Evan Vucci/AP Photo
Bannon listens to Trump during a meeting at the White House, January 2017.
Many people have observed that sheltering in place during the pandemic is beginning to feel like Groundhog Day. For me personally, Groundhog Day struck in a special way on Friday, when an email arrived from Steve Bannon telling me how much he liked my latest piece on China and trade.
Been there, done that. The last time this happened, in August 2017, it led to an on-the-record interview that cost Bannon his job as chief White House political strategist, and made me famous for 15 minutes (well, three days actually).
This time, Bannon was inviting me onto his TV show, War Room. I accepted. Here is the link.
Three years after our first encounter, Bannon is the same sly operator, the same ethno-nationalist, having become a global adviser to far-right candidates and regimes. He’s still trying to steal the Democrats’ clothes (which too many Democrats are too willing to give him) on reclaiming American manufacturing and getting tough with China.
Bannon still thinks he can make common cause with American progressives on economic nationalism. And bizarrely, even though I helped get him fired, he still sees me as a kind of ally on China policy.
Bannon’s latest persona is obsessed with China’s role in the pandemic. He has declared that the Chinese Communist Party would have blood on its hands for the death of millions of people for its initial role in covering up the extent of the illness.
If China has blood on its hands for preventable deaths, how much blood is on Trump’s hands?
But that phase did not last long—and Trump denied the seriousness of the pandemic far longer than China did. And if China has blood on its hands for preventable deaths, how much blood is on Trump’s hands?
Bannon has also darkly hinted, without quite making the allegation in so many words, that there may be truth in the thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory that the virus originated in an experiment gone bad in a Wuhan lab. This is also vintage Bannon—going well beyond the facts, but doing it with winks, nods, and innuendo.
Though he no longer works for Trump, he is evidently in regular touch with his longtime allies now in senior positions at the White House—Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, ultra–China hawk Peter Navarro, and senior adviser and Bannon protégé Stephen Miller.
When we discussed China, Bannon seemed sensible. We could agree that the U.S. is being taken to the cleaners by Beijing’s mercantilism; that until Trump, the Wall Street wings of both parties were all too happy to embrace “free trade” out of one side of their mouths while giving China a pass as long as Wall Street got a piece of the action.
But though he is far more coherent and nimble than Trump, Bannon gets tangled up in the same contradictions. He takes credit for warning about the pandemic early. But he is too polite to criticize Trump, who was in total denial mode from January, when the first cases were reported, right through mid-March when he declared a national emergency and then insisted, “I’ve felt it was a pandemic long before it was a pandemic.”
And despite blaming China for unleashing a plague on the world, Bannon joins Trump in weirdly promoting populist pressure for an early and full reopening of the economy. Here is an extract of our exchange on that:
RK: Steve, I’ve got to push you on one thing … otherwise I won’t respect myself in the morning. You’ve cut the president an awful lot of slack. And I don’t understand this pressure to reopen the economy so quickly. I’ve got a red hat I’m going to send you. It says, “Make America Sick Again.” Trump went from denying that this was happening, to thanking China for cooperating, to then being very hostile to China, and back and forth on what the right strategy is. We can criticize China, which is absolutely right, without being premature in ending social distancing, and without tweeting, “LIBERATE MINNESOTA,” “LIBERATE MICHIGAN,” “LIBERATE VIRGINIA,” and egging on shock troops. I don’t understand why the two things have to go together, other than the fact that your audience is Trump’s audience and it would be awkward to criticize the president on this show.
SB: No, no … First off, we try to get as many of the economic nationalists as we can, we really do a lot of outreach to the Bernie nationalists, because we think there is a commonality here, in looking at American manufacturing and American jobs. We’ve really been very evenhanded about our observations and our criticisms. We are hardcore partisans here, but we don’t attack Dr. Fauci or Dr. Birx from the right, like they gave to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Our problem is we haven’t seen enough metrics put out there, what the targets are … We were adamant. We had a program called 30 Days to Save America. We wanted a lockdown, we wanted no domestic flights. We were much more hardcore. The president’s decision was that at the execution level, it has to be the governors. We wanted a national policy. But I do see the logic of having the governors do it.
RK: Then why egg on people to attack the governors?
And so it goes. Bannon reminds me of an aphorism often mistakenly attributed to Henry Kissinger: No permanent friends, no permanent enemies, only permanent interests. (The original was actually Lord Palmerston, one of the practitioners of 19th-century realpolitik as British foreign secretary and prime minister.)
In Bannon’s case, permanent interest number one is advancing Bannon, with right-wing economic populism close behind. Trump is a mere instrument—who happens to be president of the United States, thanks in part to Bannon.
Where Bannon twists himself into a pretzel is in his slavish defense of Trump, who has rhetorically mirrored Bannon’s hostile rhetoric on China but in practice has done little of consequence. But despite the contradictions and contortions, Bannon remains one of the shrewdest of the right’s strategists. And if the Biden campaign doesn’t pay attention, Bannon-style economic populism will steal the Democrats’ clothes yet again.
