In November 2015, Stephen Bannon \u2013 then the executive chairman of Breitbart News \u2013 was hosting a satellite radio show. His guest was Rep. Ryan Zinke, R-Mont., who opposed President Barack Obama\u2019s plan to resettle some Syrian refugees in the United States.
\u201cWe need to put a stop on refugees until we can vet,\u201d Zinke said.
Bannon cut him off.
\u201cWhy even let \u2019em in?\u201d he asked.
Bannon said that vetting refugees from Muslim-majority countries would cost money and time. \u201cCan\u2019t that money be used in the United States?\u201d he said. \u201cShould we just take a pause and a hiatus for a number of years on any influx from that area of the world?\u201d
In the years before Bannon grabbed the world\u2019s attention as President Donald Trump\u2019s chief White House strategist, he was developing and articulating a fiery populist vision for remaking the United States and its role in the world.
Bannon\u2019s past statements, aired primarily on Breitbart and other conservative platforms, serve as a road map for the controversial agenda that has roiled Washington and shaken the global order during Trump\u2019s first two weeks in office.
Now, at the center of power in the White House, Bannon is moving quickly to turn his ideas into policy, helping direct the biggest decisions of Trump\u2019s administration. The withdrawal from a major trade pact. A ban on all visitors from seven majority-Muslim countries. And \u2013 in an echo of that conversation with Zinke, who is now Trump\u2019s nominee for interior secretary \u2013 there was a temporary ban on all new refugees.
The result has been intense fury from Democrats, discomfort among many Republicans, and a growing sense of unease in the world that Trump intends to undermine an America-centered world that has lasted 70 years. This sense of turmoil, welcomed by many Trump supporters as proof that the new president is following through on his vow to jolt Washington, reflects the sort of transformation that Bannon has long called for.
That worldview, which Bannon laid out in interviews and speeches over the past several years, hinges largely on Bannon\u2019s belief in American \u201csovereignty.\u201d Bannon said that countries should protect their citizens and their essence by reducing immigration, legal and illegal, and pulling back from multinational agreements.
At the same time, Bannon was concerned that the United States and the \u201cJudeo-Christian West\u201d were in a war against an expansionist Islamic ideology \u2013 but they were losing the war by not recognizing what it was. Bannon said this fight was so important, it was worth overlooking differences and rivalries with countries like Russia.
It is not yet clear how far Bannon will be able to go to enact his agenda. His early policy moves have been marred by administrative chaos. But his worldview calls for bigger changes than those already made.
In the past, Bannon had wondered aloud whether the country was ready to follow his lead. Now, he will find out.
\u201cIs that grit still there, that tenacity, that we\u2019ve seen on the battlefields . fighting for something greater than themselves?\u201d Bannon said in another radio interview last May, before he joined the Trump campaign.
That, said Bannon, is \u201cone of the biggest open questions in this country.\u201d
Bannon, 62, is a former Navy officer and Goldman Sachs banker who made a fortune after he acquired a share of the royalties from a fledgling TV show called \u201cSeinfeld.\u201d In the past 15 years, he shifted into entertainment and conservative media, making films about Ronald Reagan and Sarah Palin and then taking a lead role at Breitbart News.
At Breitbart, Bannon cemented his role as a champion of the alt-right, the anti-globalism movement that has attracted support from white supremacists and found a home on the far-right website.
Bannon also forged a rapport with Trump, interviewing the businessman-candidate on his show and then, in August 2016, joining the campaign as chief executive.
Now, Bannon has become one of the most powerful men in America. And he\u2019s not afraid to say so.
In interviews with reporters since Trump\u2019s election, Bannon has eschewed the traditional it\u2019s-all-about-the-boss humility of presidential staffers.
\u201cDick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That\u2019s power,\u201d he told the Hollywood Reporter in November, embracing the comparisons of him to those figures.
In the same interview, Bannon compared himself to a powerful aide to England\u2019s Henry VIII \u2013 an aide who helped engineer a world-shaking move of his era, the split of the Church of England from the Catholic Church.
\u201cI am Thomas Cromwell in the court of the Tudors,\u201d Bannon told the Hollywood Reporter.
To explore Bannon\u2019s worldview, The Washington Post reviewed hours of radio interviews that Bannon conducted while hosting a Breitbart radio talk show, as well as speeches and interviews he has given since 2014.
Bannon did not respond to a request for comment made on Tuesday afternoon.
In his public statements, Bannon espoused a basic idea that Trump would later seize as the centerpiece of his campaign.
While others saw the world rebounding from the financial crisis of 2008, Bannon just saw it becoming more divided by class.
The elites that had caused the crisis \u2013 or, at least, failed to stop it \u2013 were now rising higher. Everyone else was being left behind.
\u201cThe middle class, the working men and women in the world . are just tired of being dictated to by what we call the party of Davos,\u201d Bannon said in a 2014 speech to a conference at the Vatican in a recording obtained by BuzzFeed. Davos is a Swiss ski resort that hosts an annual conclave of wealthy and powerful people.
Bannon blamed both major political parties for this system and set out to force his ideas on an unwilling Republican leadership.
What he wanted, he said again and again, was \u201csovereignty.\u201d Both in the United States and in its traditional allies in Western Europe.
On one of the first Breitbart Radio shows, in early November 2015, Bannon praised the growing movement in Britain to exit the European Union. He said that the British had joined the EU merely as a trading federation but that it had grown into a force that had stripped Britons of sovereignty \u201cin every aspect important to their own life.\u201d
Bannon has been supportive of similar movements in other European countries to pull out of the union. Trump has echoed those sentiments in his first few days as president. It is a remarkable shift in U. S. policy: After decades of building multinational alliances as a guarantee of peace, now the White House has indicated it may undermine them.
Bannon, in his 2014 speech to the Vatican, cast this as a return to a better past.
\u201cI think strong countries and strong nationalist movements in countries make strong neighbors,\u201d Bannon said. \u201cAnd that is really the building blocks that built Western Europe and the United States, and I think it\u2019s what can see us forward.\u201d
In the case of the United States, Bannon was skeptical of multinational trade pacts, saying that they ceded control. In a radio interview in November 2015, Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., agreed with Bannon.
\u201cWe shouldn\u2019t be tying ourselves down like Gulliver in the land of Lilliputians with so many strings a guy can\u2019t move,\u201d said Sessions, who is now Trump\u2019s nominee to become attorney general. He was referring to a scene from the novel \u201cGulliver\u2019s Travels,\u201d in which the hero is tied down by a race of tiny men. \u201cThat is where we are heading, and it\u2019s not necessary.\u201d
One solution put forward by Bannon: the United States should pursue bilateral trade agreements \u2013 one country at a time \u2013 rather than multi-country agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership supported by Obama.
He suggested as much to Trump himself, when the candidate appeared on his show in November 2015.
\u201cTrump brings a deal back to the Senate and gets his bilateral trade deal with Taiwan or with Japan approved by two-thirds of the Senate,\u201d Bannon said. \u201cAnd you have to go argue, \u2018Hey, this is why it\u2019s a good deal.\u2019 And that\u2019s the way the Founders wanted it.\u201d
On a March 2016 episode, Bannon said that restoring sovereignty meant reducing immigration. In his radio shows, he criticized the federal H-1B visa programs that permit U. S. companies to fill technical positions with workers from overseas.
The \u201cprogressive plutocrats in Silicon Valley,\u201d Bannon said, want unlimited ability to go around the world and bring people back to the United States. \u201cEngineering schools,\u201d Bannon said, \u201care all full of people from South Asia, and East Asia. \u2026 They\u2019ve come in here to take these jobs.\u201d Meanwhile, Bannon said, American students \u201ccan\u2019t get engineering degrees; they can\u2019t get into these graduate schools because they are all foreign students. When they come out, they can\u2019t get a job.\u201d
\u201cDon\u2019t we have a problem with legal immigration?\u201d asked Bannon repeatedly.
\u201cTwenty percent of this country is immigrants. Is that not the beating heart of this problem?\u201d he said, meaning the problem of native-born Americans being unable to find jobs and rising wages.
In another show, Bannon had complained to Trump that so many Silicon Valley chief executives were South Asian or Asian. This was a rare time when Trump \u2013 normally receptive to Bannon\u2019s ideas on-air \u2013 pushed back. \u201cI still want people to come in,\u201d Trump said. \u201cBut I want them to go through the process.\u201d
So far, Trump has made no changes to the high-skilled visa program. This week, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said that the Trump administration may reexamine the program.
Even as Bannon was calling for a general retreat from multi-national alliances, however, he was warning of the need for a new alliance \u2013 involving only a subset of the world\u2019s countries.
The \u201cJudeo-Christian West\u201d was at war, he said, but didn\u2019t seem to understand it yet.
\u201cThere is a major war brewing, a war that\u2019s already global,\u201d Bannon said at the Vatican in 2014, at a time when the Islamic State was gaining territory. \u201cEvery day that we refuse to look at this as what it is \u2013 and the scale of it, and really the viciousness of it \u2013 will be a day where you will rue that we didn\u2019t act.\u201d
Bannon has given few details about the mechanics of the war he thinks the West should fight. But he has been clear that it is urgent enough to take priority over other rivalries and worries.
In his talk at the Vatican, Bannon was asked about Russian President Vladimir Putin. Bannon\u2019s answer was two-sided.
\u201cI think that Putin and his cronies are really a kleptocracy, that are really an imperialist power that want to expand,\u201d he said. But, Bannon said, there were bigger concerns than Russia \u2013 and there was something to admire in Putin\u2019s call for more traditional values.
\u201cHowever, I really believe that in this current environment, where you\u2019re facing a potential new caliphate that is very aggressive that is really a situation \u2013 I\u2019m not saying we can put Russia on a back burner \u2013 but I think we have to deal with first things first,\u201d Bannon said.
If Bannon succeeds, Bannon\u2019s own comparison, to England\u2019s Thomas Cromwell, might be apt \u2013 to a point.
\u201cThe analogy \u2013 if it\u2019s going to work \u2013 is that Bannon has his own agenda, which he will try to use Trump for, and will try to exploit the power that Trump has given him, without his master always noticing,\u201d said Diarmaid MacCulloch, a professor of history at England\u2019s Oxford University.
But Cromwell was later executed, after Henry VIII turned against him. For a man like that, MacCulloch said, power is always tenuous: \u201cIt\u2019s very much dependent on the favor of the king.\u201d
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