Former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon told Charlie Rose that President Donald Trump combined Jacksonian populism and Hamiltonian economic nationalism to galvanize working-class Americans of all backgrounds to win the White House.
Rose aired Bannon’s remarks on his much-heralded Charlie Rose Show on PBS on Tuesday evening. The esteemed CBS anchor interviewed Bannon for 60 Minutes, and he also aired some of his interview with the Breitbart News executive chairman on his interview program on Monday evening as well.
When Rose asked Bannon to define the populism that got Trump elected, Bannon told him that “populism is anti-elitism. Anti-crony capitalism.”
“It is basically the voice of the people of this country saying that there is a corrupt permanent political class in Washington, DC, inextricably linked to the financiers on wall Street and the high-tech community in Silicon Valley and in Hollywood,” Bannon said.
He added that these elites “rule us” in order to “spite what we want to happen” and commit “economic hate crime[s]” against American workers. Bannon spoke about the country’s industrial and manufacturing base being “exported overseas” while Asia’s middle class rises “at the expense of the working-class people in this country.”
“What Donald Trump was able to galvanize is kinda what i call Jacksonian populism, which is always very, very concerned about an elite in Washington, DC, with … Hamiltonian economic nationalism,” Bannon said. “The two great forces of 19th century politics have really been combined in this modern movement.”
Bannon further defined the three basic “touchstones” of Trump’s movement: 1) stop mass immigration and cut back dramatically on legal immigration; 2) bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States; 3) get us out of these pointless foreign wars.
He said these were the “three broad categories’ of Trump’s movement and added, “you are going to see that time and again.”
Bannon also said Trump resonated with Breitbart News’ readers and defeated the most talented Republican presidential field in history because of his positions on trade and illegal immigration. Bannon also told Rose that Breitbart News is a throwback to 19th century newspapers that openly stated their positions on issues.
“We’re very anti-elite. And the reason is the elites are incompetent,” Bannon said. “If they were so smart, we would be in a better situation. They are complete and totally incompetent.”
Bannon also added that, “We’re populist. We’re economic nationalists. We believe in America First. We don’t believe in a lot of foreign intervention that’s not in the vital national security interests of the United States.”
Bannon also said that economic nationalism is what 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 in a segment that aired on 60 Minutes. “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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