Chris Matthews said on Monday that non-interventionists like himself have a “real problem” now that former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon is no longer in the West Wing.
Matthews, who has consistently been one of the harshest critics of the Iraq War from the beginning along with others like Jim Webb, has been increasingly skeptical of America’s military adventures abroad.
“We have a real problem,” Matthews said on MSNBC’s Hardball. “People like me who are doves must wonder what is going to happen without Bannon there. At least the one thing Bannon did [was care about non-intervention].”
New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters said Bannon, a Navy veteran whose daughter is a West Point graduate who has served in the Middle East, has always wanted to reduce America’s involvement in messy foreign entanglements.
Matthews blasted “classic establishment politics” and advisers who like to “stay in war” even though “people keep getting killed so the president doesn’t get blamed politically.”
Matthews said Trump won the election because he spoke out against the “crazy wars” that neoconservatives—many of whom do not have any family members who have ever served—were cheerleaders for. Matthews pointed out that “working-class people” are the ones who are actually fighting these wars.
As Breitbart News has pointed out, Jim Webb’s 2007 State of the Union response, which was arguably the best such response, resonated with blue-collar Americans, many of whom joined Trump’s coalition to give him one of the greatest victories in history.