Bannon sounds alarm: Biden's new economic populism a 'shot across' Trump's bow

Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon sounded an alarm Thursday to former boss President Trump, saying rival Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden's new economic populism is a "shot across the bow" to the White House and to the Trump 2020 campaign.

Biden earlier in the day in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the epicenter of a key battleground Rust Belt state, unveiled a proposed $700 billion economic initiative that Democrats signaled was meant to be their own version of the "America First" economic populism that catapulted Trump to the White House in 2016, in part due to Bannon's advice.

"I'm concerned about it," Bannon told Just the News in a podcast interview with John Solomon. "You know, what I've been saying for a long time, with the present, I don't think it’s so much about a campaign as about what you're doing in the Oval Office and what you're doing as executive in this in this horrible pandemic. 

"I keep saying 'Action, action action.' And I know the team around [Trump] has been working on a 'buy American' executive order for quite a while, right. It really encapsulates a lot of what the president is talking about, particularly about bringing medical supply chains back."

Bannon called Biden campaign adviser Jared Bernstein at the Economic Policy Institute "a smart economic nationalist," and a driving force behind Biden's unveil Thursday.

"And today, let's be brutally frank, they stole a march on the White House," Bannon said. "They came out with a 'buy American' program. I think a lot of it's superficial. It's ironic that Biden is the biggest globalists, we've had in the U.S. Senate, someone who's really exacerbated the rise of China is now going hardcore, you know, hardcore economic nationalist. 

"And the reason is that they're smart: They know that to win in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin, you have to be an economic nationalist, you have to want to bring manufacturing jobs back. Biden's never done it, but trust me, he's gonna hum a few bars between now and Election Day.

"And I think this is a shot across the bow of the White House. And I think it's a shot across the bow of the Trump campaign. People have got to turn to and get on top of this and get back to what won in ’16, at least these economic issues, and I think this is a wake up call." 

Hogan Gidley, Trump 2020 national press secretary, responded to the Biden economic release, calling it something "borrowed" from democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont Independent and two-time presidential candidate.

“We don’t need to guess what a Biden economy would look like since Americans have been forced to live through it once already," Gidley said in a press statement. "Biden’s policies caused the slowest economic recovery since the Great Depression, anemic job growth, and depressed wages for the workers left.  

"Biden’s NAFTA destroyed 850,000 American jobs and his inexplicable support for China killed millions more and forced 60,000 American factories to close.  Now, Biden proudly brags he has borrowed his economic plans from Bernie Sanders, saying he’ll raise taxes on all Americans – including the middle class – and impose crippling Green New Deal regulations on job-creators that already forced so many American companies to leave our shores for other countries." 

In the podcast interview, Bannon also rejected a Wall Street Journal story claiming that the FBI is investigating exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui's pro-democracy work with Bannon. Both men are fierce critics of the Communist Party of China.

Solomon said his own reporting show that the reverse was true, that Bannon was helping the FBI with protecting dissidents like Guo. 

"I've dedicated my life to assisting the Chinese in their freedom and particularly going after the Chinese Communist Party," Bannon said. "The Chinese people are the victims here. They're the ones who have been enslaved in the global financial system in the City of London, Davos. And Wall Street benefits from that slave labor. And the serfdom of the workers throughout the rest of world is the way the system's built. We're at the vanguard of calling it out. I understand if the Wall Street Journal doesn't like us calling many of the people that not just subscribe but advertise there, and we're going to call them out every day. The hedge fund managers and the global corporations, we're not backing off."