Steve Bannon: ‘President Trump will serve a third term’

Steve Bannon, architect of US president Donald Trump’s America First movement, spoke to Edward Luce, US national editor, at the FTWeekend festival in Washington DC. The populist nationalist shared his views on everything from AI and alleging the election of American pope Leo XIV was ‘rigged’ to declaring the US would be unable to continue financing its deficits without tax rises for wealthy Americans and big cuts to the ‘deep state’. Condemning foreign strongmen, he predicted Trump would serve a third term with the help of constitutional ‘workarounds’. Bannon also denied that not enough American citizens had the skills or desire to do the jobs of immigrant workers championed by Elon Musk, Trump’s billionaire backer and government efficiency tsar who was now ‘gone…[from DC while] I’m still here’.