In his 60 Minutes interview airing Sunday, former White House strategist/current Breitbart chief Steve Bannon tells Charlie Rose he’s a “street fighter.”
Rose simpers he’s more than that.
Nope – street fighter, Bannon insists. “That’s what I am.”
“You’re more than that,” Rose counter-insists.
“I’m a street fighter,” Bannon shoots back, as the interview begins to resemble an all-guy The Golden Girls reboot.
Bannon wins that round, and expands on his “street fighter” theme:
“By the way, I think that’s why Donald Trump and I get along so well. Donald Trump’s a fighter – great counter-puncher,” he says. Now out at the White House and back at Breitbart, Bannon says he will be Trump’s “wing man outside.”
“So you will not be attacking Donald Trump?” Rose wonders.
Bannon insists he will not, and instead will “make sure his enemies know that there’s no free shot on goal.”
Rose forgets to ask Bannon who gets to decide who are Trump’s enemies.
Bannon moves on to “the Charlottesville situation,” boasting he was “the only guy that came out and tried to defend” Trump after POTUS’ initial remarks and infamous Incendiary Tuesday Trump Tower Presser.
“I was the only guy that said, ‘He’s talking about something, taking it up to a higher level,’ ” Bannon bragged. That “higher level” being an assertion that taking down statues of Confederate soldiers will end in the tearing down of the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C., and maybe pulling Winston Churchill’s bust from the White House.
Rose wasn’t letting that go, and counters that “many people” thought Trump should have focused on denouncing “from the very beginning, neo-Nazis and white supremacists and people of that political view. And it should have gone there. Because those were people that Americans in World War II went to fight against, and [he] should instantly have denounced them.”
“And you didn’t, at first instinct,” Rose scolded Bannon of the White House reax. “In fact, you seemed to be doubling down, in terms of a moral equivalency.”
Bannon street-fought back:
“What he was trying to say is that people that support the monument staying there peacefully, and people that oppose that, that’s the normal course of First Amendment.” Bannon did say neo-Nazis and neo-Confederates and the KKK “are absolutely awful– there’s no room in American politics for that. There’s no room in American society for that.”
All Trump was saying, Bannon continued, returning to his moral-equivalency theme, “is, where does it end? Does it end in taking down the Washington Monument? Does it end in taking down Mount Rushmore? Does it end at taking Churchill’s bust out of the Oval Office?”
“When you side with a man, you side with him. I was proud to come out and try to defend President Trump in the media that day,” Bannon preened.
“If you’re going to break, then resign. If you’re going to break with him, resign. The stuff that was leaked out that week by certain members of the White House I thought was unacceptable,” he added.
Rose wasn’t sure who Bannon was talking about.
Bannon spelled it out:
“I’m talking– obviously, about Gary Cohn – and some other people.”
“So, Gary Cohn should have resigned?” Rose asked.
“Absolutely,” Bannon shot back.
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