White House chief strategist Steve Bannon claimed he wants to “crush” the far right — calling them “losers” and “a collection of clowns” — during a shockingly candid interview with a liberal magazine.

“Ethno-nationalism — it’s losers. It’s a fringe element,” Bannon said during a surprise phone call with The American Prospect writer Robert Kuttner.

“I think the media plays it up too much, and we gotta help crush it, you know, uh, help crush it more,” he added. “These guys are a collection of clowns.”

The rare interview, which was published Wednesday, covered a wide range of topics — including the events in Charlottesville, Bannon’s ongoing rivalries inside the White House, and economic tensions between the US and China.

But it was his feelings on white nationalists and racism that stood out the most.

“The longer [Democrats] talk about identity politics, I got ’em,” Bannon said. “I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

Bannon told Kuttner that he called him out of the blue on Tuesday because he agreed with a column he published earlier in the day on China benefiting from the nuclear threats between the US and North Korea.

He never once asked for his remarks to be off the record, Kuttner said.

But he later told associates that he did not intend for the conversation to be turned into an “interview” for a left-wing publication, the website Axios reports.

“Bannon was in high spirits when he phoned me Tuesday afternoon,” the writer recalled. “I had never before spoken with Bannon. I came away from the conversation with a sense both of his savvy and his recklessness.”

According to Axios, Bannon told his White House colleagues that the only reason he called Kuttner was to have a personal discussion about his stance on China and other topics. He said he never expected his comments to be turned into a story.

Dubbing Bannon “the most media-savvy person in America,” Kuttner said he spoke openly with the self-described economic nationalist about his adversaries within the White House and plans to marginalize their influence.

“They’re wetting themselves,” Bannon said, adding that several people at the Departments of Defense, State and Treasury have been worried sick about being pushed out.

“I’m changing out people at East Asian Defense,” he explained. “I’m getting hawks in. I’m getting Susan Thornton [acting head of East Asian and Pacific affairs] out at State.”

Many of Bannon’s rivals reportedly have urged President Trump to fire him. Despite this, he said he will continue to try to get them out of the administration.

“That’s a fight I fight every day here,” he told the Prospect. “We’re still fighting.”

Detailing his plan to punish China with stricter trade sanctions, Bannon said Trump’s memorandum on Monday would eventually spark an investigation of Chinese trade practices.

“We’re going to run the tables on these guys,” he said. “We’ve come to the conclusion that they’re in an economic war and they’re crushing us.”

Discussing the situation on the Korean Peninsula, Bannon flat-out said that there was “no military solution” in place to deal with a possible nuclear strike from the North.

“Forget it,” Bannon said. “Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that 10 million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here, they got us.”

What the US should instead be focusing on, according to Bannon, is China’s growing economy.

“To me,” Bannon said, “the economic war with China is everything. And we have to be maniacally focused on that. If we continue to lose it, we’re five years away, I think, 10 years at the most, of hitting an inflection point from which we’ll never be able to recover.”