'We are taking over': Bannon vows Republicans will reshape America in MAGA image
Former President Donald Trump's longtime associate Steve Bannon has a message for the American people: we will reshape the country in our image.
The segment on Bannon's "War Room" show, highlighted by the Biden campaign account, was discussing Project 2025, the controversial Heritage Foundation playbook to reshape the entire federal government's civil service into an army of far-right loyalists and Christian nationalists with the next Republican administration. Bannon was speaking to Julie Kelly, a right-wing writer who helped promote this week's conspiracy theory that the FBI was plotting to assassinate Trump.
"People realize exactly what's going on here, and we're not going to back off one inch," Bannon told Kelly. "And if you don’t like it then that’s your problem, because we are taking over this country and are going to set a new set of standards, which are the traditional standards, how things have be run."
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Project 2025 has raised alarm bells among watchdog groups and democracy experts, as much of it would undo decades of anti-corruption reforms and give the president a degree of power over day-to-day operations of the law unprecedented in modern politics.
Bannon, who previously served as a top campaign official in Trump's 2016 bid, was recently sentenced to four months in prison for contempt of Congress, after he categorically refused to respond to subpoenas from the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. He has repeatedly sought to get that ruling thrown out, with no success, and the Justice Department is urging a federal court to force Bannon to begin his sentence as soon as possible.
He is also facing trial in New York for a fraud scheme in which he allegedly solicited funds from Trump supporters to privately finance the construction of a border wall, only to pocket some of the proceeds along with various associates. This largely echoes a federal indictment issued against Bannon several years ago, which was pardoned by Trump on his way out of office.