Former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon told the Values Voter Summit on Saturday that grassroots conservative candidate Judge Roy Moore’s victory in the Alabama GOP Senate runoff against D.C. establishment Sen. Luther Strange (R-AL) reminded President Donald Trump to dance with the ones that brung him.
“Every day is like Christmas Day now,” Bannon said. “I can’t wait to get up … It’s going to be a new package under [the tree] … this is the Trump program … this is what we all wanted.”
Bannon added, “Heck, I hope they’ll announce that the Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist organization and move our embassy to Jerusalem.”
Bannon said that Trump “had some bad information and some bad advice given to him” before the Alabama GOP Senate runoff, as “folks were telling him things that just weren’t so.”
“Look what happens when the president knows he has your support,” he said.
Bannon cited six specific actions the Trump administration has taken since Moore defeated Strange.
First, Bannon said after Trump palled around with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and indicated that he was going to cave on former President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, the Trump White House released a “70-point plan for DACA, including 20 deal-killers.” Bannon said that “just so [Sen. Dick] Durbin (D-IL) and Nancy Pelosi got the joke,” the White House also said there would be “no pathway to citizenship.”
Second, Bannon said that to ensure that Trump’s religious liberty executive order would not be gutted, Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a 25-page legal guidance, ensuring that “everything turned around.”
Sessions specifically mentioned in his statement that freedom of religion “includes the right to act or abstain from action in accordance with one’s religious beliefs.”
“As President Trump said, ‘Faith is deeply embedded into the history of our country, the spirit of our founding and the soul of our nation,’” Sessions said, adding that the Trump administration “will not allow people of faith to be targeted, bullied or silenced anymore.”
Third, Bannon mentioned that the Trump administration withdrew from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) last week, citing, as Breitbart News noted, the “long-standing concerns of significant anti-Israel bias at the organization.”
“This decision was not taken lightly, and reflects U.S. concerns with mounting arrears at UNESCO, the need for fundamental reform in the organization, and continuing anti-Israel bias at UNESCO,” Trump’s State Department said in a statement.
Fourth, Bannon mentioned that after Moore’s win, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin all of a sudden sounded like a populist while pushing the administration’s tax reform agenda.
Mnuchin insisted during an Oct. 1 appearance on ABC’s This Week that “the objective of the president is that rich people don’t get tax cuts,” and “it is our objective that the entire middle class will get a tax cut.”
Fifth, Bannon mentioned that the Trump White House decided the federal government is “not going to make the [Obamacare cost-sharing reduction] payments,” and added that Trump’s decision was “going to blow the exchanges up.”
“Based on guidance from the Department of Justice, the Department of Health and Human Services has concluded that there is no appropriation for cost-sharing reduction payments to insurance companies under Obamacare,” the White House said in a statement last week. “In light of this analysis, the Government cannot lawfully make the cost-sharing reduction payments.”
Sixth, Bannon said that Trump decertified the Iran Deal while labeling the Revolutionary Guard a “terrorist organization.”
As Breitbart News reported, not only did Trump decertify the Iran Deal, but he also “authorized the U.S. Department of Treasury to sanction Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization under terrorism Executive Order 13224. ” Trump said the move was “long overdue” and called the Revolutionary Guard the “the Iranian Supreme Leader’s corrupt personal terror force and militia.”
Bannon said that these are “not random events.”
“That is victory begets victory,” Bannon triumphantly said to raucous cheers. “We owe that to Judge Moore and the good people of Alabama because that all came from them.” While campaigning for Moore, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin said that a vote for Moore was not a vote against Trump but for the “people’s agenda” that got Trump elected. Her message resonated across the Yellowhammer State.
Bannon reminded the audience that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and his establishment allies like Karl Rove started the war that has galvanized economic nationalists across the country.
“It’s not my war. This is our war, and y’all didn’t start it, the establishment started it,” Bannon said, adding that, “Right now, it’s a season of war against a GOP establishment.”
On Monday, Trump said that “there are some Republicans, frankly, that should ashamed of themselves” in Congress and added, “I can understand fully how Steve Bannon feels.”
Later in the day during a press conference with Trump, McConnell implied that the economic nationalist challengers Bannon intends to support in states like Arizona and Nevada would not be able to win general elections. But McConnell did not mention that one GOP establishment strategist specifically pointed out last week that the GOP establishment should be “shaking in their boots” because Bannon, who was not responsible for candidates like Christine McDonnell and Sharron Angle, revealed that he was spending “tons of time with candidates to make sure they are fully vetted and able to defeat Democrats after they take on incumbents.”
“You have to nominate people who can actually win, because winners make policy and losers go home,” McConnell said on Monday.
McConnell may not have said it any better. In Alabama, Moore won, thrashing McConnell’s candidate Strange, who will now go home. And after Moore’s victory, the conservative grassroots have seen the Trump administration support many of their policy preferences, as Bannon triumphantly told the Values Voter Summit.
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