While President Joe Biden was holed up in Rehoboth, Delaware, recovering from Covid on Saturday afternoon, about 50 people came out in the rain to attend a rally at the White House to pressure him to abandon his reelection campaign. “Hey, hey; ho ho; thank you Joe it’s time to go,” they chanted, waving hand-painted signs emblazoned with “Pass the Torch” and “Country before Ego!”

“Young people have been shutting down streets, lobbying Congress, pressuring the White House, organizing for a chance to save our democracy, beat MAGA fascism, and win November’s presidential election with a new democratic presidential nominee,” said speaker Claudia Nachega, a 19-year-old college student and reproductive justice activist. Other speakers included Quentin Colón Roosevelt, a Princeton student and DC advisory neighborhood commissioner who is a member of the Sunrise Movement, the youth climate change organization that has called on Biden to exit the race.

The rally was co-organized by Aaron Regunberg, a former democratic Rhode Island state legislator who also helped start a new Pass the Torch political action committee. The PAC was created on July 9, just a few days after Biden’s disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump, which proved to be a turning point in his support among Democrats. The PAC has spent nearly $40,000 in the past two weeks running ads in DC and Delaware urging Biden to step aside.

President Biden, you saved democracy in 2020.
Now you have a chance to do it again.
It's time to #PassTheTorchJoe.

Our new ad pic.twitter.com/Ba7mgbe6Ed

— PassTheTorchJoe (@PassTheTorch24) July 19, 2024

Organizers at the rally noted that while the name is similar, the group is not affiliated with the Pass the Torch USA PAC, which was started by Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn) as part of his quixotic primary challenge of Biden.

“I’m less hung up on who replaces him. I care about the fact that he has no chance of winning.”

Word of the rally spread through social media over the past few days, with a boost from former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang on X. Atul Jain works at a software company in Northern Virginia. He attended the rally with his father-in-law because they were concerned that Biden’s weakness is turning Virginia, which has been a reliably blue state in recent elections, into a battleground state.

“We want Democrats to win,” he told me. “We don’t want Trump to come to power.” Like many people I spoke with, Jain wasn’t especially concerned about which Democrat might replace Biden on the ticket. “Probably Kamala Harris is the heir apparent, but I’m less hung up on who replaces him. I care about the fact that he has no chance of winning. And we don’t want him to stand in the way of giving somebody else a chance.”

Jain had been supportive of Biden until he watched him in the June debate, and he’s angry that the people around Biden have been hiding his condition from the public and “patriotic Democrats.”

“There is absolutely no way he can win,” he said. “He has to go. It is just a question of: Does he realize it? When does he realize it? In my mind, today is better than tomorrow. Tomorrow is better than day after. But I believe he has to go. I don’t see any path to him surviving. He may be the only one who thinks he can. I love the guy. I think he’s done a great job for this country. I think he did save us in 2020. But I can’t believe that he doesn’t realize this is not his time.”

For those who would like to see Joe Biden do the right thing for the country this rally on Saturday in DC is a big deal – all of the major media outlets will be there. Let Joe know it’s time to #PassTheTorch. https://t.co/CZK6gPhRZQ

— Andrew Yang (@AndrewYang) July 19, 2024

Charlie Bulman worked on the Biden campaign as an organizer in 2019 and 2020, first in Nevada for the caucuses and then in Pennsylvania for the general election. But he didn’t support Biden’s decision to run again. “I just think it’s clear that the president is not going to be up to do the job for another four years, that his candidacy is not putting us in the best position to win,” he told me. “I think he’s unambiguously the best president of my lifetime and has done a fantastic job. But we need someone new.”

Bulman worries about the impact of Biden’s campaign on down-ballot races and the party’s credibility. “I think it puts other folks in a tough position defending his competency,” he said. “And I think that they might lose trust among voters if they’re forced to do that.”

For all the Democratic establishment concerns about the chaos of an open nominating convention or replacing Biden on the ticket, no one I spoke with at the rally believed there was a downside to replacing Biden. They all suggested Democrats would rally behind the anyone but Biden ticket. Ernest Shepard, 34, is originally from Kansas but now lives in DC. I asked him whether he’d seen evidence of Biden losing support among Black men like himself, as the polls have suggested. He said he was shocked recently when he saw some friends from Kansas who told him adamantly they were not going to vote for Biden.

“They aren’t going to vote for Trump,” he said, but “people will sit on the couch.” What’s frustrating for him is that the evidence about Biden’s decline has been clear for a long time. “In every poll that asks the question ‘do you want Biden to keep running?’ they say ‘no,'” he said. “It’s a shame that it took this.”

Shepard says if there had been a real primary, Democrats would be running against a very flawed candidate with someone better. “We could have been excited about who it is.”

Pass the Torch Joe rally goers braving the rain still pic.twitter.com/KjRedQM75U

— Stephanie Mencimer (@smencimer) July 20, 2024

The “Pass the Torch” movement is unusual in that it only has one goal—getting Biden to quit the race—and it’s a short-term one. Many attendees expressed hope that they could soon go back to focusing on the campaign to defeat Trump in November.

Alex Lintz, a rally co-organizer, after watching the June debate, gave up and helped organize the “Pass the Torch” rally. “To be honest,” he said, “we are hoping we don’t have to do another one.”

While President Joe Biden was holed up in Rehoboth, Delaware, recovering from Covid on Saturday afternoon, about 50 people came out in the rain to attend a rally at the White House to pressure him to abandon his reelection campaign. “Hey, hey; ho ho; thank you Joe it’s time to go,” they chanted, waving hand-painted signs emblazoned with “Pass the Torch” and “Country before Ego!”

“Young people have been shutting down streets, lobbying Congress, pressuring the White House, organizing for a chance to save our democracy, beat MAGA fascism, and win November’s presidential election with a new democratic presidential nominee,” said speaker Claudia Nachega, a 19-year-old college student and reproductive justice activist. Other speakers included Quentin Colón Roosevelt, a Princeton student and DC advisory neighborhood commissioner who is a member of the Sunrise Movement, the youth climate change organization that has called on Biden to exit the race.

The rally was co-organized by Aaron Regunberg, a former democratic Rhode Island state legislator who also helped start a new Pass the Torch political action committee. The PAC was created on July 9, just a few days after Biden’s disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump, which proved to be a turning point in his support among Democrats. The PAC has spent nearly $40,000 in the past two weeks running ads in DC and Delaware urging Biden to step aside.

President Biden, you saved democracy in 2020.
Now you have a chance to do it again.
It's time to #PassTheTorchJoe.

Our new ad pic.twitter.com/Ba7mgbe6Ed

— PassTheTorchJoe (@PassTheTorch24) July 19, 2024

Organizers at the rally noted that while the name is similar, the group is not affiliated with the Pass the Torch USA PAC, which was started by Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn) as part of his quixotic primary challenge of Biden.

“I’m less hung up on who replaces him. I care about the fact that he has no chance of winning.”

Word of the rally spread through social media over the past few days, with a boost from former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang on X. Atul Jain works at a software company in Northern Virginia. He attended the rally with his father-in-law because they were concerned that Biden’s weakness is turning Virginia, which has been a reliably blue state in recent elections, into a battleground state.

“We want Democrats to win,” he told me. “We don’t want Trump to come to power.” Like many people I spoke with, Jain wasn’t especially concerned about which Democrat might replace Biden on the ticket. “Probably Kamala Harris is the heir apparent, but I’m less hung up on who replaces him. I care about the fact that he has no chance of winning. And we don’t want him to stand in the way of giving somebody else a chance.”

Jain had been supportive of Biden until he watched him in the June debate, and he’s angry that the people around Biden have been hiding his condition from the public and “patriotic Democrats.”

“There is absolutely no way he can win,” he said. “He has to go. It is just a question of: Does he realize it? When does he realize it? In my mind, today is better than tomorrow. Tomorrow is better than day after. But I believe he has to go. I don’t see any path to him surviving. He may be the only one who thinks he can. I love the guy. I think he’s done a great job for this country. I think he did save us in 2020. But I can’t believe that he doesn’t realize this is not his time.”

For those who would like to see Joe Biden do the right thing for the country this rally on Saturday in DC is a big deal – all of the major media outlets will be there. Let Joe know it’s time to #PassTheTorch. https://t.co/CZK6gPhRZQ

— Andrew Yang (@AndrewYang) July 19, 2024

Charlie Bulman worked on the Biden campaign as an organizer in 2019 and 2020, first in Nevada for the caucuses and then in Pennsylvania for the general election. But he didn’t support Biden’s decision to run again. “I just think it’s clear that the president is not going to be up to do the job for another four years, that his candidacy is not putting us in the best position to win,” he told me. “I think he’s unambiguously the best president of my lifetime and has done a fantastic job. But we need someone new.”

Bulman worries about the impact of Biden’s campaign on down-ballot races and the party’s credibility. “I think it puts other folks in a tough position defending his competency,” he said. “And I think that they might lose trust among voters if they’re forced to do that.”

For all the Democratic establishment concerns about the chaos of an open nominating convention or replacing Biden on the ticket, no one I spoke with at the rally believed there was a downside to replacing Biden. They all suggested Democrats would rally behind the anyone but Biden ticket. Ernest Shepard, 34, is originally from Kansas but now lives in DC. I asked him whether he’d seen evidence of Biden losing support among Black men like himself, as the polls have suggested. He said he was shocked recently when he saw some friends from Kansas who told him adamantly they were not going to vote for Biden.

“They aren’t going to vote for Trump,” he said, but “people will sit on the couch.” What’s frustrating for him is that the evidence about Biden’s decline has been clear for a long time. “In every poll that asks the question ‘do you want Biden to keep running?’ they say ‘no,'” he said. “It’s a shame that it took this.”

Shepard says if there had been a real primary, Democrats would be running against a very flawed candidate with someone better. “We could have been excited about who it is.”

Pass the Torch Joe rally goers braving the rain still pic.twitter.com/KjRedQM75U

— Stephanie Mencimer (@smencimer) July 20, 2024

The “Pass the Torch” movement is unusual in that it only has one goal—getting Biden to quit the race—and it’s a short-term one. Many attendees expressed hope that they could soon go back to focusing on the campaign to defeat Trump in November.

Alex Lintz, a rally co-organizer, had decided to volunteer on the Biden campaign a couple of months ago. But after watching the June debate, he gave up and helped organize the “Pass the Torch” rally. “To be honest,” he said, “we are hoping we don’t have to do another one.”

I found the “Secretary of Retribution” on Tuesday, sitting on a couch on media row during the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. As an associate filmed him with a phone camera, Ivan Raiklin was railing against enemies of former President Donald Trump. The self-styled Retribution Secretary had an ominous message: “Constitutional sheriffs,” he warned, were going to round up all the people on Raiklin’s “Deep State target list” in live-streamed “swatting raids” so they could be punished for treason.

Those who wanted to avoid such a fate, he said, had until September 3 to “come out as a whistleblower,” by reaching out to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) or Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) to help with their investigations into the “weaponization” of government. Then, he said, “We will spare you. Everyone else will be treated as a co-conspirator.”

It’s the kind of crazy talk that the Trump campaign has tried hard to dial back this week at the gathering of the Republican faithful. Many of MAGA world’s most controversial stars, such as conspiracy theorists Alex Jones and Roger Stone, who featured prominently at the 2016 GOP convention, have been largely sidelined. This year, speakers have focused on unity, comity, and winning in November in the wake of the assassination attempt against Trump. But Raiklin doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo.

A former Green Beret and military intelligence officer, a lawyer, and a failed Virginia US Senate candidate, Raiklin also calls himself the “Deep State Marauder.” He’s a colleague of former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and has been traveling the country with him this year as part of Flynn’s ReAwaken American tour. He’s also helped promote Flynn’s new movie, in which he has a cameo. When I saw the film at a screening in Charleston, West Virginia, Raiklin was on stage with Flynn, after playing the heavy and booting out all the media.

Raiklin was involved with Flynn’s efforts to help overturn the results of the 2020 election. He is the author of the “Operation Pence Card” memo, which proposed that Vice President Mike Pence could block certification of the election results on January 6. Raiklin’s name came up repeatedly during the House committee investigation of January 6, but he was never subpoenaed.

For the past six months or so, Raiklin has been circulating an enemies list of about 350 people whom he believes should be prosecuted for treason. The list, which has unnerved many democracy advocates, includes former Vice President Mike Pence, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, journalists, witnesses from Trump’s impeachment hearings, Capitol police officers, and more.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) told Raw Story, which recently published a long investigation about Raiklin’s list, “This is a deadly serious report. A retired U.S. military officer has drawn up a ‘Deep State target list’ of public officials he considers traitors, along with our family members and staff. His hit list is a vigilante death warrant for hundreds of Americans and a clear and present danger to the survival of American democracy and freedom.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to a question about whether Raiklin was speaking for the former president when he portrays himself as the future “secretary of retribution.”

I was not completely surprised to find Raiklin at the Republican convention, and not just because Trump himself has frequently threatened that his second term would focus on retribution against his alleged enemies. Raiklin has made himself a fixture on the right-wing media circuit. He tends to appear randomly at congressional hearings or court proceedings for January 6 defendants, including the first Oath Keepers trial and much of the Proud Boys’ trial.

My colleague Dan Friedman approached Raiklin in the cafeteria at the DC federal courthouse last year to ask him why he attended so many January 6-related proceedings and if he was concerned about facing criminal charges connected to January 6. “Most of our conversation was off the record,” Friedman says. “But I can say that he didn’t really answer the question about criminal charges. And he threatened to retaliate against me if I wrote anything he felt was unfair. It wasn’t clear exactly what he meant, but it may have been the most direct threat I’ve received in 20 years as a reporter.”

Later, Raiklin appeared in the media room at the federal courthouse, bothering some of the regular January 6 reporters. One of them told Friedman that Raiklin “does that all the time.”

Before ensconcing himself on media row at the Republican convention Tuesday, Raiklin had been on InfoWars talking with Alex Jones about how the Trump shooting was an inside job. (Jones was broadcasting from Racine, at least 30 minutes away from the actual convention site.) When I found Raiklin on the couch in the Panther Center, he was being filmed by a man who would say only that he was from Minnesota. After they finished, I attempted to ask Raiklin about the allegations that he was inciting political violence with his target list.

It did not go well.

“When you can showcase to me that you have gotten a story accurate, I will consider interacting with you as a human being in your individual capacity,” he said, launching into a long and impenetrable interrogation of my journalism. Here’s a sampling:

“I have full 100 percent disrespect for your news organization. One hundred percent. When you can lower that to below 99.9 percent, then I’ll consider communicating with you. Is that fair?…When you can show that level of repentance to start getting things right, then I’ll see you’re making a good faith effort to try to report accurately and truthfully. So you may want to go back to your employer and start to inform them that they need to start becoming an accurate purveyors of content. Until that happens, well, you can go and talk to other people, ‘cause I’m not moving.”

“What about the kidnapping of Steve Bannon? He’s still in captivity. What about the kidnapping of Peter Navarro? He’s still in captivity until tomorrow.”

I pressed him about political violence, at which point he gave me a lecture about the sort of left-wing political violence he was opposed to. “What about the kidnapping of Steve Bannon? He’s still in captivity,” he said. “What about the kidnapping of Peter Navarro? He’s still in captivity until tomorrow.” (Bannon, a Trump adviser, is serving a four-month sentence in federal prison for defying a subpoena from Congress, and Navarro, who worked in the Trump White House, just finished his four-month sentence for the same crime on Wednesday.) Raiklin told me cryptically to “talk to Elon Musk” about the Deep State list.

Several months ago, during an appearance on InfoWars, Raiklin suggested that Trump getting assassinated might have some beneficial effects for the campaign to eradicate the Deep State by setting off the “best cleansing and the fastest cleansing that we’ve ever seen in my lifetime.”

5 months ago, Alex Jones and InfoWars guest Ivan Raiklin discussed how assassinating Trump would be beneficial, according to them, because it would lead to retaliatory “in kind” assassinations of a “deep state” list which includes President Joe Biden.

Ivan Raiklin: “If they… pic.twitter.com/yzc1x1QJxh

— PatriotTakes (@patriottakes) July 14, 2024

Given his fondness for that sort of dangerous rhetoric, I was curious to know how Raiklin had been allowed inside the convention, where security was tight. I asked him what sort of credentials he had—was he media or a delegate?—which require vetting by the Secret Service. He turned on me and said, “We’re done.” (A convention press contact did not respond to questions about Raiklin’s credentials.) When I tried to ask his “videographer” where I might watch the interview he’d been conducting when I arrived, Raiklin got up in my face and said, “Are you deaf and dumb? I just answered the question three times. Can you focus and listen to the answer? I’ve answered it already.”

Did this mouse fall into the mousetrap? pic.twitter.com/ynLm6iMv4t

— Ivan Raiklin (@IvanRaiklin) July 17, 2024

Raiklin became so hostile that a convention staffer came over to ask me if I was ok. He asked Raiklin what he was doing on media row. “I’m a guest,” he retorted, insisting that he’d been giving a half-dozen interviews to outlets like “FrankSpeech” TV, the media organ of MyPillow’s Mike Lindell. Raiklin told the convention staffer to throw me out. “I’m not going to do that,” the staffer said. He later told me that Raiklin had been causing some problems and wasn’t supposed to be setting up shop there with his guest pass.

Eventually, Raiklin walked away, and not long afterward he posted a video of this “epic takedown of a reporter” on his X account. But not before giving me a warning (which he left out of his video). “You’re gonna have a really fun 2024 with the way you’re interacting with me,” he said menacingly. “Expect a really fun 2024. At a personal level. Mark my words.” When I asked him if that was a threat, he said, “It’s going to be good times.”

I found the “Secretary of Retribution” on Tuesday, sitting on a couch on media row during the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. As an associate filmed him with a phone camera, Ivan Raiklin was railing against enemies of former President Donald Trump. The self-styled Retribution Secretary had an ominous message: “Constitutional sheriffs,” he warned, were going to round up all the people on Raiklin’s “Deep State target list” in live-streamed “swatting raids” so they could be punished for treason.

Those who wanted to avoid such a fate, he said, had until September 3 to “come out as a whistleblower,” by reaching out to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) or Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) to help with their investigations into the “weaponization” of government. Then, he said, “We will spare you. Everyone else will be treated as a co-conspirator.”

It’s the kind of crazy talk that the Trump campaign has tried hard to dial back this week at the gathering of the Republican faithful. Many of MAGA world’s most controversial stars, such as conspiracy theorists Alex Jones and Roger Stone, who featured prominently at the 2016 GOP convention, have been largely sidelined. This year, speakers have focused on unity, comity, and winning in November in the wake of the assassination attempt against Trump. But Raiklin doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo.

A former Green Beret and military intelligence officer, a lawyer, and a failed Virginia US Senate candidate, Raiklin also calls himself the “Deep State Marauder.” He’s a colleague of former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and has been traveling the country with him this year as part of Flynn’s ReAwaken American tour. He’s also helped promote Flynn’s new movie, in which he has a cameo. When I saw the film at a screening in Charleston, West Virginia, Raiklin was on stage with Flynn, after playing the heavy and booting out all the media.

Raiklin was involved with Flynn’s efforts to help overturn the results of the 2020 election. He is the author of the “Operation Pence Card” memo, which proposed that Vice President Mike Pence could block certification of the election results on January 6. Raiklin’s name came up repeatedly during the House committee investigation of January 6, but he was never subpoenaed.

For the past six months or so, Raiklin has been circulating an enemies list of about 350 people whom he believes should be prosecuted for treason. The list, which has unnerved many democracy advocates, includes former Vice President Mike Pence, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, journalists, witnesses from Trump’s impeachment hearings, Capitol police officers, and more.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) told Raw Story, which recently published a long investigation about Raiklin’s list, “This is a deadly serious report. A retired U.S. military officer has drawn up a ‘Deep State target list’ of public officials he considers traitors, along with our family members and staff. His hit list is a vigilante death warrant for hundreds of Americans and a clear and present danger to the survival of American democracy and freedom.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to a question about whether Raiklin was speaking for the former president when he portrays himself as the future “secretary of retribution.”

I was not completely surprised to find Raiklin at the Republican convention, and not just because Trump himself has frequently threatened that his second term would focus on retribution against his alleged enemies. Raiklin has made himself a fixture on the right-wing media circuit. He tends to appear randomly at congressional hearings or court proceedings for January 6 defendants, including the first Oath Keepers trial and much of the Proud Boys’ trial.

My colleague Dan Friedman approached Raiklin in the cafeteria at the DC federal courthouse last year to ask him why he attended so many January 6-related proceedings and if he was concerned about facing criminal charges connected to January 6. “Most of our conversation was off the record,” Friedman says. “But I can say that he didn’t really answer the question about criminal charges. And he threatened to retaliate against me if I wrote anything he felt was unfair. It wasn’t clear exactly what he meant, but it may have been the most direct threat I’ve received in 20 years as a reporter.”

Later, Raiklin appeared in the media room at the federal courthouse, bothering some of the regular January 6 reporters. One of them told Friedman that Raiklin “does that all the time.”

Before ensconcing himself on media row at the Republican convention Tuesday, Raiklin had been on InfoWars talking with Alex Jones about how the Trump shooting was an inside job. (Jones was broadcasting from Racine, at least 30 minutes away from the actual convention site.) When I found Raiklin on the couch in the Panther Center, he was being filmed by a man who would say only that he was from Minnesota. After they finished, I attempted to ask Raiklin about the allegations that he was inciting political violence with his target list.

It did not go well.

“When you can showcase to me that you have gotten a story accurate, I will consider interacting with you as a human being in your individual capacity,” he said, launching into a long and impenetrable interrogation of my journalism. Here’s a sampling:

“I have full 100 percent disrespect for your news organization. One hundred percent. When you can lower that to below 99.9 percent, then I’ll consider communicating with you. Is that fair?…When you can show that level of repentance to start getting things right, then I’ll see you’re making a good faith effort to try to report accurately and truthfully. So you may want to go back to your employer and start to inform them that they need to start becoming an accurate purveyors of content. Until that happens, well, you can go and talk to other people, ‘cause I’m not moving.”

“What about the kidnapping of Steve Bannon? He’s still in captivity. What about the kidnapping of Peter Navarro? He’s still in captivity until tomorrow.”

I pressed him about political violence, at which point he gave me a lecture about the sort of left-wing political violence he was opposed to. “What about the kidnapping of Steve Bannon? He’s still in captivity,” he said. “What about the kidnapping of Peter Navarro? He’s still in captivity until tomorrow.” (Bannon, a Trump adviser, is serving a four-month sentence in federal prison for defying a subpoena from Congress, and Navarro, who worked in the Trump White House, just finished his four-month sentence for the same crime on Wednesday.) Raiklin told me cryptically to “talk to Elon Musk” about the Deep State list.

Several months ago, during an appearance on InfoWars, Raiklin suggested that Trump getting assassinated might have some beneficial effects for the campaign to eradicate the Deep State by setting off the “best cleansing and the fastest cleansing that we’ve ever seen in my lifetime.”

5 months ago, Alex Jones and InfoWars guest Ivan Raiklin discussed how assassinating Trump would be beneficial, according to them, because it would lead to retaliatory “in kind” assassinations of a “deep state” list which includes President Joe Biden.

Ivan Raiklin: “If they… pic.twitter.com/yzc1x1QJxh

— PatriotTakes (@patriottakes) July 14, 2024

Given his fondness for that sort of dangerous rhetoric, I was curious to know how Raiklin had been allowed inside the convention, where security was tight. I asked him what sort of credentials he had—was he media or a delegate?—which require vetting by the Secret Service. He turned on me and said, “We’re done.” (A convention press contact did not respond to questions about Raiklin’s credentials.) When I tried to ask his “videographer” where I might watch the interview he’d been conducting when I arrived, Raiklin got up in my face and said, “Are you deaf and dumb? I just answered the question three times. Can you focus and listen to the answer? I’ve answered it already.”

Did this mouse fall into the mousetrap? pic.twitter.com/ynLm6iMv4t

— Ivan Raiklin (@IvanRaiklin) July 17, 2024

Raiklin became so hostile that a convention staffer came over to ask me if I was ok. He asked Raiklin what he was doing on media row. “I’m a guest,” he retorted, insisting that he’d been giving a half-dozen interviews to outlets like “FrankSpeech” TV, the media organ of MyPillow’s Mike Lindell. Raiklin told the convention staffer to throw me out. “I’m not going to do that,” the staffer said. He later told me that Raiklin had been causing some problems and wasn’t supposed to be setting up shop there with his guest pass.

Eventually, Raiklin walked away, and not long afterward he posted a video of this “epic takedown of a reporter” on his X account. But not before giving me a warning (which he left out of his video). “You’re gonna have a really fun 2024 with the way you’re interacting with me,” he said menacingly. “Expect a really fun 2024. At a personal level. Mark my words.” When I asked him if that was a threat, he said, “It’s going to be good times.”

On Tuesday morning, just a few days after a lone 20-year-old climbed a roof in Butler, Pennsylvania, shot former President Donald Trump in the ear, and killed one person using an AR-15 rifle, attendees of the Republican National Convention were gathered in a swank hotel room to hear members of Congress and the Trump campaign talk about protecting the rights of gun owners. In a normal world, the event, organized by the US Concealed Carry Association, may have faced some criticism for being in poor taste, taking place, as it did, within days of the attack on Trump.

Instead, Trump co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita spoke to the group about his therapeutic trips to the gun range and worries about accidentally taking his (legal) weapon to the airport. And members of Congress spoke about the need to stand firm in the face of any new attempts to limit the ownership of such powerful semi-automatic weapons.

Texas Rep. Wesley Hunt (R) was adamant: The left, he said, is going to “use the AR-15 as a scapegoat to infringe on your rights. They are going to demonize AR-15s” and make out the people who own them as a bunch of “crazed mass shooters.” He claimed that assault weapons were used in only a small portion of US gun homicides committed every year. Hunt warned the audience to be vigilant lest the Democrats use the AR-15 as a “Trojan horse” to take away their Second Amendment rights.

After his talk, I asked him if he thought that Democrats in Congress would use the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump to try to revive the assault weapon ban. “No, they won’t,” he said. “They won’t because the assassination attempt was against President Trump.”

Hunt was particularly vociferous in his defense of the assault weapon, but the attack on Trump doesn’t seem to have caused any shift among Republicans when it comes to gun control. Delegates and others I spoke with at the convention voiced little enthusiasm for bringing back a ban on assault weapons. There’s even an AR-15 giveaway going on in the convention center.

Abby Vesoulis/Mother Jones

I waited in the security line to get into the hotel hosting Tuesday’s concealed carry event with Jay Kemmerer, the wealthy pro-Trump co-owner of the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort in Wyoming, and an influential Republican who helped knock Liz Cheney out of Congress. He was dressed in a fancy American flag shirt and a straw cowboy hat, with every possible convention credential hanging from his neck. I figured he had a pretty good handle on where the party stood on the issue.

I asked him if he thought Republicans might be more open to bringing back the assault weapon ban in light of the assassination attempt on Trump. He told me he thought the Republican Party still believes people should keep their guns. “Assault weapons? You could probably debate that,” he said thoughtfully. But not right now. At the moment, he said, the party was focused on its unity message and getting Trump elected. “There’s another time for that debate.”

On Tuesday morning, just a few days after a lone 20-year-old climbed a roof in Butler, Pennsylvania, shot former President Donald Trump in the ear, and killed one person using an AR-15 rifle, attendees of the Republican National Convention were gathered in a swank hotel room to hear members of Congress and the Trump campaign talk about protecting the rights of gun owners. In a normal world, the event, organized by the US Concealed Carry Association, may have faced some criticism for being in poor taste, taking place, as it did, within days of the attack on Trump.

Instead, Trump co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita spoke to the group about his therapeutic trips to the gun range and worries about accidentally taking his (legal) weapon to the airport. And members of Congress spoke about the need to stand firm in the face of any new attempts to limit the ownership of such powerful semi-automatic weapons.

Texas Rep. Wesley Hunt (R) was adamant: The left, he said, is going to “use the AR-15 as a scapegoat to infringe on your rights. They are going to demonize AR-15s” and make out the people who own them as a bunch of “crazed mass shooters.” He claimed that assault weapons were used in only a small portion of US gun homicides committed every year. Hunt warned the audience to be vigilant lest the Democrats use the AR-15 as a “Trojan horse” to take away their Second Amendment rights.

After his talk, I asked him if he thought that Democrats in Congress would use the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump to try to revive the assault weapon ban. “No, they won’t,” he said. “They won’t because the assassination attempt was against President Trump.”

Hunt was particularly vociferous in his defense of the assault weapon, but the attack on Trump doesn’t seem to have caused any shift among Republicans when it comes to gun control. Delegates and others I spoke with at the convention voiced little enthusiasm for bringing back a ban on assault weapons. There’s even an AR-15 giveaway going on in the convention center.

Abby Vesoulis/Mother Jones

I waited in the security line to get into the hotel hosting Tuesday’s concealed carry event with Jay Kemmerer, the wealthy pro-Trump co-owner of the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort in Wyoming, and an influential Republican who helped knock Liz Cheney out of Congress. He was dressed in a fancy American flag shirt and a straw cowboy hat, with every possible convention credential hanging from his neck. I figured he had a pretty good handle on where the party stood on the issue.

I asked him if he thought Republicans might be more open to bringing back the assault weapon ban in light of the assassination attempt on Trump. He told me he thought the Republican Party still believes people should keep their guns. “Assault weapons? You could probably debate that,” he said thoughtfully. But not right now. At the moment, he said, the party was focused on its unity message and getting Trump elected. “There’s another time for that debate.”

The last official anti-Trump resistance within the GOP went out with a whisper in Milwaukee on Monday night at the Republican convention.

During the official roll call, representatives from every state from California to Vermont sent a representative to the stage to enthusiastically pledge all their delegates to nominate former President Donald Trump, often calling him the greatest president of all time. And then at the very end, after all 50 states and some territories, came the District of Columbia’s turn.

When DC GOP chairman Patrick Mara took the stage before thousands of cheering Republicans, he didn’t promote the city or laud President Trump. Instead, he quickly and uncomfortably announced that DC would be pledging its 19 delegates “in accordance with the rules.” And then he fled without further elaboration—as any sane person would under the circumstances.

The opening day of the Republican convention in Milwaukee featured a party dominated by Trump and his most fervent supporters. But in its GOP primary, DC voters had overwhelmingly chosen former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley over the former president, 63 percent to 33 percent, giving her one of only two state victories before she dropped out of the race.

Earlier this month, Haley had released her delegates so that they were free to vote for Trump if they wanted to. In every other state—including Vermont, where she’d won the most delegates outside of DC—they did just that.

But DC party rules required the city’s delegates to go to Haley. And if any group was poised to make a last-ditch protest vote against a twice-indicted former president who refused to accede to the peaceful transfer of power in 2020 and paid hush money to a porn star, it was the DC delegation. The former president has referred to the Nation’s Capital as a city of “filth and decay” and campaigned on a “federal takeover of this filthy and crime-ridden embarrassment to our nation.”

With nearly 700,000 residents, DC is taxed without representation, and relegated to the same stateless status as Guam and Puerto Rico, with only a non-voting delegate to represent its residents in Congress. It’s also overwhelmingly Democratic. More than 92 percent of the voters chose Joe Biden in 2020. The city has never supported a Republican for president since winning the right to vote in 1961. The Republicans who do live in DC tend to be Never Trumpers.

But a lot has changed in the past week. On the convention floor, I caught up with Mara, who told me that after Biden’s disastrous debate performance and the assassination attempt on Trump, the DC Republicans had “pretty much solidified” around the former president. In fact, he said, most of the delegates would probably have gone to Trump after Haley released them if the party had not changed its rules last year. It did so to prevent a repeat of the potentially fractured delegation of 2016 or 2020, where people were threatening to write in other candidates. The new winner-takes-all rules ended up constraining the delegates once Haley released them. “We over-corrected,” Mara confessed, noting that the party will probably take another look at the rules before the next election.

In the meantime, now that DC has fallen into line, in spirit if not in delegate votes, Trump will come out of the convention with a fully united party behind him as he faces off with President Joe Biden in November—a feat Democrats will be hard pressed to match.

The last official anti-Trump resistance within the GOP went out with a whisper in Milwaukee on Monday night at the Republican convention.

During the official roll call, representatives from every state from California to Vermont sent a representative to the stage to enthusiastically pledge all their delegates to nominate former President Donald Trump, often calling him the greatest president of all time. And then at the very end, after all 50 states and some territories, came the District of Columbia’s turn.

When DC GOP chairman Patrick Mara took the stage before thousands of cheering Republicans, he didn’t promote the city or laud President Trump. Instead, he quickly and uncomfortably announced that DC would be pledging its 19 delegates “in accordance with the rules.” And then he fled without further elaboration—as any sane person would under the circumstances.

The opening day of the Republican convention in Milwaukee featured a party dominated by Trump and his most fervent supporters. But in its GOP primary, DC voters had overwhelmingly chosen former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley over the former president, 63 percent to 33 percent, giving her one of only two state victories before she dropped out of the race.

Earlier this month, Haley had released her delegates so that they were free to vote for Trump if they wanted to. In every other state—including Vermont, where she’d won the most delegates outside of DC—they did just that.

But DC party rules required the city’s delegates to go to Haley. And if any group was poised to make a last-ditch protest vote against a twice-indicted former president who refused to accede to the peaceful transfer of power in 2020 and paid hush money to a porn star, it was the DC delegation. The former president has referred to the Nation’s Capital as a city of “filth and decay” and campaigned on a “federal takeover of this filthy and crime-ridden embarrassment to our nation.”

With nearly 700,000 residents, DC is taxed without representation, and relegated to the same stateless status as Guam and Puerto Rico, with only a non-voting delegate to represent its residents in Congress. It’s also overwhelmingly Democratic. More than 92 percent of the voters chose Joe Biden in 2020. The city has never supported a Republican for president since winning the right to vote in 1961. The Republicans who do live in DC tend to be Never Trumpers.

But a lot has changed in the past week. On the convention floor, I caught up with Mara, who told me that after Biden’s disastrous debate performance and the assassination attempt on Trump, the DC Republicans had “pretty much solidified” around the former president. In fact, he said, most of the delegates would probably have gone to Trump after Haley released them if the party had not changed its rules last year. It did so to prevent a repeat of the potentially fractured delegation of 2016 or 2020, where people were threatening to write in other candidates. The new winner-takes-all rules ended up constraining the delegates once Haley released them. “We over-corrected,” Mara confessed, noting that the party will probably take another look at the rules before the next election.

In the meantime, now that DC has fallen into line, in spirit if not in delegate votes, Trump will come out of the convention with a fully united party behind him as he faces off with President Joe Biden in November—a feat Democrats will be hard pressed to match.

On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that former President Donald Trump has broad immunity from prosecution for crimes he allegedly committed while in office. The majority decision provoked furious dissent from the court’s three liberal justices. “The President is now a King above the law,” wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor, concluding, “With fear for our democracy, I dissent.”

The decision is deeply at odds with public opinion. Surveys by researchers at Bright Line Watch earlier this year found that fewer than 30 percent of Americans— including about half of all Republicans— believed the court should extend broad immunity to Trump and future presidents. The immunity decision joins a string of other, less-publicized opinions this term that will contribute to the paralyzed state of the American government and loosen constraints on public corruption.

Taken as a whole, these opinions may have ripple effects on American democracy that go far beyond the immediate impact on federal regulations or Trump’s criminal trials. At a bare minimum, they suggest that the conservative justices have forgotten a basic first-year law school lesson: when citizens no longer believe they can resolve disputes through trusted institutions or depend on a rational legal system to hold officials accountable, they are much more inclined to take matters into their own hands. And unlike many Supreme Court oral arguments, this one isn’t just a hypothetical.

“What we have found is that support for political violence is highly correlated with deep distrust of democratic institutions.”

“What we have found is that support for political violence is highly correlated with deep distrust of democratic institutions,” says Robert Pape, director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST) at the University of Chicago.

For the past three years, CPOST has been tracking American support for political violence in the wake of the January 6 attack at the US Capitol. One of their findings is that the levels of acceptance for the use of force in politics rises as faith in the country’s institutions declines, as it has with the Supreme Court. Since the Capitol insurrection, Republicans have expressed the highest levels of approval for violence as a political tool, Pape says. But over the last year, CPOST has seen smaller but growing levels among Democrats. “There’s no reason to think that Democrats will be immune from this,” he says.

Among its most controversial cases this term, the court struck down a 40-year-old precedent that allows federal agencies to interpret laws they administer. Known as the Chevron Doctrine, this cornerstone of the administrative state has been under assault by big polluting companies and other corporate bad actors for years. In another case, the court opened the floodgate to “a tsunami of lawsuits” against federal regulatory agencies by radically expanding the time frame allowed for legal challenges, according to Justice Ketenji Brown Jackson in her dissent in the 6-3 ruling.

January 6 rioters and former President Trump received a reprieve in the court’s decision in Fischer, which may result in charges being dropped for their efforts to block the certification of the 2020 election results.

The court also weakened the ability of prosecutors to combat public corruption in a decision holding that there’s nothing wrong with public officials taking “gratuities“—essentially bribes given after the fact—from parties they favor with their official actions. The recent revelations that Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas have for years been taking tens of thousands of dollars worth of luxury trips and other gifts from people with business before the court made their June ruling to limit bribery prosecutions especially cynical.

“There’s good reason to believe that Democrats will become more distrustful of the Supreme Court as legitimately serving its role as a guardrail of democracy,” Pape says, especially given the immunity and Fischer cases and the number of cases decided along partisan lines. “If those beliefs grow, then you’re likely to see growing support here for the use of force on the part of the left as an alternative.”

For instance, CPOST found that the number of Democrats who supported using violence to restore the abortion rights the court obliterated in 2022 had doubled between January and June 2023, growing from 8 to 16 percent. Among those Democrats most distrustful of the current state of democracy, that figure jumped to 26 percent.

None of those numbers are particularly surprising. Even Republicans have been shocked about stories of women with pregnancy complications left to bleed out, while their husbands look on helplessly, as doctors and hospitals refuse to treat them because of state abortion bans the court allowed to take effect. The court’s decision to kick the can down the road in a challenge to such a state ban in Idaho will only contribute to the fury.

The Supreme Court’s decision to grant presidents wide-ranging immunity from criminal prosecution is only guaranteed to fuel Democrats’ fear of a second Trump term and its impact on everything from the justice system to immigration to LGBT and other civil rights. “The more you see Trump as a danger to democracy,” Pape says CPOST data shows, “the more you support the use of force to prevent Trump to return to the presidency.”

All of these issues have contributed to an overall decline in Americans’ faith in the Supreme Court, which has plummeted since 2021. Polls show that the high court’s approval rating has hit record lows—and that was before its immunity ruling. A September 2023 Gallup poll found that nearly 60 percent of Americans disapproved of the way the court is doing its job, more than double the number from 2001. An Associated Press-NORC poll at the end of June found that 7 in 10 Americans believed that the court’s rulings are driven by ideology, not the law. The same poll found that nearly 60 percent of Democrats had lost all faith in the court.

The Supreme Court’s recent ideological and anti-democratic decisions have the potential to broadly weaken citizens’ faith in American institutions, especially given the current presidential election chaos. As Barbara Walter, the author of How Civil Wars Start: How to Stop Them, writes, countries don’t fall into autocracy because their leaders are weak or untested, but because their leaders “start to ignore the guardrails that protect their democracies.” Among the protective guardrails she cites are constraints on presidential power, or exactly the opposite of what the Supreme Court has done this term.  “A country standing on this threshold—as America recently was,” she writes, “can easily be pushed toward conflict through a combination of bad governance and increasingly undemocratic measures that further weaken its institutions.”

Amanda Ripley, author of High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out, has been studying the roots of political violence for the past six years. She told me recently that the real danger of the collapse in confidence in democratic institutions like the Supreme Court is that “once violence gets started, it’s very hard to stop. And now that we’ve undermined our institutions, people don’t trust the institutions to do the right thing.”

Pape says none of the data he’s mined means violence is inevitable. “Political violence is like a wildfire,” he explains. “You need both combustible mass material—dry wood—and you also need a trigger, like a lightning strike or a cigar butt. With political violence, we can measure the size of combustible material. What we can’t predict are the political triggers to that combustible material.” Those triggers, he says, depend heavily on what political leaders do. “Leaders can act either as a trigger or a damper.”

Pape worries that all the combustible material laid down by the Supreme Court and other political players recently has created very dangerous conditions for an election, after which the potential for violence tends to escalate. “We’re heading to a collision course after November 5,” he fears. “Not to say we’ll certainly have political violence, but what you’re observing in the last week are the ingredients for what is setting us more and more on that collision course.”

On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that former President Donald Trump has broad immunity from prosecution for crimes he allegedly committed while in office. The majority decision provoked furious dissent from the court’s three liberal justices. “The President is now a King above the law,” wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor, concluding, “With fear for our democracy, I dissent.”

The decision is deeply at odds with public opinion. Surveys by researchers at Bright Line Watch earlier this year found that fewer than 30 percent of Americans— including about half of all Republicans— believed the court should extend broad immunity to Trump and future presidents. The immunity decision joins a string of other, less-publicized opinions this term that will contribute to the paralyzed state of the American government and loosen constraints on public corruption.

Taken as a whole, these opinions may have ripple effects on American democracy that go far beyond the immediate impact on federal regulations or Trump’s criminal trials. At a bare minimum, they suggest that the conservative justices have forgotten a basic first-year law school lesson: when citizens no longer believe they can resolve disputes through trusted institutions or depend on a rational legal system to hold officials accountable, they are much more inclined to take matters into their own hands. And unlike many Supreme Court oral arguments, this one isn’t just a hypothetical.

“What we have found is that support for political violence is highly correlated with deep distrust of democratic institutions.”

“What we have found is that support for political violence is highly correlated with deep distrust of democratic institutions,” says Robert Pape, director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST) at the University of Chicago.

For the past three years, CPOST has been tracking American support for political violence in the wake of the January 6 attack at the US Capitol. One of their findings is that the levels of acceptance for the use of force in politics rises as faith in the country’s institutions declines, as it has with the Supreme Court. Since the Capitol insurrection, Republicans have expressed the highest levels of approval for violence as a political tool, Pape says. But over the last year, CPOST has seen smaller but growing levels among Democrats. “There’s no reason to think that Democrats will be immune from this,” he says.

Among its most controversial cases this term, the court struck down a 40-year-old precedent that allows federal agencies to interpret laws they administer. Known as the Chevron Doctrine, this cornerstone of the administrative state has been under assault by big polluting companies and other corporate bad actors for years. In another case, the court opened the floodgate to “a tsunami of lawsuits” against federal regulatory agencies by radically expanding the time frame allowed for legal challenges, according to Justice Ketenji Brown Jackson in her dissent in the 6-3 ruling.

January 6 rioters and former President Trump received a reprieve in the court’s decision in Fischer, which may result in charges being dropped for their efforts to block the certification of the 2020 election results.

The court also weakened the ability of prosecutors to combat public corruption in a decision holding that there’s nothing wrong with public officials taking “gratuities“—essentially bribes given after the fact—from parties they favor with their official actions. The recent revelations that Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas have for years been taking tens of thousands of dollars worth of luxury trips and other gifts from people with business before the court made their June ruling to limit bribery prosecutions especially cynical.

“There’s good reason to believe that Democrats will become more distrustful of the Supreme Court as legitimately serving its role as a guardrail of democracy,” Pape says, especially given the immunity and Fischer cases and the number of cases decided along partisan lines. “If those beliefs grow, then you’re likely to see growing support here for the use of force on the part of the left as an alternative.”

For instance, CPOST found that the number of Democrats who supported using violence to restore the abortion rights the court obliterated in 2022 had doubled between January and June 2023, growing from 8 to 16 percent. Among those Democrats most distrustful of the current state of democracy, that figure jumped to 26 percent.

None of those numbers are particularly surprising. Even Republicans have been shocked about stories of women with pregnancy complications left to bleed out, while their husbands look on helplessly, as doctors and hospitals refuse to treat them because of state abortion bans the court allowed to take effect. The court’s decision to kick the can down the road in a challenge to such a state ban in Idaho will only contribute to the fury.

The Supreme Court’s decision to grant presidents wide-ranging immunity from criminal prosecution is only guaranteed to fuel Democrats’ fear of a second Trump term and its impact on everything from the justice system to immigration to LGBT and other civil rights. “The more you see Trump as a danger to democracy,” Pape says CPOST data shows, “the more you support the use of force to prevent Trump to return to the presidency.”

All of these issues have contributed to an overall decline in Americans’ faith in the Supreme Court, which has plummeted since 2021. Polls show that the high court’s approval rating has hit record lows—and that was before its immunity ruling. A September 2023 Gallup poll found that nearly 60 percent of Americans disapproved of the way the court is doing its job, more than double the number from 2001. An Associated Press-NORC poll at the end of June found that 7 in 10 Americans believed that the court’s rulings are driven by ideology, not the law. The same poll found that nearly 60 percent of Democrats had lost all faith in the court.

The Supreme Court’s recent ideological and anti-democratic decisions have the potential to broadly weaken citizens’ faith in American institutions, especially given the current presidential election chaos. As Barbara Walter, the author of How Civil Wars Start: How to Stop Them, writes, countries don’t fall into autocracy because their leaders are weak or untested, but because their leaders “start to ignore the guardrails that protect their democracies.” Among the protective guardrails she cites are constraints on presidential power, or exactly the opposite of what the Supreme Court has done this term.  “A country standing on this threshold—as America recently was,” she writes, “can easily be pushed toward conflict through a combination of bad governance and increasingly undemocratic measures that further weaken its institutions.”

Amanda Ripley, author of High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out, has been studying the roots of political violence for the past six years. She told me recently that the real danger of the collapse in confidence in democratic institutions like the Supreme Court is that “once violence gets started, it’s very hard to stop. And now that we’ve undermined our institutions, people don’t trust the institutions to do the right thing.”

Pape says none of the data he’s mined means violence is inevitable. “Political violence is like a wildfire,” he explains. “You need both combustible mass material—dry wood—and you also need a trigger, like a lightning strike or a cigar butt. With political violence, we can measure the size of combustible material. What we can’t predict are the political triggers to that combustible material.” Those triggers, he says, depend heavily on what political leaders do. “Leaders can act either as a trigger or a damper.”

Pape worries that all the combustible material laid down by the Supreme Court and other political players recently has created very dangerous conditions for an election, after which the potential for violence tends to escalate. “We’re heading to a collision course after November 5,” he fears. “Not to say we’ll certainly have political violence, but what you’re observing in the last week are the ingredients for what is setting us more and more on that collision course.”

Donald Trump confidante and far-right agitator Steve Bannon talks for nearly four hours most days of the week on his show, War Room. But starting Monday, the only people who will be listening to Bannon will be other inmates at a low-security federal prison in Danbury, Conn.

Two years ago, a federal jury found him guilty of contempt of Congress for ignoring a subpoena related to the investigation into the events of January 6 at the US Capitol. A judge sentenced Bannon to four months in prison. Last week, the Supreme Court finally rejected his last appeal, and Bannon will report to prison on Monday.

In the meantime, he seems to be trying to squeeze in as much talk as he possibly can before he’s silenced for most of the presidential campaign. An unrepentant Bannon has been making the rounds of the same mainstream media he claims to despise. He told Time magazine last week that he feels ready for prison. “I don’t fear this at all… I’m a political prisoner,” Bannon said. “I’m at war with the ruling class of this country… I’ve dedicated my life to this. I don’t have a social life. This is my life.” He added that Americans should not expect him to come out of prison “ripped,” as the 70-year-old pugilist would be toiling away in the library rather than working out.

On Saturday, he spoke with NBC News and doubled down on what sounded to innocent observers like calls for political violence:

When asked what his endgame is, Bannon told NBC News it was “victory or death of this republic.”

“If we don’t win the—first of all, they shred the Constitution. It is the death of the constitutional American republic we know,” he continued.

In an interview with ABC’s Jonathan Karl, which aired Sunday, Bannon declared that Trump was going to win the election “in a landslide. ” He also pushed back on suggestions that he has helped incite political violence with his frequent references to civil war. But when Karl asked him whether he’d accept the results of the 2024 election and also urge his supporters to do the same, Bannon dodged. “Have you asked a Democrat this question, yes or no?” he responded.

“I haven’t seen Democrats storm the Capitol to try to stop an election,” Karl replied. “And by the way, I have no problem asking Democrats if they’re going to respect the election.”

When pressed about former Pres. Trump’s vow for “retribution” for his opponents if he returns to office, longtime aide Steve Bannon tells @JonKarl, “What we're saying is we want justice. We want to have full investigations.” https://t.co/k6RUJxeiWA pic.twitter.com/ypST82bXr8

— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) June 30, 2024

Karl also asked Bannon about Trump’s plans for a second term, and Trump’s “retribution” campaign against his perceived enemies. Warming to the topic, Bannon ticked off several people he believed would be investigated and possibly sent to prison, including Trump’s former Attorney General Bill Barr and FBI Director Christopher Wray. Among the top agenda items that he said Trump would focus on were “mass deportations,” and “trying to dismantle the administrative state brick by brick.”

Bannon has made many predictions about the MAGA movement’s eventual takeover of the country, but Karl pointed out during his interview that many of Bannon’s favored candidates lost in the last two midterm elections.

“This is a populist nationalist revolution,” Bannon replied. “It’s a process.”

He has no concerns about Trump’s ability to beat Biden, however. “We have 100 percent certainty we can beat Biden and beat him big, take the Senate, and pick up seats in the House,” Bannon insisted.

Even so, Bannon had not been in favor of Trump debating Biden on CNN last week, especially under the terms of the debate that allowed the moderators to cut the mikes when a candidate ran over his allotted time. He also believed that because the debate was so early in the campaign, it would give the Democrats time to swap out Biden for a better candidate, as he’d been predicting they’d do all along. “I didn’t think Biden would be the nominee,” he told Karl.

But he said Trump had, in effect, taken one for the team and participated in the debate for the country, suggesting that the former president had intended to show the world just how much Biden’s mental faculties had declined. Next time, he said, “President Trump should debate who the Democratic Party nominee is,” Bannon said. “It’s not a guy named Joe Biden.”

Bannon also has spoken directly to his supporters who watch his show, preparing them for his time off-air. On Friday, he told them not to send him any letters, which is promised he would not read. Instead, while he is locked up, he urged them to get to work.

“Use your time, husband your resources, and use your time. And your time is not sending me some missive in prison that I’m not going to read. You know why I’m not going to read?” he asked. “Because I’m going to be working. Outside of my job in prison, I’m going to be working the rest of the hours on what? Total and complete victory.”

Bannon will leave prison shortly before the November election.