Steve Bannon part 2: “I am Thomas Cromwell in the court of the Tudors”

To the fascinating Buzzfeed transcript providing an insight into Steve Bannon, that I wrote about the other day, we can now add an exclusive interview with Bannon conducted inside Trump Tower in recent days. Written by Michael Wolff for the Hollywood Reporter the whole thing is a gripping and extraordinary exercise in hubris, offering a glimpse inside the Trump machine as it works on the transition.

Even if you think – as I do – that everyone needs to calm down about Trump and Bannon, the key quotes are pretty jaw-dropping.

“I’m not a white nationalist, I’m a nationalist. I’m an economic nationalist,” Bannon tells Wolff.

“The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia. The issue now is about Americans looking to not get f—ed over. If we deliver we’ll get 60 percent of the white vote, and 40 percent of the black and Hispanic vote and we’ll govern for 50 years. That’s what the Democrats missed, they were talking to these people with companies with a $9 billion market cap employing nine people. It’s not reality. They lost sight of what the world is about.”

Bannon promises to build an entirely new political movement.

“It’s everything related to jobs. The conservatives are going to go crazy. I’m the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. With negative interest rates throughout the world, it’s the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Ship yards, iron works, get them all jacked up. We’re just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution — conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.”

Ship yards… iron works… get them all jacked up. It’s almost as though they’re preparing for something…

Bannon is clearly smart and articulate, if wild. He concludes with a quote that may come to haunt him. It is as ill-chosen as the infamous riff by Lloyd Blankfein (of Goldman Sachs, where Bannon used to work) on doing God’s work. Bannon says: “I am Thomas Cromwell in the court of the Tudors.”

Cromwell was the great player of the game under Henry VIII. In the end he ran out of luck, was deposed, and then executed by the king. Sad…

You can read the whole thing here.