Bannon Declares 2024 GOP Primary ‘Over’ After CNN Trump Town Hall

Steve Bannon gloated on Monday that his former boss, Donald Trump, had already locked down the 2024 GOP presidential nomination while reacting to commentary from MSNBC earlier in the day about how the media should handle Trump’s third run for the presidency.

Bannon played a clip of veteran political journalist Joe Klein on MSNBC’s  Morning Joe and reacted by declaring the “primary is over.”

“Okay. Okay. Did I mention that the primary is over?” Bannon said, adding:

It’s Monday 15 May in the year of our Lord, 2023. And there you’re seeing now the culmination. The thing was on Wednesday night, was it Wednesday or Thursday night? Wednesday night? I think now we’re five or six days and today they’re having the complete meltdown. Who’s your daddy? Right. Who’s your daddy? Trump’s your daddy. He owns you right now.

The “thing” Bannon was referring to was of course CNN’s headline-grabbing town hall with the former president from last Wednesday.

Bannon made his remarks in reference to Klein saying of the town hall’s moderator, Kaitlan Collins, that she “is an excellent journalist, but it was like having Donald Trump interviewed by his daughter.”

“But it seems to me we have the criticism followed by the false choice, which was you can either hide your head in the sand or have events like the CNN town hall meeting. You say there’s a middle ground. What is it?” Joe Scarborough asked Klein in the clip Bannon showed.

“Well, I think we have to be a lot smarter about how we handle this and maybe a lot less politically correct. You know, Kaitlan Collins is an excellent journalist, but it was like having Donald Trump interviewed by his daughter,” he replied, adding:

I think that would be much more psychologically interesting if we had a father figure, because, as you know, Joe, Fred, Trump was the most important figure in Donald Trump’s life. And he was an authoritarian. He was a tough guy.

And, you know, we need to have someone interviewing Trump and we need to be more authoritative when we interview. And we need to be able to say things like, you can’t really believe that, can you? No one’s done that yet. No, no one’s done that in a long time. And I think that I was critical of CNN in the piece that I wrote, but I could be equally critical of the other networks as well.

Bannon, who helped run Trump’s 2016 campaign, appeared to take Klein’s analysis as evidence that not only was Trump’s town hall appearance on CNN a success but that it showed the former president will outmaneuver the media in the 2024 presidential campaign.

Watch the full clip above.