'We have a massive problem': Steve Bannon gives two-word explanation for MAGA mass shooter
MAGA podcaster Steve Bannon — who was President Donald Trump's White House chief strategist during his first term — is now offering up a novel explanation for the perpetrator of a mass shooting at a Mormon church last weekend.
On Sunday, 40 year-old Thomas Sanford — a U.S. Marine Corps veteran — drove his pickup truck festooned with American flags into the Jesus Christ Church of Latter-Day Saints in Grand Blanc, Michigan and killed four people while injuring eight others. He also set fire to the church. Police killed Sanford roughly eight minutes into the attack.
Investigators say Sanford harbored hostile feelings toward the Mormons, and had previously been in a relationship with a Mormon woman. Sanford was an apparent Trump supporter, and was once photographed in a t-shirt that read "Trump 2020: Make Liberals Cry Again." He also had a Trump sign outside of his home. But despite all of the shooter's apparent affiliations with the MAGA movement, Bannon took efforts to distance the shooter from the pro-Trump community, and blamed the attack on "psychotic drugs" before quickly pivoting from the topic entirely.
“I think these shooters this weekend were also on these psycho, you know, the psychotic drugs,” Bannon said on his Monday podcast. “We’ve let the psychiatry industry basically poison the minds and the bodies with drugs. We have a massive problem that is the foundational element of the violence atop.”
The other shooting Bannon was referring to happened in Southport, North Carolina, where 40 year-old Marine veteran Nigel Max Edge — who served between 2003 and 2009 and was deployed twice to Iraq — allegedly killed three people and wounded five others. Edge was apprehended alive and has been charged with three counts of first-degree murder, five counts of attempted murder and five counts of assault with a deadly weapon. Authorities said the attack was "highly premeditated."
Before those two shootings, another mass shooting broke out at the Kickapoo Lucky Eagle Casino in Eagle Pass, Texas in the early hours of Sunday morning. 34 year-old Keryan Jones allegedly killed two people and injured several others. One of those killed in the shooting was a retired U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agent.
After the fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk earlier this month, President Donald Trump chalked up his murder to "radical left political violence," though authorities have not yet publicly stated the alleged shooter's motive. Trump has not commented on the shootings in North Carolina or Texas, but in a Truth Social post this weekend, the president said the Michigan shooting was part of a "targeted attack on Christians in the United States of America."
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