Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon contradicts the president and says there’s no military solution to the threat posed by North Korea and its nuclear ambitions.
Bannon also calls Va. white supremacists ‘clowns’ in interview
Steve Bannon, the White House chief strategist, seemed to take issue with President Donald Trump on North Korea, attacked white supremacists as “clowns” and “losers” and described his efforts against administration rivals in an unusual interview Wednesday with The American Prospect, a progressive magazine.
The interview with magazine co-editor and columnist Robert Kuttner was initiated by Bannon, Kuttner said, in an Anthony Scaramucci-style phone call in response to a column Kuttner had written on China.
“Bannon was in high spirits when he phoned me Tuesday afternoon to discuss the politics of taking a harder line with China, and minced no words describing his efforts to neutralize rivals at the Departments of Defense, State and Treasury,” wrote Kuttner. “‘They’re wetting themselves,’ he said, proceeding to detail how he would oust some of his opponents at State and Defense.”
On North Korea, Bannon said: “Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that 10 million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here, they got us.’ ” Seoul is the capital of South Korea, which North Korea has threatened.
That comment seemed at odds with Trump’s “fire and fury” threats to use military force against North Korea.
On China, Bannon told Kuttner that the United States was at “economic war” and warned that “one of us is going to be a hegemon in 25 or 30 years and it’s gonna be them if we go down this path,” according to the article.
“On Korea, they’re just tapping us along. It’s just a sideshow,” he said.
Kuttner also asked Bannon to comment on the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., last weekend and Trump’s reluctance to condemn the participants. “Ethno-nationalism — it’s losers. It’s a fringe element,” Bannon told the magazine. “I think the media plays it up too much, and we gotta help crush it, you know, eh, help crush it more.”
“These guys are a collection of clowns,” he added.
A White House spokeswoman said “Bannon’s comments stand on their own.”
In a separate interview with the DailyMail.com, Bannon said his comments to The American Prospect “drew fire away from” Trump and that he successfully “changed the (media) narrative” around Trump with the earlier interview.
The remarks were surprising coming from Bannon, who spent more than four years running the farright website Breitbart News before he was tapped to join Trump’s campaign.
Bannon, the site’s former executive chair, has called the Breitbart “a platform of the alt-right,” a political grouping or tendency mixing racism, white nationalism, anti-Semitism and populism.
It was his strategy to use the site to channel white supremacist support for Trump and provide a mouthpiece for his populist message during the 2016 election, a move that helped secure him a senior role in the administration.
In the wake of the violence in Charlottesville, which left a counterprotester dead and 19 injured, civil rights leaders have called on Trump to fire Bannon over his ties to the white nationalist community, as The Washington Post has reported.
Asked Tuesday if he still had confidence in his chief strategist, Trump deflected. “We’ll see what happens with Mr. Bannon,” he said.
When the conversation turned to race and the events in Charlottesville, Bannon dodged questions about his role in cultivating the alt-right, according to The American Prospect article. He also faulted Democrats for focusing on identity politics.
“The longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em,” he said. “I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”