Former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon told Charlie Rose that elites on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and Washington, DC, have committed an “economic hate crime” against working-class Americans by eviscerating the country’s industrial base.
Rose aired Bannon’s remarks Monday evening on his much-heralded Charlie Rose Show on PBS after 60 Minutes devoted two segments to Rose’s interview with Bannon on Sunday evening.
Bannon said though Donald Trump had a double-digit deficit in the polls when he took over his campaign, he knew Trump was going to win the election as soon as Hillary Clinton gave her infamous alt-right speech.
“America does not think it’s a racist country. You saw [that] in Houston. This is the greatest country in man’s history in how we pull together. People don’t think they’re racist,” Bannon told Rose. “And she’s up there with identity politics at the time when elites in this country have had an economic hate crime. You wanna talk about hate crimes? Economic hate crime on the working class people in this country. That’s a hate crime.”
Bannon said the “industrial base in this country has been eviscerated, and the elites in the ascendant economy in Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Hollywood, and Washington DC” are living large.
“And she’s got the gall to sit up there and talk about that,” Bannon said of Clinton. “Her whole defeat was summarized the day she came back … and we knew it.”
Bannon said when he was announced as the Trump’s campaign chairman, the legacy media and the left saw that Trump was down 16 points in the polls and thought the campaign was heading to a 20-point deficit. He said they figured Trump knew the campaign was over and brought in a “bomb-thrower” who was “going to wreak havoc” on all of his “enemies on the way down.”
But Bannon told Rose that “what you saw was the opposite—a highly disciplined campaign … going to certain areas we knew we had to be with that message every day of populism, nationalism.”
He said a week after he joined the campaign, “Clinton, who had been with all her fat cats in the Hamptons and Silicon Valley doing nothing but raising money the entire time,” comes out and gives “the Breitbart, Bannon, white supremacist, alt-right speech.”
Bannon said he was in the campaign’s war room and told the crowd, “We got her.”
“If that’s where she’s gonna go, we got her,” Bannon recalled saying. “She’s done.”
Bannon said though Trump was 15 points down in the polls, he said Clinton “reconfirmed” to him that “she has no earthly idea what she’s doing. She has no earthly idea where this country is.”
“I thought at that time that we could beat her big,” Bannon said. “They walked into a trap.”
Bannon told Rose that he reminded Trump to keep hammering the economic nationalist message at all of his campaign rallies, and Bannon was proven right on election night when Trump shocked the world by winning the White House largely due to working-class voters in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
In a segment that aired on 60 Minutes, Bannon told Rose that economic nationalism will unite Americans of all backgrounds.
“Economic nationalism is what this country was built on. The American system—we look after our own. We look after our citizen, we look after our manufacturing base,” Bannon told Rose. “And guess what? This country’s going to be greater, more united, more powerful than it’s ever been. This is not astrophysics. And by the way, that’s every nationality, every race, every religion, every sexual preference.”
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