On Tuesday, Steve Bannon went to Topeka, KS, and spoke at a rally that was attended by precisely about 25 people.
The fact that we know this is almost entirely due to one local news reporter named Sherman Smith, who is the managing editor for the Topeka Capital-Journal.
Bannon flew all the way to Topeka as a part of his “Red Tide Rising” series, which, admittedly, has focused on small communities. Still, only 25 people showed up to watch Bannon essentially beg for them to get out the vote so Republicans can keep the house and save Donald Trump from impeachment.
Per the Capital-Journal:
At an unpublicized micro-rally in North Topeka, Bannon told a small gathering that a New York Times poll showing Democrat Paul Davis with a four-point lead over Republican Steve Watkins was the catalyst for his spur-of-the-moment decision to fly to Kansas.
He expects Robert Mueller to deliver a report on President Donald Trump before the end of the year. If Davis wins, Bannon said, Democrats will take control of the House and use the Mueller report as a blueprint to launch impeachment proceedings.
If the Trump base doesn’t show up next Tuesday, he said, “we’re going to lose this.”
It’s unclear why the event was “unpublicized,” but we do know that in lieu of normal ways of getting people to come to an event, the Bannon team sent out unsolicited text messages:
Smith’s story is very straightforward, but his live Twitter feed from covering the event captures the utter strangeness of it all much better. Apparently, Steve Watkins, the Republican candidate Bannon was stumping for, didn’t want anything to do with the rally either.
This is bleak. A huge chunk of the people weren’t even Bannon fans (Smith also noted that the Democrats had a plant in attendance at one point):
About 25 people attended the rally at the Holiday Inn Express on US-24 highway, including a small contingent of event organizers and individuals following Bannon for a documentary.
Here he is, baby, two collared shirts and all.
Also, while the AP photo at the top of this post is from a completely different rally earlier this month, Bannon is wearing almost exactly the same outfit, which is also the same as the one he’s wearing in the header image for this post from May! (The jacket might be very slightly different, which, if it is, would also be weird—why have two almost-identical jackets?)
Just last week, Bannon was in Staten Island, doing the same shit—also for almost no attendees! Is this fun for Bannon? Is this his idea of a vacation? Either he is playing some kind of truly six-dimensional politics chess or like, man, the guy needs a new hobby. I guess we’ll find out next week.