Steve Bannon Gloats That Democrats Are Sticking With “Cadaver” Biden

Even from behind bars, Steve Bannon’s message is clear: Republicans want Joe Biden to stay in the presidential race. Why? Because they know it will be better for Donald Trump.

In an email interview with Matthew Boyle from far-right Breitbart News, the former Trump adviser was asked what he made of the Democrats sticking with Biden amid widespread criticism of the president’s performance in last month’s debate and the calls for him to drop out of the presidential race.

“So we got the candidate we want … and the country is stuck with a nonperforming cadaver,” Bannon replied.

Bannon took over Breitbart in 2012, and directed the site to publish his patently pugnacious rhetoric and conspiracy theories cooked up by far-right activists and white supremacists. In 2016, Bannon stepped down to join Trump’s presidential campaign as its CEO and went on to mastermind the authoritarian MAGA movement.

Earlier this month, Bannon chaotically reported to Danbury federal prison in Connecticut after being found guilty on two counts of contempt of Congress. The former Trump strategist had made several desperate attempts to avoid jail time, all of which were clearly unsuccessful.

In his interview with the propaganda machine he helped build, Bannon laid out his own plan for how Republicans can use all of the discourse around Biden’s health to launch Trump back into the White House.

First, he urged the GOP-led House to force Biden’s fitness as an issue of urgent “national security.”

“This is not about whether Biden can serve four more years but can he get the country safely to January 2025?” he said. “The House should move immediately to investigate and get to the bottom of who knew this when—the cover-up is all-important.”

He also advised right-wing media to work to tarnish any attempt to switch candidates.

“The political goal here for MAGA is to ‘toxify’ the process of the Democratic bait and switch as much as possible,” he said. “This is all process, and the American voter should be armed with minute-by-minute information on what is actually going on.… I’m sure they will be repulsed.”

Bannon has a point: If MAGA Republicans are given the airtime and column inches to successfully poison the well, it could prove difficult for Democrats, the media, or voters to get fully on board with another Democratic candidate.

Still, it’s revealing that a political strategist, and one of Trump’s biggest backers, is hoping that Biden sticks around until November. If Biden doesn’t listen to Democrats asking him to exit the race, maybe he should be scared by Republicans who ask him to stay?

Before actor George Clooney published an op-ed in The New York Times Wednesday calling for President Joe Biden to withdraw from the 2024 race, he reportedly reached out to former President Barack Obama, who didn’t try to dissuade him. 

Obama didn’t encourage or advise Clooney on what to say, but he also didn’t try to stop him, according to Politico, which is telling, considering what Clooney ended up writing. The actor didn’t hold back, saying, “We are not going to win in November with this president. On top of that, we won’t win the House, and we’re going to lose the Senate.”

Clooney and Obama are on friendly terms. The actor hosted a major fundraiser for Biden last month that the former president also attended, raising $28 million for Biden. Obama initially publicly defended Biden after his disastrous debate performance two weeks ago, saying that “this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself.”

But he didn’t try to dissuade a high-profile celebrity from calling for Biden’s ouster, and that could be an omen for Biden. Obama isn’t just a former president, but one of the most senior Democratic figures in the country aside from Biden. This may signal an opening for Biden to be replaced without objections from Obama, if not his outright approval.

Obama’s non-objection to a major call for Biden to step down echoes similar actions from other leading Democrats, including Senator Tim Kaine and Representative Nancy Pelosi. Rank-and-file Democratic politicians can take all of this as a sign that their objections to Biden staying on aren’t hurting their standing with the party, and could ultimately strengthen the momentum behind the efforts to replace Biden with a new candidate.

Democrats tying Project 2025 to Donald Trump continues to get under his skin: Trump took to Truth Social late Wednesday night to try to distance himself from the radical agenda, posting after midnight, “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have not seen it, have no idea who is in charge of it, and unlike our very well received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it.”

“The Radical Left Democrats are having a field day, however, trying to hook me into whatever policies are stated or said. It is pure disinformation on their part. By now, after all of these years, everyone knows where I stand on EVERYTHING! DJT,” he added.

This, it should come as no surprise, is probably not true. As The New Republic previously reported, Trump’s campaign, in coordination with the Republican National Committee, installed former Trump appointee Russ Vought as the RNC platform committee’s policy chair and Trump stooge Ed Martin as RNC deputy policy director. Both sit on the advisory board of Project 2025—and Vought even authored an entire chapter of the plan. A CNN analysis released Thursday found at least 140 people who worked in Trump’s administration involved in Project 2025—spanning across every level of his administration. According to CNN, six of Trump’s former cabinet secretaries collaborated on the 900-page master plan, with roughly 20 pages credited to Trump’s first deputy chief of staff.

Project 2025 is a pathway for executing Trump’s extreme policies The conservative think tank behind the project claims it’s crafted for any Republican president, but it’s not a matter of divine coincidence that Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee who, if he wins in November, will be inaugurated in 2025, the year for which the initiative is named. The thorn of Project 2025 dogging Trump seems to be its extreme position on executing a federal ban on abortion and IVF. It’s a position the extreme right holds, but which is at odds with a majority of the electorate.

Trump’s stated stance on contraceptives routinely shifts, but according to his recently adopted RNC platform, he wants to maintain access to contraception and IVF, while remaining murky on emergency contraceptives (Plan B) and the abortion pill, and opposing late-term abortions. Project 2025, meanwhile, seeks to dismantle access to IVF, emergency contraceptives, and the abortion pill nationwide.

During his presidency, Trump appointed several anti-abortion hardliners to his administration and the Supreme Court, which soon overturned Roe v. Wade. He allowed employers to opt-out of providing birth control coverage in their health insurance plans, expanded the “global gag rule,” and also sought to gut Planned Parenthood by banning the nonprofit from receiving federal funding.

Biden’s campaign has leaned into pairing Trump with Project 2025 as he attempts to distance himself from it. The DNC placed Project 2025 billboards around his rally in Doral, Florida, on Tuesday, and Biden has released multiple posts encouraging people to learn about the threat it poses, first directing people to Google the plan and then unveiling a website tying it to Trump. “Project 2025 will destroy America,” Biden warned in a video released by his campaign on Wednesday. “Look it up.”

There are legitimate questions to be had about President Joe Biden’s physical and mental ability to serve another four years in the White House, but at least one conservative lawmaker is pushing an unhinged conspiracy to explain the chief executive’s disastrous debate performance last month.

Early Thursday, Colorado Representative Lauren Boebert rhetorically asked online, “I wonder what could have caused Joe Biden’s rapid physical and cognitive decline?” But her choice to include four additional photos of Biden getting vaccinations revealed the shallowness of her concern.

Boebert has aggressively pushed the idea that Covid-19 vaccines are unsafe and dangerous, accusing door-to-door vaccinators at the height of the pandemic of being “needle Nazis” and claiming that instituting a mandatory vaccine network would be akin to “communist China.” In April, the Colorado congresswoman became a target for the conspiracy she helped inflame, battling conspiracy theorists after she suffered a medical emergency.

It’s not the first conspiracy that’s been crafted out of Biden’s poor matchup against Donald Trump in June.

Earlier this week, the White House had to shut down a bubbling conspiracy that Biden has Parkinson’s disease, an idea built almost entirely around one Republican lawmaker’s opinion on Biden’s footwear.

In a news release Monday night, White House medical experts explained that Dr. Kevin Cannard, a neurologist who has reportedly visited the White House eight times since last summer, has been a member of the White House medical unit since 2012, and is the “longest serving Neurologist at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and in the Military Healthcare System.” Cannard’s routine visits in the last year were a part of neurology clinics for active-duty members working in the White House, wrote Dr. Kevin O’Connor, physician to the president.

Representative Pramila Jayapal had the perfect response to a Fox Business reporter who asked her whether she had any doubts about President Joe Biden’s mental fitness.

Hillary Vaughn asked the Washington state Democrat about Biden’s mental acuity as the two walked down the hallway on Capitol Hill Wednesday night.

“Do you think it’s OK to have a president, though, where there’s this open question about whether or not he’s in cognitive decline?” Vaughn asked.

“Do you think it was OK to have President Trump in cognitive decline for his entire four years?” Jayapal shot back.

Jayapal’s right: Donald Trump has repeatedly shown that his memory is slipping. The presumptive Republican nominee is prone to incoherent rambling, slurring his words, and forgetting the names of lawmakers, his doctor, and even his own son. And while all of these examples are from the campaign trail, it’s worth noting that Trump has been making similar gaffes for years, including during his time in the White House.

In 2019, 733 health professionals signed a petition to Congress claiming that Trump’s psychological state was quickly deteriorating. “Donald Trump has the real potential to become ever more dangerous, a threat to the safety of our nation,” they wrote. The same is still true.

Jayapal released a statement Monday emphasizing the stakes of another Trump term, but stopped short of supporting Biden’s candidacy or hinting that the president should drop out. She did have a message for the media, though.

“Any reporter or pundit who is asking about or talking about the aftermath of President Biden’s debate performance and health should also be spending at least the same amount of time and energy talking to Republicans about why they are still supporting a convicted felon who incited an insurrection and wants to be Dictator on Day 1,” Jayapal wrote.

Again, Jayapal hits the nail on the head. Fitness is not just physical or mental; it’s also based on ability and will. And as many of Trump’s former staffers, allies, and friends can attest, his crimes have disqualified him from ever being fit to hold office again.