Ghosts of 6 January are coming home to roost, but bad boy Steve Bannon is already thinking 2024

The  cover  of the 2 February, 2017, edition of TIME magazine was dark and stormy: a sombre close-up of then-chief White House strategist Stephen K Bannon headlined THE GREAT MANIPULATOR. Inside, the cover story asked: ‘Is Steve Bannon the Second Most Powerful Man in the World?’

Bannon was the American Rasputin, who charted it all out. And his President Donald J Trump tangoed — on immigration, Muslims, climate, free trade deals and China.

Therefore, when the former Goldman Sachs banker was  convicted by a federal court  for refusing to comply with a subpoena issued by the House Select Committee investigating the 6 January, 2021, US Capitol attack to testify and provide documents, it seemed like time had run out for Bannon.

But it hadn’t. Bannon has only morphed into a juggernaut that seems to be crushing its way to a 2024 Trump comeback. America’s most dangerous political provocateur has survived two blows that would have put ordinary politicians to pasture. He was  fired by Trump  in August 2017 because his feet had burst out of his boots and were sowing chaos in the White House. Three years later,  he was  arrested and charged  for defrauding donors of hundreds of thousands of dollars in a fundraising campaign to purportedly build Trump’s Mexico border wall.

Far-Right and Trump’s staunchest ally

Bannon’s sartorial conundrum of a blazer, two button-down shirts, a Polo and an undershirt—one stacked above another—has the recalcitrance and iconoclasm of the fashion world’s late l’enfant terrible Alexander McQueen.

“You’ve got to know the rules to break them. That’s what I am here for: to demolish the rules but to keep the tradition,” the ‘Hooligan of English Fashion’ once said about his style.

Bannon’s layering is like his personality; each strata has its own theme, from ethno-nationalist to streetfighter, and from flame-throwing pugilist to white supremacist.

Bannon’s hypersonic rise to right-wing stardom was reinforced with unabashed hypocrisy. As a blue-collar sympathiser, he espoused the causes of malevolent white supremacists and the ultranationalists with the money of the affluent.

From slogging at a Virginian junkyard—because of his middle-class background—and his graduation from Virginia Tech to his master’s in national security studies from Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and an MBA from Harvard Business School, Bannon never lost focus.

After the failure of Operation Eagle Claw during the 1980 Iran hostage crisis, Bannon — in the navy then — poured scorn on the Jimmy Carter regime. “I wasn’t political until I got into the service and saw how badly Jimmy Carter f**ked things up. I became a huge Reagan admirer… But what turned me against the whole establishment was coming back from running companies in Asia in 2008 and seeing that Bush had f**ked up as badly as Carter,” he once said.

Bannon has been there and done that, everywhere and all that. After a successful stint as an investment banker in Goldman Sachs, he forayed into Hollywood, where he produced 18 movies, including Sean Penn’s The Indian Runner. His production of the Ronald Reagan documentary In the Face of Evil sowed the seeds for the big American right harvest.

Bannon was introduced to American conservative journalist and political commentator Andrew Breitbart, who later established the far-Right syndicated news and opinion website Breitbart News. Locked and loaded, he was all set to further his agenda of personal aggrandisement in the garb of hyper-nationalism through Breitbart News.

One year down the line after joining the website and founder Breitbart’s death, Bannon became the executive chairman. He replaced Breitbart’s vision of targeting liberals in politics, entertainment and the media with his dangerous ultra-nationalist agenda and started supporting the alt-right movement.

Despite belonging to a family of Democrats, Bannon despised both Democrats and Republicans but hobnobbed with the mighty and the rich, like tax-evading Manhattan heiress Rebekah Mercer and her father and hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, who funnels millions into conservative causes. All this while espousing the cause of blue-collar workers as well as promoting his anti-establishment agenda. According to The Guardian, the  senior Mercer is the director of eight Bermuda companies  as revealed in the Paradise Papers.

“I come from a blue-collar, Irish-Catholic, pro-Kennedy, pro-union family of Democrats,” Bannon once told Bloomberg Businessweek. That didn’t keep him from associating with billionaires whose funds he used to boost his conservative ambitions.

According to American author-journalist Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House: “It was Rebekah Mercer—who had bonded with Bannon, and whose politics were grim, unyielding, and doctrinaire—who defined the family.”

When the 2008 financial crisis imploded, Bannon used his AT&T lineman dad Martin J Bannon’s loss of $100,000 as the trigger for his anti-government crusade as Wall Street giants were bailed out while middle-class families like his took a hammering.

When Rebekah introduced Trump to Bannon, the disruptors immediately bonded over their hatred towards immigration, Muslims, Blacks, free trade pacts, Democrats and Republicans. “Both of them had a real talent for kind of stoking resentment and channelling that resentment into a political force that they could direct at more mainstream Republicans and at Democrats,” Joshua Green, who wrote the book Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency,  told the Vox in July 2017 .

In fact, the Mercer Family Foundation provided $4.7 million to Bannon’s Government Accountability Institute to publish the book Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich and target presidential contender Hillary Clinton in 2015.

“We know that he’s living very lavishly—thanks to others. He’s got houses all over the place… When he was trying to get the European populist-nationalist movement off the ground, he stayed in all these fabulous luxury suites financed by others,” Jennifer Senior, a Pulitzer Prize-winning staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of a feature on Bannon called American Rasputin,  told Vox  in July. “He takes private jets that are owned by others. The Mercers underwrote him.”

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Breitbart News amplified Trump’s twin agenda of anti-immigration and job creation under the slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ (MAGA) and  targeted the mainstream media, including CNN and others and even conservative outlets like Fox News.

A  study  by Harvard professor Yochai Benkler and his colleagues in March 2017 of more than 1.25 million online stories published between 1 April, 2015, and voting day showed how Bannon used Breitbart News to push Trump’s conservative agenda and hammer Clinton. His use of a sledgehammer to promote the disinformation of Islam threatening Christianity, immigrants committing crimes and globalisation and liberalisation affecting US supremacy resonated with the Right and Trump supporters.

Breitbart News was at the centre of the right-wing media, surrounded by Fox News, the Daily Caller, The Gateway Pundit, the Washington Examiner, Infowars, Conservative Treehouse and Truthfeed, the study showed. Trump supporters retweeted the most from Breitbart while Clinton backers preferred The Washington Post.

It’s All About 2024 Now

“If you want to back Donald Trump, become a precinct committee member of the Republican Party today,” thunders a Bannon from the ‘Breitbart Embassy’, a basement in a Washington, DC, townhouse, on his podcast ‘Bannon’s War Room’.

The audio version of the podcast, started in 2019 and downloaded tens of millions of times, is among the  top three Apple political podcasts  in the USA only behind ‘Pod Save America’ and ‘The Chris Cuomo Project’. In January 2021, Bannon claimed that his  podcast had 29 million streams  to date,  according to ProPublica .

For four hours a day, he amplifies Trump’s unsubstantiated allegations of a rigged 2020 election and voter fraud, spews venom against Democrats and the Biden administration, and exhorts Republican supporters to support the MAGA campaign.

Bannon’s most dangerous aspect is that he has provided an intellectual touch to Trumpian thought and articulates his ‘Big Lie’ in a more forceful manner. Trump supporters and Americans who believe that the election was stolen from their man can’t stop lapping it up.

“We’re going to get to the bottom of (last year’s election) and we’re going to decertify the electors. And you’re going to have a constitutional crisis,” Bannon told CNN last December, adding that his podcast is “about winning elections with the right people—MAGA people. We will have our people in at every level.”

Bannon has already the November mid-term elections in his sights. He launched a  special edition show titled War Room: Battleground  on the John Fredericks Radio Network on 7 March to provide maximum exposure to Trump-aligned candidates and “literally destroy the Democratic Party”. “It’s a definite platform for MAGA and for ‘America First’. It’s the hyperlocal version of the War Room,” he told Buzzfeed News.

Nonprofit media watchdog group Media Matters, which has been naming the biggest misinformers for the last 18 years, selected  Bannon as the ‘Biggest Misinformer of 2021’  pointing out that his podcast is full of misinformation and conspiracy theories.

“He is operationalising extremism in a way that previous misinformers haven’t. There is a real-world impact. A whole infrastructure is being built right underneath all of us as a result of the misinformation he is popping up 17 hours a week,” Media Matters president Angelo Carusone told MSNBC in January.

According to Senior, the US “ignores him at our own peril if for no other reason than what he does is, he’s really in the business of moving the Overton window and mainstreaming unacceptable ideas. And he’s very, very good at that.”

“He’s such a dervish of chaos that I don’t know if I would necessarily say that he was responsible in any logistical way for 6 January. But he was one of the architects, surely, of the legislative insurrection, which he was very invested in. And more to the point, I think he was responsible for organising the energy behind it,” Senior said.

Green feels that with the podcast, Bannon has a “similar kind of power to unleash these wild conspiracies (election lies)”.

Bannon’s Precincts Strategy

Bannon always believed that the Republican Party wasn’t conservative enough and boiled with rage as Trump lost the election. In a bid to reshape and reinvigorate the GOP for 2024, he has developed the ‘Precincts Strategy’, which aims to fill the smallest local voting regions in the USA with Trump loyalists and influence election results.

“We want you to sign up to be a volunteer election official. Go to precinctsstrategy.com and sign up to be a precinct committee member. Everybody should be a precinct committee member. Now is the time to get in power,” a fired-up Bannon prods Trump diehards and GOP supporters.

Bannon believes that if Trump runs in 2024 and stares at another defeat, precincts workers could play a critical role—unlike in 2020—in blunting a Democratic win using unfair means. “We’re taking over all the elections,” he said on his podcast on November.

There are more than 200,000 precincts with volunteers from both the parties known as precinct officers. In some states, they help pick members of election boards and in others, appoint poll watchers who can challenge a voter’s right to vote. In some states, they determine the winners of some primaries.

For example, the GOP’s secretary of state pick in Michigan for the mid-terms, Kristina Karamo, who believes in Trump’s election lies, got the vote of precincts officers in April despite no experience as an elected official. If she wins, Karamo will oversee elections in the battleground state, according to CNN.

On 26 July, Karamo tweeted in support of the unproven theory of an illegitimate election system: “Why is our vote so sacred? History has taught us that there are two ways power is obtained in a nation, voting or war. With that we should not be surprised that some people would corrupt our election system, it’s the mechanism power is obtained in our nation.”

Joanna Lydgate, chief executive of the States United Democracy Centre, told The Guardian in January that the USA is “seeing a  dangerous trend  of election deniers lining up to fill election administration positions across the country”. “And the efforts by (Michael) Flynn, Bannon and other promoters of the Big Lie are all part of this playbook to hijack elections in 2022 and 2024 if their preferred candidate doesn’t win.”

Senior fears that Democrats will lose both the House and the Senate in the November elections—and even if they are in a position to recapture the White House in 2024, there is a grave danger of “enough people” rejecting election results with “people like Bannon who claim that the whole apparatus for tallying votes is illegitimate”. 

The writer is a freelance journalist with two decades of experience, and comments primarily on foreign affairs. Views expressed are personal.

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