Fwd: Steve Bannon’s clever idea to save the GOP from brutal midterms
[{"sender": "Sultan Bin Sulayern", "recipients": ["Jeffrey Epstein [jeevacation@gmail.com]"], "timestamp": "6/1/2018 10:54:16 PM", "subject": "Fwd: Steve Bannon’s clever idea to save the GOP from brutal midterms", "body": "Sent from my iPhone\n\nBegin forwarded message:"}, {"sender": "Fareed Zakaria GPS", "recipients": ["Fareed Zakaria GPS"], "timestamp": "June 2, 2018 at 2:26:50 AM GMT+4", "subject": "Steve Bannon’s clever idea to save the GOP from brutal midterms", "body": "Please scroll down or click here to read my latest Washington Post column.\n\nSteve Bannon’s clever idea to save the GOP from brutal midterms\nBy Fareed Zakaria, Friday, June 1, 2018\n\nROME -- The Republican Party faces dim prospects in the midterm elections. But it doesn’t have to be that way, says\nStephen K. Bannon, the chief ideologist of the populist wave that brought Donald Trump into the White House. “If the\nRepublicans continue on the path they are on,” Bannon told me Thursday, “they will lose 40 seats in the House and\nPresident Trump will be impeached.” He presented an alternative that strikes me as clever, and it’s a strategy that\nTrump himself seems to instinctively get.\n\nBannon was in Rome to learn from and provide support to the unusual coalition of populists and nationalists who\ntogether won half the vote in Italy’s recent elections and are now set to govern. Bannon sees that sort of coalition —\nmixing left and right, old and young — as his goal for the United States. “Europe is about a year ahead of the United\nStates. ... You see populist-nationalist movements with reform [here]. ... You could begin to see the elements of\nBernie Sanders coupled with the Trump movement that really becomes a dominant political force in American politics.”\n(This column draws on an on-air interview he did with me for CNN, as well as a subsequent conversation.)\n\nThe Republican Party’s strategy, for now, appears to be to make the midterm elections a series of local contests focusing\non the tax cut and the healthy economy. Bannon views this as fundamentally misguided. “You have to nationalize the\nelection,” he said. Bannon understands that voters are moved from the gut more than through a wonky analysis of\ntaxes. “This is going to be an emotional [election] — you’re either with [House Minority leader] Nancy Pelosi or you’re\nwith Donald Trump. ... Trump’s second presidential race will be on Nov. 6 of this year.”\n\nBannon is most focused on the issue of immigration because it hits both the heart and the head. “Immigration is about\nnot just sovereignty, it’s about jobs.” He believes that the Trump coalition can attract up to a third of Sanders supporters\nwho see trade and immigration as having created unfair competition for jobs, particularly for working-class blacks and\nHispanics. He advocates appealing directly to those voters, saying, “You’re not going to be able to take the Hispanic and\nblack community from the STEM system in grammar school to our best engineering schools . . . to the great jobs in\nSilicon Valley, unless you start to limit these H-1B visas and this unfair competition . . . from East Asia and South Asia.”\n\nNow this strikes me as entirely wrong. The reason that not enough Hispanic and black students end up in Silicon Valley\nhas much more to do with a broken education system, particularly for poorer kids, than the modest number of skilled\nAsian immigrants who get work visas. The most likely result of limiting these visas is that talented immigrants will simply\ngo elsewhere — Canada, Britain, Australia — and start successful companies there. And, in fact, there is lots of evidence\nthis is already happening."}]