The embrace of political extremism by the Republican Party in the United States has Constitutional historians worried about the drift towards fascism. If that’s the case then the hapless Biden administration may go down in history as the imitation of the Weimar Republic before the rise of American fascism.

This week saw two examples of how the Grand Old Party of Abraham Lincoln has descended into something of an extremist cult.

A Republican congressman, Paul Gosar (R-Arizona), was formally sanctioned for posting an edited cartoon video depicting him murdering another lawmaker, Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York City). The video also showed Gosar wielding swords in a bloody attack on President Joe Biden.

The Republican politician remained unapologetic about the incitement of violence. Most of his congressional party members refused to vote for the censure.

This is not simply about a silly video that can be easily dismissed as a poor-taste joke.

There is an increasing endorsement of violence by Republican members towards political opponents. That is in line with GOP lawmakers openly taking public positions in support of extreme far-right militia groups such as the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys. Such groups are best described as fascist, promoting white supremacist ideology.

The other development this week was the formal indictment of Steve Bannon in connection to his alleged role in the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol in Washington DC. Bannon is believed to have coordinated with then-President Donald Trump in a bid to overthrow the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s election as the new president. On that eventful day, Trump and his acolytes incited thousands of supporters to violently assault the Congress building. It was a coup attempt carried out by far-right extremists fired up by spurious claims of election fraud.

Trump is still lurking in the shadows of the U.S. political process. Despite an impeachment over the January 6 debacle, he has never been held to account for what was an audacious fascist attack on the democratic institutions. Trump continues to spout the Big Lie about election fraud and being cheated out of the White House. He rails against how Biden is destroying America, accusing Biden with baseless slogans of “radical socialism” and “cultural Marxism”. Such labels are politically illiterate in the narrow spectrum of America’s two-party system. But they are handy for distracting voters from the real class war that is being waged ruthlessly against the majority of working Americans by the oligarchic system, a system in which both parties are loyal servants.

From the defiant, truculent demeanor of the Republicans dismissing charges of political violence, it is plausible to view the party as gravitating towards fascism. Combined with that drift is the espousal of racist enmity towards ethnic minorities and immigrants who are denigrated as “illegal aliens”. Republicans promote divisive conspiracy theories such as “white replacement” which claims that white Americans are deliberately being marginalized by people of color.

The political language is becoming ever more dogmatic and hateful whereby anyone not in agreement with the Trump-dominated Republican Party is liable to be vilified as a traitor and enemy. Among 13 GOP lawmakers who voted for passing Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure bill, most of them were harassed by party supporters whipped up by extremists like Representative Majorie Taylor Greene. Some were even sent death threats.

Here’s the rub: the crisis in American society stems from capitalism and its oligarchy. Vast inequality, poverty, unemployment, crumby social welfare and healthcare, housing and education, and so on, are all rooted in the historic failure of U.S. capitalism. People like Trump and other GOP grandees, as well as Democrats, are the beneficiaries of the capitalist racket. Yet Trump and his ilk, as well as clueless media pundits, grossly mislead the public by telling them that their problems all stem from the “radical socialism” and “cultural Marxism” pushed by the Biden administration.

Trump and the Republican Party are pushing fascist politics as a panacea under the guise of “Saving America”.

Biden and his effete Democrat administration are aiding and abetting the rise of fascism in the U.S. because they are too timid in challenging the capitalist system and the entrenched oligarchy. The Democrat Party is too busy pursuing superficial “identify politics” rather than taking on the class politics that really impact most Americans.

Biden and Democrats are merely tinkering with the system in a vain attempt to make it softer. As the old quip goes: what’s the difference between Republicans and Democrats? The Dems use lube when they are screwing you.

By this stage, however, the entire rapacious system is destroying the fabric of U.S. society and impoverishing tens of millions of Americans. What is needed is a formidable, full-on socialist program that transforms the system of private profit and wealth for a tiny minority. The irony is that most Americans, including ordinary Republicans and Democrat voters, would probably support such a radical policy.

But radical policy is not going to happen under the Democrats. They will only prolong the system that is crushing society under a false veneer of “progressive reform”. In such futile circumstances, the Trump fascists can prey on vulnerable people looking for seeming quick fixes.

Germany’s Weimar Republic (1919-1933) tinkered with capitalist failure and in so doing thereby created chaos and fomented extremism and fascism which culminated in the Nazi Third Reich. The soaring economic inflation and social woes under the Biden administration, as well as increasing disillusionment alongside the burgeoning of extremist politics, point to a similarly disastrous outcome awaiting the United States.

Steve Bannon, a political guru for Donald Trump’s Republican political base, is hooked up with a Chinese billionaire whom China wants the U.S. to extradite over corruption charges. It may seem a strange pairing for Bannon given his rabid anti-China views. A few years back, Bannon was predicting the U.S. would be soon at war with China.

Together, their ventures are a mix of financial embezzlement and peddling conspiracy theories that are winding up fears and misapprehensions about the Covid-19 pandemic as well as fueling an anti-China public climate in the U.S.

Bannon and Guo Wengui are double-act scam artists who are not only ripping off hapless Republican voters for money. The pair and their shady media ventures are adept at spreading spurious notions about the last presidential election, the pandemic, vaccines, and China.

Guo’s media businesses were fined earlier this month $539 million by U.S. authorities for illegal stock market trading. The companies had been accused of fleecing thousands of investors with unregulated digital securities known as G-Coins or G-Dollars. As part of the settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission, three media businesses belonging to Chinese-born billionaire Guo Wengui are compelled to return funds to investors and desist from further trading business.

“Thousands of investors purchased GTV stock, G-Coins, and G-Dollars based on the respondents’ solicitation of the general public with limited disclosures,” said Richard Best, Director of the SEC’s New York regional office. “The remedies ordered by the Commission today, which include a fair fund distribution, will provide meaningful relief to investors in these illegal offerings.”

Welcome to the scam world set up by Guo and Steve Bannon. Guo fled from China in 2014 to avoid a crackdown against business corruption under President Xi Jinping. An international arrest warrant has been issued by Beijing based on a litany of charges for fraud and other serious crimes. Several of Guo’s former associates have been jailed in China.

While living in exile in the United States, Guo has established himself as a prominent critic of the Chinese government, accusing it of corruption and abuse of power. As an anti-China mouthpiece, this is no doubt why the U.S. government seems to tolerate Guo and has declined to facilitate Beijing’s requests for extradition.

Guo’s profile and media businesses took off after he teamed up with Steve Bannon, the right-wing former aide to Donald Trump. Bannon received a $1 million fee as a media and political consultant to Guo. Bannon has a huge following among the Republican base and is still influential in Trump’s inner circle. By enlisting Bannon, Guo was able to bring his media companies and business scams to a much wider audience.

Bannon, as with many other Trump acolytes, has shown a flair for scamming the public over dodgy fundraising projects. In August 2020, he was arrested while on Guo’s 150ft luxury yacht off the Connecticut coast. He was charged with embezzling millions of dollars by promoting a fund to build a border wall with Mexico on private land. The case didn’t go to court because Trump pardoned Bannon in his last days as president.

Guo and Bannon have openly declared that their mission is to bring down the Chinese Communist Party. In June 2020, they set up a “New Federal State of China” whose overt purpose is regime change in Beijing. A so-called “embassy” has even been opened in New York.

To mark the one-year anniversary of the declared Chinese government-in-exile, a major media event in New York was sponsored by Guo. Speaking at the gala were Bannon, Rudy Giuliani, Michael Flynn and other Trump associates. Among the rallying themes were claims that Donald Trump is the rightful president of the United States as well as impending war with China. This seditious cabal is strangely tolerated by U.S. authorities.

To harbor an enemy, self-declared government on U.S. soil is a provocation to the People’s Republic of China as well as a violation of international law. We can be sure that if the shoe was on the other foot, the United States would be fulminating against an “act of war”.

Guo and Bannon have a lucrative symbiotic relation. Guo’s billionaire funds pay for Bannon’s Neo-fascist political projects to get Trump re-elected. And Bannon brings millions of Republican voters into Guo’s media web that up until recently when the SEC caught up, had succeeded in embezzling billions of dollars.

To keep the whole snake-oil show on the road, Guo and Bannon whip up the Trump base with all sorts of conspiracy theories. Thus, it goes, the 2020 presidential election was a steal, Joe Biden is a radical leftist, Trump is going to be reinstated one day soon as rightful president, the Covid-19 pandemic is a hoax, vaccines are poisonous and are part of the Chinese Communist Party takeover of American society. Guo and Bannon overlap with the QAnon crazy conspiracy network. They reinforce one another in an evil vice of ignorance, delusion, and fear-mongering.

Meanwhile, Republican voters are dying in droves because they refuse to get vaccinated or wear protective masks which the Republican snake-oil salesmen refer disparagingly to as “face diapers”. Even right-wing radio talks show hosts are dying disproportionately from the disease that they have been dismissing as “fake news”.

Tragically, many ordinary U.S. citizens have not only been cheated out of their money and life savings through fraudulent fundraising by Guo and Bannon; they’re being cheated out of their very lives as the scam artists peddle one false claim after another.

The biggest worry, however, is the poisoning of relations between the U.S. and China by these scam artists and their cultic influence.

On U.S. domestic politics, Covid-19, vaccines, and other issues, the Biden Democratic administration may be at odds with Bannon and the right-wing Trump base. But in terms of foreign policy towards China, there is bipartisan convergence. Biden is pushing an equally hostile agenda tantamount to beating war drums. The new American military pact with Britain and Australia – unveiled last week known as AUKUS – is but the latest provocation.

Unlikely as it might seem, Bannon and the Guo scammers and a host of know-nothing, bigoted Republican politicians and pundits are fueling public acceptance of Biden’s warmongering towards China.

Speaking in early 2020, Steve Bannon asserted that the information age makes us less curious, and less willing to consider worldviews unlike our own. Digital content intentionally is served up to us, algorithmically, so that with the ensuing cascade of likeminded-content, we ‘dig-in’ – rather than ‘open up’. Anyone who wants to – of course – can find alternative viewpoints online, but very few do.

Because of this trait, the notion of politics by argument or consensus is almost entirely lost. And no matter what our political or cultural perspective, there is always someone creating content tailored to suit us – as self-stratifying consumers.

This – the magnetism of like-minded content – represented the psychic ‘quirk’ that made the tech oligarchs into billionaires. For Bannon however, the significance was different: Yes, it was becoming obvious that persuasion and argument were not significant in shifting the allegiance of the marginal voter. But what could shift it (Bannon’s key insight), was not to read meta-data for its trends (as advertisers did), but rather, to invert the whole process: To read up from the stratified data, to craft specially-conceived, like-minded messaging to readers that would trigger (i.e. ‘nudge’) an unconscious psychic response – one that potentially could be led in a particular political orientation.

This meant, in Bannon’s view, that the Trump campaign, and politics generally, henceforth must be centred around mobilisation politics, rather than persuasion.

Bannon never claimed this as a new insight (tagging its initial appearance to 2008 with the Democrats), but his contribution lay with the notion of reverse engineering the Big Tech model for political ends. The particular salience of this insight however, lay with a concomitant development that was then materialising:

Christopher Lasch’s prescient 1994 The Revolt of the Élites, was distilling into reality. Lasch had predicted a social revolution that would be pushed forward by the radical children of the bourgeoisie. Their demands would be centred on utopian ideals – diversity and racial justice. One of Lasch’s key insights was how future young American Marxisants would substitute culture war for class war. This culture war would become the Big Divide.

And for Bannon (as for Trump), “A culture war – is war”, as he told the Times. “And, there are casualties in war”.

The politics of mobilisation was here to stay – and now it is ‘everywhere’. The point here is that the mechanics of mobilisation politics is being projected abroad – into American ‘foreign policy’ (so-called).

Just as in the domestic arena, where the notion of politics by suasion is being lost, so the notion of foreign policy managed through argument, or diplomacy, is being lost too.

Foreign policy then becomes less about geo-strategy, but rather, its ‘big issues’ such as China, Russia or Iran, are given an emotional ‘charge’ to mobilise their ‘troops’ in this domestic cultural war – so as to ‘nudge’ domestic American psyches (and those of their allies) either to be mobilised behind some issue (such as more protectionism for business), or alternatively, imagined darkly to delegitimise an opposition; or to justify failures. This is a highly risky game, for it forces a resistance stance on those targeted states – whether they seek it, or not.

This shift to seeing foreign states in this psychic way forces those states respond. And it is not just to America’s rivals that this applies – it applies to Europe too.

Peter Pomerantsev, in his book, This is not Propaganda, gives one example of how an ‘emotional charge’ (in this case anxiety) can be created. As a researcher at LSE, he created a series of Facebook groups for Filipinos to discuss events in their communities. Once the groups got big enough—about 100,000 members—he began posting local crime stories, and instructed his interns to leave comments falsely tying the grisly headlines to drug cartels.

The Facebook pages suddenly lit up with frightened chatter. Rumours swirled; conspiracy theories metastasized. To many, all crimes became drug crimes. (Unbeknownst to their members, the Facebook groups were designed to boost Rodrigo Duterte, then a long-shot, presidential candidate running on a pledge to brutally crack down on drug criminals).

Behavioural and ‘nudge psychology’ in today’s politics are proliferating. Reportedly, Britain’s own ‘behavioural’ experts advised PM Johnson that his Coronavirus policies were in danger of failing because Britons were not ‘frightened enough’ of Covid. The remedy was self-evident. Indeed, much of western pandemic and lockdown anxiety strategies may be seen as behavioural ‘nudging’ towards a planned, wide ranging Re-set – in parallel to the virus.

Central to this technique is the use of micro-targeting: The process of slicing up the electorate into stratified niches, and using “covert psychological strategies” to manipulate the public’s behaviour was pioneered in large part by Cambridge Analytica. The firm began as part of a nonpartisan military contractor that used digital psyops to thwart jihadist recruitment efforts. But as MacKay Coppins writes, it then metamorphosed:

“The emphasis shifted once the conservative billionaire Robert Mercer became a major investor and installed Steve Bannon as his point man. Using a massive trove of data it had gathered from Facebook … Cambridge Analytica worked to develop detailed psychographic profiles for every voter in the U.S., and began experimenting with ways to [psychologically nudge voters in one, or other, particular direction]. In one exercise, the firm asked white men whether they would approve of their daughter marrying a Mexican immigrant: Those who said ‘yes’ were [then] asked a follow-up question designed to provoke irritation at the constraints of [woke] political correctness: “Did you feel like you had to say that?”.

“Christopher Wylie, who was the director of research at Cambridge Analytica, said that “with the right kind of nudges,” people who exhibited certain psychological characteristics could be pushed into ever more extreme beliefs and conspiratorial thinking. “Rather than using data to interfere with the process of radicalization, Steve Bannon was able to invert that,” Wylie said. “We were essentially seeding an insurgency in the United States.”

Both Bannon and Andrew Breitbart had been startled earlier by the real populist power that they witnessed in the Tea Party. The latter had emerged in response to the 2008 Financial Crisis, as Tea Party members saw ordinary Americans having to pay to clean up the mess, whilst its perpetrators went away, further enriched: “[The Tea Party] was something totally different. This wasn’t… this was not standard Republican Party. This was a whole new deal. You had the—you had the—you had the huge Tea Party revolt in 2010, in which we won 62 seats. The Republican Party didn’t see that coming”, Bannon said.

“The inability of the Republican Party to connect with working-class voters was the single biggest reason that they were not winning.” And that’s what Bannon told Trump: We take ‘trade’ from being number 100, right? It’s not [now] an issue. The whole Republican Party’s got this fetish on free trade—they’re like automatons, “Oh, free trade, free trade, free trade”—which is a radical idea, particularly when you’re against a mercantilist opponent like China.

“So we’re going to take trade from being number 100, to number two, and we’re going to take immigration, which is number three to being number one [in terms of Americans’ priorities]. And it will be focused on workers, right? And we’re going to remake the Republican Party”.

And so to the second point about the use of psychological strategies that operate below their level of awareness: From the outset, they were intended to blow apart the Republican Establishment. They were intended to be explosive and transgressive. Bannon illustrates from a key Trump’s campaign speech: “He starts [on the] immigration part and trade, which nobody’s ever talked about – but then he starts doing the over-the-top stuff, and I go: “You watch. They’re going to bite hard. And they’re going to bite hard; and blow this up.”

“I’m sitting there watching this thing on TV. When he starts talking about the Mexican rapists and everything like that, I go, “Oh, my God.” I said, “This is—” I said: “He’s just buried—they’re going to go nuts. CNN is literally going to broadcast 24 hours a day.” By that—he goes to Iowa, I think, that night. It’s all they talk about. He goes from number seven. He’s at one, and never looks back”.

In the next-day’s polling, Trump has gone to number ‘one’. Very transgressive, very edgy and polarising. That was its intent. As Bannon said: In war there are casualties.

Of course, Bannon was well aware (he came from Goldman Sachs) that precisely it was American Corporations that off-shored manufacturing jobs in the 1980s to Asia in search of hiked profit margins (i.e. not China’s doing). And it was always the U.S. Chambers of Commerce who were advocating higher immigration, in order to squeeze down U.S. labour costs. But all this background was material insufficiently combustible for winning an all-out culture war. It was too nuanced: No, China ‘wants to culturally overwhelm America, and to dominate – the world. It stole your jobs’: It gave us Covid. Suddenly, Red America is ‘lit up’ with anxious chatter. It still is.

Democrats worried about the trend were looking to other countries for lessons in how to counter the mobilisation trend. One example was Indonesia, which cracked down after a wave of viral narratives led to the defeat of a popular candidate for governor in 2016. To prevent a similar disruption happening again, a coalition of journalists from more than two dozen top Indonesian news outlets worked together to identify and debunk ‘hoaxes’ before they gained traction online.

It sounded a promising model. One that was much in evidence after the 3 November Time Magazine’s article The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election, highlights how the Shadow Campaign, “successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation; and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears”.

Today, Biden says, that he intends for his triple expenditure bills to change America, “forever”. Ultimately, his Administration’s intent is to ‘decolonise’ America from white primacy – and by inverting the power paradigm – to place it, rather, in the hands of their victims. It is about deep structural, political and economic changes that are far more radical than most appreciate. The comparison is made with national consensus for transformational change of the kind that the American people fostered with their votes in 1932 and 1980.

Today there is not the mandate for transformation that existed in in 1932 or 1980. To achieve the domestic agenda is ‘everything’: It would represent a decisive ‘win’ in the American cultural war. The Biden Circle’s foreign policy agenda is secondary – It’s prime objective is to forestage ‘toughness’; to allow no ‘chink’ through which the GOP can gain enough support in 2022 to shift the razor-thin balances in Congress, through portraying Biden as an appeaser, and weak.

The Democrats still have a neuralgic fear of the GOP outbidding them on ‘America’s Security’. Historically, a strategy of foreign foes and heightened public anxiety has consolidated public support behind a leader.

Russia, China, Iran – they are but ‘images’ prized mainly for their potential for being loaded with ‘nudge’ emotional-charge in this western cultural war – of which these states are no part. They can only stand steadfast, and warn against trespass beyond given ‘red lines’. This, they have done. But will transgressive, mobilisation politics be able to understand that this stance is not some same-ilk counter-mobilisation, and that ‘red lines’ may be ‘red lines’ literally?

In late January 2021, NATO think tank, The Atlantic Council, published a paper termed, The Longer Telegram, which sets out a proposed strategy for the United States to achieve domination of the world, a strategy which focuses on China as the main obstacle to that domination, with Russia now considered an “irritant.” It is the fantasy of megalomaniacs who sit in dark rooms dreaming of world power and achieving it using any means necessary, including world war.

It is in essence a propaganda document designed to not only proclaim a new world war, the American war against China, but to try to justify this war. It describes a China that does not exist except in the fantasies of these right wing ideologues. The insults litter every page; against President Xi, against the Communist Party, against Chinese culture and achievements. It‘s secondary purpose of course is to try to create unrest and division within China, to weaken it, to bring down socialism, to bring down Chinafor it claims to know things, to reveal things. Almost written as a script in a drama but in essence is a criminal document written by criminals and fools.

The title of the document is a reference to a document known as The Long Telegram, written by U.S. foreign policy advisor, George Kennan, in 1946 setting out a strategy to destroy the Soviet Union, a strategy that was followed. So it has to be assumed that the author or authors of this document expect it to become the strategy adopted by the Biden regime and, indeed, we have seen a lot of discussion of this document in the western media and political circles, mainly in approval, indicating it is being considered in high circles, and we have also seen with the first pronouncements of President Biden that American aggression will continue and will be intensified.

The mystery for many is who wrote the document as it was signed by Anonymous. It may be have a single author but the word “anonymous” could be a mask for a committee, or it could have been written by Biden’s new Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. Whoever the author is, it clearly has the approval of the Atlantic Council, and therefore NATO and the NATO governments. However, several other names have been suggested in its drafting; including the usual anti-China suspects, Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, and Steve Bannon.

Why are those names considered as possibilities? Blinken, and the Obama team, who began the “pivot to Asia” are obvious candidates. But Mike Pompeo, as former head of the CIA, and Trump’s Secretary of State, is a possibility because of his positions of great power and influence. His anti-China rhetoric is notorious. John Bolton is a possibility for the same reasons, a series of high posts, a man of influence on the right, who has held positions in in the U.S. no matter which party holds the presidency, who is only able to think in terms of domination and war and who holds strong views against China and the Communist Party.

Then there is Steve Bannon, one of the loudest of the anti-China hawks in the United States today, whose constant propaganda against China and socialism is designed to create general hostility towards China. Since he is out of power now he is less likely to be involved directly. But his propaganda internet and radio programme is rabidly anti-Chinese, and supports the views expressed in the Longer Telegram.

Of him less is known, but he is worth examining to understand the workings of the American propaganda system. He is a figure coming out of the shadows, rising through a series of steps from U.S. Navy officer and assistant to the Chief of U.S. Naval Operations, to Goldman Sachs banker, to Hollywood producer, to friend of the wealthy, radio host, to advisor to President Trump, to member of the National Security Council, who now continues his anti-Chinese propaganda on his TV and radio show, tellingly called War Room, which he co-hosts with British far right personality Raheem Kassam. Kassam among other things, was advisor to Nigel Farage of the British Independence Party and before that worked for the far right Henry Jackson Society in London which has the objective of spreading capitalism everywhere and which targets Russia and China as “dangers to democracy.”

On his War Room programme of February 11, Bannon repeated his big lie that the covid-9 virus is from a Chinese PLA laboratory in Wuhan despite the fact the WHO confirmed it was highly unlikely and said its origins elsewhere must be investigated. In that programme Bannon pretended to interview a Chinese woman, not named, except by the code name TCC, who claims she is a doctor with inside knowledge of China who supported Bannon’s claim that it is a “bioweapon.” This is the type of propaganda that is being fed to the American people and others constantly by Bannon and his crew, propaganda designed to raise fear and hatred of China and directly accusing China of making an attack on the United States. The clear objective is to push the U.S. government to go to war with China.

Where Bannon gets the money to run his operation is also a question. Some of it is said to come from royalties from reruns of the American comedy show Seinfeld, in which he had invested in 1990 but he also has very close ties to Guo Wengui, aka Miles Kwok, a Chinese billionaire who fled China when he was charged with corruption, bribery and fraud and has since been a constant propagandist against China and the Communist Party. He and Bannon became involved a company called GTV Media Group which they founded in 2020. The two men are being investigated for fraud in a scheme that saw 300 million dollars vanish from the pockets of investors and are also being investigated for fraud and mail fraud for their role in a Go Fund me campaign to fund the Trump wall at the Mexican Border. It is alleged people gave money to be used for the wall but it was siphoned off by Bannon and Guo for their personal use. It was for these crimes that Bannon was pardoned by Trump so he can never be held accountable for his fraud except in civil lawsuits.

Bannon claims he is driven by ideology, by concerns for democracy. But news service Axios revealed in October 2019 that after Bannon left the White House he was given a contract by Guo to provide “consulting services” for which, in 2018-19, he was paid one million dollars. The man who pays the piper calls the tune.

Working for foreign money is nothing strange to Bannon who now claims to be an “anti-globalist.” He began his financial career at Goldman Sachs, one of the big global investment banks, involved in mergers and acquisitions. Then, when he found he could make more money on his own he formed his own investment company in 1990, Bannon and Company, which he used to take advantage of the expansion of the U.S. film industry globally. Unable to raise sufficient funds for investments in intellectual properties like film royalties he partnered with the Japanese investment bank, Nissho Iwai, which gave him millions of dollars over five years.

Relying on foreign money became his modus operandi. He once stated, “our forte was working with American companies to work with foreign investors.” It was through his dealings in California that he acquired shares in the “Seinfeld” TV series that has reaped him large profits. In 1996, after the Japanese deal expired he linked up with the French investment bank, Societe General and at the same time he also had an investment deal with Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, a nephew of the Saudi king, who was head of the United Saudi Commercial Bank who he helped to obtain investments in the Hollywood movie business. It is at this time that he becomes involved with Donald Trump, buying Trump’s yacht in 1991, he claimed “to bail Trump out” and in 1995, when he and a Singapore investor acquired the Plaza Hotel in New York.

He claims he turned further to the right as a result of the 2008 financial crisis, and then began supporting films about America’s decline, supported the right wing Tea Party movement and then joined Bretibart Media in 2012 owned by the billionaire Mercer family and used his internet programme to support Trump’s candidacy for president. When Trump was elected he was made a member of the National Security Council. Bannon was one of those who pushed Trump to abandon the Pars Climate Agreement, and to impose a travel ban on Muslims into the USA, an action that angered his Saudi friends.

After conflicts arose in the White House, Bannon was forced out, to return to Breitbart. But some of his statements and racist views led to even right-wing heiress, Rebekkah Mercer, who owned part of Breitbart, to force him off his radio show which resulted in his consolidating his connections with Guo, taking his money and starting his own programme.

The dark web of American propaganda is made up of many facets, some of them official government propaganda agencies such as Voice of America, the CIA, NED and so on, as well as the private media controlled by people with the same thinking or by direct influence from the intelligence agencies. Bannon is an example of the sleazy characters that populate this shadowy world, who move between the government and the private spheres, almost seamlessly. They are opportunists who think they can make a buck by creating propaganda against foreign nations and peoples and cashing in.

They claim to be concerned about “democracy” and “human rights” but they are really only concerned with their lining their own pockets, and they don’t care how they do it. For them, lying is their business. ”

With the financial support of Mercer Family Foundation far-right heiress financier Rebekah Mercer, exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, U.S.-based Falun Gong cult leader Li Hongzhi, and the Dignitatis Humanae Institute, which is associated with the fascist Opus Dei Roman Catholic sect, Donald Trump’s sporadic political adviser, Steve Bannon, has implemented a multi-pronged approach to enabling fascist control of governments around the world. Bannon’s ideological approach to furthering fascism globally can be called “Bannonism.”

Bannon and his fascist political allies around the world have embarked on a project that seeks to take over existing major political parties of the traditional conservative slant and transform them into fascist parties. What has occurred with the U.S. Republican Party with it becoming a far-right cult of personality organization beholden to Trump is a case in point. Bannon and his allies hope to achieve the same results with the British Conservative Party and the Conservative Party of Canada.

Another tactic employed by the fascist is to create or dominate existing parties of the far-right and achieve initial representation in provincial or regional parliaments, councils, or legislatures. After gaining seats in legislatures with devolved political powers, the fascist parties can use their local power to aim for legislative seats at the national level, or, as in the case of the European Parliament, at the supranational level. An examples of this tactic includes the creation of the Brexit Party in Britain by Bannon and Trump ally and founder of the anti-European Union UK Independence Party (UKIP), Nigel Farage, the modern-day Oswald Mosley of British politics. Mosley was the leader of the British Union of Fascists prior to World War II. His politics, like those of Farage, originated within the British Conservative Party. The British Tories, which also launched the career of racist politician Enoch Powell, have served as a well-spring for nurturing fascism. Farage and UKIP went on to commandeer a majority of the UK’s seats in the European Parliament. Farage now hopes that his far-right Brexit Party can have the same success with the British Parliament. Bannon appreciates the role of the Tories have played in fostering far-right political leaders and he is taking full advantage of the fact that Tory Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government is the most far-right of any recent British Conservative government.

Bannon understands that making alliances with small far-right extremist political parties can pay off handsome dividends with patience and a healthy degree of financial support. The Nazis saw dismal election results when they first began to contest elections in Weimar Germany in the 1920s. They polled just 3 percent of the vote in the national election for the Reichstag in 1924. Their vote share fell to 2.6 percent in 1928, and they won a mere 12 seats out of 491 in the Reichstag. The Nazis fared no better in state elections. They saw 2.4 percent in East Prussia in 1928. In Bavaria, where the Nazi coup attempt failed in 1923, the Nazis inched up with 6.1 percent of the vote in the state election and 9 seats in the Bavarian Landtag. But patience and increased party funding from wealthy German industrialists, no different than the Mercers and the Koch family in the United States, paid off. In 1932, the Nazis won 36 percent of the vote for the East Prussian Landtag and 162 seats. That victory was followed by a Nazi coup that ousted the East Prussian government. In July 1932, the Nazis garnered 32.5 percent of the national vote for the Reichstag and 43 seats, which they were to use as leverage form a government the following year. Once Hitler became chancellor, the Weimar Republic – democratic Germany – was doomed.

One of Bannon’s staunchest fascist allies, Matteo Salvini, saw his far-right Northern League, which advocates independence for northern Italy, achieve major success in winning 29 out of 80 seats in the Regional Council of Lombardy. Salvini even entered a national coalition government consisting of his League and the Five Star Movement as the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Interior. Salvini’s rapid rise in Italian politics made him a valuable ally for Bannon, who has established a secretariat for a de facto “Fascist International,” known as “The Movement,” in Brussels. Salvini, to Bannon’s delight, established close links with two other far-right European leaders, National Rally chief Marine Le Pen in France and Freedom Party leader Geert Wilders in the Netherlands.

Salvini’s political strength in Italy, stemming from his co-option of the Northern League, originally a fringe party in northern Italian politics, is what Bannon, a student of fascist takeovers in Italy and Germany, hopes to achieve in other countries. With Salvini’s support and that of other Italian far-right leaders, Bannon has ominously attempted to create a fascist academy to train a new generation of political leaders at the 13^th century Trisulti monastery on the slopes of Monte Rotonaria in central Italy. Although the Vatican, Pope Francis I, and the current Italian government have opposed Bannon’s plans, the nation that launched the fascist dictatorship of Benito Mussolini is seen by those like Bannon, Salvini, Farage, and others as a natural birthplace for a renewed international fascist movement.

These developments directly impact on the United States. The fascist co-option of the U.S. Republican Party has ensured that the opposition pro-democracy Democratic Party has been relegated to very weak minority status in some state legislatures around the country, particularly in the South and the West. Bannon and his fascist associates believe that takeovers of existing parties in certain other countries can achieve the same type of success. One of Bannon’s closest foreign associates, Brazil’s far-right neo-fascist Mussolini- and Adolf Hitler-admiring president, Jair Bolsonaro, worked his way into the presidency by joining the electoral slates of small far-right fringe parties, including the ill-named Brazilian Progressive Party, the Social Christian Party, and another inaptly named party, the Social Liberal Party. Bannon has provided political consulting not only to President Bolsonaro, but also to his three politician sons, all having higher ambitions beyond federal Senate and Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo municipal politics.

The Bolsonaros would have never been a serious factor in Brazilian politics had it not been for the strong support they receive from Brazil’s right-wing Christian nationalist evangelical community, which is steadily supplanting the traditional political influence of the Roman catholic Church across the nation. Christian nationalists are serving as a convenient vehicle for right-wing extremists to gain political power, from the U.S. state of South Carolina, where they dominate politics to the remote Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic, where a far-right Christian extremist currently serves as foreign minister.

It is now very apparent that Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Party march on Rome in October 1922 served as the inspiration for the march on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Mussolini’s march was not taken seriously by either Prime Minister Luigi Facta or King Victor Emmanuel III. On October 28, 1922, after Mussolini besieged the Italian government with some 25,000 Blackshirt militia supporters, the King handed over the reins of government to Mussolini and his fascists. By 1925, Italy was a fascist dictatorship. The Parliament was dissolved and replaced by the “Chamber of Fasces and Corporations.” It is clear that the January 6 American coup plotters intended to replace the U.S. Congress with a rump parliament consisting of only Trump supporters. With the elimination of much of the Congressional leadership through assassination, the January 6 coup marchers and internal Republican enablers at the White House and in Congress would have ensured the rejection of the 2020 electoral victory of Joe Biden and declared Donald Trump the winner. Such an act would have ushered into being an American fascist dictatorship using the example set by Mussolini in Rome in 1922.

Although Prime Minister Facta declared a “state of siege” in Rome as the Blackshirt militias marched on the city in October 1922, the King refused to sign the order to deploy the military to quell the Fascist insurrection. Similarly, neither acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller nor Joint Chiefs staff director, Lt. General Charles Flynn, the brother of Trump’s former national security adviser, retired Lt. General Michael Flynn, ordered the National Guard to protect the U.S. Capitol from attack. In November of last year, Michael Flynn called for Trump to declare martial law and order the military to conduct new elections in the “battleground” states that Trump lost to Biden. The fact that there have been sieges by pro-Trump fascists, similar to the U.S. Capitol attack, on the state capitol buildings in Michigan, Georgia, Oregon, and Washington state are a clear indication that the Mussolini example will continue to be followed by fascist forces everywhere. In February 2020, the Trump-friendly president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, entered the Legislative Assembly with armed police and soldiers in what was called an attempted coup. The fascists have the stage for similar anti-parliamentary actions everywhere.

It should be noted that Mussolini’s successful march on Rome in 1922 was followed the next year by a march by Adolf Hitler and his Nazi supporters in Munich, the capital of Bavaria. Hitler hoped to repeat the success of Mussolini in laying siege to the Bavarian government and overthrowing it in a “Beer Hall Putsch,” or coup d’etat. Unlike the situation in Rome, Bavarian troops opened fire on the vastly outnumbered 2000 Nazis, killing 16 of them. Hitler was given a lenient prison sentence for his role in the march and putsch attempt. When Hitler and his colleagues were freed from prison, they were more dangerous than ever, having garnered sympathy from some of the conservative-leaning members of the German electorate. This should be kept in mind by juries and judges handling the criminal cases of hundreds of Trump supporters arrested for their role in the U.S. Capitol attempted putsch. The granting of bail to some of the accused Capitol coup plotters is setting the stage for significant problems in the near future.

The playbook for the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol was the October 1922 insurrection of Mussolini’s fascists in Rome, albeit with two different outcomes. Bannon has been serving as Trump’s resident ideological fascism chief since joining the ex-president’s campaign in 2016. In many respects, Bannon has been for Trump what Nazi ideological chief Alfred Rosenberg was to Adolf Hitler. Rosenberg promoted Nazi ideology to not only nations under German occupation but to countries around the world, including the United States, where a pro-fascist first-generation German-American, Fred Trump, Sr., became enamored of fascist and racist beliefs in his hometown of New York City. Bannon’s promotion of fascism goes back to at least his time as editor for the far-right Breitbart News, a media operation funded by Rebekah Mercer and her father. Today, Mercer money has supported the far-right social media platform Parler.

United Nations Secretary António Guterres recently told the UN Human Rights Council that the threat posed by global neo-Nazis and white supremacists have been “cheered on by people in positions of responsibility in ways that were considered unimaginable not long ago.” Guterres added, “We need global coordinated action to defeat this grave and growing danger.” He is correct.

The sooner the nations of the world awake to the clear and present transnational threat posed by fascists abusing electoral systems to gain dictatorial power, the possibility of a repeat of the fascist rise to power during the 1920s and 1930s can be snuffed out – now and far into the future and, hopefully, permanently.

From 1920 to 1945, the formal name of the German Nazi Party was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, abbreviated NSDAP in German. Despite its name, there was nothing even remotely “socialist” or “workers” related about the Nazi Party. Its very foundation was t o combat the influence of labor unions, particularly those closely-linked to the Socialists or Communists. Socialist ideology, whether it was of the social democratic or Marxist -Leninist version, was anathema to Nazi policy. Therefore, it was the height of hypocrisy that the Nazis, with their financial backing from Germany’s leading industrialists – Krupp, Thyssen, and Opel, to name a few – would appropriate the terms socialist and workers for their own designs. When “socialist” was added to the “National German Workers’ Party” in 1920, in a jaded attempt to appeal to lower middle class left-wing laborers, Adolf Hitler vehemently objected. The term “socialist” within the official name of the Nazi Party was more of a mockery of socialism than anything else.

Today, there are elements within the Donald Trump wing of the Republican Party desiring to rebrand the party as a “Republican Workers’ Party.” There are indications that Trump supports these efforts. Trump, who eschews books or any other reading material for that matter, is known to have once kept a book of Hitler’s speeches at his bedside. Trump is, therefore, keenly aware of the success the Nazis in Germany had in appealing to labor ranks to support its cause. However, just as the Nazis had no commitment to labor, the Republican Party has never supported the workers. It is and always has been a party representing the moneyed classes. Republicans serve the interests of Wall Street, not Main Street. Trump, more than anyone, knows this. In his four years as president, not one of Trump’s policies helped the workers of America, particularly those represented by organized labor.

Just as with the Nazis between the two World Wars, there is a coordinated global effort to re-brand far-right political parties as being friendly to and supportive of the working class. However, the financing for such re-branding emanates largely from billionaires, who have no interest in the working class. This is merely an effort to expand political power through running division and deception operations in electoral campaigns around the world. Those financing this disinformation program include the hedge fund father-daughter team of Robert and Rebekah Mercer, fugitive Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, and billionaire industrialist Charles Koch. Former and, reportedly, current Trump strategist Steve Bannon has received funding from the Mercers and Guo to organize an international fascist movement of political parties, many with deceptive names.

Bannon’s fascist international, which is based in Brussels and called “The Movement,” has, in addition to the Republican Party in the United States, targeted parties in Brazil, where Bannon is close to far-right President Jair Bolsonaro and his politician sons. In 2018, Bolsonaro, who has praised Hitler and Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini, ran on the presidential ticket of the Social Liberal Party (PSL). One might believe that such a party would be socially liberal. They would be dead wrong. The PSL is as far-right as Bolsonaro and opposes equal rights for women and supports Brazil’s past military dictatorship. One faction wants to restore Brazil’s emperor and become a monarchy. Likewise, there is nothing “progressive” about the Brazilian Progressive Party – the Progressistas. The party is right wing and embraces Brazilian nationalism, which are Hardly progressive virtues.

The false branding of Brazilian political parties is made to order for fascists like Bannon, his financial benefactors, and the Bolsonaro family. Another example of false political advertising is the Brazilian Labor Party, which, far from embracing labor or workers’ rights, believes in fiscal conservatism, laissez-faire business policies, and social conservatism. Likewise, the Brazilian Labor Renewal Party is about as far from supporting labor as possible. It is pro-Bolsonaro and prone to advancing conspiracies that are also promoted by neo-Nazis. The Party of the Brazilian Women might be confused as a women’s rights party. They are not. They are anti-feminist and believe in paternalistic oligarchy and social conservatism.

A similar confusing situation exists in Colombia. The ruling Democratic Center party is neither democratic nor centrist. It is the party of current far-right President Ivan Duque and his mentor, former President Alvaro Uribe. The Democratic Center represents Colombia’s oligarchs and the interests of the Medellin drug cartel. Likewise, there is nothing “radical,” in the standard political definition, about the Radical Change Party. It is right-wing and supports both Duque and Uribe.

Around the world, the placement of the word “Christian” in a party’s title does not mean that it is committed to Christian teachings of tolerance and equality. Aside from Christian Democratic parties, far-right parties use “Christian” to entrap the politically gullible. Alliance C-Christians for Germany (Bündnis C) unconditionally supports Israel while it debases the United Nations, public education, and abortions. Similarly, political Islamic parties use the word “democratic” in their titles even though their 13^th century platforms, inclusive of arcane sharia law, are far from democratic.

Deceptive political party names and the confusion they cause are not limited to Latin America. Voters in California have erroneously registered to vote as “Independents” by mistakenly registering under the “American Independent Party,” which has appeared on California ballots since 1968 when Alabama Governor George Wallace ran on the party’s ticket as a third-party presidential candidate. Wallace subsequently abandoned the upstart party and returned to the Democratic Party fold four years later. However, the American Independent Party lived on in California, where it served as a political umbrella for several far-right candidates, some tied to neo-Nazis. During the 2016 presidential race, after an upsurge in party registrations by voters who believed they were registering as generic independents, the American Independent Party falsely claimed that it was the “Fastest Growing Political Party in California.”

Bannon’s “Movement” in Brussels is headquartered at the same address used by Mischaël Modrikamen, the leader of a defunct far-right political party that was mis-named the “Popular Party.” In Ukraine, “People’s Front” is used by a decidedly right-wing party that has menacingly organized a military branch. The words “popular” or “people’s” have traditionally been associated with left-wing and progressive broad fronts going back to the Popular Front of President Salvador Allende of Chile and, before that, of Socialist-Communist Popular Front coalition governments of the Spanish Second Republic of 1936 and pre-World War II France. The pre-war Popular Fronts in Spain and France, as well as those in other countries, including Germany and Great Britain, failed because of the perfidious attitude of Trotskyists, who were more than willing to disrupt anti-fascist Popular Fronts, even if they gave way to fascist victories. Today, there are ample examples of Trotskyists cooperating with neo-fascists against established parties of the left. That is why Bannon has, on occasion, expressed his admiration for “Marxist-Leninists.” It is nothing more than a power play to entice confused “populists” of the left, particularly the “Bernie or Bust” supporters of Vermont Independent Socialist U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, who has never been a member of the Democratic Party, although he caucuses with them in the Senate.

As Trump, Bannon, and others seek to re-brand the Republican Party, they will not only be reaching out to die-hard Sanders supporters, who falsely contend that the Democratic Party twice cheated their candidate from the presidential nomination, but also to blue collar workers in the rust belt who have been taken in by Trump’s nationalistic rhetoric on international trade and U.S. industrial decline.

Around the world, political parties and movements, as well as the media, should remain vigilant against the far-right, which continues to misappropriate the historical and traditional names of the parties of labor, the popular masses, equality, and progressivism.

Lying at the heart of the increasingly discredited ideology of Trumpism is the bankrupt politics of libertarianism. Like the old joke about the dog chasing the car and finally catching up with it, the seething crew of armed and deranged Donald Trump supporters who managed to temporarily seize control of the upper and lower chambers of the U.S. Congress on January 6 were unsure of what to do with their briefly captured prize. Some decided to rifle through Senate desks in search of some holy grail of secret documents. Others were content with snatching laptop computers from offices. A few felt encumbered to aim canisters of destructive caustic bear spray at priceless oil paintings of Presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams.

Libertarians have as some of their heroes some of the most deranged economists, philosophers, and politicians in recent history. At the top of that list of deplorables is sociopathic writer and godmother of modern libertarianism Ayn Rand. A critic of programs she deemed “socialist,” including President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Social Security system and President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Medicare, she did not hesitate to avail herself of both “socialistic” federal programs in the 1970s. During the 1973 Israeli-Arab War, Rand said that the war involved “civilized men,” Israelis, fighting “savages,” the Arab nations. Rand also justified European colonialists seizing the land of the indigenous native peoples of the Western Hemisphere. Even though Rand was a supreme hypocrite and racist, her vile beliefs seeped into the Republican Party’s “libertarian” wing, partially represented by Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater and President Ronald Reagan, and which later developed into the Tea Party movement and Trumpism.

The Libertarian Party of the United States represents nothing more than parlor room discourse by major political party rejects. Libertarians have only achieved political power by nesting themselves inside established political parties having a record of electoral success and governance. This has been the case with Trump, disgraced House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich, Pat Buchanan, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, and Paul’s father, Ron Paul, the latter having quixotically run for President on the Libertarian Party ticket in 1988, before becoming a Republican and being elected to the U.S. House from Texas. Paul became one of the ideological leaders of the anti-government Tea Party movement. Paul and other Republican leaders embraced the laissez-faire economic doctrines of such anti-government and pro-corporate economists as Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises, Charles Murray, and economist, Milton Friedman. This resulted in increasingly rightward-leaning anti-labor policies by the administrations of George W. Bush and Trump. While Paul and his son, Senator Paul, have nothing but hostility for the social democratic-inspired government services provided in the Nordic nations, Germany, and Canada, they have no problems with governments like those of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, and Britain’s Boris Johnson that embrace the corporate fascist policies of Friedman and the Austrian School economists Hayek and von Mises.

Libertarian opposition to labor rights, public health, and environmental controls has resulted in poverty-level wages, the spread of disease – including the present Covid virus – and poisonous air and water.

Libertarians and the U.S. “militias” who support them through threats to public safety and armed insurrection constantly wail against government. They are also the first to demand government services after they lose their jobs or see their homes and communities devastated by hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes. Libertarian politicians hate government but have offered nothing even halfway feasible to replace it. Representative government has been humankind’s best endeavor for the common health, welfare, and security of the people since the days of democratic Athens, the Roman Republic, and the Althing of the Icelandic Commonwealth.

Governments that represent the people who install them into power are also subject to demands for change. In 1970, Cabinets around the world included traditional portfolios of foreign affairs, defense, justice, finance, labor, agriculture, commerce, education, home affairs or interior, posts and telecommunications, health, and housing. Positions such as ministries of housing and health were relatively new in many countries. In the United States, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare was established in 1953 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican. It was first proposed in 1923 by President Warren G. Harding, another Republican. Neither Eisenhower nor Harding would recognize the Republican Party of today, with is infiltrated at the highest levels by anti-government libertarians or every stripe, from “flat Earth” conspiracy types to Ayn Rand followers.

When one examines Cabinet-level ministries of today it is clear that governments around the world responded to general and more specific needs of the people. There are ministries for the environment, infrastructure and web connectivity, mental health, addictions, and well-being, cyber safety, indigenous peoples, early child learning, innovation and better regulation, suburban rail services, veterans’ services, disability services, family violence and women, child protection, seniors and aging, multi-cultural affairs, medical services, national unity, climate change, sustainable development, disaster management, workplace safety, the arts, and homelessness. Libertarians argue all of this represents “big government.” They are dead wrong. Expansion of government services to meet modern challenges and serve the people is responsible government, not big government. Those who argue otherwise display their selfishness and cruelty in ignoring the needs and pleas of those who require assistance to equally enjoy the fruits of responsive government and society.

Trump insurrectionists may have temporarily damaged and destroyed the chambers of the U.S. Capitol but that stands in stark contrast to the possible permanent damage Trump officials wrought against federal government departments and agencies over four years of libertarian-driven policies.

Trump’s last-minute full pardon granted to his one-time chief strategist and campaign manager Steve Bannon sends a signal to all of Bannon’s fellow fascists around the world that Bannon and his embryonic “Fascist International” are back in business. Bannon’s poisonous focus of “killing off the administrative state” has not only found a home in the U.S. Republican Party but also the Libertarian, Direct, Democratic (LDD) of Flemish Senator Jean-Marie Dedecker and the Wallonian People’s Party of Mischaël Modrikamen, the latter being a co-founder of Bannon’s Brussels-based global fascist organization called “The Movement.” Other Bannon-inspired right-wing libertarian parties include the People’s Party of Canada, which split from the Conservative Party as a far-right and anti-government alternative party; the Go Tax Evaders! Party of Italy; the Capitalist Party of South Africa; and the anti-taxation 5.10 party in Ukraine. The foolhardiness of the libertarian agenda contributed to the collapse of libertarian parties in Argentina, the Canadian Province of Manitoba, France, New Zealand, and Poland. Far from being a clever strategist, Bannon is a pursuer of lost causes, as libertarianism has, time after time, been shown to be a fraud.

Libertarianism for many of its backers is a means to an end. Promoters of this lost political cause are more interested in pushing dubious gold and silver investments, Ponzi scheme operations and similar pyramid schemes, fraudulent medical cures and devices, and bogus ventures for real estate and “pump and dump” stocks.

It has been under governments committed to serving the needs of the people that the world has seen the advancement of public health, social security, reliable transportation services, and civil rights protections for minorities. Libertarianism offers the world nothing more than greed and selfishness.

This is not the first time that Trump has been blind-sided by a seismic news event. But it gives us a reminder that if he had any advisers on policy when he took office, that we now have a president in the Oval Office who believes he has learnt the ropes and doesn’t listen to anyone in the White House, doesn’t read memos and whose only contact with the outside world is via Fox news.

Trump has, single-handedly destroyed relations with China, empowered the North Korean leader, brought much more war in a troubled Middle East which he has succeeded in dividing further, brought relations with Europe to an all-time low and has made America a Goon Show on the world stage – so much so that even old allies are refusing to share intel with a man whose startling obsession with his own re-election surpasses everything else.

The Trump period is marked by satire or black humour. And yet it is real. Is it not The Truman Show nor The Onion.

But as we put down another completely nuts news report of Trump claiming that he wanted to have Assad assassinated – ho ho ho – (which he blamed on General Mattis), we are lad to ask ourselves, now that he has built a team of sycophants in ill-fitting suits, is he doing foreign policy completely alone? Do we have a rogue president in the White House who is literally making up foreign policy on the whim, based on ignorance, his own foibles and insecurity and his naked, arch objective of being re-elected?

The stultifying logic of Trump is enough to make the gorillas on his own personal TV channel vote for Biden. He doesn’t even understand his own baloney and is not vexed when others don’t either. His obsession, is simply to be on television every day. If he has to put on a clown’s outfit, juggle oranges or just talk like a child on subjects he knows nothing about, so be it.

But his sanctions on Iran and the strategy of late beggars belief and leads me to wonder if Steven Bannon, a vagabond who was struggling to make the headlines this year until his own arrest for illegality relating to a wall funding program, put him in them, is advising Trump through a conduit.

Confiscating four Iranian tankers on their way to supply Venezuela is exactly what Steve Bannon would advise Trump to do, knowing full well that this is a policy which can only lead to war with Iran. Bannon, who interviewed me about the Middle East for his own radio talk show in the summer of 2016 days after the attempted coup in Turkey, is charismatic, clever and certainly a maverick who journalists love to talk to. But one thing he is not is an expert, by any stretch of the imagination, on the Middle East. In fact, I doubt if he could find most of these countries which Trump’s policies throw a spotlight on, on a map of the Middle East.

But drawing Iran into a war, which the U.S. can say to their call-centre journalists in DC was a war “which Iran started” when Iran retaliates and blocks shipping – or confiscates tankers – in the Straits of Hormuz, is exactly what Bannon would advise. You can just see the headlines in U.S. press talking about “Iran’s unprovoked attacks” and how the U.S. “has to defend its allies in the region” etc etc.

The lunacy of Trump’s piracy in international waters where these Iranian oil tankers were confiscated, is that Trump is playing a double bluff with the Iranians, which he believes he can win. Pumped up with confidence after he saw no immediate retaliation for the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, he thinks that Iran will not dare take on the might of the U.S. military in the one shipping lane in the world where it has a good chance of causing havoc and making the headlines completely dwarf all news coverage leading up to the climax of the presidential elections.

The only question about this is when it will happen, rather than if. Hardliners in Iran have already made it clear that they will not tolerate four more years of U.S. sanctions and the theft and absolute disregard for international law which Trump has sanction when he took the Iranian ships – is a point of no return. What is remarkable is that he believes that such a gambit will pay off. He believes that he can win both the actual war with Iran and also the media one back home when Biden’s press herd of left-wing commentators and analysts push the knife in deep.

Trump believes the payback will compensate for that and that he has a stronger chance of remaining in office, than winning the presidency without a war with Iran. This can be the only explanation for the bellicose reaction, which some might consider to be a suicide pill.

Even Trump’s own sycophants and their parody news websites are getting worried. One recently tweeted entirely malicious and fabricated claims about Biden using a teleprompter during an interview (when in fact he was looking at a monitor of people who were asking him questions), such is the level of concern about Trump not returning.

He must believe that a war with Iran is a vote winner. And he believes that he can defeat the present regime in Iran. This rancorous, misguided policy which holds the American people to hostage and threatens to seriously hit the U.S. economy – and threaten world peace – will be a defining moment though in both his presidency and no doubt a large part of a movie or book which Steven Bannon is no doubt writing as you read this article. Part of that story, in real life, will no doubt be a presidential pardon for Bannon’s fraud case. Bannon, we should not forget, more or less invented Trumpism and this latest Iran bluff is straight out of the text book. It is “auto-trump”.

The only way that America can come out a winner in this cavernous strategy is on the big screen, directed by Oliver Stone, called simply ‘Trump’. Bannon, a sort of dishevelled revenant hack who many of us wrote off when his efforts in Italy to create a pan-European far-right movement didn’t quite come off, will have his day, perhaps not in the White House, but in Hollywood, certainly. We are only waiting now. Will Iran strike before the final votes of the election, or in the coming weeks, after if Trump wins? The capture of the four Iranian vessels in August was a declaration of war, which even the hardest of all hardliners in Iran can no longer ignore or work around.

Bannon is back.