In the wake of former President Donald Trump's reelection, former Trump White House chief strategist and podcaster Steve Bannon spoke to the secretive Council for National Policy, a coalition of Christian nationalists and right-wing activists that was deeply engaged in the plot to keep Trump in office after he lost the 2020 election.
Bannon, fresh from his stint in prison for refusing to comply with a subpoena from the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, told the CNP audience that the Senate's role is simply to confirm whoever Trump nominates and celebrated that conservatives are on the verge of having a complete monopoly on the Supreme Court.
"Donald Trump took a bullet to the head, and then four months later won in a landslide," Bannon proclaimed. "He can pick anybody he wants to serve in his government and all I wanna hear is a cheery 'aye, aye' from the United States Senate."
"It's advice and consent," Bannon said. "We'll take your advice, but you're going to give us your consent."
The Senate serving as a mere rubber stamp for the president is, of course, not what the Constitution proscribes, but the fact that Bannon's bellicose pronouncement received raucous applause says a lot about the CNP's supposed reverence for the nation's founding document.
Bannon then hailed Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, Robert Kennedy Jr., and Matt Gaetz as "the Four Horsemen of the deep state apocalypse" and vowed that all four are "going to be confirmed." Since Bannon delivered his speech, Gaetz has already withdrawn his nomination and the other three are all plagued by controversy.
"We we have a unique time," Bannon continued. "We have the White House, we have the executive branch. We have the House and the Senate—small majorities, but we have them. We have the courts. And if we do our work and stop [Sen.] Elizabeth Warren—there are 47 court openings right now—if we stop her in the Senate between now and [January] 20th, we will actually redo the district court level. And then these corrupt appellate courts. And guess what? We're going to get two or three pickups in the Supreme Court. We're going to go for a 9-0 court of conservatives."
