Steve Bannon Thinks People Are Trying to Assassinate Him. Also, Steve Bannon Is Thinking of Running for President.

‘I’ve Had a Couple Assassination Plots’ Bannon Claims

Steve Bannon thinks he’s so important people are trying to assassinate him. Not just kill him, but assassinate him. As if he’s some political leader so dangerous, important, and influential some nut-jobs are plotting “assassination” attempts. 

“I’ve had a couple assassination plots,” Bannon tells VANITY FAIR’s Gabriel Sherman, “I got it from an intelligence source.”

VANITY FAIR has just published a lengthy and wide-ranging profile of the former Trump campaign CEO and former Trump White House chief strategist. It reveals a tragic figure whose sense of self is far greater than most Americans probably think. In other words, it reveals Steve Bannon as we already know him. A blowhard. And in fact, at one point in the piece Sherman calls him just that.

And as it turns out – no surprise – Bannon wasn’t too popular in the White House:

The relationship between Kushner and Bannon worsened through the spring. At one point, Bannon said, Trump called an Oval Office meeting to broker peace. Attending were Bannon, Kushner, and Ivanka Trump. She blamed Bannon for the leaks.

“She’s the queen of leaks,” Bannon argued back.

“You’re a fucking liar!” Ivanka said.

Sherman writes that back in October, “Bannon called an adviser and said he would consider running for president if Trump doesn’t run for re-election in 2020. Which Bannon has told people is a realistic possibility. In private conversations since leaving the White House, Bannon said Trump only has a 30 percent chance of serving out his term, whether he’s impeached or removed by the Cabinet invoking the 25th amendment. That prospect seemed to become more likely in early December when special counsel Robert Mueller secured a plea deal from former national security adviser Michael Flynn.”

And then, there’s what Bannon thinks of Trump, at least President Trump:

Bannon has also remarked on the toll the office has taken on Trump, telling advisers his former boss has “lost a step.” “He’s like an 11-year-old child,” Bannon joked to a friend in November.

Bannon said that as the top White House aide, “I had influence, I had a lot of influence, but just influence.”

And now that he’s back at his old job, running the Breitbart website, which he once bragged is the “platform” for the “alt-right”?

“I have power. I can actually drive things in a certain direction.”

That “power” includes publishing some (at best) inaccurate stories designed to gin up the far right, the alt-right, and other conservatives. Snopes, the debunking site, has an archive of (let’s politely call them) inaccurate stories from the Breitbart site. So does PunditFact, an arm of PolitiFact. (And while Wikipedia isn’t the world’s best resource, here’s what it says starting with the second sentence on the Breitbart entry: “The site has published a number of falsehoods and conspiracy theories, as well as intentionally misleading stories. Its journalists are ideologically driven, and some of its content has been called misogynist, xenophobic and racist.”)

Back to Bannon.

Sherman continues, writing, “the idea of Bannon as a political figure, let alone a presidential candidate, inspires ridicule and venom from the Republican establishment. The Wall Street Journal editorial page called Bannon’s roster of candidates a bunch of ‘cranks and outliers.’ Former McConnell chief of staff Josh Holmes said Bannon is a ‘white supremacist.’ Stuart Stevens, a veteran of five Republican presidential campaigns, told me that Bannon is ‘an odd, strangely repulsive figure who is trying to use the political process to work through personal issues of anger and frustration.’ He added, ‘like many people in their first campaign, he confused his candidate winning with the fantasy voters supported him.'”

The article ends with this quote from Bannon: “I’m not a political operative,” he said, “I’m a revolutionary.”

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Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr and a CC license

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