Malcolm Nance: Welcome to the American Insurgency

With Steve Bannon as its national security advisor

I'm pleased to bring you this interview with Malcolm Nance, who worked as a United States Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer specializing in cryptology and foreign languages - part of a three decades-long career in the US intelligence community. Nance is a New York Times best-selling author, media analyst for NBC/MSNBC news, and executive director of the Terror Asymmetrics Project on Strategy, Tactics and Radical Ideologies (TAPSTRI). His latest book is They Want to Kill Americans. The Militias, Terrorists, and Deranged Ideology of the Trump Insurgency (2022).

Our conversation, which follows up on our April 2021 interview, took place on Jan. 4, 2022, and has been edited for clarity and flow.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat (RBG): Your new book about the Trump insurgency has the word militias in the subtitle. I've been wanting to ask you whether in America, with our toleration of White domestic terrorists, and hundreds of millions of guns in private hands, you really need the armed forces to pull off a coup. Trump couldn't get the military to play his coup game so he got together a custom army for his Jan. 6 action.

Malcolm Nance (MN): The armed forces have weapons systems, including armored vehicles, that anyone who wants to carry out a rebellion would have to deal with. They'd have to seize arsenals and armories. I don't foresee the United States going to that model of civil war. But what I do foresee, and I make it very clear in this book, is that the groundwork is being laid for a series of insurrections, which will have political backing, and are aimed at putting Donald Trump into power illicitly.

And as we saw in a recent poll, 30% of Americans think that it might be necessary to use force against the government. And among Trump supporters, it's almost 40%. But I don't care how many AR-15s or handguns you have. You just don't have the concentrated firepower of even a small police force or National Guard organization. Any insurgency will be ruthlessly put down.

RBG: I am also concerned about extremists in the military, and was struck that three retired generals —a category of people who don't often speak out—recently warned about this problem and the possibility of an insurrection in 2024.

MN: There are always extremists within the military. The armed forces of the United States are a cross section of the US population. There are going to be people who sympathize with the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis, and there are a sizable number of Trump supporters in the armed forces. If you recall, in the lead up to the 2020 election, Trump had a minority of support among the armed forces. And there's a reason for that. We do not tolerate fools well in the armed forces, Donald Trump and the type of people who follow him are the very type of people we look out for in the military—people who will get you killed through an accident or through malfeasance or negligence.

So, we're constantly on the alert for people who have extremist views, who are not integrating well with the team, who might be inciting sedition or voicing their own political views. And you'll see very quickly that those people are crushed. The system was designed over 244 years to ensure that good order and discipline take hold.

To have a successful coup, you have to seize police stations, radio stations and communications centers. I spent two decades in the armed forces. My family has served for over 150 continuous years. So I know that every one of those orders would be an unlawful order and members of the armed forces to the man or woman have an obligation to disobey unlawful orders. So that's just never going to happen.

RBG: How do you see January 6 today?  

MN: You know, we're just coming to see the evidence. And that shows that there was nothing spontaneous whatsoever about January 6th. I had been monitoring it for some time and that's why I could go on national TV two days after the election and say, hey, there's going to be an insurgency, which is a series of insurrections, and which has a political component to it.

This is where you take your political differences from the halls of power and move them onto the street, but with the intent of destabilizing a government to the point where that government will collapse. And we're now seeing the depths of that political activity, right up to the PowerPoint that laid out how you overthrow the government. We have confessions by people in the Trump administration that they worked tirelessly in those 62 days to bring hundreds of Republican political operatives in to essentially topple American democracy.

The types of activities that we're going to see in the future are also part of a national mobilization effort that requires leadership. And this is why you have the great influencers leading Republican opinion, the Dan Bonginos, the Ben Shapiros, and Steve Bannon.

Bannon is without question the national security advisor to the insurrection. He has put up a strategy to actually overthrow this government. This is a man who believes in essentially a form of Marxist-Leninism, and who follows Alexander Dugin, the philosopher of Vladimir Putin.

When Bannon goes on his show, that's all he talks about. He gives everyone the game plan right out in the open, and the entire system is now wired to listen to what he and others say, because they think it comes from the mouth of Donald Trump. And to a certain extent it does.

We could see the start of regional rebellions led by rogue governors. In Oklahoma, for example, Governor Kevin Stitt (R) tried to refuse the Pentagon's vaccination mandate for his state's National Guard.  

RBG: I've got my eye on Gov. Ron DeSantis, who now refers regularly to "the free state of Florida."  

MN: He wants to be the acceptable Donald Trump. DeSantis is setting himself up to lead a national rebellion.

RBG: Do you think the public is prepared for what might unfold over the next few years? What Bannon & company lay out day after day for their followers is a new horizon of possibility. You and I have different professional backgrounds, but we both understand what that new world can look like.

MN: New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow recently tweeted that we're in collective denial. That we are standing on the precipice. That the American experiment is about to end. I have been screaming this from the rooftops.

As for the news media, they're not like ostriches with their heads in the sand. They are literally living a pie in the sky life where, if you live in New York City and Donald Trump does horrible things, the bodega still has flowers. You can still go and get a sandwich in two in the morning. You can still get an Uber. It's almost like we would require to have the American version of the Blitz occur.

I grew up in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Philadelphia. And one of the first things I learned about in my early tweens period was the Holocaust. I have twice been invited to speak at Auschwitz, and at the last conference I went to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation was questioning whether the world was going back into an authoritarian era where we could see pogroms again.

I've watched this happen in other countries and I see the dominoes start to fall over in my own country. I think we are in a very dangerous state. We have 10 months to wake up because the November 2022 elections will determine whether America descends rapidly into authoritarianism and quite possibly dictatorship.