“The hobbits or the deplorables had a great run in ’16,” Steve Bannon said Friday. | Getty Bannon tells Breitbart: ‘Hobbits’ and ‘deplorables’ were key to Trump’s success ‘Everybody mocked them and ridiculed them, and now they’ve spoken,’ the incoming White House chief strategist and senior counselor said in an interview.

The past year has been great for the “hobbits” and “deplorables,” incoming White House chief strategist and senior counselor Steve Bannon said Friday — but that was just the beginning.

The former Breitbart executive chairman — who was embracing terminology used in a derogatory manner by Sen. John McCain and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, respectively, to describe the so-called alt-right — returned to his former radio show to talk about 2016 and what’s to come for President-elect Donald Trump’s followers.


“The hobbits or the deplorables had a great run in ’16,” Bannon said Friday in an interview with “Breitbart News Daily.” “Everybody mocked them and ridiculed them, and now they’ve spoken. And I think ’17 is gonna be a very exciting year.”

Until this past August, Bannon led Breitbart News, identifying his outlet this summer as “the platform for the alt-right,” a group known for white-nationalist and anti-Semitic politics.

Trump, his transition team and presidential campaign have disavowed the support of white supremacists. Democrats, though, have condemned Trump for appointing Bannon, whom they accuse of being a racist, anti-Semitic, white supremacist who doesn’t belong in the White House.

In his interview Friday, Bannon repeatedly praised Breitbart, crediting its website and radio shows for “following this [movement] and reporting on it for years.”

“We’ve lived through an historic time,” he said. “I think they’ll talk about what happened in this year politically for many, many decades to come.”

He told Breitbart’s audience that he “really” misses them and looks forward to chatting with Breitbart again “early in 2017.”

Bannon said the best things about Breitbart are the comments section and the callers.

“I noticed on Breitbart over the last month or two as either certain appointments were made or certain things were done that didn’t comport with behavior that deplorables or the hobbits thought were correct, it was interesting to see, you know, some of the articles written on the site and the intensity in the comments, and I think that’s great,” he said. “I think people are engaged. They feel like they have a voice, and just continue on.

“It was always great to hear what the hobbits had to say because at the end of the day, what they had to say was what mattered most,” Bannon said. “This whole movement, it’s really the top of the first inning.”

Bannon encouraged supporters to stay engaged and hold the incoming administration accountable — “including me,” he later told the Daily Mail in a text message.

