“To me,” White House chief strategist Steve Bannon told The American Prospect, “the economic war with China is everything." | Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images Bannon ridicules White House adversaries in wide-ranging interview The interview comes as Bannon has been under increasing pressure inside the White House.

White House chief strategist Steve Bannon pledged to shake up staffing at the Departments of Defense and State and said his adversaries, both inside and outside the White House, are “wetting themselves” at the prospect of his plans.

He also appeared to take on National Economic Council Chair Gary Cohn and said the U.S. must ready itself for an “economic war with China” that has already begun.


Bannon, in the same interview with the liberal magazine The American Prospect, labeled hate groups of the type that marched in a deadly rally over the weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia, as “a collection of clowns.” But he also said the cultural issues raised by the hate groups had lured Democrats into a rhetorical trap that would allow Republicans to succeed.

On North Korea, Bannon struck out a position different from that of his boss, President Donald Trump, telling The American Prospect that “there’s no military solution” to the repressive regime’s nuclear program and that the U.S. should “forget it.” Trump has said the U.S. will not allow North Korea to obtain a nuclear weapon capable of striking the continental U.S. and has pointedly refused to take a military option off the table.

“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,” Bannon said.

But North Korea, Bannon continued, is “just a sideshow” on which China is “just tapping us along” relative to the economic battle he sees brewing with the Chinese. He predicted that either the U.S. or China would be the world’s dominant nation in the next quarter-century, “and it’s gonna be them if we go down this path.”

Bannon told his interviewer that part of his plan to turn the economic tables on the Chinese government would be to issue complaints under the 1974 Trade Act, a move he said had other government officials “wetting themselves” with concern over upsetting the international trading system or removing the possibility that China might help tamp down North Korea.

“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.”

Pushing his get-tough-with-China approach is “a fight I fight every day here.” At least part of his strategy, he said, would be to change staff members at the State Department and Department of Defense, specifically naming one official he planned to remove.

“I’m changing out people at East Asian Defense; I’m getting hawks in. I’m getting Susan Thornton out at State,” Bannon said, naming the acting director of East Asian and Pacific affairs at the State Department. “We’re still fighting. There’s Treasury and [National Economic Council chair] Gary Cohn and Goldman Sachs lobbying.”

A senior State Department official, however, said Thursday that “Susan remains an instrumental part of the [Democratic People's Republic of Korea] pressure campaign. She is valued for her professionalism, diplomacy and expertise.”

The State Department's defense of Thornton stepped up as the morning wore on, with an unidentified State Department official also saying Thursday that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson asked Thornton "to lead in a very important role" and "continues to rely on her to lead the State Department’s diplomacy in Asia."

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Bannon, who rarely speaks to reporters on the record, initiated the phone call with The American Prospect because he agreed with something the author, Robert Kuttner, had written on China. Kuttner said his discussion with Bannon did not include any requests to put any of their conversation off the record. Thursday, Bannon told The Daily Mail that his interview with Kuttner had been successful because his remarks "drew fire away from POTUS" because he had "changed the [media] narrative."



The interview comes as Bannon has been under increasing pressure of late inside a shifting White House, with newly installed chief of staff John Kelly seeking to impose greater discipline in the West Wing. Asked about Bannon’s future in the White House at a news conference earlier this week, Trump offered no guarantees.

“We’ll see what happens with Mr. Bannon,” the president said. “He is a good person, and I think the press treats him frankly unfairly … I like him. He is a good man. He is not a racist.”

Bannon, the former head of the conservative media outlet Breitbart News, has been blamed by some for bringing to the forefront the type of fringe nationalistic rhetoric that was at times visible during Trump’s campaign and was on full display last weekend in Charlottesville. But Bannon was critical and dismissive of the white supremacist groups whose rally left one woman dead and 19 people injured, telling The American Prospect, “ethno-nationalism—it's losers. It's a fringe element. I think the media plays it up too much, and we gotta help crush it, you know, uh, help crush it more.”

But with attention shifting onto cultural issues, Bannon said he sees an opportunity for Republicans and Trump to return to the type of messaging that allowed the president to navigate a crowded GOP primary field and then defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton’s formidable campaign apparatus.

“The Democrats,” he said, “the longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em. 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.”

He made similar remarks in an interview with The New York Times, telling the newspaper that Trump’s suggestion that taking down statues of Confederate generals and politicians might lead to calls for the removal of statues of slave-owning Founding Fathers like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. That suggestion from Trump, Bannon said, “connects with the American people about their history, culture and traditions.”

“The race-identity politics of the left wants to say it’s all racist,” Bannon told the Times. “Just give me more. Tear down more statues. Say the revolution is coming. I can’t get enough of it.”

Nahal Toosi contributed to this report.

