Former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon believes economic nationalist candidates who challenge GOP establishment incumbents will “rejuvenate” the Republican Party.
Addressing reports that Bannon intends to support primary challengers to Sens. Jeff Flake (R-AZ), Bob Corker (R-TN), Dean Heller (R-NV), and Roger Wicker (R-MS), in addition to opposing establishment Republican Alabama Sen. Luther Strange, Rose asked Bannon whether such challenges will “rip apart the Republican Party.”
“It’s rejuvenating the Republican Party,” Bannon countered.
Rose’s interviewed Bannon for CBS’s 60 minutes, and Rose aired other segments of his interview with the Breitbart News executive chairman every day on his esteemed Charlie Rose Show interview show last week.
Bannon told Rose that the “Republican Party could not win national elections” when it was perceived as the establishment party for corporatists and Wall Street. He said that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), a war hero, and Mitt Romney, a successful businessman, showed that the establishment Republican Party “was incapable of winning national elections.”
Bannon said President Donald Trump’s coalition of working-class voters, especially those in the upper Midwest, “shows you we are on the path to power if you only reinforce the policies you said [you would support],” reiterating his belief that Trump will win in a landslide in 2020 if he just keeps his campaign promises and does not become the modern version of George H.W. Bush.
Bannon noted that Trump galvanized the “grassroots movement” in the country, and he told Rose that the “grassroots movement is the single most important part of the coalition that came together to elect Donald Trump.”
“They are what Senator McCain called the ‘hobbits.’ It’s the forgotten man. It’s the people who hold our churches together, our civic society, who coach Little League,” Bannon said. “That grassroots conservative movement, which the Republican establishment holds in contempt and has always held in contempt, finally found a champion in Donald Trump. ”
Bannon, who said GOP establishment politicians like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) want to “nullify” the 2016 election, again told Rose that Republican establishment leaders “do not want Trump’s populist, economic nationalist agenda to be implemented.”
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