Steve Bannon: Trump’s 2020 Gauntlet, D.C.’s War Against Trump
Steve Bannon, former White House senior strategist to President Trump and Chairman of the 2016 Trump for President campaign was on my radio show on Monday, March 18.
Now Chairman of a C-4, Citizens for the American Republic, Bannon has been in the forefront of a campaign to raise private funds for building a wall on private property along the southern border:@AmericansCR
The full interview is here.
Below are the highlights of Bannon’s take on Trump, the GOP and 2020.
New Zealand Massacre
People should read [the killer’s] manifesto. When you read his manifesto, you realize right away he’s a very unstable guy. He’s got tons of fantasy in there. He also calls himself an echo-fascist and he relates to the country that he likes politics most: the Chinese Communist Party, in China.
I think one of the reasons you can’t get your hands on this manifesto is because I think once you read the manifesto, you can only find one very short passing reference to Donald Trump…
Then he pivots and says he doesn’t agree with any of Trump’s policies, doesn’t agree with any of Trump’s politics. But he calls himself an eco-fascist, and then relates to the country he thinks has the best governance: the Chinese Communist Party in China.
Once again before the dust even settles they’re [legacy media] just all over Trump.
DEM DUMP
The Democrats play identity politics. I said this in the ’16 campaign.
President Trump just has to keep focused on the basic promises he made to the American people about the wall, about bringing manufacturing jobs back from China, about getting out of these endless foreign wars, and continuing with the deconstruction of the administrative state.
Get the judges in there, just keep doing what he’s doing. Keep building a strong economy of which working class, middle-class people participate in. And let them [Dems] deal with the identity politics and we’ll see how this turns out. All he’s got to do is just focus on what’s most practical.
THE GAUNTLET
The next five or six months is going to be what I call the gauntlet…
Elections have consequences, and we have to embrace something we lost, and I think we lost pretty badly the house races in ’18. If you gross up the vote, it was 52-46.
But we are where we are, and you have to live with those consequences. And the consequences are the Democrats, no matter what smiley face that Nancy Pelosi puts on it — he’s going to have to run a real gauntlet.
I think over the next five or six months of these horrific investigations by the House and the whole city is waiting for the Mueller report.
The Democrats are going to weaponize [the Mueller report] immediately, and you’re going to have a series of investigations. [House Judiciary Chairman] Nadler is going to go after the President personally to dig up dirt on him to make his 2020 reelection even more difficult.
I tell people it’s tough to really start thinking seriously through 2020 until you figure out how you’re going to get through this gauntlet.
That being said, President Trump just has to hunker down and realize that there are the establishment Republicans and even some people in his own Administration who are not pushing forward for his basic policies…
Trump’s now in this dog fight over the border wall and what’s stunning … We were doing a rally for the build the wall project last week in Michigan, and actually went to downtown Detroit and had 750 or 800 people show up on a Thursday night to talk about building a wall, which they’re going to donate $25, $50, more…
THE REBUKE
On the same day, 12 Republican senators, half of whom, if he [Trump] had not endorsed them – he dragged them across the finish line just to have them vote against him.
And I think that rebuke, and that’s what it was — a rebuke–by Mitch McConnell and the establishment Republicans of the President on his signature issue has to be dealt with. This is an issue [the wall] that everybody knows he has to start to deliver on to actually win in 2020.
I think that where we stand today is that the President, once again is not only fighting the permanent political class in Washington DC, what we refer to as the swamp–that permanent political class of donors, lobbyists, and the political class–he is also fighting the establishment elements of his own party.
He’s taken on the opposition party, the [legacy] media and he’s taken on a new energized Democratic Party, and their leader, AOC.
As much as we can mock her for not knowing a lot, she knows what is basically wrong.
She has energized young voters with her use of social media and other platforms and apparatus, and she has energized this base of the Democratic Party.
MOBILIZATION VS. PERSUASION
Today, politics is about mobilization. It’s not about persuasion, it’s about mobilization. And they know how to vocalize it.
…Democrats win because they stick together…
This is probably the central issue besides China’s situation with manufacturing jobs. Probably the two most important issues of President Trump’s presidency and quite symbolic. And so, no, I don’t think [THE GANG OF 12] was a symbolic vote at all. I think this was a rebuke of the President. And I think it’s outrageous that he had to go and veto this…
Why don’t we have the wall today?
Because Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell never had the President’s back, and trying to fight this thing in the first two years when we had control of every branch of the government…
THE REPUBLICAN ESTABLISHMENT RESISTANCE
That’s why it was the Republican establishment resistance. They have no interest. John, as you and I’ve talked many, many, many times between the Chamber of Commerce, and the donor class. They have no interest in controlling the border.
What they want is continued mass illegal immigration, to flood the zone with low skilled workers, to have higher margins on jobs that require low skill workers.
The same way that they’re trying to force more HB1 visas, and force more legal immigration, to put increasing pressure on tech workers. And we’re never going to sort the problems out in this country, in the inner cities with the African-American, Hispanic middle class, until we get full access to American citizens, every race, color, and creed to high technology and it jobs in Silicon Valley.
We’re not going to do that as you continue to press the legal immigration situation. That’s the brutal reality.
I went to Harvard business school, I worked at Goldman Sachs in the mergers and acquisitions department. I can do the math.
This is all about higher operating margins, and it’s to suppress wages. It’s quite simple what’s going on here. That is the struggle President Trump has had from day one. And to me it’s outrageous. All it does is feed the left. And it makes President Trump weaker.
THE FECKLESS GOP GANG OF 12
People should understand and these Republican Senators should understand: would Roy Blount be in the United States Senate today if Donald Trump hadn’t dragged him cross the finish line in the closing of 2016 campaign?
Would Roger Wicker even be a Senator in Mississippi, if President Trump had not endorsed him?
Would Chris McDaniel not have taken on Wicker and beaten him, if President Trump had backed McDaniel? He gave Wicker the endorsement. That’s why Wicker’s in the United States Senate.
Yet from Mississippi, he flips on him on this and I don’t think it’s just symbolic. I think it’s another thing, and President Trump gets beat up in the media and it sends a signal that you don’t need to have his back.
In the last couple of weeks, the President’s been rebuked on the Yemen situation, he’s now been rebuked on the wall. And trust me, people in Washington D.C. are watching very closely how the GOP Senate has the back of the President of the United States.
IMPEACHMENT
And let’s be frank, the Democrats are focused on impeaching President Trump in the House of Representatives, which they control. And they’re going to look to weaponize the Mueller report. They’re going to look to Nadler’s judiciary committee.
He [Nadler] said he’s going to have a potential 56 other investigations…And so the Senate is looked at as the bulwark against any type of shenanigans against the President and this impeachment process.
I don’t think it bodes well when you start seeing the President losing votes in a Republican-controlled Senate. I think it sends an incredibly negative signal, and I think it emboldens the President’s enemies…”