The Italian government has delivered a potentially fatal blow to Steve Bannon’s plans to transform a medieval monastery near Rome into a training academy for the far-right.
Italy’s cultural heritage ministry announced on Friday (May 31) that it would revoke a lease granted to Bannon after reports of fraud in the competitive tender process. The former Breitbart chief and aide to US president Donald Trump was reportedly paying €100,000 ($110,000) per year to rent the 13th Century Carthusian monastery, but now will have to search for another spot.
The Italian state allowed the conservative Catholic organization Dignitatis Humanae Institute (DHI) to use the building early last year. Bannon happens to be a trustee of the institute, and planned to convert the space into a “gladiator school for cultural warriors,”where students would learn philosophy, theology, history, and economics, and receive political training from the former Trump aide himself.
But earlier this month, Italian newspaper Repubblica reported that a letter used to guarantee the lease was forged. The letter had the signature of an employee of Danish bank Jyske, but the bank said that employee hadn’t worked there for years, and called the letter fraudulent.
The Economist reported last week that Benjamin Harnwell, the director of the institute, was surprised by the revelation. Bannon, meanwhile, claimed the letter was “totally legitimate.”
“All of this stuff is just dust being kicked up by the left,” Bannon said at the time.
The institute plans to fight the decision in court. “The DHI will contest this illegitimate maneuver with every resource at its disposal no matter how many years it takes. And we will win,” Harnwell told Quartz on Friday. He promised the academy will still start its activities this autumn, “and in the meantime, we relish the opportunity to fight our case in court.”
This is only the latest hurdle that Bannon is facing in his attempt to help the far-right grow its reach in Europe. His funding of extremist parties ended before it even started last year, after the Guardian revealed that foreign donations, like the ones the millionaire was planning to make, would break electoral laws in a dozen European countries.
This story was updated with reaction from Benjamin Harnwell.
onald Trump once declared: “I alone can fix it.” He never made the claim: “I alone can break it.” When it comes to softening up institutions, eroding norms and chipping away at the foundations of democracy, it takes a village.
While the president has led the way in stirring outrage, he is aided and abetted by an entire ecosystem of activists, officials, politicians, pundits and social media stars. Far from being a lone voice screaming into the void, Trump can be confident that every baseless conspiracy theory he generates will be echoed, endorsed and enlarged – whatever the cost to the rule of law.
“There’s no idea too lunatic or extreme that Trump cannot find someone to amplify them for him,” said Charlie Sykes, a conservative broadcaster and journalist. “This is the new political normal. It’s no wonder that Trump is not deterred from saying crazy things, because he knows there will always be someone willing to go out there and repeat them.”
A case in point is the fallout from the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Trump has spent two years throwing out words like “coup”, “deep state”, “hoax”, “treason” and “witch-hunt” with unnerving insouciance. When Mueller’s report emerged last month, Trump falsely claimed it totally cleared him of collusion and obstructing justice. There duly came a chorus of support, from Republicans in Congress to the extreme fringes of the web.
Emboldened, Trump is going further. He alleges without evidence that the FBI committed treason, spied on his election campaign and tried to rob him of victory. Last week, he gave the attorney general, William Barr, authority to declassify information about the origins of the investigation. Again, there is enthusiastic backing from cheerleaders who holler “investigate the investigators” and suggest that Barack Obama, not Trump, should be on trial.
Among them is Sebastian Gorka, a former White House adviser turned rightwing pundit. “The Kraken has been unleashed,” he declared in a beyond-parody video.“Watch, in the next two days, the rats, the hyenas, start to eat each other. Clapper, Brennan, Lynch, even Obama. The fun and games have begun!”
Among the targets of the backlash is Peter Strzok, an FBI agent who helped lead the investigation and exchanged anti-Trump text messages during the 2016 election with the FBI lawyer Lisa Page, with whom he was in a relationship. Strzok was removed from Mueller’s team following the discovery of the texts and later fired from the FBI. Page also left the bureau.
On the same night Gorka hailed the Kraken, the former Trump aide Corey Lewandowski went on Fox Business. He sought to blame the investigation on the former vice-president Joe Biden, who may be Trump’s opponent at the polls next year. He also predicted that in March or April next year Strzok and Page, along with the former FBI director James Comey and his deputy Andrew McCabe, “will be on trial for the crimes they committed against the fourth amendment and against this president”.
Sebastian Gorka speaks at CPAC in 2017. Photograph: Alex Wong/Getty Images
Two days later, this far-out narrative went mainstream. Liz Cheney, a member of the House Republican leadership, appeared on ABC, one of America’s major TV networks.
“I think what is really crucially important to remember here is that you had Strzok and Page, who were in charge of launching this investigation, and they were saying things like: ‘We must stop this president, we need an insurance policy against this president,’” she said.
“That, in my view, when you have people that are in the highest echelons of the law enforcement of this nation saying things like that, that sounds an awful lot like a coup and it could well be treason.”
When a clip of Cheney’s comments went viral, Gorka was among those to eagerly retweet it.
It was just one example of the way in which, critics say, Trump’s allies recycle his most outlandish claims, spread conspiracy theories and slowly but surely wear down institutions so he can one day shatter them. The reward is publicity, pundit work and presidential attention and retweets. The result for the country could yet prove to be an “imperial presidency”.
Sykes, author of How the Right Lost Its Mind, added: “Liz Cheney is a member of the House leadership, a daughter of the former vice-president, and for her to be using the word ‘treason’ about FBI investigators is stunning – and yet in the new climate it was just shrugged off.
“You have this new level of rhetoric talking about political opponents as ‘traitors’ who, in theory, would deserve the death penalty. The president of the United States has pushed this line. Who knows what are the long-term consequences of this, because it certainly ramps up the coarsening of our political culture.”
‘A failed Democrat coup’
The constellations of Trump amplifiers are mutually reinforcing as they turn TV studios and social media into echo chambers. Within the president’s own family, Donald Trump Jr is a prolific interviewee and tweeter, constantly championing his father, deriding Democrats and trafficking in incendiary gossip about Mueller, Comey, Strzok and Page.
The former deputy assistant FBI director Peter Strzok is sworn in before a joint committee hearing of the House judiciary and oversight committees. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Within the White House, the counselor Kellyanne Conway, lawyer Rudy Giuliani and press secretary Sarah Sanders are reliable defenders. Within Congress, they are ably backed by Cheney, Congressman Matt Gaetz – “Comey, Clapper, and Brennan all are in jeopardy” – Jim Jordan, Kevin McCarthy and Senator Lindsey Graham, who this month suggested that Trump Jr should ignore a congressional subpoena.
Elsewhere in the forest, Trump can count on the vocal support of rightwing pressure groups such as the American Conservative Union, National Rifle Association and Turning Point USA, whose founder and president, Charlie Kirk, tweeted on Friday: “BOOM!/ Despite constant fake news/ The two year Russia investigation/ And a failed Democrat coup/ President Trump’s approval rating just hit its highest point in two years!”
Judicial Watch, which claims to be a “conservative non-partisan educational foundation promoting transparency, accountability, & integrity in government”, is fighting Trump’s corner ferociously. It pumps out a constant stream of damning claims about Obama and Hillary Clinton, promising to “expose Obama’s cover ups of Clinton’s crimes”. This week its president, Tom Fitton, described the Mueller investigation as an “abuse of power” and called for the special counsel himself to be investigated. On Friday he tweeted: “AG Barr’s truth-telling on Spygate abuses of @RealDonaldTrumpand its threat to our republican form of government is essential reading.”
There are also outspoken Christian evangelical backers such as Jerry Falwell Jr and Franklin Graham, the social media personalities Diamond and Silk and the actors James Woods and Jon Voight, the latter of whom who urged last week:“Let us stand up for this truth: that President Trump is the greatest president since Abraham Lincoln.”
None of this would gain much traction without willing media outlets. Trump is a regular viewer of and interviewee on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News. The line between the White House and the network has become increasingly blurred.
When Mueller broke a two-year silence this week to deliver a statement, highlighting that he had not cleared Trump of a crime, Fox News’ opinion hosts got to work. Tucker Carlson described the special counsel as “sleazy and dishonest”, Sean Hannity said “he’s basically full of crap” and Laura Ingraham insisted: “The deep state set Candidate Trump up after it became obvious he was going to win the nomination.”
There is ample backup from Breitbart News, the Federalist – “Lawsuit Exposes How The Media And Deep State Hatched The Russiagate Hoax” – the One America News Network and the Sinclair Broadcast Group, along with media figures such as Lou Dobbs, Mark Levin and Rush Limbaugh. But none has the power of Fox News, the top-rated cable network, where Don Jr, the former House speaker Newt Gingrich, the ex-White House press secretary Sean Spicer and others sell the president’s message to millions of viewers.
Kurt Bardella, a former House oversight committee and Breitbart spokesman, said: “People who worked for [Trump] or are making money off him go out and say something on Fox News. The president will watch it and regurgitate it. They will then get to say, ‘Like the president said …’ If you took Fox out of the equation, you’d go back to the old media ecosystem.”
‘A delicate counter-offensive’
It does not take much for a wild idea to hop from the dark reaches of the internet to Fox News to Capitol Hill to the White House and back again. Today’s fringe rumour is tomorrow’s Republican conventional wisdom. Some argue that paves the way for a constitutional crisis.
Bardella added: “Trump’s congressional enablers talk about these conspiracy theories and legitimise them. Apparently the attorney general sees himself as Trump protector rather than the defender of justice. There’s nothing to stop them trying to chase down these conspiracy theories and using all the official tools at their disposal to do so.”
However, the Trump presidency has met resistance from activists, Democrats and institutions.
Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, suggested that the Trump ecosystem would not have everything its own way.
“There are wealthy Republicans who are uncomfortable with Sebastian Gorka and the like,” she said. “The Republican establishment will push back through Fox, the Wall Street Journal and other outlets. The titans of the economy will put up with stuff only so long.”
Even Fox News is not as monolithic as many assume and contains critical voices. This week the host Shep Smith told viewers: “The president attacking the investigator, true to pattern.”
Schiller added: “Fox has let Chris Wallace, Brit Hume and Shep Smith off the range. They’ve done town halls with Democrats. There’s a delicate counter-offensive against the power of the president.”
Bannon in Rome in September.
