Steve Bannon Blames ‘Devil’ Mitch McConnell for Gaetz Failure: ‘We Have to Get a Lot More Aggressive’

Steve Bannon mourned Matt Gaetz’s withdrawal from the confirmation process to become attorney general in a new interview with The Dispatch in which he suggested that President-elect Donald Trump’s team needs to be “a lot more aggressive.”

Speaking with Mike Warren, Bannon credited outgoing Republican leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) for sinking Gaetz — whom he has referred to as “the best of the best” on his show — and mused that “you gotta give the devil [McConnell] its due.”

“I think we have to get a lot more aggressive. I think [the transition] has to be more aggressive. He selected controversial candidates, including a couple of Democrats that are quite controversial and quite controversial to be accepted by traditionally hidebound, standard-stock, Republican establishment, the established order of the Republican Party, which is still infesting the Senate, and they’re not going to just sit there and say, ‘Oh, this is terrific,'” Bannon told Warren. “They are anti-populist, they’re anti-economic nationalists, and they’re going to show the donor class, which is really who they report to, that they can stop Trump, and they’re going to try to stop Trump in the U.S. Senate.”

“We took a casualty today. One of the best warriors we have in all his imperfections, and he’s quite imperfect, as Donald Trump is imperfect, as Stephen K. Bannon is super imperfect,” said Bannon after Gaetz took his name out of consideration last week. “And Tucker Carlson and Vivek Ramaswamy, Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard, RFK, Jr., all of it. Very, very, very imperfect instruments. But in that imperfection is some of their power. We took a casualty today. One of the reasons we took a casualty, I hate to say it and let me be brutally frank. You can’t stick these people out there with no air cover. What are we doing? You can’t stick them out there and take them off television. They’re the best at selling themselves. You take them off television for five, six, seven, eight days, and it’s nothing but incoming. Where is the plan and where is the execution of the plan?”

“It’s a big defeat for President Trump today,” he continued. “And trust me, those demons and jackals and hyenas up there in the United States Senate, Mitch McConnell, that crowd, they know it.”