Turnout will decide the victor. And if Harris is declared the winner next week, will Bannon accept the result and concede defeat?

“I think, just because you’re ahead on votes on this, like I keep telling Trump, that has no legal standing, no legal status. There’s an entire process to get to January 6.” I think that counts as a “No”, consistent with Trump’s position.

Bannon continued: “On January 6, the Electoral College really comes together. Because until January 6, until the votes are actually certified by the House and the Senate, you can have a contingent election.”

The Constitution provides that if the two candidates are tied in the Electoral College, the first election is set aside, and a contingent election is decided by the House and the Senate. The odds of a 269-269 tie are low, but it’s possible. There are two precedents for a president to be chosen by contingent election – in 1800, when Thomas Jefferson won, and in 1824, when John Quincy Adams was anointed.

Are there any circumstances where violence can be justified, I ask Bannon? He replies that an “overwhelming vote plus tough legal effort stops them” from using violence. That’s the Democrats he’s talking about.

But what about the avid Trump supporters? “Trump’s most avid supporters are the most peaceful.”

It’s true that Trump was the intended target for the only publicly known assassination attempts of this campaign. But it’s also true that Trump incited his followers to “fight like hell” before they marched on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, assaulting the police and looking to hang anyone in Trump’s way.

Bannon is clear that he’s prepared to take the US to new levels of hostility. “If people think American politics has been divisive before, you haven’t seen anything,” he told The New York Times this week.

Or, as he put it to me, if the Democrats try to “steal” the election, “it will be Stalingrad every day”. That was a horrifically violent battle, I point out. “A political Stalingrad,” he rejoins.

Like Trump himself, Bannon is adept at deploying metaphors of violence while preserving plausible deniability against the charge of inciting it.

Then again, in this cause, every supporter has to be prepared to go to prison, apparently. It’s a hell of a way to run a democracy.

Peter Hartcher is international editor.

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