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ROME — Donald Trump’s MAGA warriors scored an unlikely win in Italy this week.
Few could have guessed that the quietly triumphant middle-aged Englishman strolling out of a Rome courtroom in an ill-fitting suit had just secured a victory that is likely to embolden one of the most stubborn and influential advocates of Trumpian populist-nationalism worldwide.
Benjamin Harnwell, the right-hand man of former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, was cleared of all charges Thursday after years of grueling litigation against Italy’s top prosecutor. The sprawling case had involved allegations by the Italian state of fraud centered around a “gladiator school” for budding far-right politicians that the two men had tried to set up in an ancient monastery in the mountains of central Italy.
“I’m overjoyed,” Harnwell said as he celebrated with a few close friends in the whitewashed corridors of Rome’s Criminal Court. His eyes grew misty as he went to embrace his mother, Miriam, who had made the journey from the U.K. to witness what she was certain would be her son’s exoneration.
“I always knew,” she said, adding that she didn’t much care about his political views. “I just support Ben.”
But this was more than a mawkish conclusion to a long-running Italian legal melodrama.
The bombshell ruling frees up Bannon to establish a Trumpian foothold in the heart of Europe, at a moment when right-wing forces are surging. While Bannon told POLITICO that the format might be different, the goal remains the same: to set up an academy to own the libs.
“This is a huge victory,” he said. “The deep state of the EU came after us to shut this down. They are petrified about having any type of training academy that can train populists, nationalists.”
Gladiator school reboot
Harnwell said Thursday that he and Bannon are now mulling how to reclaim the lease for the Trisulti charterhouse that was to be the home of the Academy for the Judeo-Christian West — the so-called gladiator school — until Harnwell was booted out in 2021.
The Italian Ministry of Culture had granted the €100,000-a-year lease in 2017 to the Dignitatis Humanae Institute (Institute for Human Dignity), the Catholic think tank Harnwell had founded with arch-conservative Vatican heavyweight Cardinal Raymond Burke.
The frescoed, 800-year-old monastery, nestled in thick woods at the summit of a soaring mountain in central Italy, was in disrepair, its few remaining friars dwindling, and the Ministry of Culture was looking to rent it out to somebody who could manage the upkeep.
In swept Bannon and Harnwell.
Their idea was that prominent right-wing politicians like Italy’s League chief Matteo Salvini and Britain’s Brexit champion Nigel Farage would visit the monastery to teach specialized courses on “Judeo-Christian values” amid the cobwebs and old oil paintings. Harnwell said the objective was to educate students how to effectively challenge the liberal worldview embodied by Pope Francis, the Left, the European Union, Black Lives Matter and the climate change movement.
But after an Italian investigative documentary alleged that Harnwell had committed fraud in his application for the lease and failed to make two payments of €100,000 to the Ministry of Culture, the “gladiator school” was suffocated by five years of grinding lawsuits in civil and criminal courts, eventually forcing Harnwell’s eviction.
As such, he expects Thursday’s ruling — which also saw the state prosecutor drop all charges relating to fraud after the government’s star witness repeatedly failed to show up, citing Alzheimer’s — to provide catnip for Trump supporters who say the former president and his allies have been unfairly persecuted.
In the interim, Bannon’s plans for a gladiatorial reboot have mushroomed.
Whether based in Italy or elsewhere, the next iteration will primarily exist online, Bannon said, adding that it would be launched by the inauguration of a second Trump presidency (potentially starting in January 2025). Describing the Academy as an intensive training camp that would “augment Trump’s war against the administrative state,” he assured POLITICO that there was “overwhelming” demand and that “hundreds” of undisclosed locations in the U.S. and abroad had demanded that kind of instruction in-person.
“It may be a wacky side project, but it helps gain visibility for these people,” Roberto D’Alimonte, a political scientist at Luiss-Guido Carli University in Rome, said. “It appeals to minorities, and minorities do have an effect. Look at the Trump phenomenon — we need to pay attention to these things.”
Owning the right
With the resurgence of Trump, flying high and dominating the Republican primary, Bannon has made progress elsewhere in restoring his influence beyond the terminally online MAGA right wing. Indeed, on the same day Harnwell was cleared of wrongdoing, Bannon was at the Hungarian embassy in Washington meeting with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, with whom he talked about CPAC Hungary, a conservative conference, and his Academy plans, among other things, he said.
Bannon said he sees the increasing popularity in Europe of politicians like Orbán, whose government will control the Brussels agenda in the second half of 2024 at the helm of the EU Council, as an illustration of the extent to which Trumpist populism has already penetrated Europe at the expense of traditional conservatism.
Bannon said leaders like Trump and Orbán have proven attractive to young voters.
“These leaders go up, they’re dynamic, and they’re attracting younger people and younger people want to be trained,” he said.
Pollsters in Europe forecast big gains for the European far right in June’s EU election, on the heels of Dutch nationalist Geert Wilders’ win in the Netherlands late last year. Right-wing sentiment has been brewing over a mixture of inflation, the costly defense of Ukraine against Russia and expensive green policies. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has also taken a rightward turn, coming round to Italian leader Giorgia Meloni’s hardline position on migration, who has herself softened on right-wing fixations like EU membership and NATO responsibilities.
But Bannon also expressed concern at this convergence of von der Leyen with Meloni, who was once seen as the great hope of the European far right. Figures such as Matteo Salvini, Italy’s hard-line deputy premier, are seizing on her Atlanticist, pro-EU turn to present her as a traitor and push more hardcore policies. While Bannon didn’t criticize Meloni outright, he was at pains to portray himself as right wing — distancing himself from the term “conservative.”
Harnwell was more forthright, emphasizing that the next frontier would now be a bitter struggle within the right itself.
“Meloni made the calculation that Trumpism was dead in the U.S., that Steve had fulfilled all his usefulness to her, and that her political future lay in Brussels,” he told POLITICO. “Now she’s trying to put out feelers to Trump and his associates without repudiating her position of the last two years. She feels she can have her establishment cake and — how can I make this work — eat her anti-establishment cake at the same time. But if there’s one thing that defines Bannon, it’s expectations of loyalty. “
So it’s not just the liberal establishment in Bannon’s crosshairs this time — his next goal includes owning the right-wingers who betrayed him.
