Steve Bannon

Former Trump Adviser

Steve Bannon is a media executive and political strategist. He served as executive chairman of Breitbart News, as an adviser to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and later as chief strategist in the Trump White House.

This is an excerpt of an interview with FRONTLINE’s Michael Kirk conducted on March 17, 2019. It has been edited for clarity and length.

This interview appears in:

Supreme Revenge

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Mitch McConnell and the Courts

… [Sen. Mitch] McConnell (R-Ky.), the president, president really lets him have it after the Obamacare thing fails in the Senate.… What's up with McConnell from your point of view?Is he the leader of the opposition party?Where is he then and now?

Well, first off, he's—look, there's nobody I've had bigger disagreements [with than] Mitch McConnell, because to me he's the epitome of the establishment.That being said, if you're a conservative, he essentially saved the country.He fought for all those years and kept 140 federal judges, I mean, and the Supreme Court.This was why the campaign was so important when I stepped in there.The country's on the line.Remember, the reason Merrick Garland is not in the Supreme Court is because Hillary Clinton and these guys didn't think he was progressive enough; they were going to have their own pick.He was too moderate.He was kind of like Obama.He's too moderate.They want to send more progressives.

… If we had lost in '16, you're done for a generation.They were going to fill those, the court system.And then they had the courts, the legislator, legislative and the—that was the thing of reason I stepped in, because it looked like Trump's potential death spiral could take down the—you know, we could lose the House.You'd lose the Senate even more than you lost it.And you clearly lose the executive.And you lose the courts for a generation.

Mitch McConnell kept those 140 seats.Remember, the key of this is Don McGahn and McConnell, the deconstruction of the administrative state.That is the mantra of the Federalist Society, and that is the mantra of this thing about taking this fourth [sic] branch of government that's kind of metastasized to be all-encompassing.… That's what [Brett] Kavanaugh, that's what [Neil] Gorsuch, that's what these guys are great theoreticians about this.

So that is a whole 'nother line of work that's probably the one legacy, besides the confrontation of China, [Trump will] be known for: to completely redo the courts, right?At both the appellate level and the district level.And not just that.You may have four—I think he'll have four picks on the Supreme Court in his fourth [sic] term, so it's monumental.And Mitch McConnell brought that on.And honestly, that is Mitch McConnell’s—he's spending more time focused on that than he is on this other stuff.So when you say Trump reads him the riot act, I never saw that.I always saw a level of respect.Disagreement, but respect there, too.

Mitch McConnell has, I've always thought, looked at Trump as somebody that's passing through town, right?He's the majority leader.He's a big institutionalist.And he is looking at this fundamental change in the courts.

And so, no, I haven't seen him, you know, radically support the president.I think he'll do more because he's up for re-election in '20, so he doesn't want some Tea Party opposition or some populist, like [Matt] Bevin did last time, to try to go after him.So no, but I haven't seen any.

But I haven't seen—like on the emergency, it's outrageous to me that 12 Republican senators voted against the president on his core issue.Particularly when over half of those guys are either in the Senate because of Trump, they pulled him across the finish line, like [Roy] Blunt (R-Mo.).We've got to remember, at the end of the day, we gave Mitch McConnell his job.[Richard] Burr in North Carolina, Blunt in Missouri, [Pat] Toomey in Pennsylvania, a couple more were—[Ron] Johnson in Wisconsin, there were four or five guys that were down that last week that all won.That was another big surprise, to come across and to win that big win in the Senate.So that was all Trump, 100 percent Trump, in this kind of populist movement.

And McConnell, to me, has not been a big support.He's been in support of what he wants to support, right?Tax cuts he wants to support.The donor-driven tax cuts he wants to support, right?If he wants to support, it gets done.On the wall, they've had no interest in the wall.So the wall, they just will—they'll just look, you know, look the other way and now actually oppose the president, which he had to veto.

The Trump Campaign and the Nominee List

How much do you figure the list from the Federalist Society and Heritage Society that was given to Trump in March helped him with conservatives, brought him across the finish line in lots of ways?

Huge.Remember, when I got in, as I said, we're going to focus on three things.One, we're going to simplify this whole thing.Eighty-eight days ago you're down by a bunch, OK?We've got to simplify.Number one, we're going to … stop mass illegal immigration and limit legal immigration to get our sovereignty back and protect our workers.That's one leg of the stool.The second, bring back manufacturing jobs from China, OK?They're going to get that in Ohio and Wisconsin and Michigan.Number three, get out of these pointless foreign wars.Those three.

Oh, and we're going to run Pence for governor of five of these states up in the Midwest.We're going to always, every day, hit the evangelicals and Republican establishment with the judges, with the judges, with the list.And we expanded it another 10 to make it 20.Remember, if you go back to the spring of 2016, within 30 days of each other, two lists come out.The national security list slapped together by Corey Lewandowski, right, that has all the problems with [George] Papadopoulos, all these other guys.This list, because the whole national security apparatus is Never Trump.They’ve got this collection, odds and ends—it's like the bar in Star Wars, right?I call Corey, I go: "Dude, I know this space.I haven't heard of half of these guys.Who are these?"He says: "Well, we had to get something out.We're getting heat from the media for not having it."I said: "It's better not to put anything out than to put it out, and now you've reaffirmed to everybody that you don't know anybody in national security, OK?This is embarrassing."

…That list, and then 30 days later the Federalist Society and Heritage come out with those 10 [potential Supreme Court nominees], which is, hey, you may hate Trump, you may not trust him, but it's got to be this 10.We expanded to another 10, right?That was a massive seller.

… One of the ways to close that gap was just hit every day, hit the list, the judges, the judges.The judges are going to bring the Republican establishment back because they realize how fundamental this is and how—and that was—so two lists within 30 days.One causes nothing but problems, right?The other is a solution.And I don't think he'd be president without that list.Whoever thought of the idea of it—I think it was McGahn and Leonard Leo—absolutely brilliant.And then we expanded.

And McConnell.

And McConnell. Absolutely.Look, McConnell on the judges is golden.He will go down in history, in conservative history, of literally changing the court system.This is why we lost the '18 election.Remember, the Republican establishment hasn't accepted Trump as the transformative president and historical figure.It's the progressive—it's the Netroots Nation; it's the Time’s Up movement; it's Tom Steyer; it's The Resistance.They're the ones out in Iowa, in Iowa 1, knocking on doors in 90 percent humidity and heat in June and July.Why?They understand that Donald Trump is going to be in their lives 10, 20 and 30 years from now.It's a Kafkaesque nightmare.This guy's never going away.And the one way I’ve got to do it, I got to take the House of Representatives because we're going to use that apparatus to weaponize [Robert] Mueller and everything else, and we're going to have this head on a pike.That is where American politics is.

And God bless them, they did it.You know how they did it?They did it like the Tea Party.They mobilized their forces.They knocked—I kept telling them, we'd have conference calls right here in July, and I'm saying, “Hey, you know, today in Iowa 1, they've had 500 people knocking on doors, doing voter registration, handing out literature, and trust me, in the last 60 days, they’re going to be getting all those folks to vote.And we're going to lose.That's a House Freedom Caucus.I think it was [Rod] Blum's district.Blown out, right?You could see these people working in the spring, in the early summer of '18 on exactly the things that the Tea Party had done—mobilization, getting people out.

The reason is?The courts and the deconstruction of the administrative state.The progressive left understood that under the hood what was going on, besides all the signal and the noise, they got the signal, and it couldn't have been stronger.And they said, we've got to stop.You know, the noise is just Trump and the Twitter and all this other madness.

McConnell, as much as I detest him, delivered that.And that's, I think, what he'll be known for, this kind of Herculean effort not to roll over on Obama, to keep those 140 seats.And then, it's one of the reasons we don't have any ambassadors.Remember, only half the ambassadors we've put up have been—we went through the first two years.They've all got to be re-nominated.And the reason is, is all the time's been spent on the judges because they realize the judges are permanent, and that's where the focus has been.And I think he's done a magnificent job.And this is where real fundamental—Trump will be known, I think, in hindsight, on China and the courts.

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