Did Steve Bannon drop a hint about Iran plans?

After the US bombing of Iran, MAGA loyalists were quick to praise defense secretary Pete Hegseth for the remarkable feat of not texting plans of the raid to a journalist in advance, as he did with an air strike against Houthi rebels in Yemen in March.

Jennifer Griffin, Fox News’s national security correspondent, was so impressed that she gushed to viewers: “In the last 18 years at the Pentagon, I’ve never seen such operational security. There was nobody speaking about this. There was a complete lockdown, almost a blackout of information… that is a significant achievement because there were no leaks about the timing.”

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Hegseth may not have leaked anything this time, but one MAGAite did seem to let Donald Trump’s plans slip. It was Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon, who hours before the attacks, told listeners of his War Room podcast: “I’m just reporting what I’m hearing from pretty good sources. The party is on. So another big weekend in this unfolding aspect of the third world war.”

Not content with these none-too-cryptic remarks, Bannon added a reference to a classic film about World War II, saying: “Remember in A Bridge Too Far, in the movie about [Operation] Market Garden and the last bridge at Arnhem. The phrase there was, ‘The party is on’.”

Completely coincidentally, Bannon had visited Trump for private talks in the White House on the Thursday before the bombs fell. The advice to America’s enemies, then, seems to be: don’t wait for a text from Pete Hegseth; subscribe to Steve Bannon’s podcast instead!