Steve Bannon Says US Is ‘Not a Democracy’

Steve Bannon, right-wing media personality and former White House chief strategist under the Trump administration, wrote on social media on Sunday that the United States is “not a democracy.”

Bannon took to Gettr on Sunday and shared a Semafor article titled, “Could Trump really ‘end democracy?'” that was published on Friday. Bannon, who was seen by many as a key driving force behind former President Donald Trump‘s ideological stance during the latter half of his 2016 campaign and the first part of his presidency, wrote, “MAGA Ascendant—We are a Constitutional Republic NOT a Democracy.”

When reached for comment on Sunday, Bannon reiterated to Newsweek via text message: “We are a ‘constitutional republic.'”

Trump is set to face off against President Joe Biden later this year in a rematch of the 2020 election as each candidate has won enough delegates to secure their party’s presidential nomination.

On January 6, 2021, thousands of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol building in an effort to stop the 2020 presidential election results from being certified in Biden’s favor. Trump, without evidence, said that the election had been stolen from him via widespread fraud.

Trump was charged with four counts last year by the Department of Justice in relation to the riot, including conspiracy to defraud the United States; conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding; and conspiracy against rights. Trump has pled not guilty and has said that the case against him is politically motivated. The former president is also facing three other indictments on the state and federal level, which he has also maintained his innocence in.

Newsweek has reached out to Trump’s spokesperson and the White House via email for comment.

Last month, former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner took aim at Trump and said that he was a “threat to everyone in the United States of America” and a “threat to democracy.”

“He is a threat to everyone in the United States of America,” Kirschner, a former assistant U.S. attorney and frequent Trump critic, said. “He is a threat to democracy. He launched an attack on January 6 against our democracy and it turned out to be a deadly attack. And he launched it with far less inflammatory language than he just used at the rally on Saturday: ‘There will be a bloodbath in this country.’ Do you understand me? That’s what he just said. He’s actually ratcheted up the recklessness and the violence of his rhetoric. And he’s on pretrial release in four felony cases.”

Kirschner referenced remarks the former president made during a rally in Ohio about this year’s upcoming election.

“Now if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole—that’s gonna be the least of it,” Trump said at the rally. “It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country. That will be the least of it.”

In response, Steven Cheung, the Trump campaign’s communications director, previously told Newsweek in an email that the former president meant “economically it will be a bloodbath because Crooked Joe Biden’s policies have decimated working families.”

On the third year anniversary of January 6, former Representative Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican, took to X, formerly Twitter, to share a video warning voters about Trump, adding that the 2024 election is about a single issue, democracy.

“Today, the third anniversary of this stain on our democracy, is not a day just to revisit darkness but rather is a perfect time to expose and shine a light upon lies. I’ve always said democracies are not judged by their bad days, but by how we emerge from them. And that history has yet to be written,” he wrote at the time.

Kinzinger was one of two Republicans who served on the bipartisan House select committee that investigated the riot. In December 2022, the committee published a report that said the former president was personally responsible for the insurrection and recommended he face criminal charges. Kinzinger was also among the 10 House Republicans who voted in support of impeaching Trump after the insurrection.

Since the events surrounding the 2020 election, some have questioned what to call the system of government in the U.S.—a democracy or a republic.

According to Jay Cost, a political scientist and the Gerald R. Ford Nonresident Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on political theory, Congress and elections, democracy and republic are two ideas that should be thought of together.

“These two ideas combine, and the reason they combine is because you can have oligarchic republics. Like the Roman Republic was oligarchy; you could even say ancient Sparta was oligarchy. Usually—a lot of it depends on who you count as citizens. The United States, because every native-born person or every naturalized citizen over the age of 18 can vote and participate, that really makes us a democratic republic,” Cost told Benjamin Klutsey, the director of the Program on Pluralism and Civil Exchange at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, in a Discourse article published in January.

Cost added that democracy means “the rule of the people,” and republic points to the ultimate goal of the rule of the people.

“The way I think that the two ideas fit snug together was really well expressed by Abraham Lincoln at the Gettysburg Address, in which he called for the salvation or protection of government “of the people, by the people”—those are both democratic—but the “for the people” line: that government has to work for the entire political community rather than just some subset of it,” he said.