With glee, former Trump campaign chairman Steve Bannon confirmed on Wednesday that he helped former President Trump plan the Jan. 6 insurrection as part of an effort to “kill the Biden presidency in the crib.”
The Trump adviser made the comments on a Wednesday episode of his War Room: Pandemic, confirming reporting in Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s book Peril.
Bannon played a clip on his podcast of the two Washington Post reporters discussing the book on MSNBC, in which Costa said that in the days leading up to the insurrection, Bannon “privately told President Trump to have a reckoning on January 6th.”
“And he said to the president, it’s time to kill the Biden presidency in the crib,” Costa added.
Bannon then cut the clip, and said on the podcast: “Yeah, because it’s about legitimacy.”
“Let’s look at the Economist poll, not Revolver, not The War Room – 42 percent of the American people think that Biden did not win the presidency legitimately,” he added.
Bannon’s view, garbled through his own puffery and bizarre manner of speaking, also appears to confirm the book’s reporting that he told Trump that the day should be a “reckoning.” Unsurprisingly, Bannon’s remarks manage to both posit the insurrection as a legitimate revolt while also placing himself at the center of events.
It’s another piece of evidence that further ties Trump to violence at the Capitol, which occurred as Trump gave a rally repeating the Big Lie and telling his audience to go “fight” as members of Congress formalized Biden’s win.
The Justice Department continues to bring charges against individual participants in the Capitol insurrection. Federal prosecutors have yet to charge anyone with the crime of insurrection, however, and they also have yet to bring charges relating to those higher up who organized and ordered the attack.
Bannon suggested on the podcast that the insurrection could have had a dual impact: potentially stopping the electoral count, but also hardening the views of the supposed “42 percent” who bought into the Big Lie on some level.
The Trump adviser then brought it back to the politics of the moment.
“It killed itself,” Bannon said. “That’s why this debt ceiling fight, the CR fight is so important. Thats’ why getting – exposing to the world the Mogadishu situation in Del Rio, Texas – particularly for all the hardworking blue-collar Hispanics in this country, American citizens.”
He went on to suggest that the goal is further chipping away at the Biden administration’s legitimacy in the eyes of the public.
“Just look at what this illegitimate regime is doing,” he added. “It killed itself. OK? But we told you from the very beginning, just expose it, just expose it, never back down, never give up and this thing will implode.”
