Steve Bannon, incoming White House chief strategist, predicted Friday that next year would be even more eventful than the political roller coaster that was 2016.
“I think ’17 will be actually more exciting than ’16 was,” Bannon said during an interview on Breitbart News Daily, a radio program of the conservative media outlet Bannon chaired before joining President-elect Trump’s campaign earlier this year.
“There’ll be a lot of exciting actions over the next couple of years,” he added.
Bannon touted the strength of the movement that delivered Trump the White House, comparing it to the political shifts in Europe that preceded Britain’s exit from the European Union this summer.
“I think we’ve lived through a historic time,” Bannon said. “I think they’ll talk about what happened in this year politically for many, many decades to come.”
A close Trump confidante who has often been credited with shaping the president-elect’s populist edge, Bannon’s role in the campaign and soon-to-be position in the West Wing has drawn ire from Democrats wary of what they have described as his connections to a racially-tinged fringe group known as the alt-right.
Both Bannon and Trump himself have dismissed suggestions that the former Breitbart leader has ever associated with the alt-right, a loosely-defined group that became a favorite target of Hillary Clinton and other Democratic candidates during the presidential race.
Bannon noted he had frequently purused the “comments section at Breitbart” and listened to concerns from callers to its radio program, where voters would “share every day what their feelings were” and therefore guide the priorities of the Trump movement.
“I think people were very engaged in this election, and I think will be very engaged as time goes forward,” Bannon said. “The key is to hold people accountable.”
