Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon said in a newly published interview he is “fascinated” by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.
“He was clearly loved by women. He was a guy’s guy. He has all that virility,” Bannon told the British magazine The Spectator. “He also had amazing fashion sense, right, that whole thing with the uniforms. I’m fascinated by Mussolini.”
Bannon, who left the White House last year after serving six months in the Trump administration, has spent the past few weeks traveling through Europe discussing populism.
During his interview, he offered few thoughts on President Trump and his time in the White House.
“I hated it,” Bannon said. “I’m not a staffer.”
The former chief executive of Breitbart News brushed off any suggestion that Trump will be impeached, calling it a “ridiculous question.”
“President Trump is going down the path of fulfilling now that he has pivoted back to economic nationalism: he is going to hold the House in 2018, pick up a couple of seats in the Senate, and he is going to run again and win with over 400 electoral votes,” he said.
Bannon joined the Trump campaign as chief executive in August 2016 and served in the White House until August 2017.
He then returned to serve as the executive chairman of Breitbart News, but was ousted from that position following the release of Michael Wolff’s tell-all, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.
In the book, Bannon made disparaging comments about Trump and his family, which led the president to issue a stinging rebuke of his former chief strategist.
Bannon wouldn’t say when he last spoke to the president, but said their lawyers do talk “because it’s the middle of an investigation,” a reference to special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
“It’s better that we don’t chat,” Bannon said.
