Forwarded Fareed Zakaria column on Steve Bannon’s political strategy

From: Sultan Bin Sulayern Sent: 6/1/2018 10:54:16 PM To: Jeffrey Epstein [[email protected]] Subject: Fwd: Steve Bannon’s clever idea to save the GOP from brutal midterms Importance: — High Sent from my iPhone Begin forwarded message: From: Fareed Zakaria GPS Date: June 2, 2018 at 2:26:50 AM GMT+4 To: Fareed Zakaria GPS <r Subject: Steve Bannon’s clever idea to save the GOP from brutal midterms Please scroll down or click here to read my latest Washington Post column. Steve Bannon’s clever idea to save the GOP from brutal midterms By Fareed Zakaria, Friday, June 1, 2018 ROME -- The Republican Party faces dim prospects in the midterm elections. But it doesn’t have to be that way, says Stephen K. Bannon, the chief ideologist of the populist wave that brought Donald Trump into the White House. “If the Republicans continue on the path they are on,” Bannon told me Thursday, “they will lose 40 seats in the House and President Trump will be impeached.” He presented an alternative that strikes me as clever, and it’s a strategy that Trump himself seems to instinctively get. Bannon was in Rome to learn from and provide support to the unusual coalition of populists and nationalists who together won half the vote in Italy’s recent elections and are now set to govern. Bannon sees that sort of coalition — mixing left and right, old and young — as his goal for the United States. “Europe is about a year ahead of the United States. ... You see populist-nationalist movements with reform [here]... . You could begin to see the elements of Bernie Sanders coupled with the Trump movement that really becomes a dominant political force in American politics.” (This column draws on an on-air interview he did with me for CNN, as well as a subsequent conversation.) The Republican Party’s strategy, for now, appears to be to make the midterm elections a series of local contests focusing on the tax cut and the healthy economy. Bannon views this as fundamentally misguided. “You have to nationalize the election,” he said. Bannon understands that voters are moved from the gut more than through a wonky analysis of taxes. “This is going to be an emotional [election] — you’re either with [House Minority leader] Nancy Pelosi or you’re with Donald Trump. ... Trump’s second presidential race will be on Nov. 6 of this year.” Bannon is most focused on the issue of immigration because it hits both the heart and the head. “Immigration is about not just sovereignty, it’s about jobs.” He believes that the Trump coalition can attract up to a third of Sanders supporters who see trade and immigration as having created unfair competition for jobs, particularly for working-class blacks and Hispanics. He advocates appealing directly to those voters, saying, “You’re not going to be able to take the Hispanic and black community from the STEM system in grammar school to our best engineering schools . . . to the great jobs in Silicon Valley, unless you start to limit these H-1B visas and this unfair competition . . . from East Asia and South Asia.” Now this strikes me as entirely wrong. The reason that not enough Hispanic and black students end up in Silicon Valley has much more to do with a broken education system, particularly for poorer kids, than the modest number of skilled Asian immigrants who get work visas. The most likely result of limiting these visas is that talented immigrants will simply HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_030876