Jennifer Senior: Steve Bannon Is an Asymmetric Threat

Welcome to the Bullework Podcast. I’m Charlie Sykes. Back in June, I had a great discussion with the Atlantic’s Jennifer senior who had just profiled Steve Bannon. She hung out with him. He texted her at gazillion times.

He made political predictions that were totally wrong. And he got mad when she called his show a podcast. This is one of the funniest ways to talk about one of the most infuriating and loads some people in America. Just listen to the show and you’ll see why we included this episode on our best of twenty twenty two list. In case you have not seen it, Jennifer’s senior’s piece on Steve Bannon American Rasputin online, you you can read it is an absolute must read.

Steve Bannon is still scheming. He is still a threat to democracy. So first of all, I had to introduce Arguastra Jennifer senior who is a staff runner at the Atlantic. And The winner of the two thousand twenty two Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. So welcome to the podcast and wow congratulations on that.

Thank you very much. Yeah, I heard about it while I was writing about Steve Bannon. And if you wanted to know how to cancel your relation over winning a Pulitzer, try being in the midst of a long profile of Steve Bannon. They they more or less balance each other out. Right?

Like the stress versus the glee. Anyway, thank you.

Well, I mean, were you also thinking like, okay, so a little bit of pressure here? I mean

No. Oh, that’s interesting. Yeah. The pressure was like I was writing about Steve Bennett. It sort of existed whether, you know, I could have been a lover, I could have gotten a prize.

It it sort of didn’t matter. He is independently a stressful regardless. Well,

this is stressful and dystopian. Oh, yeah.

If you wanna talk about a meeting of Bummer, we can go there. You know, if you wanna talk about the existential dread and all that, but yes, go on. Sorry.

Kind of having like a front row seat to the bonfire of American democracy.

Well, and that he’s so cavalier about it. You know, he’s sitting there, treating it like it’s a game almost. You know, there’s a certain amount of sport. When he takes up these matters. Yeah.

But the content is hair raising. Right? So yes. Absolutely.

He is living his best life, and I’m I wanna read something I mean, here’s a guy who not that long ago was arrested and indicted for fraud. And you would think that, okay, you know, that’s that’s the comeuppance for Steve Bannon who gets pardoned by Donald Trump. And, of course, you know, he’s facing criminal charges from freezing to testify before the house. But this guy is feeling it right now, isn’t he? I mean, this is this is what Steve Bannon was born for.

Right? Well,

yes, because he’s fundamentally a media guy. And he was never meant to be anyone’s employee. He didn’t stick with most of the organizations he worked for for very long and he would always kind of go off on his own and he lasted, what, seven months in the Trump administration. He’s happiest I think alone howling into a microphone. I think there’s a lot of truth to that.

And it is his moment for reasons that are not entirely of his own do it. In fact, I don’t think they have so much to do with him. I mean, he’s able to hell and rant about inflation, and that’s a product of many birds coming out to roost. He’s howling about prices at the pump, And that’s Ukraine plus. Right?

That’s other things. Drag queen story hour. Right. Drag queen story hour. What does what even say about that?

I mean, how about

yourself? Quite a bit about okay. So you mentioned something and you triggered a a memory when you said that he never wanted to work for anybody else. Because I remember the moment during the twenty six campaign when Donald Trump named him like the co campaign manager, Yeah. And weirdly enough, I was on a panel with Hugh Hewitt on MSNBC or something.

And he was, of course, saying what a brilliant woman was. And I I remember saying, you know, I just don’t think this is gonna end well. I got the election wrong. Right?

You know

what I mean? So I guess it ended and given where Steve Bannon is right now, Steve Bannon living the dream.

You can argue he’s living his best life. You can also argue that he isn’t, that he’s kind of a sad figure. And I do leave that open as a possibility at the end of the peace. And I would point out that I don’t know, are you living your best life when the sort of Damocles is sort of hanging over your neck wherever you go? There are a lot of potential lawsuits that could happen here.

Right? There are many states that could get very testy about we build the law, and come after him for a wire fraud and all sorts of other things. And it is conceivable that, like, his vision about his townhouse next door becoming the kind of center for the worldwide populist movement won’t ever really happen in the way that it never really happened in Europe and maybe his timing was just bad in Europe. And maybe the Europeans just didn’t quite like him or get him in the vice versa, but I could argue that one’s flatter around. I’m just not gonna sit.

Okay.

We’ll come back to that because I I sort of have this image of Steve Bannon on the mountain top thinking, you know what? If I can’t burn it all down, I will just go in this blaze of glory. So he knows he’s on the edge. But but actually, you know, the self emolation, utter destruction, murder them. I the guy’s trained, but So my producer is named Katie Cooper, and and she sent me a note about this article about our our interview today.

So I I wanted to read this to you. She says, you can see the evidence of how she won that pulitzer in her lead and she send it to me. I sometimes look at the long ribbons of text I’ve gotten from Steve Bannon to wonder whether they couldn’t tell the whole story on their own. There are certainly enough of them. He says he has five phones too encrypted, and he’s forever pecking away, issuing Prudencio Mendo’s.

It’s closed up. Prudencio Mendo. With incontinence abandoned after midnight. During commercial breaks for a show, war room, sometimes while the broadcast is still live, You can discern much of Bannon’s mad character and contradictions in these exchanges, the chaos and the focus, the pugnacity, and the enthusiasm, the transparency and industrial grade bullshit. Also, the mania, local mania, arithbo mania, monomania, he likely coped to all of these, especially that last one, He’s the first to say that one of the features of his show is Wash RIN’s Repeat garden variety hyper mania with a generous assist from Espresso’s And last of all, perhaps above all else, straight up megalomaniya, which even those who profess affection for the man can see that would have appears to be a problem only for those who believe, as I do, that he’s attempting to insert a lit bomb into the mouth of American democracy.

That’s a hell of a paragraph.

Thank

you. So you spend time with him. He decided that he was gonna work with you and that he was gonna text his thoughts to you, which is always an interesting choice.

Yeah. Well and I I’m not the only one. He’s an avid texter. I think he texts his thoughts to a lot of reporters, and I think I might have been just the first to go, God, you know, this would make a really interesting read. In fact, they should kind of be woven throughout the piece because his texts are peculiar.

There’s a lot of crowing in them. He could be very pugnacious and very conceited in those texts. His sense of humor, which he does have, is almost never an evidence in those texts. Unless you’re ribbing him and then he rise in NOL. He knows when you’re kind of japing or whatever.

But I think I wrote at one point that they felt almost like a Turing test. I wasn’t quite sure. I was talking to a human sometimes. There was something slightly bot ish about a

little delay. Do that. I mean, that’s the test of the camera whether, you know, computer, artificial intelligence can effectively imitate human behavior. So Right.

An owning the lip’s bot. You know, if if there was an owning the lip’s bot, like, you can imagine it generating a lot of the text I got, like, maybe eighty percent of them. But, you know, then he would text things to me, like, about missing his father, you know, and that’s not a known in the lips spot text. That’s a real text. That’s

real. But at the same time, so you get a little, like, glimpse of human being, but then he’s calling an apple bomb a fucking clown spelled with a k,

Yeah. I mean, honestly, there’s something really distasteful about that. That was kind of waking up and getting a fondue for poked in your eye. I was like, what is this? You know?

And I tried to just sort of gently, like, respond by saying, I don’t mean, I didn’t take the bed. I just said, interesting. You know, you’ve always really liked her and expressed nothing but admiration, and respect for her intellect, what what’s going on here? And it just turned out he linked to something she said about Hunter’s laptop that he just approved up because she just didn’t think that Hunter’s laptop was all that interesting. I

remember She just

found it under him or there, and that pissed him off. But, yeah, he could be quite abrasive in those texts.

So one of the surest ways to get under his skin, though, it’s always interesting what what his points of sensitivity are. Apparently, if you call his show the war room, if you call it a podcast, he gets very upset. No.

He doesn’t. And it’s I mean, he’s used to it, and he knows that’s how it’s referred to. I mean, I I defer you to kinda Google it and see it referred to as anything other than that. But He takes it very seriously as a TV show, and so seriously that it’s true that parts of it are mystifying and incomprehensible as a podcast. He never IDs the voices.

Right? Somebody like Navarro will hold up a pie chart, and no one can see it. But, I mean, it’s on, like, channel two forty of Pluto TV, which I write as sort of own a weird metaphor? You call it

a sad metaphor.

Yeah. It is. But because it’s like in the kuiper belt of the of the universe, where is it? Right? I mean, it’s like, it’s so far away.

It’s not readily accessible in many markets. You can watch it on rumble if you want to go online. Yeah.

I mean, Pluto TV is not, like, you you put in a not high end. It’s, like, at this usually, the musing shoe stream quality. I mean, it’s It’s like

it’s like it’s

like like Wayne’s world for insurrectionists. I mean, what Yes.

Exactly. And I think I said it’s like Father Coggling stumbled into Wayne and Garth space. Oh, yeah.

Right? Has a

very low budget kind of feel about it, which I think he actually takes some pride in. It’s very homespun. I once said to him you know, Steve, I can hear your two of your cell phones buzzing throughout the show. Like, when it’s between my ears and I’m which is mainly how I took it in, I would, like, listen to it. Because Spotify doesn’t carry it, but I guess Apple does.

And I said to him, it just I mean, it sounds like mosquitoes. Like, there are just these mass casualties and mosquitoes as you’re listening. And I I said to him, like, it’s a little weird. I didn’t do a thing about it. Just leaves them right in front of the mic.

I mean, he’s too engaged with them. He wants the feedback. He wants to know what’s blowing up. He wants to know which guests listeners are responding to. What things people are saying that are sticky.

So he’s kind of tied to the low budget, low rent quality. People are sitting in like these kind of white corners with kind of shades and I mean, nobody seems to have had any TV training. I mean, there’s a lot of sad brown backdrops Did everyone

go there. Right? I mean, it’s become like the go to place for the deployables. Every candidate, every elected official, you know, they come in and they and they kiss the ring and I guess I was surprised to read that they do pre interviews too.

Yeah. And Bana does them. I mean, here’s what I will also say. For what he does, he’s pretty good at it if you know what I mean. I mean, if you wanna make your meat and potatoes like trafficking and conspiracies and repeating the big lie and occasionally getting super wonky in a very conservative framework with economic data and pulling data.

You know, the facts are sketchy. Well, I can get pulled out of wrong. If you wanna spread a lot of COVID misinformation, I mean, He’s your guy, and it’s a variety show. There are a, b, c, and d blocks. He mixes up the pacing.

He gets fringe candidates who are running for local offices and, you know, activist moms and throws in his own Peter Navarro’s and Steve Cortez’s people who will analyze the data the way he likes to, you know, there’s kind of a pro quality going on with him in his correspondence. They talk for a while, then he’ll throw in something else. Mean, it’s not the Dick Van Dyke Show. But but there’s more variety in this hour than there are in a lot of other podcasts, I would say. And he does four hours.

Right? So, you know, four hours? He does four hours. It’s exhausting just watching. So

you mentioned that the show became over time a guided tour through Bannon’s gallery of obsessions, a stolen election, Biden family syndicate hunter, of course, the invaders of the southern border, the evil Chinese come into this party, the stolen election, the COVID mandates, the folly of modern monetary theory, the election. That strikes me as kind of a rundown of what has become the id of the right. And so I guess this is the question. I’m I’m sure you’ve got to ask this. Like, why pay attention to Steve Bannon?

Don’t we just give too much oxygen to the fringes by paying attention to him.

Yeah. I have been asked that, but my feeling about this is that, first of all, exposure is not an endorsement. Right? It’s journalism. But my other thought is, actually, I think it’s important to know what the actual content is, what they’re saying.

I mean, I think we have to know what their talking points are. I don’t think we do ourselves any favors by not knowing kind of what shit they’re flinging against a wall. I think we have to know. It’s important to get a beat on what the misinformation is and disinformation is. And also to grasp how very much of it there is.

You know, what Obama said about flooding the public square with raw sewage. I mean, I just think that not knowing these things never helps because he’s doing it whether we’re paying attention or not.

I think one of the big mistakes the people made was not paying attention before twenty sixteen. And

in a sudden, we’re we’re

we’re I mean, we’re really Exactly. I mean and and if it weren’t for the fact that Donald Trump is waiting out in the wings and might be the next president of the United States, and the fact that Steve Bannon is actually pretty influential, maybe not in gross numbers, but in terms of where the right wing is going, we don’t have the luxury of ignoring this. You I mean, you mentioned, for example, you know, Bannan’s country’s biggest exponent of this precinct strategy, which, you know, encourages people to sign up for, you know, the great work of elections and, you know, the Democratic Party’s nightmare scenario. And there’s a lot of evidence that It may sound crazy. It may sound awful.

It may sound like, you know, Iago, ranting, but that’s what’s happening. In the

country. Thank you for saying that because I think that, like, Democrats would be smart to pay very close attention to the precinct strategy and try and match it, do it on their own. Right? There are things we can learn from what they’re they’re trying to take over every level of state government so that Trumpists and Mega people are in control of the infrastructure so that whatever barely held together in twenty twenty will completely come up unstrung or undone in twenty twenty four. So I think it’s important to know that.

It’s also important to understand the way guys like him are really mainstreaming completely zany ideas. So for instance, I mean, he was banging his spoon on his high chair for forever about impeaching Joe Biden for the, quote unquote, southern invasion. Right? The idea that there are unprecedented numbers of undocumented men that immigrants coming over the border. And he considers this an impeachable offense.

It’s failure to protect a defense. Right? And to me, this just seem nuts. And if you’re dissatisfied with this, you address it through policy, you vote by now, you do whatever normal democratic things are. He just wants to impeach him for it.

I thought, well, this is bananas and it’s never gonna go anywhere. Mhmm. Seventy percent of all Republicans now believe that in twenty twenty two if Republicans take over the house, they should impeach Joe Biden. I mean, that’s that’s nuts. And I don’t think that Democrats — What

is going to happen?

— and and Democrat should not be caught on their back foot. They can’t be caught on their back foot about this. I mean, does anyone have a strategy for what happens if this happens? I don’t know when you came of age politically, but I was like a cub reporter when New Gingrich took the reins of, you know, in nineteen ninety four and ninety five. And everybody thought that he was just right.

Okay. So everybody just thought he would almost had a roosterly hairdo. He had that big high hair. He would puff out, you know, and sort of strut around and tell everyone that he was gonna over the house, and no one took him seriously. And you know what?

He took over the house. And he sort of understood what the grand realities look like. Steve Bannon could be jumping on bandwagon rather than actually kind of sitting on the saddle, leading, you know, kind of grabbing a horse. But I I do think we should be paying attention to what he says. I

do. Well, I totally agree. And and and also because in many ways he is a leading indicator of where party is going to go. And we’ve seen this over and over again where you have some bizarre things sort of a, you know, tiny cloud on the horizon that everybody else is ignoring. And then before, you know, it is on you.

Stuff that was, you know, considered quite extreme now has become mainstream. So when he makes comments about Vladimir Putin and Ukraine, you may think, okay. Well, obviously, he’s a complete outlier. They’re only two to three percent of Republicans, you know, agree with his take. Well, just wait a while.

Just wait Watch how it grows and it spreads when he talks about the impeachment this is going to happen. He obviously was sharing with you his glee at what he thinks is gonna happen during the midterm, the the left and the media, they’re all about democracy. He ran it to me one day you wrote, that he broke into a smile. On November eighth, the war room and the war room posse on all the little people at the school boards and things. We’re gonna give you democracy shoved up your ass.

Okay? We’re gonna give you a democracy suppository. Ever classing you. And

of course, I laughed at the time. I know. I know. One of the reason I think I could afford to laugh was that he’d actually didn’t say it particularly scarily. I mean, he sort of is grinning and making support of the whole thing, but it’s terrifying because it there’s some truth to it.

I mean, if everybody if people do infiltrate the sort of state infrastructure, right, and they become the people who eventually oversee elections, and become secretaries of state, that’s it. Right? I mean, then they can nullify and invalidate legitimate election results if they don’t like them. And it’s very upsetting. And I’m

sure you’ve had the same reaction. I mean, I was concerned to alarm after the election before January sixth about what was going on. But on a daily basis, we’re finding out that we weren’t necessarily alarmed enough. These people were very, very serious. And the question is, once they figure out, you know, which doors are unlocked, which buttons they can push, which personnel they need in certain places.

They’re serious about all this, and And Steve Bannon, he he doesn’t pretend. I mean, what you have is that raw id telling you who we’re going to punish, how we’re going to use the power how far we’re willing to go. And I mean, it’d be incredibly naive not to think that he is going to be incredibly influential and that, you know, Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell may not think the same way, but those are the voices they’re gonna be hearing at their back come next January. Oh,

yeah. I mean, when they’re trying to contain their right flank and cater to them, I mean, when they’re talking to Matt Gates and Marjorie Taylor Green, Absolutely. Those were the regulars, you know, at Steve Bannon’s Star Wars bar, you know. And if I can also just point one thing out, it is true that for instance, somebody like Benjipiro or somebody like Don Bon Gino or somebody like Joe Wirtgen, all of these people have significantly larger audiences. The question is, how many people you need?

Because I think Bannon is sort of an asymmetrical threat. All you need to do is inflame, you don’t need hundreds of thousands of people to wreak havoc at the capital. Right? You just need the right number to overpower the cops to kill cops, to reutter havoc, to come within a hair’s breath of harming actual members of Congress. I mean, Steve Bannon’s audience is more than large enough to inflame those folks.

And that’s really all you

need. This is a key point. And I think this is also something that Steve Bannon understands, you know, he’s described himself in the past as a Lennonist. I think he that this is interesting because, of course, you know, as a right winger, he though has internalized many of those revolutionary attitudes and and the kind of thing that you need a, you know, small Vanguard and what you can accomplish bullish with that. Did you talk about the federal?

You know, I should

have, particularly because I think you tried to make common cause at one point with the editor in chief of the American prospect or So there are moments when I would actually stop him and say, I agree with you. I also think that, you know, the pharmaceutical companies are getting away with murder and that they ought to be national at sure. I mean, it makes a certain sense. I mean, my grandpa’s were both union guys. Right?

Yeah. My grandparents they saved money and became part of the prosperous middle class in the United States. They were foundational to America, you know. And Steve Bannon on some level fancies himself the champion of guys like my grandpa and guys like his own father. If he can find his talk to all the Leninist stuff, it’d be great.

But you can do that without spreading the big lie. You can do that without fermenting really horrendous culture wars and telling people not to get vaccinated. You can do it I mean, I don’t really know where to go with this. I mean, you can follow Bernie Sanders if that’s what you like. It’s

interesting the different opinion. You got Stephanie Grisham, White House alum and I told you that she thinks of him as a conemann, Anthony Scaromucci, said he’s a very sick megalomaniac compared to the Hitler. Another White House colleague called him a cancer in the administration with too many conversations ended with we burn it all down, just burn it down. But you write, this is interesting either, that there’s a dirty secret about ban and that many liberals of madam are disarmed by how timing he is. White House reporters actually liked him because he was a huge leaker and can easily code switch into the pattern of the coastal elite probably because he’s a card carrying member whether he likes it or not.

So, I mean, here’s a guy who’s known for having having an extraordinary, like, high level of bullshit and yet as dramatically not believing any of it. So why I’m gonna get your take at the end of the day. Does he believe the bullshit? Is it a role that he’s playing and I guess that’s the same question we ask about Trump, you know? Why?

Deaugeal. Is he really Iago or is Iago a character that he’s assumed? What do you think? Okay. I

mean, I wouldn’t wanna lay too much money on this, but We are seeing this in the January sixth hearings right now. Right? Smart people didn’t believe this? No one believed this. No one with their wits about them believed anything.

And Sam Lundberg, on the record, said to me that Steve doesn’t believe this. What he needed was a pardon. So to curry favor with Trump, he embraced this. Now is Sam right? I mean, Sam has better visibility into Steve Bennens.

Head probably than I do. He worked with him side by side for quite some time. Sam was one of the first employees, if not the first employee on the Trump campaign. So I take what Sam says, seriously. I think anybody who keeps two sets of books after a while has to figure out some way to merge them.

And because the cognitive dissonance is just too great. There’s a gulf running between what you say and what you privately believe. So eventually, you start to internalize your own pattern. Right? And I could watch Bannon at times.

I’ll tell you two stories because I would sometimes see him take up a position where he he was doing it almost for sport. But by the end, he had wound himself up so completely. It was almost he started to believe the things he said. There was a moment when we were talking about Khataji Brown Jackson. And he was really stuck on one particular case.

It was the Hawkins case. Mhmm. She

gave him, I think,

only three months of jail, and I think two years were, you know, recommended. That wasn’t even the sentencing guidelines. Trial

in one case.

It was a child born case, and it was the only one where she really radically departed from what was recommended. And he was fixated on it. And I said to him, yes, but did you read the Washington Post piece about this kid? Because if you read it, And he was like, no, I read, I did. And he’s a recidivist, and I said, he’s not a recidivist.

If you read that piece, what was very clear to me is that it was a story about being a young black gay man in a community where it was hard to be young black and gay and he came of age obviously online both in York to Portland and kind of over stimulated by porn and also was probably, you know, closeted. And to me, there were just so many complicated pathways that I think she was using her individual discretion and saw something cultural and looked at this adolescent and saw something else. And made a different decision. And we don’t know the full story here. And at first, he was just dismissing it.

I was then trying to steer him back to talking about Marjorie Taylor Green and why I don’t know if he kept having her on his show when she was a demonstrable nutball and anti semite. And he said, you’re just trying to change the subject because you’re losing the argument about Catanji Brown Jackson, and I said, I’m not losing this argument. We just don’t agree. And he paused. And he said, okay.

Wait. Let me just get this straight. You’re saying that you think this was about masculinity in the black community and this was about a kid. It was uncomfortable and in the closet. He repeated back to me — Mhmm.

— with utmost compassion. What I had said to him. And I stared at him and said,

Mhmm. So

you can do that? Mhmm. Why don’t you ever do that? If you can do that. He can do that.

But he can’t weaponize

that. Exactly. Brilliant. Exactly. Exactly.

It doesn’t make for good radio or podcasts or low rent, low budget cable access level TV. That’s right. It’s not a wedge and his genius is in polarizing people. Can I tell you another quick story about that? Sure.

Yeah, please. So this

killed me. This killed me. Okay. So he was lecturing me about how, you know, who really hates illegal immigrants legal immigrants, Jennifer. They really hate and I cut him off saying, you know what?

Steve. I actually know this and I don’t need you telling me this because I learned it as a really really young woman when I saw a John Sales film called Lone Star and John Sales is super lefty and, you know, a pioneer in the indie film and multiracial recasting and he I learned it from John Sales. I don’t need you telling me that, and I described the scene in Lonestar. And then he cut me off and said, God. Don’t you love John Sales?

I love John Sales. I mean, that film about that coal mining. I mean, that was so good when he started going on about a John Sales film. He speaks our language. This is

why I put him in a completely different category than the Sean Hannity’s or the Don Bongino’s because he owes this stuff. He’s at a different level. He his intellect can go in different directions, but he’s chosen this. It’s not like as Sean Hannity who’s dumb as a box of rocks, this is a guy who has taken this intellect. And in in that I don’t know what a golf under digression, but that’s why I put them in the category of Tucker Carlson.

These are really intelligent, well read, individuals who have decided that this is the role they want to play. Okay. That’s interesting.

I didn’t know that about John Hannity. So I’m totally intrigued by that. I mean, it’s it scans, but, like, I don’t watch his show. I I just see clips. Tucker, I’ve watched

my entity is dumb. Yeah.

I just assumed that anybody who achieves a certain level of something can’t be entirely dumb, but Trump obviously wasn’t particularly right. Forget it. That’s stupid. Scrap that. That was dumb.

Sure. Sean Hannity is dumb. Steve Bannon is not dumb. He’s most emphatically not dumb. And he’s perfectly callable.

I mean, the the thing that I found also that needs to be said is that he’s a great company. I mean, he was perfectly respectful to me. He was perfectly charming to me. And this is why I think he’s successful. He’s charismatic.

Right? I mean, this this accounts partially for his success. And the reason that he’s popular with reporters, I mean, I think it’s really interesting. He has stopped texting me. So clearly, he felt on some level heard by what I wrote.

I think otherwise, he would have kept texting me. There are plenty of reporters that he’s in constant touch with, you know, and I’m not among them. So — Mhmm. — something yeah. You didn’t like it.

I think, in the end, no, he claimed on the first day that he did and that it was badass. And I think he texted me on the second day too, and then it just stopped. It just stopped. I I think he reconsidered. Well, his

intelligence and the charm and the other things you or also why he is consequential and why he is dangerous. Yep. And he he engages in talk, which I also think that people should pay attention to and not brush off, you know, about the destruction of institutions. You know, it’s one thing to say the media to be destroyed. There’s an undertone of just, you know, burning everything down, the possibility toys, the possibility of civil war, taking over various institutions.

I mean, and again, that’s the kind of of dangerous stuff that might be off most people’s radar screen. But he’s sowing the seeds of something. I mean, is it just talk talk to me about that because, you know, when you talk about taking a lip grenade and putting it in the mouth of American democracy, See, where does this go? What does it morph into? What does it take us?

If I had a dime for every time I asked him that question, I would be rotting at a beach somewhere with an umbrella drink in my hand. I mean, I I honestly would. I’d hang up my pens. I mean, I asked him over and over again how do you envision this ending? Mhmm.

And he he doesn’t have much of a vision beyond being in the crane with the wrecking ball. You know, there is and this is what’s alarming about a certain kind of fascism, you know, that it’s kind of content free. Right? There is no message. There is no content here.

It’s just about power. But, like, if you ask him, he will say things like some of us are meant to clear the land and others are meant to settle it. I cut a lot of things out of this piece, including my story about John Sales, including that quote. I mean, he sees himself as the person who clears the land, but that’s a delicate euphemism. That’s quaint and suggests that, I mean, this is destroying things.

Yeah.

The point is the fire. Right. You know, you you mentioned the kind of reason to say the goal is power. Well, there’s a kind of fascism where it’s just the fire and the flames and tearing everything down. And that seems to be what excites you, man, and not building anything, certainly not running anything.

Right. And there’s

a certain nihilism I think under that he, I think would say, there’s a certain nihilism that he’s taking advantage of in his listeners. I think he just has this kind of There’s almost a spiritual dimension to it where he just thinks history moves in eighty or a hundred year cycles. And this is the cycle of destruction. And soon there will be a rebirth and new things will grow in its place. But he can’t give you for the life of him.

It’s the contours of what kind of shape they’ll be. Will there be anything like I mean, in the meantime, let’s be like, let’s just speak very bluntly. We need, like, people to pick up our garbage and pave our roads. You know, we still need an extent government. We need structures to we need a functioning department of energy, like, and and commerce just to do all the things that we don’t even know exist.

I mean, they’re all kinds of things that, like, he’s cavalierly proposing that we just tear it all down, but our lives are made possible by infrastructure that we don’t really even know is there. You

can’t see past the horizon of destruction. What he’s got in mind. It’s like — Yeah. — we tear everything down and then Well, I’ll leave that to somebody else. Well, that’s they’re not not reassuring.

So in terms of the tearing down, one of the things that really has always been I mean, I think a major theme of of Steve Bannon’s career going back to the bright part days when he very openly said that he thought the bright part was an alt right platform. Form. And and you talk about the threads of antisemitism that run through the war room. You know, they have chat rooms filled with antisemitism and You asked him about that band describes it, the commentary as a little spicy. So so talk about this because you found that that there’s something about his world where anti Semitism is the most abundant form of ugliness.

Along his stands. What is that about?

No surprise until I wasn’t. Because I was expecting to see it much more anti Muslim sentiment are much more redeeming sentiment. Mhmm. But it wasn’t, like, a close call at least the times that I watched him on rumble. The anti Semitism drowned it all out, all from different handles.

And I think it’s actually straightforward, and it’s this. When Steve Broadcast, he’s got sitting above his is it his right shoulder? Or I guess it’s his left shoulder, but on the viewer’s right, what you see is the sign. It’s his own quote that he

has, like, sitting on the mantle saying there are no conspiracies, but there are no coincidences, which is itself an ingenious form of doublespeak. Right? I mean, it’s saying, there are

no conspiracies, but there actually are. Right. You know, that, like, it it gives you the ability to, like, say, this isn’t a lie. Please believe this lie. You know?

And he really does traffic and loads of conspiracy theories. They aren’t just about the election. They’re about all kinds of things, like including, gosh, it was that really Omicron in China during the Olympics? Or was it an outbreak of something like hemorrhagic fever and Ebola? I don’t know.

Just saying it could be. We don’t know.

Just asking questions.

Just asking questions. You know, right. We stipulate you decide, you know, so there’s a lot of that. And if conspiracies are sort of what you pedal if they’re your bread and butter. Antisemitism is really the biggest conspiracy of them all because It’s the mother of all conspiracies.

It says that Jews are behind everything. I mean, you

point out. I mean, he he tells you that, you know, he has lots of Jewish friends. He loves his Jewish doctors in Los Angeles, I guess. But You’re you’re right. There’s no question the Bannon and his guests are always invoking George Soros.

They’re always talking about the Rothschild, the new frequent gas marjorie Taylor Green known for her Jewish space laser references. Uh-huh. A rat child controls those. Exactly. I mean, one of his regular guests is Jack Pisobiak, you know, of the three sets of parenthesis me, one of the pizzagate guys.

And — Yeah. — and so it’s not a coincidence that all of these folks have gravitated to him. Now it’s another one of the warning flags that people want not to sleep on. Right.

And if he wants to claim that he has never said an anti Semitic word or, you know, or you know, and that no Jew can actually find any antisemitic moment. Number one, he’s using code words. Right? SOROS SOROS SOROS. He said when he was kissing Macron, he said the former Rothchild’s banker and then caught it himself and that had to say on the air, that’s not code.

I mean, he had already had a, you know, conversation about this. I mean so he knows he is aware that, of course, it’s a code. And he’s anti simeon adjacent with the Soviet who, by the way, on Bannon show, actually, was on some tear about wrong clean and kept saying we’re on clean. And there’s no one in Washington who has any confusion about how you say we’re on clean. It looks like rain and rain and rain and rain and rain and it rhymes with all those things.

And then Pisovic stopped himself one day while I was listening and called him Ronald Klein. Just wanted

everybody to know what kind

of fellow he was.

Just in case

you’re curious how that name got morphed over time.

So what was Steve Bannon doing on January sixth? The January sixth committee played one of the more extraordinary sound bites from Steve Bannon’s war room the night before when he basically said, you know, it’s it’s going to be extraordinary. I mean, it was it was as if he knew what was going to happen. So whatever happened on January sixth, the deep bannon is part of that story, isn’t it? So here’s what

I can’t say. I mean, the whole clip from the night before, it’s going to be extraordinary. Yeah. He that’s a lot of war room macho talk, you know. And he could, to my mind, having listened to many, many, many hours war room.

That sounded sort of consistent with the kind of, you know, extra habanero talk that he has all the time when he’s talking on the show. Like, oh, it’s gonna be epic. It’s gonna be, you know, we’re gonna feel strip these clouds. We’re gonna you know, like, to me, I heard that as, like, this is gonna be a legislative interaction in the life the likes of which you’ve never seen. I did not necessarily think that he knew, although I felt like he had been stirring up his audience and flaming them for weeks, telling them, you know, to protest to, you know, man the phones to write he was certainly selling the big lie awfully hard and giving lots of coverage to the rally on the mall with all the things that were happening the night before.

What we know from the day of is that he was working the phones. He won’t say who he was calling. He had first wouldn’t even admit that much but his daughter had spoken to me about what had gone on that day. She was on the mall. She was listening to Trump speak.

And then she got a call from Mark Finch, who’s running for secretary of state in Arizona, who was closer to the capital than she was. And he said, don’t come near here. It’s chaos, walk away. So she went back to the Brevard embassy. He broadcasts nearby and she went back and she told me that she didn’t really see much of her dad.

She just briefly went upstairs, which I believe is only accessible through the outside of the house.

Saw him,

told him she was safe, and then went downstairs into the war room studio and watched on their giant TV. And he was upstairs working the phones, and she didn’t really see him until, you know, it was time for his next broadcast at five o’clock. Mhmm. When I first asked him about this, he said, well, I was just watching it the entire time and the war downstairs. And I said, but you weren’t?

Because your daughter told me you weren’t down there. You know? You weren’t there? And then

know, the second you kind

of catch him in a contradiction. He just glides away backwards on his ice skates and changes the the story slightly. Well, you know, I eventually got down there. You know, I’m sure he did. I mean, he had to broadcast at some point.

It seems

that one of the things that he does a great deal is to threaten retaliation against people who he feels is be have betrayed the cause. He obviously despises Mike Pence, you know, bitterly blames Pence for the day, calls him a goutless coward. He just I think it was yesterday, he was talking about, you know, we’re coming for you, Bill Barr — Yep. — in your story, you talk about how he’s going to defeat Lisa Markowski. Because she voted for KBJ to confirm her for the Supreme Court.

So this is again, you know, he’s feeling powerful in a vindictive vengeful way, which obviously, you know, places him at the heart of Trump wrote, when I thought when I was watching one of the the brief clips, I I can’t stand watching that long form. I think that I give those take so much that as I was watching him recently, his cockiness, it it did occur to me that he thinks that Trump is coming back into the White House and that all the rules will change, that that will be the culmination, that here’s a man who look like he was faced with complete destruction when he was indicted. He was pardoned. He understands the power of the president. The power of the president to rewrite the rule of law, and he thinks this is going to happen.

And it’s one of the I don’t know. It just seems like the winded his back. Do you do you get that sense at all? Or Yeah. I think that he I I think he’s highly energized by this

moment. I I do agree. You know, it’s super upsetting to behold. By the way, he had no measurable effects. Lisa Murkowski did not listen to

him. You know, yeah,

I mean, there are people who are blashing themselves to the mast and deciding they are going to resist the temptation to capitulate to, you know, voices like this, you know, if I had to guess She’s not listening to his show. Mhmm. But I agree with you that I think he is enjoying himself. But, you know, it’s also agitating to him. He can taste it.

Right? And there’s something agitating about being almost there for him. And I I do think there are questions just about what his future will look like. I mean, he’s sixty eight, but I mean, I don’t have any pivots he has left in him. And he’s got an impressive list of people who don’t like him.

And he wouldn’t wanna work with him. I think he’s best positioned where he is, you know. And he doesn’t care. He doesn’t care about all

those people. He doesn’t care. I mean, he’s he’s got that revolutionary spirit which, again, one of the great ironies of our time is the conservative Republican Party now being taken over by a guy who is a revolutionary, and and he sees the revolution at hand. And I think that’s that revolutionary mentality that I don’t think that Democrats understand because I think they still think the politics has some vague resemblance to the way it is and I don’t know whether you had a sense of it. You spend time with it and realize that this is a completely different moral cultural universe in many ways.

Well, Yeah. Certainly, the the democrats in many instances are playing chess whereas he’s playing checkers. And checkers is like, you know, the kruiter thing sort of tends to prevail and tends to win. I do have that sense. Tell, I wanna push your

analogy. They think they’re playing chess, and he’s bringing a knife to the chess match. I mean, he’s playing chess for game games. You know, they’re they’re doing the king of rooks four type thing, you know, rooks four type thing. And he basically just has this big you know, cuddle and he’s smashing the board.

And they whoa. Hey. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I there’s that scene in Indiana Jones where you know, those guys are sort of moving really smoothly in that amazing knife play and Harrison Ford just, like, gives him the content to his look, shoots him with his gun. I mean, if that’s what you’re thinking. Yeah. I I can coast with that metaphor.

I totally get it. Although, you know, Harrison Ford looks much cooler in that. I mean, yeah. And you sort of wish the democrats would be the ones who look cool. Yeah.

I mean, of course, I’m totally nervous about all of this, and I think it’s been true for a while where but look, democrats still believe in government. Right? So they’re still trying to get the government to do stuff. And so paradoxically, a number of them are still the incrementalists. Like you said, you know, the number of conservatives who are, you know, embracing conservative principles and do and opting for incremental change are becoming vanishingly rare.

And it’s now bizarrely the Democrats who were trying to kind of be incrementalist, but they too have a left flank. And look, I’m gonna say something about Steve Bannon. I mean, he was noisier about inflation earlier. I watched MSNBC and everyone else sort of buy the Biden administration line. Mhmm.

This is just a blip. This ain’t gonna be nothing. This is nothing. And Bannon was skeptical, and he was very dubious, very early on. He was making noise about that laptop for eighteen months.

And only recently, did the New York Times in Washington post concede that it was real? And there was a time when you couldn’t even post Nevada on Facebook Right? Right. He has reason to be pissed at the mainstream media. He has reason to be pissed at people like me.

I am really conscious of that. I mean, if he weren’t so busy trafficking and lies. If he wanted to point out our excesses, I would welcome it. You know, it is not without merit to say that, like, the democrats looking at all of the, you know, black lives matter and riots and sort of disregarding, you know, the looting may have been very problematic, right, for the Democratic Party. But there are things that he was focusing on where I think we were vulnerable and he was right.

What he is doing in response is so catastrophic. It’s just so a hundred x bad and Well, that

is right. And that’s, of course, part of the problem when you start to see the world in this binary term is you close your eyes to where the other side might actually be. Right? So I’m sitting here in Wisconsin. And last night, I don’t watch a lot of television at all.

And I was watching, you know, some of the news broadcast because I wanted to, you know, see the coverage of the committee and the political ads here are wall to wall. And they’re they’re almost all republican and they’re all pounding away on law and order and the canossia riots. Right. Now, you know, for much of the legacy media, including MSNBC, where I’m a contributor, I should acknowledge that. They look back on that as well, that didn’t work for Republicans.

That, you know, that was let’s let’s move move past that. Well, don’t be so sure. Guys like Bandon understood that those scenes of burning storefronts were going to be great wedge issues and they are just pounding and pounding away on all of that. And I’m not sure that a lot of the the folks on the coast understand what’s happening. Here with with issues like that.

But I have to concede what your point is the banner nose. Well, that’s just it. And I

think that you can get suburban moms on your side with that and a couple other things, if you’re shrewd, he’s not. I mean, he’s got all the subtlety, you know, crocodile. But, I mean, we just don’t know how much that matters. And I think that Bannon was more he was early to think about the pandemic. Like, he was early on the possibility that it might have been a lab leak.

And that’s because, you know, he hates China, and that’s like his, you know, relentless talking point. So, you know, that might have been just an instance of a stop clock happening to be right. But nonetheless, I think Democrats are vulnerable on this, and I think that, like, legacy media is vulnerable on this and was vulnerable on this. You can see how he could have a feel and why people might just despise us. He did make me see that.

I will say, you did. You did. Well, the story

is American Rasputin. It is online and in the July August issue the Atlantic Magazine, Jennifer Senior. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time talking about somebody who is both loathsome and immensely consequential at the same time. Thank you. That

is can you imagine that as like a business card lothsome and immensely consequential. Like, that’s good. But my ambition is just

about my card some days. Yeah.

I was just you would need both baby. Oh my god. But this has been just an absolute delight and pleasure. You’re just you’re the best dude, the biz needs. You you’re as good as it gets.

Well, thank

you so much. Thank you for listening to the Bulwark podcast. Okay. So we talked about banning to day. And next up, we’re gonna talk about old school Trump with one of America’s most famous reporters who happens to be from his hometown.

We’ll do that tomorrow, and we’ll do this all over again.

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