That invocation of a fight to the death would be courtesy of Steve Bannon, revving up the crowd (whom he likened to the "vanguard of the revolution") at Turning Point Action earlier this month. Amid lies and bunkum, he hurled insults and glorified violence. He repeatedly invoked the stolen 2020 election and celebrated the January 6, 2021 rampage; remarked of Joe, Jill, and Hunter Biden, "They're a bunch of feral dogs"; and reviewed the Trumpian agenda for a second term, including the pledge to "seal the Southern border and ... start the deportation of 10 to 15 million illegal aliens," which generated a crescendo of applause. He led a brief chant, "Trump! Trump! Trump! Trump! Trump! Trump! Trump! Trump!"
Looking to a second Trump term, he promised, "We're going to purge DOJ. We're going to take out the FBI: the American Gestapo," and dismantle the FBI building, "ugly slab by ugly slab," adding: "And we're going to do what the Romans did at Carthage. We're going to salt the earth around it."
He name-checked Roger Stone, Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, Peter Navarro, James O'Keefe, and himself -- as "the first wave" (à la Normandy), that is, men who have encountered a variety of consequences (from deplatforming to losing a law license to criminal prosecution), which he blamed on Trump's opponents. And he reserved a special malice toward those opponents, to whom he ascribed treason and criminality. He pledged to Lock 'em up (though not in those exact words, the vintage vocabulary of 2016).
Ten minutes into his remarks he bellowed, "On the afternoon of January 20th we must free the 1400 patriots and must incarcerate the criminals!"
A Trump opponent responds
Andrew McCabe, former deputy director of the FBI, shrugged off Bannon's (and Donald Trump's) threats to folks perceived as enemies of Trump. He then segued into questions about the country we think we are and what direction we'd like to go.
We know that Donald Trump and his friend are, you know – these are people who are obsessed with personal grievances and settling scores. Their entire way of thinking about leading, administering this country is in the context of having been wronged and trying to engender support among their supporters by, you know, throwing this kind of red meat out to people who are, uh – who respond to this sort of language.
So we shouldn’t be surprised by it all. They are both paranoid old men – one of whom is on his way to jail and the other one, we’ll see. That may happen for him as well. So that part doesn’t surprise me.
What’s really to me shocking and disgusting about the rhetoric is what it says about who we are becoming as a nation. And the fact that a person who is, you know, quite possibly the next President of the United States is engaging in this level of absolutely, fundamentally anti-democratic rhetoric and behavior and ideation.
Everything he says, it stands in direct contrast to the nation that we think we are, the nation that we have always been. But I think people have got to start asking themselves: Is this the direction that we wanna go? Is this the country that we’re becoming? A place where an incoming president takes the levers of power and uses them for his own gratification to pursue enemies?
Those of us who disagree with the direction MAGA seeks to take us will have a say on November 4.