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Bannon: 'Nobody can run and hide'
Former chief strategist promoting GOP challengers
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In this July 17, 2015 file photo, former Rep. Michael Grimm, center, leaves following his sentencing at federal court in the Brooklyn borough of New York. President Donald Trumps former chief strategist Steve Bannon is boosting multiple challengers to GOP incumbents and the partys preferred candidates in next years midterm elections. - photo by Associated Press
JACKSON, Miss. — Steve Bannon has a stark message to Republican incumbents he considers part of the establishment: "Nobody can run and hide."President Donald Trump's former chief strategist is promoting a field of potential primary challengers to take on disfavored Republicans in Congress and step up for open seats. Among the outsiders: a convicted felon, a perennial candidate linked to an environmental conspiracy theory and a Southern lawmaker known for provocative ethnic and racial comments.It's an insurgency that could imperil Republican majorities in the House and Senate. Bannon called it a "populist nationalist conservative revolt" in a speech to religious conservatives in Washington on Saturday.The emerging Bannon class of rabble-rousers shares limited ideological ties but a common intent to upend Washington and knock out Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., standard-bearer of the establishment.So intent is Bannon on bringing down McConnell that he laid down this marker Saturday to some of the incumbents at risk of a challenge from his flank of the party: disavow McConnell, satisfy other conditions and possibly escape the wrath."Until that time," he said, the message to the elite is: "They're coming for you."The crop of outsider candidates unnerves a GOP that lost seats — and a shot at the Senate majority — in 2010 and 2012 with political novices and controversial nominees and fears a stinging repeat in 2018."The main thing that binds them together is a rejection of the Republican Party establishment, a rejection of the political elites, the financial elites and the media elites," said Andy Surabian, a former Bannon aide and senior adviser to the pro-Trump PAC Great America Alliance.Bannon told the religious conservatives that economic nationalism and anti-globalism, the same forces he said elected Trump, can overpower Republican elites."This is our war," he said.
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