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Steve Bannon’s European Adventure

The reputed mastermind of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has launched a full-scale effort to unite Europe's right-wing forces and bring down the European Union. But, as with European fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, the various strands of right-wing populism in Europe today show little ideological coherence.

NEW YORK – After being cast out of the White House and Breitbart News, Stephen K. Bannon, often referred to as the mastermind of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, has vowed to remake Europe. His organization, called “The Movement” and based in Brussels, aims to unite Europe’s right-wing populists and take down the European Union in its current form.

Bannon sees this effort as part of a “war” between populism and “the party of Davos,” between the white, Christian, patriotic “real people” (in the words of his British supporter, Nigel Farage) and the cosmopolitan globalist elites. In the media, at least, Bannon is taken seriously.

It would seem to be a tall order for this permanently disheveled American media blowhard and promoter of cranky ideas about cyclical cataclysms to change the history of Europe. Despite meeting such right-wing luminaries as Hungary’s strongman Viktor Orbán, Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, and Boris Johnson, the clownish former British foreign secretary, all of whom wish him well, Bannon has almost no experience in European politics. He stunned a sympathetic audience in Prague by ranting against “unfair competition” from foreign countries that use cheap labor. Much of the Czech Republic’s GDP comes from exports, for just that reason.

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