‘He is running in 2028’: MAGA loyalist Steve Bannon on Trump’s long-term agenda

Bannon, however, is keeping the Trump flame alive. “He doesn’t say he’s not going to do it. I tell people: he’s building the Arc de Trump [in Washington] and he’s building the ballroom [at the White House]. I think that shows there’s some permanence,” Bannon says.

In telling remarks about the Republicans’ electoral strategy moving forward, Bannon said part of the reason for controversial immigration raids in Democratic cities such as Minneapolis was to deport illegal immigrants who the MAGA movement believes are being imported by Democrats to distort the electoral roll.

“You’re seeing their [the Democrats] business model in Minneapolis, which is to get a bunch of illegals and all these phony quote-unquote legal immigrants, put them on the government payroll, deal with the fraud, pay for it, and then have them vote in these phony things with the big-city mayors of these sanctuary cities,” Bannon said. “We’re shattering that.”

If the electoral roll were “legitimate”, Bannon claimed, it would be “virtually impossible” for Democrats to win national elections. These views reflect long-running but unfounded allegations about widespread voter fraud. In fact, non-citizen voting is illegal, states have various checks in place, and the Brennan Centre for Justice says the practice is “vanishingly rare”.

‘We can’t be beaten’

The main event on the US political calendar this year is November’s midterm election for the whole House of Representatives and a third of the Senate.

Last week Trump said to Reuters in an interview that there should be no midterm elections because he had accomplished so much, though press secretary Karoline Leavitt subsequently said the president was joking.

Bannon says there will be midterms and is increasingly confident Republicans can keep control of the House – a rare feat for the party in the Oval Office – based on highly optimistic assumptions about economic growth and a rosy assessment of recent fortunes.

He claimed Republicans had won seven of eight national elections since Trump became a candidate, including presidential primaries and the 2020 election (which, in fact, Trump lost to Joe Biden). The only election he conceded was the 2018 midterm, crediting Democratic veteran Nancy Pelosi for doing “a magnificent job”.

In all other circumstances, he says, “The MAGA base is not beatable … we can’t be beaten.”

It is not clear how close Trump and Bannon are today, but Bannon says there is a correlation between what is discussed on War Room and what Trump comments or acts upon, implying the president watches the show. And Stephen Miller, Trump’s hardline deputy chief of staff, was a key ally of Bannon’s and is seen as his protege.

Bannon has also played a role in key events. In his book Retribution, American journalist Jonathan Karl revealed that days before Trump’s shakedown of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last year, Trump dialled Bannon into a preparatory meeting, where Bannon called Zelensky a “punk” and urged Trump not to trust him.

Recently, Bannon has used his podcast to highlight the strategic importance of Canada to the Arctic Rim and defence of the western hemisphere. He worries it is vulnerable to adversaries China and Russia, and told this masthead Canada will be Trump’s next focus. A day later, NBC News reported Trump has been raising similar concerns about Canada with aides.

“This is a bigger problem than Greenland,” says Bannon, who was horrified by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s trip to China last week. “This thing in Canada is going to be a major, major, major problem.”

Flooding the zone

Bannon, who was a key MAGA thinker during Trump’s four years out of office, says even he is shocked by the unprecedented pace and scale of disruption over the past 12 months, domestically and on the world stage.

“He’s crammed into a year what no president in living memory has done,” Bannon says of Trump. “The Reagan revolution pales in comparison – that’s a week’s worth of work for Trump. Look at every major aspect of American life. The administration and President Trump is deeply ingrained with major policy changes everywhere.”

Bannon says Trump’s wilderness years were beneficial because it allowed the MAGA movement to produce a policy blueprint – most notably Project 2025, which Trump disavowed on the campaign trail – and a plan to neuter American institutions through chaos, which he says has worked.

“The theory was to overwhelm the system, what we call ‘flood the zone’, and have ‘days of thunder’. And think about it – we’ve overwhelmed the system. The system can’t respond. It’s too much every day,” he says.

“If you step back and look at it, it’s actually breathtaking what’s been accomplished in one year. And obviously the work is far, far from done. That’s why I’m so adamant about Trump 2028.”

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In Bannon’s telling, the real strength of the MAGA plan was a theory about how Article 2 of the Constitution could be used to radically claim executive power for the president, which Trump and his team have ruthlessly pursued.

“No.1, he’s chief executive officer of the US government, so he can fire any f—ing person he wants,” Bannon says. “No.2 … he has virtually unlimited power as commander-in-chief, and he’s using it.”

He notes Trump may yet use the Insurrection Act to dispatch the US military to the streets of Minneapolis to quell protests against his immigration crackdown, which the administration called “domestic terrorism”. The Pentagon reportedly told 1500 troops in Alaska to be on standby for possible deployment.

“No.3 – and I think this is the most important of all – is that he’s broken this post-Watergate [state of affairs] where the radical lawyers could run the Justice Department, the judiciary. By the inherent powers of Article 2, he’s the chief magistrate and chief law enforcement officer of the country.”

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Trump’s accumulation of power has alarmed constitutional experts, lawyers, historians and legions of everyday Americans. Bannon, however, was not concerned that it might create a precedent by which a future Democratic president could claim those same powers for him – or her – self.

“There’s not going to be another Democratic president,” Bannon said. “I’m not worried about that.”

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