Steve Bannon has never had much of a filter. After all, his podcast, Bannon’s War Room, is basically tailored for people who like hearing right-wingers with no filter.

If you don’t remember Steve, he’s the disheveled guy with too many collars for as many shirts as a normal person might wear. Oh, and Trump’s campaign strategist in 2016.

And if Trump was mad at Steve Bannon after he gave quotes for a book critical of the former president, he’ll probably be apoplectic when he finds out that Bannon exposed the Trump strategy for 2024 third=party voters.

In an article with the New York Times, Bannon went full exposé on a pretty complicated and devious plan developed by Trump’s allies to get him elected in November. And they’re so sure it will work that they don’t even care about the multitude of felony charges he’s facing.

You may have heard about Hillary Clinton’s “pied piper” strategy in 2016 that actually boosted the Trump campaign so that she wouldn’t have to face a more moderate candidate like Jeb! Bush.

The Trump campaign intends to deploy much the same kind of strategy, but in order to draw in voters further to the left of President Biden.

That sounds pretty counterintuitive, but the scheme is actually brilliant in its complexity. They plan to boost the Jill Stein campaign, should she become the Green Party candidate as expected, and then harp on Biden’s increased oil production as a way to draw voters to Stein and away from Biden, based on the things that are especially valuable to Green voters.

Now, it should be noted that nowhere near enough Stein voters siphoned votes from Hillary Clinton in any given state to affect the 2016 election, and that Green Party voters are not necessarily people who would otherwise vote for the Democratic candidate in any given election. They have values that set them apart from Democrats — the very reason they vote third-party to begin with.

It’s a lot like the way people assume Libertarians would normally be Republicans, if only the Republicans would embrace weed and do away with public schooling and ALL taxation.

But this cynical strategy may entice some “Green” vs. “Biden” vs. “Non-Voter” fence-sitters away. If they take their deception far enough, it could bring Greens to the Trump camp, just by making them angry about oil drilling. As Bannon said:

“No Republican knows that oil production under Biden is higher than ever. But Jill Stein’s people do. … Stein is furious about the oil drilling. The college kids are furious about it. The more exposure these [third-party candidates] get, the better it is for us.”

That’s what makes this so disgusting: Republicans WANT more oil drilling, but vote against it if it’s Joe’s idea because invariably the increases by Democrats — recalling that under Obama made us an net exporter of oil — aren’t enough. They want the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, too. They want a pipeline that spans our northern and southern borders, that doesn’t even BRING us oil — it would have gone to Canada, if the Keystone XL Pipeline had gone through.

Now they plan to campaign on the idea that Biden has drilled too much in order to appeal to Green voters.

Thankfully, Greens are not stupid, even if they don’t have much of an effect on an election.