Steve Bannon joined Donald Trump’s campaign as its CEO in August and before that was the head of Breitbart News. | AP Photo Steve Bannon hails Trump's 'economic nationalist' agenda

Republicans will “govern for 50 years” if Donald Trump is able to deliver on the promises he made on the campaign trail, incoming White House chief strategist Steve Bannon told The Hollywood Reporter in an interview published Friday.

Contrary to the way he’s been portrayed in the press in the days since Trump appointed him to a top White House job, Bannon said, “I’m not a white nationalist, I’m a nationalist. I’m an economic nationalist.”


Bannon said that Democrats and — until Trump — Republicans had both abandoned mainstream America in favor of what he labeled in his conversation with writer Michael Wolff as “the donor class,” “ascendant America,” and “the metrosexual bubble.” The president-elect won, in Bannon’s estimation, because he targeted his campaign at those that both political parties had left behind.

“The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia. The issue now is about Americans looking to not get f—ed over,” said Bannon, a former Goldman Sachs banker who went on to found his own boutique investment firm. “If we deliver, we’ll get 60 percent of the white vote, and 40 percent of the black and Hispanic vote and we’ll govern for 50 years.”

Trump, Bannon said, “gets it intuitively” and is “probably the greatest orator since William Jennings Bryan” because he is so able to connect with the thousands of people who attend his rallies.

Bannon joined Trump’s campaign as its CEO in August and before that was the head of Breitbart News, the alt-right media outlet that was an early champion of the Manhattan billionaire’s campaign. Breitbart’s headlines, which include “there’s no hiring bias against women in tech, they just suck at interviews,” “birth control makes women unattractive and crazy” and “Bill Kristol: Republican spoiler, renegade Jew,” have prompted outrage from Democrats who have demanded that Trump remove Bannon from his White House staff.

But Bannon seemed unconcerned by all the criticism in his interview, certain that those attacking him as a racist and anti-Semite were missing the point in the same way that they missed the movement that lifted Trump into the White House. “Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power," he said. "It only helps us when they get it wrong. When they’re blind to who we are and what we’re doing.”

Bannon said the media are “just a circle of people talking to themselves who have no f---ing idea what’s going on. If The New York Times didn’t exist, CNN and MSNBC would be a test pattern. The Huffington Post and everything else is predicated on The New York Times. It’s a closed circle of information from which Hillary Clinton got all her information — and her confidence. That was our opening.”

Fox News, he said, will become more centrist and rebuild itself around Megyn Kelly, the Fox personality who was perhaps the most critical of Trump throughout his run.

Trump’s White House will “build an entirely new political movement,” Bannon said, likening it to “[Andrew] Jackson’s populism.” All of it will be based on kicking the economy into higher gear.

“It’s everything related to jobs. The conservatives are going to go crazy. I’m the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan,” Bannon said. “With negative interest rates throughout the world, it’s the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Shipyards, ironworks, get them all jacked up. We’re just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution — conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.”