Three weeks to go and this season of The Trump Show is barreling toward its riveting midterm denouement.

A dawn DHS raid on Rep. Ilhan Omar’s house – a timely stunt to remind xenophobes that their hero can do something about a brown woman in a headscarf. ICE blasting away with live ammo on the streets of New York for maximum attention. Armed National Guardsmen posing by DC ballot boxes.

And now, the big crowd-pleasing reveal: a shrieking diva cast into oblivion.

Yes, they’re throwing Kimberly “The Best is Yet to Come!” Guilfoyle under the bus. The Mar-a-Lago-faced hellion has had a long career as a brazen hustler; her game was well known before she was confirmed as America’s ambassador to Greece. Trump always casts a few women who can play borderline personality disorder, and Guilfoyle will serve as a timely pre-election distraction from the catastrophes of war, gas prices, environmental ruination, self-dealing and the Grand Grifts of the Brothers and Son-in-Law.

Plus – someone else has likely bid high to live in the State Department’s luxurious Athens mansion for the next two years.

If you’re not MAGA, you’re probably not tuned in to the chief midterm narrator explaining all this. But “War Room” podcaster and Trump whisperer Steve Bannon continues to mesmerixe millions of MAGA sheeple who still buy that he’s a populist on their side – even though, just like the man he shills for, the most cursory reading of the Epstein files shows him to be an Epstein Class A all-access passholder.

As we have reported before, with receipts, Bannon is one of the great wannabe globalists, leveraging his insider knowledge of the White House and Epstein’s contacts to gain access to the highest echelons of Gulf royalty and the EU’s Nazi-adjacent political backrooms.

The House Oversight Committee has not yet bothered to subpoena Bannon, even though he was one of Epstein’s closest late-in-life buddies and his communications with Jeff suggest at least an awareness of the trafficking schemes. Bannon did prison time for blowing off his last congressional subpoena, so that might factor into the committee’s considerations. His “I fought the law and the law won” four month prison stint followed by Trump’s pardon have made him as immune as Big Daddy in some ways. For the moment anyway.

Since 2020, Bannon has been cheerleading a right-wing coup, broadcasting twice a day via a media company called Real America’s Voice (RAV). He admits that The Big Lie is the tentpole of the MAGA movement, calls for armed guards at polling places and urges his listeners to serve as election deniers (aka meddlers) on precinct committees. He even suggested that they might carry weapons to their polling places. At a “Fraud Fighter Summit” this summer, he gave activists a dozen congressional districts to target, adding that legal sidearms would not be a bad idea. “We need to be at every precinct. If you’re armed or not, that depends upon what your state laws are.”

The claque of supervillains behind RAV, the media company that platforms Bannon’s two-hour twice-a-day bray, is so baroquely evil that the concept of it probably wouldn’t even fly in a Marvel Comics writers’ room.

RAV founder Robert Sigg makes Rupert Murdoch look like Jimmy Stewart. He is a convicted felon and fraudster with a long rap sheet. The federal case against him involved a large identity theft scheme in which he and his cohorts ran help-wanted ads in a Denver newspaper to solicit job applicants, “promising salaries of more than $100,000, for the sole purpose of obtaining the applicants’ personal identification information to obtain the fraudulent mortgage loans.” His rap sheet, according to a Denver news site, also includes: selling or distributing drugs; burglary; assault; assault and battery; resisting or obstructing arrest; domestic violence; driving under the influence of drugs; being a habitual traffic offender; harassment; and drug possession.

But wait – there’s a chip off the old block! Sigg’s son Austin is currently serving a 40-year prison sentence in Colorado for kidnapping a fifth grader off the streets of suburban Denver when he was 17, zip-tying and sexually assaulting her before dismembering her. The lad’s defense included the allegation that his mom – one of Robert Sigg’s wives – sniffed glue while pregnant.

Austin’s younger brother, Parker Sigg, is RAV’s vice president and has been serving as Bannon’s War Room White House pool reporter. When the five major pool outlets recently boycotted Trump coverage in solidarity with their banished colleagues at CNN, Parker Sigg and RAV stepped in to do their own “free pool coverage.” They are continuing to provide it to this day, meaning this super sketchy “news” outlet now has top-level security access to the White House and Trump’s travel.

“We’re gonna continue giving real time updates to everybody,” the younger Sigg chirped on a recent War Room podcast. “This is extremely unique. There are other systems that have been around that the legacy media has used. I don’t believe there’s been anything as streamlined or sophisticated as this. We did this in little to no time. We set this up and beta tested it in 24-48 hours. People are really enjoying it. We’re going to continue to put updates out, make it easier to use, and make it more accessible.”

Through RAV, Bannon is in deep with the Siggs financially, as was his corrupt Chinese pal Guo Wengui, whose backers bought in early. It is still possible to be amazed at how, even for bottom-feeder Bannon, there is no rock under which the failed Hollywood auteur won’t look for a business partner.

Maybe it pays off: RAV is becoming the media home of choice for die-hard election deniers and conspiracy theorists too far gone for FOX or OAN. RAV platformed Jack Posiobiec, the first person to tweet “Stop the Steal,” and just launched a new Ed Martin show to platform his election conspiracy theories. The former Missouri politician and lawyer was a lead organizer of Stop the Steal and a fundraiser for the J6 rioters, who also oversaw their mass pardons as acting DC Attorney. He left the DOJ in August after overseeing another raft of eye-popping and allegedly corrupt Trump pardons but – to his professional detriment – failed to fulfill The Boss’s lawfare vengeance schemes.

Among RAV’s other graduates cavorting in the sweaty DC MAGA clubhouse is Beni Rae Harmony, who once posed in a “Fuck Biden” shirt with an AR-15 strapped across her chest. Big Daddy Donald has made Beni Rae understudy to the new White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia. (Zacharia is another lady nutter who could be in the running to become Trump’s next Guilfoyle/Noem/Omarosa. She apparently agrees that Trump sends QAnon-coded messages from rally podiums, with the number of times he sips from a water bottle supposedly carrying a secret signal.)

Last week, War Secretary Hegseth announced, during a RAV interview with Jack Posobiec, that Nidal Hasan’s execution by firing squad would be livestreamed for the public. Will RAV get the exclusive pay-per-view?

In the run-up to the election, Real America’s Voice is ever more a contender in the contest for market share of MAGAs with an appetite for crazy. FOX News is giving more play to Trump criticism, even inviting Muslim “communists” like Abdul El-Sayed to parlay with Jesse Watters. The DOJ is pursuing an antitrust probe against the mainstream media companies over their boycott last month, while the White House press office veers deeper into the extremist swamp. RAV and Bannon are uniquely positioned to fill the widening gap between reality and unreality with the laughing gas of MAGA midterm delirium.

Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Katie Chenoweth is associate professor of French at Princeton University and an investigative researcher

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow