"If we lose the midterms and we lose 2028, some in this room are going to prison - myself included."

Washington - There are sentences that are not analysis but confession. Steve Bannon spoke this one with that peculiar mixture of defiance and fatalism that makes his appearances so ominous. On the stage of the Conservative Partnership Academy in Washington, at the lectern with the golden inscription "The 2025 Bellator Awards," the former chief strategist of Donald Trump stood before a hall full of like-minded people and spoke a sentence that, in its honesty, reveals the whole truth about this movement. If they lose, they go to prison. Some of them, anyway. He included.

Bannon on stage at the Conservative Partnership Academy on November 6, 2025

The audience fell silent for a moment. Maybe because they knew it was not just a rhetorical exaggeration. Bannon, the gray eminence of the nationalist right, knows how thin the line is between political power and legal vulnerability. He himself has already been convicted of contempt of Congress, is waiting to begin his prison sentence, and faces new fraud charges in New York. But instead of showing remorse, he stages himself as a martyr - as a prophet of a system he himself has corroded.

The stage in front of which he stood looked like a symbol of his own ideology: golden edges, black letters, Roman helmets. "Bellator," the warrior. A celebration of self-glorification, a medal for those who see themselves as fighters for a supposedly threatened civilization. In truth, it was a gathering of those who have turned politics into a power game without rules - and who now, as the rules return, need the justice system as an enemy.

Bannon knows that the fear of prison has become a political tool in his camp. Trump himself cultivated it, both as a warning specter and a means of mobilization. "If they hit me, they hit you," the president said again and again. Bannon simply reverses that sentence: if they let us lose, they will punish us. This is not a political strategy but a threat against democracy - and an admission that power is no longer understood as a mandate but as a shield against accountability.

What Bannon said in Washington is therefore more than just a snapshot. It is the self-image of a movement imprisoned in its own myth. The man who once promised to destroy the establishment now stands on a stage that looks like a mausoleum of his own revolt. His words echo like the resonance of an endless war against reality - a war they can no longer win without losing themselves.

And yet, within this scene lies a truth that cannot be denied: the battle Bannon invokes is not one between good and evil, not even between left and right. It is a battle for impunity. For the right to remain unpunished. And those who fight for that have already lost - no matter how many awards they bestow upon themselves.