Donald Trump’s former White House strategist Steve Bannon “drank his own Kool-Aid,” and is now struggling to figure out how a judge and jury didn’t swallow his bluster, said a journalist who has written a book on Bannon.
“He started this process last October, when he was hit with a subpoena” by the House Jan. 6 panel, “vowing to ‘go medieval’ on his enemies — that was his quote,” Bloomberg Businessweek reporter Joshua Green noted Friday on MSNBC.
“He said he would make it a ‘misdemeanor from hell’ for the Biden administration. But he wound up not even taking the stand in his own defense” — and was found guilty on two contempt of Congress charges, added Green, who wrote “Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency.” “It shows the bubble he’s been living in.”
He “drank his own Kool-Aid in the end, and didn’t understand — or didn’t want to face the fact — that he is in a court of law and that sort of thing isn’t going to fly. The judge made that clear, the jury made that clear,” said Green.
The “idea that he would be allowed to skate, or that he wouldn’t have to face any accountability for spurning the subpoena, just defies reason,” but Bannon believed it, the journalist added.
He’s never really been held accountable for anything until now, Green noted. Two years ago he was hit with “criminal charges for his alleged involvement in a scheme to build a privately funded border wall. At the last minute, he finagled a pardon from Trump,” Green pointed out.
“I think he’s gone so far in life, kind of talking his way out of situations, and not really having to face a body like this that has real powers to hold him accountable, that he just didn’t think through what it was he was doing. I think we see the consequences of that with the verdict,” Green said.
Check out the full interview here: