Steve Bannon’s Trojan Horse — How Trump Nearly Brought the Nation to its Knees and How Joe Biden Can Bring it Back from the Brink

Steve Bannon caught a wave after the Wall Street bailout in 2008. He recognized a rising populist movement on the Left with Occupy Wall Street and helped to build one on the Right. To him, they’re two sides of the same exploitable coin. Neither extreme trusts the “elites” in Washington. Both were primed to rally around faux-grassroots leaders, who used to fear and division to build their movements. But there was one key difference. Bannon’s side wanted the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” while the Bernie Sanders side wanted exactly the opposite: a massive expansion of government to solve every single problem in society.

It takes a worldwide pandemic to reveal the vulnerabilities in both of these movements in a time of crisis. Deconstructing the administrative state led to abolishing the pandemic response program put in place by the Obama administration. Big government socialism can’t rescue an economy in collapse. Bannon would be happy to see it all burn to the ground. He wants total destruction anyway: all the better to rebuild an isolated “America First” new world order. It’s hard to argue that Bernie Sanders would feel any different. After all, he thinks (and many of his supporters think) that a collapse like…