Steve Bannon Calls For 'Shock Troops' To 'Deconstruct' State As GOP Takes Oval Office

Donald Trump’s former White House strategist Steve Bannon on Saturday evoked a dystopian future when he called for “shock troops” to quickly “deconstruct” the state as soon as a Republican takes the Oval Office again.

Bannon made the chilling comments in a phone interview on NBC News after it reported that he had met Wednesday with the party faithful to urge them to be prepared to “reconfigure the government” with a Republican leader.

“If you’re going to take over the administrative state and deconstruct it, then you have to have shock troops prepared to take it over immediately,” Bannon told NBC. “I gave ’em fire and brimstone.”

Bannon, who ran Trump’s 2016 campaign, said the former president’s agenda packing the government with loyalists was delayed because he couldn’t move quickly enough to fill some 4,000 posts.

Bannon spoke at the Capitol Hill Club Wednesday at the invitation of a new organization called the Association of Republican Presidential Appointees, according to NBC. The group was formed as a resource for future GOP officials to tap into to quickly fill federal jobs.

Bannon told NBC that he wants to see “pre-trained teams ready to jump into federal agencies” when the next Republican president takes office.

“We’re going to have a sweeping victory in 2022, and that’s just the preamble to a sweeping victory in 2024, and this time we’re going to be ready — and have a MAGA perspective, MAGA policies, not the standard Republican policies,” he said, referring to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan.

Bannon was one of four close Trump associates subpoenaed earlier this week to appear before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection. Investigators said Bannon urged Trump to focus efforts to return to the White House on the Jan. 6 action. He rallied his listeners on his “War Room” broadcast that “all hell is going to break out” that day.

Bannon admitted last week on his podcast that he told Trump before the insurrection: “You need to kill this [Biden] administration in its crib.” That led Harvard constitutional law expert Laurence Tribe to wonder why the Department of Justice hadn’t convened a grand jury to consider sedition charges against Bannon.

Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, former Trump social media chief Dan Scavino and former Defense Department official and House Intelligence Committee aide Kash Patel were also subpoenaed by the committee.

Trump early this year pardoned Bannon, who faced multiple fraud counts in the Southern District of New York following an indictment a year ago for allegedly stealing funds from Trump supporters who donated to a charity he controlled, which purported to raise money to help build Trump’s southern border wall.

For more on the subpoena against Bannon and the other Trump cohorts, check out the video clip up top. The section on Bannon begins at 8:20.

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This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.