Former White House chief strategist and current podcast host Steve Bannon is set to report to prison to serve a four-month sentence for refusing to comply with a subpoena related to his participation in the January 6 Capitol insurrection. Before he does, though, the MAGA luminary laid down a ground rule for Trump’s 2024 campaign.
“We’re the railhead of the big steal every day, with every aspect of it, and we take pride in it. I’m adamant. There shouldn’t be anybody in the Trump campaign or the RNC in a paid position that does not believe to the marrow of their bones that the 2020 election was stolen. If you don’t believe that, to me, you miss the point of where we are and why we’re here,” Bannon said in a new interview published in The Guardian.
One person who might not pass Bannon’s vetting test: former president and presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, who was caught on tape during an interview with Variety editor Ramin Setoodeh accidentally admitting that he lost the election. One imagines the big man would be given a pass, but still it’s clear that Republicans are seeking an ideological purge of all but the truest of believers in the baseless idea that Trump was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election.
Bannon also claimed that Fox News, which settled a defamation lawsuit brought by voting machine company Dominion for $787.5 million and faces a separate $2.7 million defamation suit from Smartmatic for broadcasting false information about the companies in the aftermath of the 2020 election, was engaging in a “psyop” for ceasing coverage of the stolen election myth.
And for good measure, Bannon refused to commit to accepting the results of the 2024 election, retreating into the same evasions, semantic games, and packaged phrases of supposed contingencies that Trump (and the rest of the conservative movement) made popular in 2020 and promises to trot out again. “We’re going to have to go through it line by line and make sure. It’s got to be certifiable, chain of custody, legitimate votes from American citizens. If we do that and those votes are there I have no problem if they win, but we’re not going to answer now ‘Yes, we’re going to do it’, because we don’t know, we’re not there yet and it’s going to be hard fought. Nobody’s asked Democrats that if Trump wins,” he said.
