Stephen Bannon, the alt-right guru and racist provocateur who will serve as Donald Trump’s chief strategist in the White House, doesn’t talk like a normal Republican—even when he’s off Breitbart duty. When outlining his dreams for a Trump presidency, he sometimes sounds remarkably like a Bernie Sanders populist eager for a return to the big-government heyday of the 1930s.

“The conservatives are going to go crazy,” Bannon told The Hollywood Reporter last week. “I’m the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. With negative interest rates throughout the world, it’s the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Shipyards, iron works, 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.”

In his exuberance, Bannon gives away the problem that Trump will face with his economic nationalist agenda, which along with infrastructure includes a newly protectionist trade regime and an immigration crackdown. Note how, after Bannon says, accurately, that “the conservatives will go crazy,” he says within a few seconds that his coalition consists of “conservatives, plus populists.”

“The conservatives are going to go crazy,” Bannon says, over Trump’s big-spending agenda. So will many of Trump’s voters.

Both statements are true—conservative Republicans are likely to bristle at the idea of a trillion-dollar infrastructure spending, not to mention any push for protectionism. And Chamber of Commerce-style conservatives won’t like losing cheap immigrant labor, either, no matter how much they theoretically support strict borders. Populists? They’ll be gung-ho for the right kind of job-creating plan.

Welcome to the immediate future of the Republican Party: a tug-of-war between Bannon and Trump’s populism and conservative Republican austerity politics. The push-and-pull will undoubtedly put a strain on the volatile coalition that Trump assembled in November. He won by bringing together two factions: one, an expanded share of the white working class (attracted in part to the message of economic populism), many of whom had voted for Obama; two, a consolidation of the traditional Republican base—which skews higher on the economic ladder, and cares more about tax cuts than economic populism. You see the problem.

