Bannon Urges Trump to Shut Down Government if No Wall

Stephen Bannon, who helped guide President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign to victory and then served briefly as top White House strategist, said Sunday that the president should draw a line in the sand over his proposed border wall.

The wall on the U.S. border with Mexico was Trump’s signature campaign promise, but since taking office, he has been unable to get more than token funding from Congress for the project.

Appearing on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” Bannon told guest host Jonathan Karl that it is time for Trump to play hardball.

“In September, if they have not allocated money for the wall, then shut down the government,” he said. “And by the way, on November 6, let the voters decide.”

Bannon departed from the White House after a series of internal clashes and returned to his former perch at Breitbart News — only to resign after blowback from his support for controversial Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore in an Alabama special election.

Bannon also offered a forceful defense of the administration’s zero tolerance policy of filing criminal charges against illegal immigrants apprehended near the border — even if it means separating them from children with whom they are traveling.

The practice has drawn outrage in the media, among Democrats and even some Republicans.

“It’s zero tolerance. I don’t think you have to justify it,” Bannon said. “We have a crisis on the southern border. Look, the elites in the city — and this ties into Korea; this ties into everything that took place this week — the elites in the permanent political class in this city want to manage situations to bad outcomes.”

Bannon suggested that illegal immigrants have been using kids as a shield to block prosecution or deportation since a 1997 court settlement prohibiting long-term detention of minors. That led former President Barack Obama’s administration to release both parent and child.

It is a sign, Bannon, of a festering problem that other presidents ignored. “He’s just not gonna kick the can down the road,” he said.

Bannon decried the mainstream media’s focus on immigrant children while ignoring Americans who have been victimized by illegal immigrant crime.

“All he’s had is his hand smacked away the entire time. And they’re trying to demonize him. The whole purpose here is to demonize Donald Trump.”

“And by the way, I don’t see the mainstream media, and I don’t see the liberal Left, embracing the ‘angel moms,’ those people that were permanently separated from their children because of illegal aliens that came over here and committed crimes and killed people,” he said. “You’re very selective.”

Bannon said Trump has shown more leadership and a greater willingness to defy his own political base than other recent presidents. He said the president’s efforts to work out a deal to grant amnesty to young illegal immigrants enrolled in Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program are not popular among his base.

Related: Homeland Security Official Blasts False Reporting on Child Separations

Yet, Bannon added, Trump has gained nothing from Democrats for his outreach.

“All he’s had is his hand smacked away the entire time,” he said. “They’re trying to demonize him. The whole purpose here is to demonize Donald Trump.”

Bannon’s wide-ranging interview covered a number of other topics, including:

• The Department of Justice (DOJ) inspector general’s report reviewing the FBI investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified information. He pointed to a particularly damning text message in which FBI supervisor Peter Strzok vowed to “stop it” when asked if Trump might win the election. 

Bannon noted that inspector general investigators only found that text in May because it had been deleted. “You know why?” Bannon asked. “They knew it was a smoking gun.” Bannon called on Attorney General Jeff Sessions to appoint a special counsel to investigate the matter. He called Washington’s institutions “rotten to the core” and said Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein should be fired if he does not comply with pending congressional subpoenas and requests for documents within 48 hours.
• The midterm elections. Bannon said Republicans should nationalize the congressional elections in November as a referendum on whether Trump should be impeached. If they do that and run on the president’s policies, he added, they will “run the table” in the House and pick up a couple of seats in the Senate. “This is Trump’s first re-election,” he said. “It’s gonna be this November … He’s on the ballot. He’s on the ballot nationwide.”

PoliZette senior writer Brendan Kirby can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter.

(photo credit, homepage and article image: Steve Bannon [1], [2], CC BY-SA 2.0, by Gage Skidmore)