Former Trump strategist turned MAGA influencer Steve Bannon boasted in a recent interview that the president isn’t receiving any meaningful resistance, from the media or the American public as a whole, despite moving headlong with a “maximalist strategy” that has seen the erosion of civil rights and democratic norms over the past year.
“F*** the Overton window,” the War Room podcaster told The Atlantic this week, referencing the term used for “the slow evolution of societal values and norms” over time.
“You have to take it however deep you can take it and, quite frankly, until you meet resistance. And we haven’t met any resistance.”
Bannon briefly served as Trump’s chief strategist during his first term and has since become one of his loudest cheerleaders in the right-wing media ecosystem.
With the past few weeks marked by the U.S. military’s capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, Trump’s renewed push to seize Greenland, protesters taking to the streets after ICE fatally shot a Minneapolis woman and the DOJ launching a criminal probe into the Fed chair who Trump has regularly criticized, Bannon seemed elated that there appears to be little that can stop the administration.
As Trump begins his second year in office, his job approval rating has reached new lows and his standing with independent voters has cratered.
The president’s first year in office has seen National Guard troops patrolling American cities, the US bombing other countries without Congressional approval or notice, right-wing influencers posing as journalists, the forceful mass arrests and deportation of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, American citizens and residents getting caught up in ICE raids, the administration pulling funding from universities for supposedly being hostile to Trump and too “woke,” and the Justice Department taking orders from the president.
Bannon told The Atlantic that Trump feels further emboldened because the Overton window keeps shifting with little to no consequence for him.
“You move it, and you do it, and no one complains—or MSNBC and The Atlantic complain and nobody gives a f***—and then you do it again, and push it again,” Bannon, who recently floated the notion of Trump running for a Constitutionally-banned third term, bragged.
“He’s driving deep. Remember, our strategy—I say it every day—is maximalist, a maximalist strategy,’ he added. “You have to take it however deep you can take it and, quite frankly, until you meet resistance. And we haven’t met any resistance.”
One of the reasons why Trump has been successful in shattering the Overton window, the president’s allies also told The Atlantic, is that he’s framed the trampling of rights and democratic boundaries as necessary, in order to get rid of “bad” people and organizations.
“Trump is a master at getting his enemies to defend things that are politically damaging to them,” a former senior administration official close to the president told the publication.
“So if you are going out and defending the principle of due process—or whatever high-minded legal and constitutional things—even if your constitutional argument is strong, you are still effectively defending a narco-terrorist.”
That person added: “It’s interesting, the issues he picks. Even if his enemies have a legitimate beef—constitutional, legal, whatever—it still puts them in a position where they appear to be defending bad people.”
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