Trump: Steve Bannon Is Actually ‘Alt-Left’
President says he believes his controversial strategist is closer to the left.
REUTERS/Carlos Barria
In an interview with Bloomberg News published on Monday, President Donald Trump claimed that infighting in his White House had subsided—infighting that a month ago was described by administration officials to The Daily Beast as “nonstop.” In doing so, Trump praised his White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon, who just last month the president was publicly dissing.
Trump also revealed his own nickname for Bannon’s nationalist (and hard-right) ideology: "alt-left," a riff on the term “alt-right,” for which Bannon previously said the website Breitbart served as “the platform.”
“Bannon’s more of a libertarian than anything else, if you want to know the truth,” Trump told Bloomberg News.
Bannon does not identify as libertarian; he self-IDs as a right-wing, anti-globalist “nationalist,” and libertarians widely loathe Bannon. Bannon has, however, once called himself a “Leninist,” in style if not substance or ideology. Ironically, when Steve Bannon tried to set up a Breitbart India, the Mumbai-based writer Amit Varma, who he met with to launch the enterprise, rejected the idea on the grounds of being a pro-immigration, pro-gay-rights libertarian, as The Daily Beast reported in March.
—Asawin Suebsaeng
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