Steve Bannon’s attempt to talk up a Donald Trump “secretive scheme” on the campaign trail blew up in his face when he exposed a large lie instead, according to a new political analysis.
“Bannon no doubt thought he was being deviously clever,” Greg Sargent wrote for the The New Republic Thursday.
Sargent’s take arrived one day after Bannon detailed to the New York Times plans to divide Democratic voters by boosting third party candidate.
According to Sargent, Bannon also included a comment that Sargent says “undermines one of Trump’s biggest lies.”
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The lie in question concerns oil production under President Joe Biden and a Green Party candidate Jill Stein, according to Sargent.
“No Republican knows that oil production under Biden is higher than ever,” Bannon told the Times. “But Jill Stein’s people do.”
“Whoa, that’s some serious 11-dimensional chess, Steve!” replied Sargent.
“Except for one thing…it entirely undermines one of Trump’s biggest lies: the claim that Biden’s effort to transition the United States to a decarbonized economy has destroyed the nation’s ‘energy independence,’ leaving us weak and hollow to our very core.”
Sargent argues this admission highlights an essential media tactic of the MAGA far-right world, namely their ability to two different narratives to voters on either side of the political spectrum.
“You’ll note that Bannon is not even slightly troubled by the idea that telling the truth about Biden’s record to one set of voters—left-leaning, green-minded ones—might contradict one of Trump’s most frequent lies to countless others,” Sargent writes.
“He apparently has total confidence that voters who really need to hear the truth he uttered—those in the industrial and Appalachian heartlands who are the targets of Trump’s propaganda—never, ever will, even if he admits to it right in the paper of record.”
