Steve Bannon defended his former boss Donald Trump for the support the Republican president has found among white nationalists.
“It’s nonsense. I think these [white nationalist] guys grab on to anything,” Bannon told New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters in an interview published on Friday.
“[Trump] is the least racist guy I’ve ever met,” added Bannon, who stepped down as a White House adviser in August to return to heading Breitbart News. “Nothing in the campaign, nothing that he’s done to date. That’s all left wing, that’s all MSNBC nonsense.”
In Bannon’s telling, neo-Nazis and white supremacists have cottoned on to Trump as a way of gaining attention from a liberal media class already predisposed to believing Trump was sympathetic to their crusade.
“You think it’s a media fabrications?” Peters asked.
“100 percent,” said Bannon. “If they sit around and do whatever they do, nobody covers them because nobody cares, they don’t have any meaning or purpose. They’re so tiny and irrelevant As soon as they start bringing in the president, yeah, all of a sudden the cameras are there, CNN is there, New York Times is there, it’s a front page story.”
“They play the mainstream media to build it up. It’s irrelevant nonsense,” he added.
Bannon — still smarting from GOP electoral wipeouts in Virginia, New Jersey and elsewhere — said he was still confident that he was enjoying life outside the White House and his revolution was just getting started.
“You’re going to have gray skies and you’re going to have blue skies,” he said. “But I am absolutely am convinced that we’re on the right track.”