Steve Bannon, the far-right ideologue who once served as President Donald Trump's chief adviser and was touted as the brains behind the administration, has admitted that he hated "every second" of his time with the 45th president.
Bannon left the White House in August 2017 after falling foul of Trump and the vicious power battles that beset the administration. Since then, he has been largely absent from U.S. headlines. But a new documentary premiering at Sundance Film Festival this week sheds light on the controversial firebrand's day-to-day since being dumped by Trump.
The Brink is a fly-on-the-wall documentary following Bannon through his day-to-day activities as he attempts to carve out a role for himself as a global organizer of right-wing political movements, USA Today explained.
But he apparently does not look fondly on his time in Washington. "There's no glamour to the job. I hated every second I was there," he explained in the film. "The West Wing has bad karma to it. They say, 'Because you were doing bad stuff!' But I was doing the Lord's work."
Bannon was one of the driving forces behind Trump's "Muslim ban," which was implemented soon after the president took office. He was also influential in directing the president's tepid response to the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a mass demonstration by neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups sparked violence leaving one dead and many injured.
Despite having been fired and repeatedly mocked by Trump, Bannon avoided pointed criticism of the president. He lauded Trump for teaching him there is no such thing as "bad press" and stated, "Donald Trump is a historical figure and a transformative president."
"Donald Trump will be in your personal life 30 years from now, whether you like it or not," he claimed. However, he did take aim at the administration's policy of separating migrant families at the southern border, arguing, "A child can't be taken from a parent's arms…. That's inhuman."
Since leaving the White House, Bannon has campaigned—largely unsuccessfully—for a series of far-right Republican candidates in special and midterm elections. He has also turned his focus to Europe, where he hopes to build a network of right-wing movements to challenge what he calls "the elites."
The former Hollywood producer has said he intends to "provide and do pollings and data analytics and set up war rooms" for far-right parties to help them fight more moderate and established European political parties.
Bannon is specifically targeting the 2019 European Parliament elections in the hope of helping a range of nationalist and anti-European Union parties into power. He has said the elections will give voters the chance to return a government "that's not socialist," either ignoring or ignorant of the fact that conservative parties have dominated the EU Parliament for the past two decades.
But his overtures to Europe's right wing have not all been received enthusiastically. Indeed, many nationalist leaders see no merit in being told what to do by an American with little political experience outside of his home country.
Harald Vilimsky, the leader of the Austrian Freedom Party, said, "We want to forge alliances in Europe, but we do it independently of the U.S., Russia or anyone else…. We want to grow, expand on our own and develop our program and ideas on our own, but surely not under the leadership of someone active in the United States."
The leader of Britain's U.K. Independence Party—Gerard Batten—echoed this opposition, suggesting, "I'm not quite sure what he is proposing across Europe, but UKIP doesn't fit into that. UKIP is a British party that is going to pursue aims for the British people," Reuters reported.
And in France, Jerome Riviere of the far-right National Rally party said his party "rejects any supranational entity and are not participating in the creation of anything with Bannon," according to Politico.
