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Over and over again, the Toronto audience laughed at Steve Bannon, the Donald Trump campaign mastermind and former White House chief.

They laughed when he said Trump has not yet made a bad decision, and when he said Trump was trying to “rejuvenate” NATO. They laughed when he said Trump’s economic nationalism does not care about your race, religion, ethnicity, gender, or sexual preference. They laughed when he said Trump was not an Islamophobe because the first country he visited as president was Saudi Arabia. They laughed when he said Trump would admit he is not perfect.

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But this was not the laughter of scorn, mockery, and rejection. Rather, it was an aloof sort of intellectual mirth as Bannon and his partner in this Munk Debate, former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum, played with the darkest themes of Trump-era politics as if they were pieces in a rhetorical boardgame.

When it suited, they were folksy and good natured. Bannon once jokingly thanked his mother when one single person applauded. Sometimes they were earnest. Bannon especially was often self-deprecating. This jovial tone was exactly what the hundreds of protesters outside feared it was. This debate was not some crucible of truth in which Bannon’s retrograde revolutionary zeal would be put to the proper test. This was entertainment.