This is an excerpt from “Finish What We Started,” by Isaac Arnsdorf, which will publish next Tuesday, April 9.
Supporters cheer as former President Donald Trump walks out to speak during a campaign rally at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, S.C. on Feb. 10. A shroud of black mesh fence closed around the bright marble colonnades of the U.S. Capitol campus.
Bannon was not merely a student or passive observer of this prophecy; he wanted to be an agent of it, and an architect of the era that came next. So when he watched Trump glide down a golden escalator to announce his campaign for president, in 2015, his first thought was, “That’s Hitler!” By that he meant someone who intuitively understood the aesthetics of power, as in Nazi propaganda films.
In the White House, as Trump’s chief strategist, Bannon heralded the dawn of a “new political order,” but he lasted only seven months. Trump threw him out after white supremacists and neo‐Nazis marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, against removing a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, and one of them drove a car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing a young woman.
Could they really pull it off? Didn’t matter. “I had no downside,” Bannon would later say. His aim was to use the occasion to stage such a spectacle that it would undermine Biden’s legitimacy with millions of Americans — “shred that f---er on national TV,” permanently hobble his ability to govern, “kill the Biden presidency in the crib.” All that mattered was for Trump supporters to believe it was possible for Congress to block the election results that day.
Soon the lawmakers in the Capitol could hear the crowd roaring outside. The mob broke in and the lawmakers fled. For hours the counting and certification of the electoral votes was stopped. Once police and National Guardsmen secured the Capitol and the lawmakers reconvened, Pence refused to do what Trump demanded, and not enough Republicans objected to the votes to force a contingent election in the House. The massive victory Bannon had promised did not come to pass.
“OK, live from the nation’s capital, you’re in the War Room,” your host began today’s show. “It’s still an occupied capital. The question still needs to be asked, why are seven thousand National Guard, up‐armored National Guard, still in the nation’s capital?” The answer, according to Bannon, was that the show of force was a “psyop” — a form of psychological warfare meant to cow the MAGA movement, to break Trump supporters’ will to resist.
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