Steve Bannon stokes chaos in the Republican Party and fires up his far-right base

Last Wednesday morning, two Republicans who hours earlier had toppled Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House made a well-worn trek to a 19th-century brick town house a few blocks away from the Capitol and entered the cluttered sanctuary of Steve Bannon’s recording studio.

Matt Gaetz of Florida, the instigator of the rebellion, and Nancy Mace of South Carolina, one of seven other Republican defectors, huddled with Bannon for a morning meeting before a joint appearance on his War Room podcast.

“Tectonic plate shift here in the imperial capital,” Bannon told his listeners, while directing them to donate to his guests online. “We must stand in the breach now. We have to lance the boil that is K Street in this nation.”

From this cave-like studio not far from where Congress meets, Bannon, a former Trump adviser, has been stoking the chaos now gripping the Republican Party, capitalising on the spectacle to build his own following and using his popular podcast to prop up and egg on the GOP rebels.

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Bannon has spent years promoting the lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from former president Donald Trump, railing against coronavirus mandates and what he refers to as a “criminal invasion of the southern border”. His obsession of late was toppling McCarthy and taking out what he describes as “uniparty” Republicans who have become indistinguishable from Democrats.

With McCarthy’s historic downfall this week, his wing of the party has claimed its most prominent trophy.

Bannon represents a clear throughline from the grievance-driven Maga base to Congress. And his role in the meltdown that played out last week in the House helps explain why the Republican Party appears to be eating its own. He is a vital part of a feedback loop of red-meat media hits and social media posts, online fundraising and unfettered preaching to an often-angry and fervently right-wing base that rewards disruptions and detests institutions.

In past decades, right-wing rebels on Capitol Hill have encountered trouble getting real traction – shunned by lobbyists and big-money political action committees, excluded from leadership suites in the Capitol and disregarded by Fox News. But with the help of Bannon, who streams live for four hours every weekday, Gaetz and others don’t need to rely on any of that.

Bannon casts the agitators as heroes to his devoted Maga acolytes, and helps boost their small-dollar fundraising. He participates in calls with members and donors. He offers strategic advice. He hounds Fox News hosts who he argues don’t give them a fair shake. But mostly, he offers an unfiltered platform where individual rabble-rousers can speak directly to the base, known on War Room as “the posse”, creating more incentives for them to wreak havoc on the House floor.

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For weeks, Bannon has been strategising with Gaetz on the bid to take down McCarthy, offering himself up as a sounding board as Gaetz plotted his moves.

“KABOOM,” Bannon texted a reporter on Monday night, minutes after Gaetz filed his long-dangled motion to oust the speaker.

He has also encouraged hard-right lawmakers to use the House floor to yank legislation as far to the right as possible – earning themselves media attention in the process. His advice to them: “Get an amendment. Make it as outrageous as possible. Just be on there – don’t worry if you’re not on Fox – we’ll cut it, we’ll play it.”

On Wednesday, Bannon introduced his guests on his podcast as the “architects and heroes of yesterday” and gave them airtime to make a fundraising pitch.

“I do need help because they’re coming after me,” said Mace, who represents a politically competitive district. “They’ve threatened to dry up all my money. I’ve had multiple members, previous to the vote last night, threaten to withhold fundraising if I took this vote. It’s a huge amount of pressure. They call your staff, they scare them.” Twice, Bannon cued her to spell out her campaign website so that listeners could find it.

His audience is still wary of Mace, a fiscal conservative who leans toward the centre on some social issues and voted to hold Bannon in criminal contempt for defying a subpoena from the January 6th committee, which investigated the attack on the US Capitol building in 2021.

But Bannon sees her as a gift. Her vote to oust McCarthy allowed him and his cohorts to push back on the notion that it was only an angry group of ultra-Maga hardliners who had lost faith in McCarthy.

“Nancy is not a hard-right intransigent lawmaker,” Gaetz said on the show. “Nancy is a fiscal hawk.”

Mace has previously called Gaetz a “fraud”.

But all of that appeared to be water under the bridge the morning after McCarthy’s removal. They were, at least temporarily, allies. On Wednesday, they sat next to each other in Bannon’s basement, where books about China, Trump and sensible weight-loss programmes live in messy piles on any flat surface that avails itself. Notes from Trump written in his trademark Sharpie (“Steve! Your show is sooooo great – Proud of you! Donald”) sit stacked with other miscellany.

They were still digesting the historic events of the previous day, while figuring out their next moves. They decided, together, to use Wednesday’s broadcast to look ahead, rather than to “dunk” on the former speaker.

“He was punching down; it was really ugly last night,” said Mace, whom McCarthy targeted at his evening news conference, suggesting she was lying when she claimed he had not kept his word.

During commercial breaks, they mulled who might be the next speaker, but there was no clear answer. “I asked Jim Jordan on the floor yesterday, you’re going to be the next speaker?” Mace said. She turned to Gaetz with an idea. “Want to go meet with any of them today, together? Like, Scalise or Jordan or anyone?” He was non-committal.

Bannon was, too.

“I’m just going to see how it develops,” he said. “Who’s got the stones to take on the apparatus?”

Gaetz has described himself to people as a “Bannonite tribalist”.

Bannon, for his part, is in awe of Gaetz, whom he compares to 19th-century lawyer and statesman Daniel Webster. He credits the Florida Republican with recognising early on last year how helpful a slim GOP majority could be to the hard right.

“He sat right here in July and talked about how we weren’t going to have a 30- or 40-seat majority, but that was actually going to be better,” Bannon said. “We were going to have leverage. He’s a very special guy.”

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Bannon’s name is often greeted with an eye roll, even among Trump loyalists. He’s seen by some as a man who has made the wrong bet on candidates, like the failed Senate candidate in Alabama, Roy Moore, and has an inflated sense of his own influence. He was charged with defrauding donors who were giving money to build a wall along the southern border, before being pardoned by Trump. He was sentenced to four months in jail for criminal contempt of Congress for defying the subpoena from the January 6th committee and is free while he appeals the conviction.

But last week, as Bannon’s cohort debated amendments to the annual military spending bill on the House floor, Bannon was glued to the coverage like a proud stage parent.

“This is red meat,” Bannon exulted, as Matt Rosendale of Montana defended an amendment that would prohibit mandatory coronavirus vaccines for service members, referring to the vaccine as an “experimental drug”.

Bannon, an unrepentant agent of chaos, admits he was spoiling for a government shutdown.

“You create a firestorm now that totally changes things,” he said. “People right now think government is a benefit. I’m going to show government spending as cootie-infested.”

Bannon is also famously temperamental. He has turned on former friends, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, for backing McCarthy during the contest for the speaker’s chair and on the debt ceiling deal. She has been blacklisted from the show for months.

But after she said she was opposed to any spending bills that included aid to Ukraine, Bannon said he was warming back up to her. “There’s always a path back,” he said.

Last Wednesday morning, Bannon and his guests tried to temper their glee.

“Do not allow the posse to get punch-drunk,” Gaetz said on the show. There was more work to do.

Gaetz and Mace stayed for three segments of the show, until it was time for Rosendale to pick up the mantle and fire up the base.

“I’ll talk to you later today,” Bannon said as Gaetz showed himself out.

– This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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