Bannon tells of infighting over China trade policy

WASHINGTON — White House chief strategist Steve Bannon took public his long-simmering feud with some of President Trump’s top economic advisers, saying in an interview with the American Prospect that he battles them often, especially over his determination to take a tougher position on China.

“That’s a fight I fight every day here,” Bannon is quoted as saying in the interview published Wednesday. He pointed to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn, both alumni of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. who are pushing for a softer stance on trade with China. “We’re still fighting. There’s Treasury and Gary Cohn and Goldman Sachs lobbying.”

The interview was conducted Tuesday by the magazine’s co-editor Robert Kuttner, who said Bannon told him he reached out because he agreed with Kuttner’s past writings on China. Bannon rarely speaks with reporters on the record, let alone a liberal-leaning magazine.

The interview with Bannon comes as the White House has struggled to respond to Saturday’s violent racial protests in Charlottesville, Va., and as some aides — including Cohn — have objected in private to Trump’s restrained denunciations of white supremacists. Bannon approved of the president’s approach, officials in the administration who asked not to be identified have said.

Bannon, who also once worked at Goldman Sachs, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the interview.

In the interview, Bannon said his rivals in the administration are “wetting themselves” as he works to undermine their influence with the president, and he bragged about working to get some of them ousted. There has been speculation in recent days that Bannon could be in danger of losing his job, though Trump spoke in supportive terms about about him at Tuesday’s news conference.

Bannon said he favors pushing back against Chinese economic expansion, arguing only one country will emerge as a leader from what he described as an “economic war.”

“To me, the economic war with China is everything. And we have to be maniacally focused on that. If we continue to lose it, we’re five years away, I think, 10 years at the most, of hitting an inflection point from which we’ll never be able to recover,” he said.