Story highlights
Bannon's interview largely didn't address the controversies surrounding the top Trump adviser
It provided insight into the behind-the-scenes at Trump Tower
Steve Bannon has no regrets.
The ex-Breitbart executive, who serves as Trump’s chief strategist for the new administration, told The Hollywood Reporter that “darkness is good.”
“Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power. It only helps us when they (liberals) get it wrong. When they’re blind to who we are and what we’re doing,” he said in an interview published Friday, his first outside of Breitbart since the election.
Briebart News, which Bannon has been associated with since its start in 2007, has been vehemently pro-Trump throughout his presidential campaign, and is also known for pushing nationalist policy positions, as well as conspiracy theories, and has been criticized as being racist, sexist and anti-Semitic.
The interview largely didn’t address Bannon’s previous controversies, though he denied being a “white nationalist.”
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“I’m a nationalist. I’m an economic nationalist,” he said in the interview. “The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia. The issue now is about Americans looking to not get f—ed over. If (the Trump White House delivers), we’ll get 60 percent of the white vote, and 40 percent of the black and Hispanic vote and we’ll govern for 50 years. That’s what the Democrats missed. They were talking to these people with companies with a $9 billion market cap employing nine people. It’s not reality. They lost sight of what the world is about.”
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Bannon also said he wanted to scrap the establishment Republican Party and start anew with Trump’s movement.
“Like (Andrew) Jackson’s populism, we’re going to build an entirely new political movement,” he said. “It’s everything related to jobs. The conservatives are going to go crazy. I’m the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. With negative interest rates throughout the world, it’s the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Shipyards, iron works, get them all jacked up. We’re just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution – conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.”
He also said he was a strong follower of Trump’s leadership, adding that the way he speaks helped his message and to get him elected.
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“He gets it; he gets it intuitively,” Bannon said about Trump. “You have probably the greatest orator since William Jennings Bryan, coupled with an economic populist message and two political parties that are so owned by the donors that they don’t speak to their audience.”
He said he always knew that former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton would lose the election.
“I knew that she couldn’t close,” he said. “They outspent us 10 to one, had 10 times more people and had all the media with them, but I kept saying it doesn’t matter, they got it all wrong, we’ve got this locked.”