For months now, there’s been a lot of conversation about and around Steve Bannon. The conversation began in September, when Donald Trump’s campaign had a major staff shake-up and Kellyanne Conway and Bannon were hired. Bannon was seen as a right-wing-fringe lunatic who cozies up to white supremacists, violent crazy people and the worst kind of conspiracy theorists. The conversation took an even more frightening turn when Trump won the election and announced that Bannon was being appointed as his senior adviser. There’s now a movement to “Dump Bannon” mostly because of his allegiance to hard-right white nationalism. Of course, there’s also a conversation that perhaps Bannon is being used as A) the red meat for Trump’s white supremacist base; B) the easy-to-follow controversy for liberals looking for a boogeyman; C) a distraction from the larger conversation of why Donald Trump is appalling, destructive and fascistic. It’s certainly an interesting moment for Bannon to agree to an exclusive interview with The Hollywood Reporter, right? Right. You can read Bannon’s interview here. Some highlights:

Bannon doesn’t mind being a dark, shadowy figure: “Darkness is good. Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power. It only helps us when they” — I believe by “they” he means liberals and the media, already promoting calls for his ouster — “get it wrong. When they’re blind to who we are and what we’re doing.”

Bill Clinton’s strength with the white working class: “The Clinton strength was to play to people without a college education. High school people. That’s how you win elections.” And, likewise, the Republican party would come to betray its working-man constituency forged under Reagan. In sum, the working man was betrayed by the establishment, or what he dismisses as the “donor class.” To say that he sees this donor class — which in his telling is also “ascendant America,” e.g. the elites, as well as “the metrosexual bubble” that encompasses cosmopolitan sensibilities to be found as far and wide as Shanghai, London’s Chelsea, Hollywood and the Upper West Side — as a world apart, is an understatement.

Bannon doesn’t believe Trump’s victory was about race or racism: “I’m not a white nationalist, I’m a nationalist. I’m an economic nationalist. 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” — by “we” he means the Trump White House — “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.”

The new political movement is Trumpism: “Like [Andrew] Jackson’s populism, we’re going 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.”

He hates the mainstream (“liberal”) media: “The media bubble is the ultimate symbol of what’s wrong with this country. It’s just a circle of people talking to themselves who have no f—ing idea what’s going on. If The New York Times didn’t exist, CNN and MSNBC would be a test pattern. The Huffington Post and everything else is predicated on The New York Times. It’s a closed circle of information from which Hillary Clinton got all her information — and her confidence. That was our opening.”

He also hates conservative media, like Rupert Murdoch & Fox News: “They got it more wrong than anybody. Rupert is a globalist and never understood Trump. To him, Trump is a radical. Now they’ll go centrist and build the network around Megyn Kelly.”

On Trump’s oratory skills: “He gets it; he gets it intuitively. You have probably the greatest orator since William Jennings Bryan, coupled with an economic populist message and two political parties that are so owned by the donors that they don’t speak to their audience. But he speaks in a non-political vernacular, he communicates with these people in a very visceral way. Nobody in the Democratic party listened to his speeches, so they had no idea he was delivering such a compelling and powerful economic message.”

How he sees himself: “I am Thomas Cromwell in the court of the Tudors.”

[From THR]

Thomas Cromwell in the Tudor court? Does that make Donald Trump the Henry VIII figure? Is Bannon going to spearhead an American Reformation? Ugh. As for this: “Darkness is good. Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power.” Remember when we were so worried about Karl Rove? Like, the most frightening thing was when Rove was talking about how reality could be manipulated to fit a Republican agenda. And now we have this. The embrace of darkness. The Dark Side, literally. A presidential senior advisor wishing he could be as powerful as Satan.

Photos courtesy of Getty.