Did Steve Bannon Seriously Just Do a Nazi Salute at CPAC?

At the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday, Steve Bannon decided to perform a Roman salute, commonly associated with Nazi Germany.

Bannon subtly made the gesture during his speech at the conference, raising his right arm with his palm outstretched, facing downward to cheers from the audience.

“The only way that they win is we retreat, and we’re not going to retreat, we’re not going to surrender, we’re not going to quit. Fight, fight, fight!” Bannon said, extending his arm into the salute. “Amen!”

The move is a reminder of Elon Musk’s own apparent Nazi gesture at Donald Trump’s inauguration last month. Like Musk, Bannon supports far-right political movements around the world, including the AfD party in Germany. But unlike Musk, Bannon is on the outside of the Trump administration, and is in fact in the midst of a feud with the tech mogul, even calling Musk a “parasitic illegal immigrant” in a recent interview.

“He wants to impose his freak experiment and play-act as God without any respect for the country’s history, tradition or values,” Bannon told the conservative website UnHerd on Tuesday.

So why did Bannon make the gesture Thursday at CPAC? Is he worried that Musk is stealing some of his neo-Nazi followers? Is he sending the message that he’s the real neo-Nazi, unlike the DOGE leader? It remains to be seen what Bannon’s angle is, but one can be sure it’s based a racist, fascist worldview.

Just one month into his presidency, Donald Trump appears to be imagining an extended stay at the White House.

Speaking at the Republican Governors’ Dinner Thursday night, Trump underscored the significance of the 2026 midterm elections and claimed that he’d “raised $608 million in three weeks”—funds that he implied he could use to support “some of his friends” for reelection.

But in the midst of the overt nod, the president also suggested that a third term could still be on the table.

“So we’ve got that money, and I got to spend it somewhere, and they tell me I’m not allowed to run,” Trump said. “I’m not sure. Is that true? I’m not sure.”

The MAGA leader would be 82 years old in 2028. It’s currently unclear if Trump was telling the truth or bluffing when he said he had raised more than half a billion dollars for other Republican candidates, but Federal Election Commission reports for the first quarter of the year will be due in March.

Conservative lawmakers have already started to pave the way for the unconstitutional takeover. In January, Representative Andy Ogles filed a joint resolution to amend the Constitution’s 22nd Amendment so that the executive branch leader could serve “for up to but no more than three terms.”

Trump “has proven himself to be the only figure in modern history capable of reversing our nation’s decay and restoring America to greatness, and he must be given the time necessary to accomplish that goal,” the Tennessee Republican said in a statement at the time. “He is dedicated to restoring the republic and saving our country, and we, as legislators and as states, must do everything in our power to support him.”

Also on Thursday, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon issued his own missive to keep Trump in power for an additional four years.

“The future of MAGA is Donald Trump!” Bannon said to a roaring crowd. “We want Trump in ’28. That’s what they can’t stand. A man like Trump comes along only once or twice in the country’s history. We want Trump! We want Trump!”

Staying in power longer than legally allowed is a pipedream that Trump has already mused about several times. In a private meeting with the House Republican conference in November, the 78-year-old openly joked about running for a third term, telling the crowd that they could “figure something else out.” He also suggested at the National Rifle Association convention in May that he could follow in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s footsteps, asking the crowd, “Are we going to be considered three-term? Or two-term?”

Still, the idea has an almost zero percent chance of becoming reality. As outlined in Article V of the Constitution, any such change requires at least two-thirds of the Senate and the House to agree on the modification, with that change then requiring ratification by a minimum of three-quarters of states in the nation.

A second approach to repealing the term-limiting amendment could be via a Constitutional Convention, though two-thirds of states would need to support the motion to have one at all, and any proposed changes to an amendment would still require ratification by three-fourths of the states.

No matter how many times he tries, Donald Trump just can’t seem to get this one geography question right.

During an address Thursday evening at a dinner for Republican governors, Trump once again exposed just how geographically challenged he is.

“How about BRICS, you know the BRICS states—there are like six of them? And they were trying to destroy our dollar,” Trump said.

Trump continued, saying that BRICS wanted to establish their own currency, perhaps the “won,” which he suggested was Chinese currency (but is actually South Korean), and that Joe Biden had been unwilling to do anything about it.

“So when I came in, the first thing I said is, ‘Any BRICS state that even mentions the destruction of the dollar will be charged a 150 percent tariff. And we don’t want your goods, we don’t want to partake,’” he said.

“And the BRICS states just broke up. I don’t know what the hell happened to them. We haven’t heard from them lately.”

This is the third time Trump has attempted to complain about BRICS while revealing that he doesn’t actually know anything about it.

Last week, Trump claimed that the BRICS nations were “breaking up very rapidly” after he’d threatened them with a 100 percent tariff if they did anything to undermine the dollar (interesting that the number has since magically increased.) The president listed China before adding, “I don’t even know that they’re a member of BRICS,” which it is.

Last month, just hours after entering the Oval Office, Trump falsely suggested that the ‘S’ in BRICS stood for Spain.

Trump still seems confused about how many member states there are, and which ones. The members of BRICS are Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, and new additions Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, UAE, and Iran.

BRICS did not break up. In fact, Trump’s America First isolationism could serve to strengthen groups such as BRICS, who can fill the power vacuum left by the American absence from international forums—like the 2025 G20 Summit, which the U.S. has already declined to attend.

A federal judge has just cleared the way for Trump to continue his federal employee purge.

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper decided against the National Treasury Employees Union and multiple other unions who sued the Trump administration last week to stop them from terminating thousands of federal workers. This is a huge early win for Trump, as the firings had been on hold since the suit was filed.

The unions, which included the United Auto Workers, the National Treasury Employees Union, and the National Federation of Federal Employees, argued that DOGE’s slashing of the federal workforce—and offering buyouts—went against the constitutional separation of powers, which givesCongress the power to fund federal agencies. The lawsuit aimed to stop layoffs at the Department of Defense, Department of Health and Human Services, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and Department of Veterans Affairs.

The argument didn’t seem to matter to Judge Cooper, who ruled the unions must instead file their complaints with the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA) rather than a federal court.

This is one of at least 70 lawsuits that has been filed against the Trump administration since he came into office. Each court decision will serve as a barometer for just how much the judiciary will fold to the president.

Donald Trump’s Department of Justice has sent a threatening letter to Representative Robert Garcia after the California Democrat mocked Elon Musk last week.

Garcia joined other House Democrats at the first House Delivering on Government Efficiency Subcommittee hearing last Wednesday in attacking the tech mogul’s gutting of the federal government. Garcia displayed a large picture of Musk, calling it a “dick pick” and jokingly referring to the tech mogul as president.

That picture seems to have attracted the ire of the interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Ed Martin, who has vowed to stop anyone who threatens or attacks Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Specifically, Martin took issue with an interview Garcia gave on CNN later that day, in which he said, “What the American public wants is for us to bring actual weapons to this bar fight. This is an actual fight for democracy.”

Martin sent Garcia a letter on Monday asking for clarification regarding that comment, telling Garcia, “This sounds to some like a threat to Mr. Musk - an appointed representative of President Donald Trump who you call a dick - and government staff who work for him.” Martin’s letter asked for a response from Garcia by February 24.

Garcia posted the letter to his X account Thursday, asserting that “members of Congress must have the right to forcefully oppose the Trump Administration. I will not be silenced.”

Martin has already targeted Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer for supposedly inciting violence against conservative Supreme Court justices five years ago. Martin has also threatened to investigate former special counsel Jack Smith, who was pursuing criminal investigations against Trump. It seems that Martin, a defender of Trump’s election fraud lies and the January 6 Capitol riots, wants to use his prosecutorial power to punish anyone who dares to oppose the president or Musk.