Preprison Interviews Give Bannon a Chance to Pitch Fascism, Cover-Up His Fraud

Because Steve Bannon is powerful — or perhaps because he has an effective publicist — multiple outlets decided to magnify Bannon’s views as he set off for prison for refusing to tell Congress about his role in planning an insurrection.

NBC’s interview largely gave Bannon the opportunity to undermine the integrity of any Democratic win in 2024. When Vaughn Hillyard asked Bannon to defend his claim that the Mar-a-Lago search had been an attempt to assassinate Trump, Hillyard never bothered to ask Bannon how that could happen, given that Trump was in New Jersey.

David Brooks’ interview gave Bannon opportunity to boast of his ties to European fascists (though like NBC, Brooks called Bannon’s work “populism,” not fascism).

STEVE BANNON: Well, I think it’s very simple: that the ruling elites of the West lost confidence in themselves. The elites have lost their faith in their countries. They’ve lost faith in the Westphalian system, the nation-state. They are more and more detached from the lived experience of their people.

On our show “War Room,” I probably spend at least 20 percent of our time talking about international elements in our movement. So we’ve made Nigel a rock star, Giorgia Meloni a rock star. Marine Le Pen is a rock star. Geert is a rock star. We talk about these people all the time.

Like NBC’s, Jon Karl’s interview consisted, substantially, of trying to get Bannon to admit he was calling for violence, with Bannon responding that it was all metaphor, figurative, Roman rhetoric.

All these journalists seem to think they’re going to get Bannon to admit he’s sowing violence, as if being just clever enough will get him to give up the game.

Bannon did say something interesting. When asked to describe Trump’s plans for a second term, Bannon described his plan to “end forever wars” to include the South China Sea:

• Seal the border and mass deportations
• Renew tax cuts for super wealthy
• End US power projection in Ukraine, Israel, and the South China Sea, which he called ending “forever wars”

The last bullet point is a plan to cede power to authoritarian countries — Russia, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, and China — at least some of which are suspected of funding Bannon if not his long-time associate, Guo Wengui.

But none of these interviewers asked Bannon about Guo, about Guo’s ties to UAE and his suspected ties, still, to the Chinese state. They sure as hell didn’t ask him about DOJ’s treatment of Bannon as a co-conspirator in Guo’s alleged fraud against his rabid followers.

More remarkable still, none of these interviewers asked Bannon about his upcoming fraud trial, the fraud for which all his charged co-conspirators are already doing prison time.

Steve Bannon stands accused of bilking rabid Trump supporters to support his lavish lifestyle. DOJ says his whole shtick is a fraud — fraud that serves his pocketbook, a fraud that serves the elite, a fraud that serves fascism, a fraud that might even serve the very countries he claims to oppose.

And multiple journalists decided to interview Bannon is if an accused fraudster would ever tell them the truth.