Steve Bannon, the former White House strategist who helped lead Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, sat down with Shaun Hair, the executive editor of The Western Journal, to discuss immigration, the 2020 election and China.

The transcript of this portion of the interview has been edited for clarity and readability.

Hair: You have a long history of political strategy and covering politics, so I want to talk a little bit about Donald Trump and the 2020 race and then talk about the Democrats.

With Trump, what do you think are his wins that you think will resonate with his base that he really needs to amplify?

Bannon: I think if you look at three things that he ran on, the three legs are still stopping mass illegal immigration, to protect our workers and get our sovereignty back and to limit the pool of skilled workers even coming in to protect our tech workers. Number two was to bring back manufacturing jobs from China. And number three, get out of these kind of pointless foreign wars.

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This is all part of a process. If you look at the progress he’s made, it’s pretty extraordinary. If you look at now we’re engaged in this economic war that China has been running against us — much deeper than with the trade war you hear about soybeans. This is about two systems that are incompatible with each other, and they’ve been at economic war with us for 20 years, financed by Wall Street and the technology either stolen or compromised by the tech companies.

Trump is in the middle of this. And you see this whether it’s in Huawei, the trade deal itself, or whether it’s these non-trade barriers. He’s definitely engaged in that. On illegal immigration, he’s now got the money for the border — at least part of the border wall. He’s all over these issues of immigration. They’ve got new bills coming up to dramatically reduce the number of legal immigrants we let in every year.

And then you see what he’s doing on “American First” foreign policy, to get us out of the protectorate business. That NATO is not going to be a protectorate. They’ve got to pay the 2 percent. The Gulf Emirates are going to pitch in and pay for the defense of the Persian Gulf and the north Arabian Sea. The South China Sea , the same way. Allies — Australia, you see France patrolling again, Great Britain. This is a seismic, this is a tectonic plate shift.

The global elites and the permanent political class of both parties had kind of come together and this is why the American defense bill is really one trillion dollars not 780 [billion] when you add it all up. They want us to bear the burden of everything and the deplorables’ kids to be on the ships in the South China Sea, to be on patrol in the Hindu Kush of Afghanistan.

The deplorables finally said, “we can’t do this; we have to have real allies.”

And I think you see from Japan to South Korea, the littoral nations around the South China Sea, to the Persian Gulf to NATO. You’re seeing the coming together of like-minded things, no matter what the mainstream media does, we’re working more in unison. We understand you’ve got China, Iran, Turkey, Russia and North Korea — those five on the Eurasian landmass are kind of uniting as opposed to the industrial democracies.

This is going to be a long struggle. Trump has had, I think, a brilliant geostrategic plan to do this, although sometimes you’ve got to separate out the signal from the noise. The noise, you’re going to get some in-your-face tweets every day. But the signal is very strong on these basic, fundamental things. If you go back to 2016, and you look. Besides the federal courts, which with 14 judges he’s totally redone. Besides we now have a jacked up economy because of his tax cuts and because of smart investments and deregulation.

If you look at the fundamentals of the Trump program, he’s hitting his marks essentially on every one against a permanent political class that is totally focused on stopping him.

It’s not going to take just another four years of Trump. It’s going to take another four after that, another four after that. That’s why it’s so important for him to be re-elected. If he runs on his record of his accomplishments and what they mean going forward, he will win. This is going to be incredibly difficult and tough: he will win.

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The biggest thing we had in 2016 are those counties that went Obama and then we flipped to Trump; they didn’t take us particularly seriously. They thought we were a collection of clowns and they thought Trump was a clown. They now understand he had a message that resonated with working class people throughout this country.

In 2018, they were very smart about how they counter-programmed to that. After understanding the House races, if you gross it up, it was about 52 to 46 we lost and about 8 or 9 million votes. Now a lot of those are in California and other places where they run up the score.

This time he can win, and he can win substantially. I tell people every day here, it’s going to be a struggle as you’ve seen the last couple days. And we’re sitting in a place that is going to be ground zero of that fight. I think Arizona is in play, and I think it’s going to be a tough grind.

President Trump is going to win because of his record and because of his indefatigable personality.

People are saying, “the economy is growing, this is going to be a piece of cake.”

This is going to be tough and this is going to be vicious.

Hair: Trump has a knack of turning the left’s narrative on them. So we saw that in late 2016, early 2017, “fake news,” he endorsed that term and turned it on them. The same thing with Russian collusion — now he’s tweeting about it as much as they are, and he’s kind of turned that on its head. But do you see any soft areas, any soft spots in the last two or three years that you’d say, “Trump needs to worry about this issue being exploited?”

Bannon: I don’t think this is about issues. Look, he is a master — and this is why I call him a McLuhanesque figure — I think he is such a master of communications and understands mass communications at such a deep level.

There have been many occasions — both in my years at Breitbart and doing government accountability and these other things to build this populist, nationalist movement prior to Trump — there’s been since Trump started campaigning after he came down the escalator, to the time I was fortunate enough and blessed enough to come into the campaign, to my time at the White House and beyond — where he would do things on the communications side that A, I didn’t get, and B, I didn’t agree with.

And 90 percent of the time, he’s turned out to be right. He has a deep sense of mass communications.

Hair: Is it him? We’ve debated. Or does he have a team around him?

Bannon: He has a team. Look, he has an amazing team. Scavino and these people.

Hair: But some of it comes natural to him as a communicator?

Bannon: No. When I say “the team,” the team is basically to help execute. This all comes from him. On communications he is definitely a master strategist and understands things at a level two or three down, that I don’t think people — and mass communications is quite complicated — really understand.

Like today, like this whole thing that’s happened with “the squad” and what’s happened here. People will say “racism.” But he has a set idea what he is trying to do about positioning that to not just socialism, but something that is a binary function. It’d be a binary decision. People have to see how this thing’s going to play out, but he’s as smart as they come on that and really, he understands this quite deeply.

The Western Journal divided the above interview into three parts. The above transcript is part 2 of 3. You can watch the interview in its entirety here.

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