Bannon has his MAGA megaphone back. GOP candidates know it
Steve Bannon has a new MAGA megaphone, and Republicans eager to shine in a party still tethered to former President Donald Trump know it.
Bannon, the former Breitbart News executive and one of the architects of Trump’s Make America Great Again movement, has increasingly leveraged his “War Room: Pandemic” podcast into a kind of proxy primary. Ambitious Republicans are flocking there for the chance to demonstrate loyalty to Bannon’s former boss and pitch themselves to Trump’s voters — and, more indirectly, to Trump himself.
With Fox News losing favor among Trump’s most diehard fans, “War Room” appears to be gaining steam as a safe space for the far right. It’s routinely among the most popular podcasts on Apple’s platform and streams live twice each weekday and once every Saturday through the Real America’s Voice network.
On this show, Joe Biden is not the real president, and the theory that Covid-19 leaked from a Wuhan, China, lab has been a hot topic for more than a year. Bannon encourages skepticism about vaccines one minute and peddles zinc and Vitamin D pills the next.
In an interview with NBC News, Bannon said candidates who appear will be pushed first and foremost on what he called “a litmus test” for the GOP: challenging the outcome of the 2020 election. [Continue reading…]