Steve Bannon hits the panic button
The DOJ has already criminally indicted Steve Bannon for contempt, and he’s awaiting trial. The judge has thrown out his planned defense, so it’s overwhelmingly likely that he’ll be convicted and sent to prison. And Bannon’s recent court filings give away that he suspects the DOJ is targeting him on broader criminal charges.
Yet even with Bannon’s life being ripped apart like this, he’s still out there trying to pretend that things are business as normal. Instead of focusing on the criminal charges pending against him, Bannon is wasting his time doing a political podcast. Interestingly enough, even he’s admitting that Donald Trump’s loyalty-based Republican primary endorsements are making a mess for the Republicans in the midterms.
Bannon hit the panic button this week over the fact that Trump’s handpicked candidate David Perdue is 27 points behind his Republican primary opponent, incumbent Governor Brian Kemp. Bannon seemed almost shocked that a Trump-anointed candidate could be polling so poorly, even among Republican voters. But Perdue is essentially running on a ‘Trump is great, the election was stolen from him’ platform, and that’s just not a message that resonates with the vast majority of voters in 2022.
The kicker is that even if Trump’s candidate Perdue somehow rallies and wins the Republican nomination, it’ll still take the incumbency advantage away from the Republicans in the general election. All this does is increase the odds that presumptive Democratic nominee Stacey Abrams will become Governor of Georgia.
How is it that Republican strategists like Steve Bannon and his podcast pal David Bossie are surprised by this? Trump hasn’t even so much as pretended that his Republican primary endorsements are based on merit or viability; he’s flat out admitted that he’s doing it based on personal loyalty to him. So of course his candidates are clunkers who are just making a mess of things for the Republican Party.
That said, the entire mainstream media has spent the past year insisting that the Republicans will have a magic carpet ride in the midterms no matter what. This kind of doomsday hyperbole is all about scaring people into staying tuned in and driving ratings. But perhaps even political strategists who know better have heard this daily drone of “Republicans will win the midterms no matter what” so many times that even they’ve fallen for it. Well guess what? The Republicans are imploding, and giving up whatever inherent advantages they were supposed to have in 2022. The Democrats have a real chance to win – all we have to do as political activists is put in the work required to win.
