Donald Trump's newly announced strategist Steve Bannon predicted "an insurgent candidate" would claim the Republican party nomination in the election.
In a 2011 interview with Newstalk, the chairman of Breitbart News Network predicted that the Republican nominee for the presidency would be "an insurgent candidate backed by the Tea Party".
While Bannon's prediction wasn't entirely accurate for the 2012 election, four years later Donald Trump rode a wave of grassroots support as an insurgent candidate in November's election.
"It will not be an establishment candidate, someone like a Mitt Romney or a John Huntsman", Bannon said. "I don't see how a Republican nominee can win a nomination without Tea Party support. It will be what we call an insurgent candidate over here, like Congressman [Michelle] Bachman, Herman Cain, Governor [Rick] Perry potentially, Governor [Sarah] Palin ... It will be one of those candidates."
His pick for the nomination was Michelle Bachman, Trump's evangelical advisor. Calling her a "perfect example of a Tea Party leader", and "a real firebrand", he compared her to Patrick Henry - considered one of the Founding Fathers of America.
Bachman lost the Republican nomination to Mitt Romney in 2011. She was criticised for her conservative stance on gay rights and her fundamentalism.
"Of course, the media mocks her because they fear her - she's far from a fascist. She's a strict constructionist. I made a movie called Fire From The Heartland about Congressman Bachman. The Tea Party movement was started and driven by working class, blue-collar women. It's the first centre-right movement in the States driven by women."
Bannon's recent appointment as Chief Strategist in Trump's cabinet has been met with a number of objections. The kingpin of conservative media channeling the passion of the new alt-right, he has recently been accused of being a white nationalist - something which he refutes.
In the interview, Bannon spoke about how the Tea Party stopped Barack Obama implementing tax increases, and called Obamacare "shattered".
"His desires to expand the federal scale and scope of the government has been stopped in its tracks. The federal budget of the United States will spend about €7.4 trillion in the next two years. The only cuts that politicians agreed to were €60 billion in cuts. The political class does not have the will in the United States to make these cuts."
Foreshadowing the right-wing movement in America, he attributed the movement to "a collection of working-class and middle class people that say 'enough is enough'".
Highlighting the role of the media in playing down those involved in the movement, Bannon stated that the supporters are "the people that run our civic organisations and build our communities and fight our wars, and the people that are the backbone of the country, [we] have to have a voice in this.
"The establishment we have in the United States fears the Tea Party movement and mocks its spiritual leaders as being idiots, morons, hicks, rubes, peasants with pitchforks."
"All the easy decisions are 10 years in the back of us"
In 2011, Bannon compared America's debt crisis with Ireland's, stating that there were huge cuts that needed to be made.
"It's not that any of these discussions are pleasant. All the easy decisions are 10 years in the back of us. Nobody wants to make these cuts, these cuts are going to be quite unpopular. I think Ireland is in the same situation. After you build up a welfare state or a nanny state, to have to pare it back is always very difficult.
"We’re entering into, I think, a second-dip recession.”What politicians do all the time - and they do it in Ireland - they put out numbers and then they come back two quarters later and cash them as actuals."
"We have socialism in the United States for the very wealthy and for the very poor, and we have a brutal form of capitalism for everybody else, and that's not fair [...] It's the Scotch-Irish heritage that is in the middle of the country, in the south and in the west that has really been the backbone of the country."
Referring to the Obama administration's spending as "out of control", he stated that it could be the end of the United States as an economic super power "unless we stop this deficit spending".
"I think one of the issues and one of the reasons why we have $14 trillion in debt is because it's been taken as routine.
"The political class of the United States, under the dark of the night, over the last 10 or 15 years, has continued to raise the national debt and not make it an issue. The Tea Party made this an issue for the first time, it got people to focus on it, and about how it's leading to the economic demise of the United States."
