Neo-Nazi Trump ally Steve Bannon told The Economist magazine in an interview Thursday that President Trump will have “at least” one more term in office and that the leaders of his MAGA movement “have a plan” to defy the 22nd Amendment to the US Constitution, which says presidents can be elected to only two terms.

In the 40-minute interview posted on The Economist’s website, both Bannon and his interlocutors, Editor-in-Chief Zanny Minton Beddoes and Deputy Editor Edward Carr, ignored the massive “No Kings” protests that brought over 7 million people onto the streets across the US on October 18. Bannon claimed it was the “will of the American people” for the widely hated would-be-dictator to remain for a third term in 2028 and possibly beyond.

Bannon’s statements amount to an admission that he and his co-conspirators in and around the Trump White House are engaged in treason. They are plotting to overthrow the Constitution and impose a presidential dictatorship. Yet his interview has elicited no serious response from the Democratic Party or the establishment media, including the unofficial organ of the Democrats, the New York Times.

Below is part of the interview as broadcast online:

Bannon: Well, he’s going to get a third term, so Trump 28. Trump is going to be president in 28, and people just ought to get accommodated with that.

Zanny Minton Beddoes: So what about the 22nd Amendment?

Bannon: There’s many different alternatives. At the appropriate time, we’ll lay out what the plan is, but there’s a plan, and President Trump will be the president in 28. We had longer odds in 16 and longer odds in 24 than we got in 28, and President Trump will be the president of the United States, and the country needs him to be president of the United States.

We have to finish what we started, and the way we finish it, do Trump. Trump is a vehicle. I know this will drive you guys crazy, but he’s a vehicle of divine providence … We need him for at least one more term, and he’ll get that in 28.

Bannon made clear that he was talking about civil war. He said: “It’s no longer about debate. You’re not going to reason with these people … We’re in political war. The end point is we are in charge.”

Taking a page from the playbook of his hero, Adolf Hitler, Bannon said the strategy was to “seize the institutions and then purge them.” After the failure of his 1923 Munich “Beer Hall Putsch,” Hitler determined that he would come to power through the institutions of the Weimar Republic, with the support of decisive sections of the German capitalist class. That is what occurred in January 1933, when the crisis-ridden ruling class concluded that it could no longer rule by democratic means and turned to the Nazis to smash the working class.

Trump is implementing the goals of his failed January 6, 2021 putsch, enabled by the cowardice and complicity of the Democrats. Joe Biden after January 6 called for a “strong Republican Party” and did nothing serious to prosecute Trump and his co-conspirators. In the run-up to the 2024 election, Biden, Kamala Harris and other leading Democrats warned that Trump was a fascist and would impose a dictatorship, but now that Trump is doing just that, all such talk from the Democrats has been dropped.

In the interview, Bannon made the absurd claim that Trump rules in the interests of workers and the “little man” by ending “corporatism” and restoring capitalism. This was said of a multi-billionaire gangster who is the open representative of the financial oligarchy in the United States. The interview was posted one day after Trump pardoned billionaire Changpeng Zhao, the former CEO of crypto exchange Binance. Zhao, who has extensive business relations with Trump’s sons, pleaded guilty to money laundering during the Biden administration.

The interview also coincided with Trump’s demolition of the East Wing of the White House—the physical expression of his dismantling of the legacy of America’s democratic revolutions—to build a massive ballroom. This Mar-a-Lago-style monstrosity is being paid for by corporate donors, including Meta, Amazon, Apple, Caterpillar, Comcast, Google, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Palantir, Union Pacific, the Lutnick family, Stephen Schwarzman (Blackstone), and the Winklevoss brothers.

The very fact that The Economist, a bastion of the media establishment in Britain, gave Bannon a platform to spew his fascist filth is highly significant. The promotion of Bannon was underscored by the fact that the magazine’s editor-in-chief and deputy editor were chosen to conduct the interview. Throughout the interview they showed enormous deference to the neo-Nazi demagogue.

The publication devotes its current issue to a special report headlined “The Coming Debt Emergency” and “Governments Going Broke.” The extensive article argues that governments around the world must carry out massive attacks on entitlement social programs and complains that retirees are living too long. At one point in the interview, Bannon, declaring, “We’re in a war to restore capitalism,” held up The Economist and said, “In this magazine, you tell me we’re headed to financial Armageddon.”

Such is the real agenda of war on the working class behind the policies of the ruling class internationally and Bannon’s rhetoric. These policies are incompatible with democratic forms of rule. They can be implemented only by means of dictatorship.

In his interview, Bannon spoke of his “populist, nationalist” (i.e., fascist) movement as part of an international wave, citing Nigel Farage’s Reform Party in the UK, Le Pen’s RN in France, the Alternative for Germany, Vox in Spain and Meloni’s Brothers of Italy.

Bannon, who fancies himself a great strategist of fascist counter-revolution, bases his plan on one critical assumption, which is that the Democratic Party will do nothing—beyond filing impotent legal appeals to the Supreme Court and muttering verbal disapproval— to uphold the Constitution. When push comes to shove, the Democrats will shamelessly bend down before Trump.

And this assumption is entirely correct. On Friday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries whimpered that Bannon’s remarks were “dangerous authoritarian talk” and represented a continuation of Trump’s pattern of “defying the rule of law” and “testing the limits of our Constitution.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called Bannon’s statements “chilling” and proof that the MAGA movement is “eroding constitutional safeguards.”

Neither so much as called for Bannon’s prosecution and arrest or demanded that he reveal the identities of his co-conspirators. As always, they made no call for mass action to halt the drive to dictatorship.

By Sunday, The Economist interview had disappeared from the establishment media. Appearing on the Sunday talk show “Face the Nation,” Jeffries made no mention of Bannon’s statements or any of Trump’s dictatorial actions. Nor did host Margaret Brennan ask about them.

No faction of the Democrats, including its so-called “progressive” wing, will lift a finger to stop Trump’s drive for dictatorship. Last week, Bernie Sanders, whose cyncal opportunism knows no bounds, appeared on the podcast of Trump supporter Tim Dillon and backed Trump’s war on immigrants, saying “Trump did a better job” than Biden in securing the border.

The Democrats’ indifference to democratic rights was already demonstrated in 2000, when Al Gore accepted the theft of the election by the Republican majority on the Supreme Court, which halted the counting of votes in Florida to award the White House to George W. Bush, the loser of the popular vote. As the World Socialist Web Site wrote at the time, this showed that there was no serious constituency for the defense of democratic rights within the US ruling class.

Bannon’s declaration that Trump will be kept in power through unconstitutional. i.e., illegal, methods signfies a break with democracy and its traditional political processes. But from this fact flows the critical political conclusion: If Trump is determined to retain power in violation of the law, this means that his removal from office becomes possible only through mass action, outside the bounds of the electoral process. Perhaps Mr. Bannon has not thought through to the end the implications of his criminal strategy, but there is no escaping the fact that he is legitimizing the resort to revolution by the working class.

The conspiracy of Bannon and his accomplices in the White House has created the political premises for precisely the situation envisioned in 1776 by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence:

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends [life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness] it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

In contemporary terms, the struggle against dictatorship depends upon the mobilization of the working class as an independent social force. It must take power out of the hands of the capitalist class, whose interests are incompatible with democracy. The “Safety and Happiness” of the working class, which comprises the overwhelming majority of the population, requires the formation of a workers government, based on socialist principles.

The precondition for this struggle is a complete break with the Democratic Party. Any subordination of the struggle to defend democratic and social rights to the Democratic Party—itself a party of the corporate oligarchy—is fatal. The Democrats are petrified that any movement of the working will escape their control and challenge the foundations of the capitalist system. They fear that far more than the prospect of fascist rule.

In its statement to the October 18 protests, the Socialist Equality Party noted the deep hostility in the population to Trump’s attempt to establish a fascistic dictatorship. “However,” it explained, “anger and outrage are not enough to stop dictatorship. What is required, and what is most critical, is a clear program and strategy to direct this struggle.”

Since October 18, Trump has stepped up his war against immigrants and their defenders, unleashing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Gestapo to attack protesters in Chicago, New York and other cities and threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act, which will give him the power to deploy active-duty troops across the country. He has continued illegally bombing boats off the coast of Latin America and dispatched a carrier task force to prepare an attack on Venezuela.

The SEPs calls for workers to organize collectively by forming rank-and-file committees in every workplace, factory and neighborhood to coordinate its struggle and link up with the struggles of workers internationally. This fight is being spearheaded by the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC). These committees must link the defense of democratic rights with the fight against war and for jobs, wages, healthcare and social equality.

The fight against fascism cannot be separated from the struggle against capitalism and for socialism. The defense of democracy requires the expropriation of the financial oligarchy and the transformation of the corporations and banks into public utilities under democratic workers’ control. The immense wealth concentrated in the hands of a few must be used to meet human needs, not private profit. We urge all those who want to fight for this program to join the Socialist Equality Party.