Trump loyalist Steve Bannon blasted Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s announcement that the U.S. military will provide Qatar with access to an air base in Idaho.
Hegseth made the surprise decision on Friday that a “Qatari Emiri Air Force facility” will be built at the Mountain Home Air Force Base in Elmore County, Idaho, leading to an outcry on both sides of the aisle.
The defense chief, who has rebranded his role as the “secretary of war,” later tried to clarify that Qatar “will not have their own base” or “anything like a base,” but apparently failed to reassure Bannon and other members of the America First movement.
During an appearance on Eric Bolling’s eponymous show on Real America’s Voice, the pro-MAGA network, Bolling said he didn’t understand why President Donald Trump’s administration would allow a Qatari base in Idaho.
Bannon agreed, saying he had “no idea what’s going on.”
“No foreign power should have a military base on the sacred soil of America,” he added. “Full stop.”
Despite blasting Qatar as “funders of terrorism” during his first term, Trump issued an executive order in late September granting the Gulf state a watered-down version of NATO’s Article 5 collective defense agreement.
Article 5 of the alliance’s founding treaty says that an attack against one NATO ally is considered an attack against all allies. In an unprecedented move, Trump’s executive order declared that any attack on Qatar would also be seen as a “threat to the peace and security of the United States.”
Bannon said he suspected that the Idaho base and collective defense agreement were the price the Trump administration had to pay to secure a peace deal between Hamas and Israel, since the agreement needed buy-in from Arab states.
“With the Article 5 protection he gave to Qatar, I throw it back to this is part of the price we’re paying for the Israel First crowd, the Tel Aviv Levins and others, that had support for [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu,” he said.
“This whole thing is so screwed up,” he added.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the Department of Defense for comment.
On Friday, Hegseth appeared with Qatar’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defense Sheikh Saoud bin Abdulrahman al-Thani during an event at the Pentagon to discuss developments at Mountain Home Air Force Base.
“The location will host a contingent of Qatari F-15s and pilots to enhance our combined training, increase, lethality, interoperability. It’s just another example of our partnership, and I hope you know, your Excellency, that you can count on us,” Hegseth said.
Following a swift, bipartisan backlash, Hegseth attempted to clarify on social media that Qatar would not have its own U.S. base.
“The U.S. military has a long-standing partnership w/ Qatar, including today’s announced cooperation w/ F-15QA aircraft,” he wrote on his personal X account. “However, to be clear, Qatar will not have their own base in the United States—nor anything like a base. We control the existing base, like we do with all partners,” he wrote in a post.
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