On a day which was characterized by the New York Times in a widely circulated article as a day of Pence and Priebus and the GOP gang walking the halls of Trump Tower in confusion and disarray, firing and hiring people and generally discombulated, Steve Bannon was cool, calm and collected and interviewing with the Hollywood Reporter.
In this dark day for Democrats, Bannon has become the blackest hole.
“Darkness is good,” says Bannon, who amid the suits surrounding him at Trump Tower, looks like a graduate student in his T-shirt, open button-down and tatty blue blazer — albeit a 62-year-old graduate student. “Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power. It only helps us when they—“ I believe by “they” he means liberals and the media, already promoting calls for his ouster “—get it wrong. When they’re blind to who we are and what we’re doing.”
Who he is, is a kid from a blue collar background who joined the Navy after high school, went to college on the G.I. bill and eventually to Harvard Business School, then Goldman Sachs and then he curried favor in Hollywood. In this upwardly mobile journey he became intrigued by Leninism. From a class conscious youth who lived the American dream and took advantage of all that American culture has to offer bright young people of humble background, Bannon decided that he wanted to burn it all down. He found the vehicle for that ambition in Breitbart, and proceeded to tweak sensibilities with headlines like "Trannies Get HIV 49X More" and calling pundit Bill Kristol, "A Renegade Jew." Although when confronted with his alt-right, white supremacist ideology, as proselytized by Breitbart, he denies those roots:
He absolutely — mockingly — rejects the idea that this is a racial line. “I’m not a white nationalist, I’m a nationalist. I’m an economic nationalist,” he tells me. “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 we deliver—” by "we" he means the Trump White House "—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.”
Bannon has always believed that Trump's message is visceral and compelling. Bannon characterizes Trump as, "The greatest orator since William Jennings Bryan." And Bannon rightly or wrongly believes that Trump is the carrier of a great economic message. Despite the fact that Trump has been caught in boldfaced lies about his influence on Ford Motor Co. to keep jobs in America, a blatant falsehood which has been debunked by any rational media outlet any number of times, the myth of Trump as Champion of the Working Man is one that Bannon fostered and is the mainstay of the Bannon-led Trump administration. Reince Priebus and even Ted Cruz, once firebrand of the Republican party and now reduced to an insignificant figure, take orders from Steve Bannon.
Bannon now becomes part of a two-headed White House political structure, with Reince Priebus — in and out of Bannon's office as we talk — as chief of staff, in charge of making the trains run on time, reporting to the president, and Bannon as chief strategist, in charge of vision, goals, narrative and plan of attack, reporting to the president too. Add to this the ambitions and whims of the president himself, and the novel circumstance of one who has never held elective office, the agenda of his highly influential family and the end runs of a party significant parts of which were opposed to him, and you have quite a complex court that Bannon will have to finesse to realize his reign of the working man and a trillion dollars in new spending.
“I am,” he says, with relish, “Thomas Cromwell in the court of the Tudors.”
Read the entire article published at 10:00 a.m. this morning in Hollywood Reporter. Ringside With Steve Bannon at Trump Tower as the President-Elect's Strategist Plots "An Entirely New Political ...