‘This Is DEFCON 1-Level Bad’: Steve Bannon Accused of Giving Interview ‘Casually Undermining US National Security’

Top Strategist Calls Trump’s Base ‘A Collection of Clowns’ and Undermines Commander-in-Chief on North Korea and China

White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon on Wednesday gave two interviews. One, to The New York Times, which was abhorrent. The second, to the progressive news magazine, The American Prospect. It’s the latter that’s getting all the attention, so much attention, it crashed the magazine’s servers.

But why? Bannon’s job reportedly is on thin ice. The violence in Charlottesville has turned up the heat on the neo-Nazi, white nationalist wing of the Trump White House, and in Tuesday’s disastrous press event the president refused to say if Bannon’s job was safe.

“We’ll see what happens with Mr. Bannon,” Trump told reporters.

So what happened Wednesday? How damaging was Bannon’s interview with The American Prospect?

Here’s what a Bannon colleague in the White House told Axios. 

“Since Steve apparently enjoys casually undermining U.S. national security, I’ll put this in terms he’ll understand: This is DEFCON 1-level bad.”

Here’s what has Americans stunned:

Contrary to Trump’s threat of fire and fury, Bannon said: “There’s no military solution [to North Korea’s nuclear threats], forget it. Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that ten 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.”

So Bannon feels totally comfortable undermining U.S. foreign policy and national security. He gave away America’s leverage. If you think it wasn’t intentional, guess again.

“I was a little stunned to get an email from Bannon’s assistant midday Tuesday, just as all hell was breaking loose once again about Charlottesville, saying that Bannon wished to meet with me,” The American Prospect’s Robert Kuttner reported. 

In other words, Bannon heard Trump’s refusal to offer him support, and has decided to go out in a blaze of glory – whatever the cost. Remember, Bannon is a founding board member of the far right wing website Breitbart and served as its publisher until Trump tapped him to run his flailing presidential campaign. And remember, Bannon is a strategist.

That was not the end of the interview.

Bannon also said, “We’re at economic war with China,” and if we don’t get the upper hand in five or ten years we’ll have lost. 

All of this, frankly, sounds like giving aid and comfort to the enemy, but that’s for others to decide.

If revealing the White House game plan and beliefs about China and North Korea weren’t enough, Bannon also went after Trump’s core base of white nationalists.

I asked Bannon about the connection between his program of economic nationalism and the ugly white nationalism epitomized by the racist violence in Charlottesville and Trump’s reluctance to condemn it. Bannon, after all, was the architect of the strategy of using Breitbart to heat up white nationalism and then rely on the radical right as Trump’s base.

He dismissed the far right as irrelevant and sidestepped his own role in cultivating it: “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.”

“These guys are a collection of clowns,” he added.

And, then, this:

“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.”

That echoes Bannon’s remarks in the interview he gave to The New York Times, which are stunning:

Stephen K. Bannon, the president’s chief strategist, said in an interview that if Democrats want to fight over Confederate monuments and attack Mr. Trump as a bigot, that was a fight the president would win.

“President Trump, by asking, ‘Where does this all end’ — Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln — connects with the American people about their history, culture and traditions,” he said.

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

Bannon, Axios notes, now says he didn’t know he was giving an interview. Kuttner makes clear Bannon contacted him out of the blue, they have never spoken before, Bannon did not say it was off the record, and did not even mention it, and, most importantly, Bannon is a media guru and former publisher. 

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Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr and a CC license