Former White House adviser Steve Bannon predicted a “sweeping victory” for MAGA policies in the 2022 midterms that will lead to former President Donald Trump winning a second term in 2024.
“We’re going to have a sweeping victory in 2022, and that’s just the preamble to a sweeping victory in 2024, and this time we’re going to be ready — and have a MAGA perspective, MAGA policies, not the standard Republican policies,” he told political appointees at a Washington, DC, social club last week, according to NBC News.
When that happens, Bannon said he wants to see an army of “shock troops” enter federal agencies and help Republicans completely retool the government by instituting their policies.
“If you’re going to take over the administrative state and deconstruct it, then you have to have shock troops prepared to take it over immediately,” Bannon later said to NBC News in an interview released on Saturday.
“I gave ’em fire and brimstone,” Bannon, who led Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, said he told the gathering of former Trump political appointees at the Capitol Hill Club last Wednesday.
He said the Trump administration was hindered by the inability to fill the nearly 4,000 slots for presidential appointees at federal agencies and delayed in implementing its policies as the new hires struggled to get up to speed.
Bannon was invited to speak by the newly formed Association of Republican Presidential Appointees.
“There are so many statutes and regulations as well as agency and departmental policies, it can be very overwhelming when you first come in,” Jeffrey Scott Shapiro, a former Broadcasting Board of Governors official who is one of the organizers of the group, told NBC.
“This is an organization that has a very narrow, clear and much-needed purpose, and, once it is operational, I think it could do a lot of good not just for the Republican Party but for the country,” he said.
Bannon was among the former Trump administration officials who were issued subpoenas last month by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.