War: Steve Bannon speaks with Charlie Rose on ’60 Minutes’.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell sternly directed President Donald Trump’s team in a meeting at Trump Tower to “back off” on “this ‘drain the swamp’ talk,” former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon told “60 Minutes”.
“The Republican establishment is trying to nullify the 2016 election,” Bannon told CBS anchor Charlie Rose in a riveting and wide-ranging interview that aired Sept. 10. “That’s a brutal fact we have to face.”
“I think Mitch McConnell, and to a degree, Paul Ryan. They do not want Donald Trump’s populist, economic nationalist agenda to be implemented. It’s very obvious,” Bannon said.
Ryan and McConnell must be “put on notice, ” he said.
“They’re gonna be held accountable if they do not support the President of the United States. Right now there’s no accountability.”
“They do not support the president’s program. It’s an open secret on Capitol Hill. Everybody in this city knows it,” Bannon said.
Rose then asked, “now that you’re out of the White House, you’re going to war with them?”
“Absolutely,” Bannon replied.
Other key Bannon comments from the interview:
- “In the 48 hours after we won, there’s a fundamental decision that was made. You might call it the original sin of the administration. We embraced the establishment. … Because you had to staff a government.”
- “I’m worried about losing the House now because of this – of – because of DACA … it will be a civil war inside the Republican party that will be every bit as vitriolic as 2013.”
- “You couldn’t be more dead wrong [about immigration]. America was built on her citizens.”
- “What built America’s called the American system, from Hamilton to Polk to Henry Clay to Lincoln to the Roosevelts. A system of protection of our manufacturing, financial system that lends to manufacturers, okay, and the control of our borders.”
- “I’m a street fighter. And by the way, I think that’s why Donald Trump and I get along so well. Donald Trump’s a fighter. Great counter puncher.”
- “When he’s talking about the Neo-Nazis and Neo-Confederates and the Klan, who, by the way, are absolutely awful – there’s no room in American politics for that. There’s no room in American society for that.”
- “The elites in this country have got us in a situation, we’re at not economic war with China, China is at economic war with us.”
- “I was the last guy to speak [about the Access Hollywood video], and I said, ‘It’s 100 percent. You have 100 percent probability of winning. … They don’t care.’ ”
- “ ‘When you side with a man, you side with him,’ okay? The good and the bad. You can criticize him behind, but when you side with him, you have to side with him.” And that’s what Billy Bush weekend showed me.”
- “I don’t need the affirmation of the mainstream media. I don’t care what they say. They can call me an anti-Semite. They can call me racist. They call me nativist. You can call me anything you want. Okay? As long as we’re driving this agenda for the working men and women of this country, I’m happy.”
- “I cannot take the fight to who we have to take the fight to when I’m an adviser to the president as a federal government employee.”
- “I think what he does on Twitter is extraordinary. He disintermediates the media. He goes above their head and talks directly to the American people.”
- “I think he’s [at] 36 percent or 38 percent because he hasn’t – we haven’t gotten the wall built. We haven’t done – if you just go through and just do the Trump program that he laid out and just punch those things out, you’re going to be fine. … we’re going to win in ’18 and we’ll pick [up] or six or seven Senate seats. I think we’ll pick up a couple of seats in the House. And he’ll win in a huge landslide in ’20.”
- “My suggestion and my recommendation is to solve the problem in Korea you need to solve that problem with China. … I think we have– tremendous leverage in capital markets. I think we have tremendous leverage with Chinese banks. I think we have tremendous leverage with the Chinese financial institutions.”
