Bannon call for Fauci beheading
If President Donald Trump wins reelection, former chief strategist Steve Bannon said in a video posted yesterday that he should quickly eliminate Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectiousdisease expert, and FBI Director Christopher Wray – by means of medieval execution.
‘‘I’d actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England. I’d put the heads on pikes,’’ Bannon said during a live taping of his online show, War Room: Pandemic.
Twitter permanently sus
pended Bannon’s @WarRoomPandemic account on Friday after he posted the clip, a spokeswoman told The Washington Post, citing the service’s prohibition on ‘‘the glorification of violence.’’ The move makes
Bannon one of the most highprofile political figures to be banned.
Facebook, YouTube and Spotify also removed video clips and audio from the episode.
Bannon’s menacing diatribe came amid a rise of violent rhetoric from prominent Trump supporters on Friday as the president’s chances of winning key battleground continued to narrow. Georgia state Rep. Vernon Jones, a Democrat who has endorsed Trump, said at a Friday rally with Donald Trump Jr. that ‘‘we’re starting now to see the white in their eyes and we’re getting ready to start shooting.’’
Trump Jr, meanwhile, urged his father on Twitter ‘‘to go to total war over this election.’’ Twitter flagged the tweet for making misleading statements about the election.
Bannon – who is out on bail after being arrested and then pleading not guilty to charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering in an alleged scheme to defraud Trump donors to raise funding for the border wall – made his violent threat toward Fauci and Wray on his podcast, which has chronicled the coronavirus pandemic through a pro-Trump lens.
Bannon started by calling the president ‘‘a kindhearted man and a good man’’ before suggesting that harsher action was warranted toward Fauci and Wray.
Bannon added that the stakes bearing their decapitated heads should be placed ‘‘at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats: you either get with the program or you’re gone.’’
For much of the pandemic, Trump has undercut Fauci’s warnings on the seriousness of the coronavirus and contradicted Fauci’s sentiments that the pandemic is worsening.