While he was still installed as President Trump’s chief strategist on Pennsylvania Avenue, a new report revealed Steve Bannon sat down with a powerful union leader last spring to find “some common ground.”
Bannon, according to the Intercept, held an off-campus one-on-one meeting with American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten at a Washington restaurant in March. Weingarten sought to discuss proposed cuts to education programs in the administration’s new budget, but conceded in the report their conversation also touched on everything from infrastructure to immigration to “bigotry and hate.”
“I think he sees the world as working people versus elites,” she reflected. “And on some level, he’s thought about educators as working-class folks. But what he doesn’t do is think about the other side of educators, as people who fiercely believe in equality and inclusion. It isn’t an either/or philosophy. The [Martin Luther] King philosophy of jobs and justice is not the Bannon philosophy, let’s put it that way.”
“He’s trying to figure out where the friction is, and how to change the alignment,” Weingarten added. “I think that’s really what he was trying to do.”
The labor leader seemed surprised to learn Bannon spoke her language. “He hates crony capitalism… The same kinds of things [we say], you could hear out of his mouth,” she told the Intercept.
Weingarten recalled coming out of their conversation with an understanding of Bannon as “a formidable adversary.”
While none of Weingarten’s account is shocking in the least, it provides more insight into Bannon’s quest to curb the inordinate influence of elites in Republican politics— and politics in general. If Weingarten’s assessment is accurate, that the primary lens through which Bannon sees the world is “working people versus elites,” then he seems to authentically share the perspective of his target demographic.
As we learned last November, successfully tapping into that sentiment can be powerful. The question going forward is whether Bannon will court more distant progressive allies as he sets out to transform his own party.
