Steve Bannon, a former adviser to former President Donald Trump, has laid out what he thinks the start of the former president’s second term would look like if elected later this year.
“The first 100 days of President Trump’s second term will be the equivalent of the first 100 days of FDR [Franklin Delano Roosevelt],” Mr. Bannon, the host of the “War Room” podcast, said in an exclusive interview with The Epoch Times.
How 2024 Differs from 2016
Mr. Bannon served on President Trump’s transition team in 2016 and then as the White House’s chief strategist.He recalled that former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie put together the future president’s first transition team.
Mr. Bannon dismissed the resulting work product as “a joke.”
“We reviewed it, but we threw that away,” he said. Mr. Christie was quickly replaced as the lead of the transition effort by the president-elect’s second-in-command, Mike Pence.
“During the first few days on the job, every hour felt like a race,” Jared Kushner, also a member of the transition team, recalled of the opening hours of President Trump’s time in office in his memoir, “Breaking History.”
“President Trump does like to have the tension of different viewpoints and debating things—and the best idea wins. So that’s not a negative,” Mr. Bannon said, likening the dynamics in Trump’s inner circle of advisers to those in Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet, which also included many clashing personalities.
He predicted “one difference” that would set that “Team of Rivals” dynamic in the second administration apart from what Americans saw between 2017 and 2021.
“You won’t have people that tend to be more globalist,“ Mr. Bannon said. ”I think you’ll see populist, nationalist people that are fully on board with the outlines and directionally on board with President Trump’s policies.”
President Trump, he added, is “running an anti-globalist campaign.”
Meanwhile, neither Mr. Kushner nor Ivanka Trump, Mr. Kushner’s wife and President Trump’s daughter, will be part of a future Trump presidential team, President Trump has said.
“It’s too painful for the family,” the former president told Fox News’ Bret Baier in June 2023.
‘A LinkedIn of MAGA’
The first 100 days of the first Trump term also suffered because of a lack of “a deep bench of MAGA-type people that had understood policy or had been in the government before,” Mr. Bannon said.Eight years after 2016, Make America Great Again has a real institutional presence in Washington.
“You have groups like Heritage and others that have made a huge effort,” he said, citing Johnny McEntee, a young Trump insider who now is part of The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, officially unaffiliated with any candidate, but seen by many as a blueprint for the second Trump White House with a stronger executive and weakened executive branch bureaucracies.
That slow, steady organizational work is yielding “a LinkedIn of MAGA,” according to Mr. Bannon.
The former White House strategist ran through a list of core policies that President Trump has described in his campaign trail speeches: “tariffs across the board, sealing our border, mass deportations, starting to rethink our geopolitical alliances.”
Although he conceded that some of the president’s priorities would likely require cooperation from Congress, he argued that much of the president’s agenda could be enacted through executive order, or even simply a return to enforcement of the law as written.
Executing MAGA policies requires loyal, competent people, he said.
The new MAGA-inflected institutions in Washington are “building up a cadre, a base, of like-minded people that can step into the government and media.”
“I think President Trump’s first days will be very dramatic,” Mr. Bannon predicted.
He foresees an equally dramatic response from MAGA foes.
“They will come at him from every different angle, just like they do on the lawfare now,” he said.
MAGA Equivalent of New Deal Coalition
Mr. Bannon, a naval intelligence veteran who also previously worked in investment banking and Hollywood, returned to the theme of President Trump as an anti-FDR during his conversation with The Epoch Times.FDR was elected to an unprecedented four terms, serving through the Great Depression and most of World War II. He ultimately died in office.
The New Deal coalition he forged was a political juggernaut for generations, setting a liberal tone for the national government for much of the next half-century. The coalition only began to fragment with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the 1994 “Republican Revolution,” in which Republicans gained control of both houses of Congress for the first time in 42 years.
Although a second Trump term could accomplish a lot through executive orders, the reversal of many Trump executive orders at the start of the Biden administration reveals the weakness of governance in that form. To stand a better chance of lasting, MAGA policies emanating from the top would need to be buttressed by MAGA laws promulgated by a friendlier Congress.
Republican skeptics of President Trump are quick to argue that the fruits of his political influence—for example, on the primaries ahead of the underwhelming 2022 midterms—show that MAGA isn’t a formula for victory.
But Mr. Bannon envisions a MAGA equivalent of the New Deal coalition capable of implementing an agenda that lasts.
“If we do this right, it’s just the beginning, like FDR’s was, of 50 years of MAGA policies.”
