Steve Bannon Says Joe Biden Is Trying To ‘Steal’ Donald Trump’s 2016 Campaign

Steve Bannon, who formerly served as Donald Trump’s White House Chief Strategist for the first seven months of his first term, claims that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is attempting to “steal” the president’s 2016 campaign with his new “Build Back Better” campaign.

“Joe Biden is the kind El Cid candidate, but he’s got very smart people around him,” Bannon said Thursday on his War Room podcast, referring to the famous Spanish warlord’s character in the movie, El Cid, who was put in the saddle after his death. “In particular on the economic side. And what they’re trying to do is essentially trying to steal the Trump program of 2016 and try to run that playbook.”

Bannon noted that Biden was planning to announce his program in Pennsylvania and claimed that Trump’s White House and campaign have been caught “flat-footed.”

“President Trump owns this narrative,” Bannon concluded the YouTube clip.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIk4hczKMEw

As noted by Greg Sargent in a Washington Post op-ed, Bannon previously touted Trump’s plan for his first term as centered around a populist agenda that would rebuild U.S. manufacturing.

“It will be as exciting as the 1930s,” Bannon said, comparing it to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs.

According to Sargent, Biden’s plan offers breaks from Trump’s in numerous ways.

“The new plan draws a stark contrast with Trump on two fronts — his failure to mobilize a robust federal response to the coronavirus pandemic, and his full-on embrace of GOP plutocracy, which sold out the Bannon promise.”

As reported by Yahoo Finance, Bannon is an economic nationalist. In 2018, he claimed that Trump’s trade agenda is aligned with this belief and protects the jobs of the middle- and low-income workers while providing them with more manufacturing jobs to give them upward mobility.

Bannon claims that the “core” of economic nationalism is the understanding that the U.S. cannot be a “great nation” by providing its people — the working class, in particular — with service jobs.

“It just doesn’t work,” he said.

At the time, Bannon predicted that future Democratic presidential candidates would force Trump further to the right. He also predicted that Michael Bloomberg would push a moderate conservative to run for the presidency, which he claimed would give the Democratic Party hope of winning.

In an interview with Fox News last month, Bannon said that the economy Trump built was aligned with populist and economic nationalist goals as it purportedly worked for people on the lower-income brackets.

In the same discussion, Bannon called Biden a “globalist.”