Trump advisor calls for MAGA to mount fascist takeover
Jon
Queally for Common Dreams
“I’ll tell you right, as God as my witness, if we lose the
midterms and we lose 2028, some in this room are going to prison,” Bannon told
the crowd Wednesday at an awards event hosted by the Conservative Partnership
Academy. This group offers training and certifications to aspiring right-wing ideologues
working in politics and government.
Bannon, who has already served time in prison for refusing
to submit to a congressional subpoena related to his role as a top aide to
Trump during his first term, included himself among those who might be targeted
if Republicans lost power.
In his remarks, Bannon said Tuesday’s election results
in New York City, Virginia, New Jersey, and
elsewhere—where Democrats swept the GOP—should be seen as a warning to Trump’s
MAGA base, but called for an intensification of the agenda, not a retreat.
“They’re not gonna stop,” Bannon said of Democrats and progressives aligned against Trump’s authoritarian push and Republican economic policies that have focused on lavishing ever-larger tax cuts for corporations and the rich while gutting government programs, including cuts to Medicaid, food assistance for the poor, devastating environmental policies, and dismantling of healthcare subsidies leading to a surge in monthly premiums for millions of families.
Trump’s opponents, warned Bannon, are “getting more and more
and more radical, and we have to counter that.”
His advice to Republicans in power and the right-wing
movement that supports them is to counter “with more intense action” and more
“urgency” before it’s too late. “We’re burning daylight,” Bannon said. “We have
to codify what Trump has done by executive order.”
In what seemed like a reference to Trump’s recent talk of
going “nuclear” on the filibuster in
the US Senate and
other efforts, Bannon said, “We have to get beyond these structural barriers”
in Washington,
DC, that he believes are hindering the president from consolidating his power
even further.
Speaking about discussions behind the scenes, Bannon said he
has been in touch with Republicans in the Senate who he says are asking him to
go through for them what he means and that in the coming days people may be
surprised by who “in the conservative movement” are coming around to his
thinking, mentioning “institutionalists” like Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, as
those he’s been speaking with.
“These are what I would call heavy-hitters on the
limited-government constitutionalists, in our movement,” Bannon said of other
unnamed individuals, “and they’re about to come out in the next couple of days
and make this argument because I said, ‘Look, we have to understand that if we
don’t this to the maximum—the maximalist strategy—now, with a sense of urgency,
and in doing this, seize the institutions... if we don’t do this now, we’re
going to lose this chance forever, because you’re never going to have another
Trump.”
In an interview with Politico following
Tuesday’s elections, Bannon said the win by democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani to
become New York City’s next mayor “should be a wakeup call” to Trump’s
right-wing nationalist movement. “These are very serious people,” Bannon said
of Mamdani and others who support his affordability agenda that focuses on the
needs of working people, “and they need to be addressed seriously.”
As such, Bannon called for the Justice Department, the State
Department, and the Department of Homeland Security to target Mamdani
specifically by going after his US citizenship and calling for him to be
deported. Mamdani is a naturalized US citizen who came to the United States with
his parents when he was seven years old.
As the video clip of Bannon’s remarks about jail time if the
Republicans lose in the upcoming elections made the rounds online Thursday,
reactions were predictable along partisan lines.
“Steve Bannon motivating Democratic voters,” said Aviel Roshwald, a Georgetown University professor
of history with a focus on nationalist movements.
Bannon’s call for “seizing the institutions” has been a
mainstay on his popular War Room podcast for months, but
critics warn that his open embrace of the demand should not make it any less
shocking or worrisome.
“He’s preparing his audience to see violence and
institutional takeover as ‘necessary.’ And he’s counting on Democrats and
independents being too divided or too polite to call it what it is,” warned Christopher Webb, a left-leaning political
writer on his Substack page last month.
Bannon and his allies, continued Webb, “do not give a damn
about the law, the Constitution, or democracy. They only care
about control. And if we keep treating their words as ‘just talk,’ it will be
too late when it stops being talk.”
He concluded: “This isn’t going to end well.”
