The future of Bannonism
Gone but not forgotten
Two days after he ceased to be President Donald Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon explained why he had welcomed The Economist to his house on Capitol Hill for a chat. “You’re the enemy,” he said, adding disdainfully: “You support a radical idea, free trade. I mean it, that’s a radical idea.” As he returns to his former job, running Breitbart News, a bomb-throwing right-wing website, Mr Bannon wants to make clear that he still loves a scrap. “In the White House I had influence,” he says several times during a long discussion. “At Breitbart, I had power.”
Among the particular opponents he has in his sights, said Mr Bannon, seated in a dining-room decorated with Christian iconography and political mementos, are congressional Republicans (“Mitch McConnell, I’m going to light him up”), China (“Let’s go screw up One Belt One Road”) and “the elites in Silicon Valley and Wall Street — they’re a bunch of globalists who have forgotten their fellow Americans.” Despite his departure — voluntarily, he insists, though his resignation is reported to have been demanded of him — Mr Bannon says he will never attack his former boss. Yet Breitbart will caution Mr Trump to stick to the populist nationalist course Mr Bannon charted. “We will never turn on him. But we are never going to let him take a decision that hurts him.” The website offered an early…
