DO THE WORK, BUT DON’T GET COCKY JUST YET: Steve Bannon: Maga can rule for 50 years and Farage will be PM.
When I meet him at his house in Arizona (one of several he owns across the US) at 7am on Wednesday last week, his 71st birthday, he doesn’t seem like someone who has won. For Bannon, beating the Democrats was just the start. Now comes the struggle against dissenting elements in the Republican Party.
“We are so close,” he tells me. “We just need to see this through.”
Trump may have won the presidency, but to enact the sweeping changes he wants to make — chief among them destroying the administrative state and deporting millions of undocumented migrants — he needs to move fast, with the support of his party.
If they manage this, Bannon tells me more than once, the Maga Republicans can rule for half a century. “If we deliver now, it’s upon us. They’ve given President Trump that. If he delivers on the economics of this … we’re going to govern for 50 years. It’s all there for us to lose.”
We’ve seen similar post-election gloating from the other side, which often looks quite misguided in retrospect. QED: James Carville Angles For ’40 More Years.’
—NPR, May 7th, 2009.