Ghosts of 6 January are coming home to roost, but bad boy Steve Bannon is already thinking 2024

The most dangerous political provocateur in the US is energising Trump’s legions for the Battle of 2024 The cover of the 2 February, 2017, edition of TIME magazine was dark and stormy: a sombre close-up of then-chief White House strategist Stephen K Bannon headlined THE GREAT MANIPULATOR. According to American author-journalist Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House: “It was Rebekah Mercer—who had bonded with Bannon, and whose politics were grim, unyielding, and doctrinaire—who defined the family.” When the 2008 financial crisis imploded, Bannon used his AT&T lineman dad Martin J Bannon’s loss of $100,000 as the trigger for his anti-government crusade as Wall Street giants were bailed out while middle-class families like his took a hammering. It’s All About 2024 Now “If you want to back Donald Trump, become a precinct committee member of the Republican Party today,” thunders a Bannon from the ‘Breitbart Embassy’, a basement in a Washington, DC, townhouse, on his podcast ‘Bannon’s War Room’. And you’re going to have a constitutional crisis,” Bannon told CNN last December, adding that his podcast is “about winning elections with the right people—MAGA people. “And the efforts by Flynn, Bannon and other promoters of the Big Lie are all part of this playbook to hijack elections in 2022 and 2024 if their preferred candidate doesn’t win.” Senior fears that Democrats will lose both the House and the Senate in the November elections—and even if they are in a position to recapture the White House in 2024, there is a grave danger of “enough people” rejecting election results with “people like Bannon who claim that the whole apparatus for tallying votes is illegitimate”.