Trump’s former top strategist pushes the 2024 election as a ‘victory or death!’ war

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Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former chief strategist in the White House, used the language of war to fire up a conservative gathering over the weekend, promising to remake the US government and completely deconstruct the FBI.

Comparing the presidential campaign to the D-Day invasion, Bannon encouraged a cheering crowd at the Turning Point Action convention in Detroit to see themselves as filling the positions of fallen soldiers in an assault.

‘War to the knife’

“Are we at war?” he asked the crowd. “Is this a political war to the knife?”

I was not familiar with that term – “war to the knife” – but Bannon also recently used it in an interview with ex-Fox News host Tucker Carlson. A Google search yielded a 1998 book by that name about the Bleeding Kansas skirmishes in the years before the Civil War when pro- and anti-slavery settlers flooded into Kansas and feuded over whether Kansas should enter the union as a free or slave state.

The book, according to its description, attributes the term to the Atchison Squatter Sovereign, which the Library of Congress describes as a pro-slavery newspaper of the era. It’s not clear where Bannon got the term.

“Are you prepared to leave it all on the battlefield in 2024?” he asked of Turning Point activists. “It’s very simple: victory or death!” he later added.

The Trump campaign, which has spent large portions of fundraising on the former president’s legal bills, has indicated it will rely on organizations like Turning Point Action to mobilize young activists, get out the vote in November and also to challenge votes of their opponents. Read more about