'Amazing clout': MAGA expert warns prison will boost Steve Bannon
Tina Nguyen, a national correspondent at Puck News and an expert on Donald Trump's MAGA movement, warned Thursday that Steve Bannon's prison sentence will only make him stronger.
Bannon, Trump's ex-adviser, has been ordered to report to prison next month after being convicted of contempt of Congress for ignoring a subpoena in the Jan. 6 investigation.
But Puck national correspondent Tina Nguyen said, in these times of claims of political prosecutions, it will do him nothing but good.
"As an ally and attendant orbiter around Donald Trump, to go to prison under the same reasoning and circumstances as Trump, it's amazing clout for someone in the Maga world," she said.
She also warned that Bannon has been using increasingly radical rhetoric — and that the consequences could be unpredictable.
Appearing on Vanity Fair's Inside the Hive podcast, host Brian Stelter played a clip of a speech that Bannon recently gave at a Turning Point USA conference in Arizona.
"Ladies and gentlemen, it's very simple: Victory or death!" Bannon shouted to attendees.
"Tina, when he talks like this and his fans take him seriously, what does it mean for our politics?" Stelter asked her.
"I don't think it really means anything positive or good," Nguyen replied. "It sets the movement up for a situation where they feel ready to go over the brink for whatever cause they may deem worthy at the time."
She then recapped how Bannon and the MAGA movement overall had convinced all of their followers that the news media, the electoral system, and the American justice system were all "fake." She then wondered, "What else could be fake enough to push them over the edge?"
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She then added that she believed that Bannon "would be happy to knock over the domino to civil war," although she immediately hedged and said that assessment of his motives might be too "dramatic."
Stelter then interjected to argue that "Bannon says out loud" what other Trump allies only say in private, which is that Trump and his political movement are hellbent on vengeance should he win a second term.
"For sure," she acknowledged. "It is sort of posing himself as the screaming id of the MAGA movement."