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More than a few Republicans are celebrating Zohran Mamdani’s victory, seeing the 34-year-old democratic socialist as a political gift and an albatross for the Democratic Party. Steve Bannon is not among them.
The former White House chief strategist has long preached the idea that populism is the engine of modern politics. And he sees Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York City as proof of its staying power — and a sign of the growing anti-establishment force on the left that Republicans would be foolish to ignore.
“Tonight should be a wake up call to the populist nationalist movement under President Trump,” he said in an interview with POLITICO Magazine just after midnight on Wednesday. “These are very serious people, and they need to be addressed seriously.”
Bannon seemed impressed by the Mamdani campaign’s ability to turn out low-propensity voters — “this is kind of the Trump model” — though he branded Mamdani a “neo-Marxist,” rather than a populist. And he is eager to have Trump and his administration battle Mamdani in the days ahead.
In a wide-ranging conversation following Democrats’ big wins in New Jersey and Virginia, Bannon also ripped Republicans for their failures, discussed how the GOP can avoid a 2026 midterm rout and laid out what Trump’s immediate next moves should be.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
A lot of Republicans, including the NRCC, are cheering Mamdani’s win tonight, already trying to make him the latest Democratic boogeyman. But you’ve also warned Republicans to be careful what they wish for with Mamdani — that he’s a “skilled politician” who connects with voters on affordability in ways the GOP hasn’t. Where’s the flashing red light for Republicans in his victory?
First off, all those people that said he wasn’t going to win the primary and he was great to run against, I think, have been proven wrong. This is not a debating society.
Tonight, what you saw out of Mamdani is something you’ve never seen this entire race. I mean, that’s an angry guy. That was in your face, and particularly the president’s face, up in his grill, and the president responded: “And so it begins.”
People better understand they have a fight on their hands. This guy is a serious guy. I've said this from the beginning — I said early in the primary.
Forget the Republican Party in New York — that's a joke — but the national Republican Party and some of the smartest strategists do not realize the power of the Working Families Party and the [Democratic Socialists of America] for ground game. Modern politics now is about engaging low-propensity voters, and they clearly turned them out tonight, and this is kind of the Trump model. This is very serious.
You call Mamdani a Marxist, but a lot of other folks would call him a populist —
He's a Marxist, a neo-Marxist.
Are there alarm bells for Republicans in this victory? I mean, he clearly is trying to make this populist appeal.
There should be even more than alarm bells. There should be flashing red lights all over.
This is not Karen Bass. This is not the guy in Chicago. You're going to see a whole new group of Mamdanis in these major urban cities because they're just flooded with immigrants, right? That’s where his vote came from, principally, and the progressive left, these kids have come up through the public school system. This is the flower of what the progressive left has delivered over the last 40 or 50 years. You saw it tonight and people, we’re going to have a fight on our hands.
All the Republicans sit there and tell me, “Oh, Steve, this is what we’ve always wanted, a socialist.” I said, “This guy is a Bolshevik, he’s a Marxist.” These guys are going to hunker down for a while, and they’re going to take over every apparatus of New York City government, and they're going to start putting the squeeze on business. And you're going to see, they're going to roll, they're going to roll hard.
His speech tonight could not have been nastier or more aggressive. He mocked Cuomo. That is one of the first families of the Democratic Party, particularly in the state of New York.
And then with Trump, it was a direct throwdown to Trump, unlike any politician’s ever done. He tried to call President Trump out, and President Trump responded.
I think tomorrow — and I've argued from the beginning — this guy's citizenship should be checked immediately.
To me, it ought to be addressed. It ought to be addressed by the State Department, DHS and the Justice Department, to go through all this. If the guy lied on his naturalization papers, he ought to be deported out of the country immediately and put on a plane to Uganda.
Mamdani was born in Uganda and moved here when he was 7 years old and is an American citizen. Have you spoken to President Trump about trying to denaturalize him?
I don't want to say who I've talked to, but on the [War Room] show, I have been very pointed about that. I've been very upfront about my beliefs on this.
I told people this back in July. A bunch of donors asked me to come up after he won [the primary], because I kept saying, “This guy's going to win.” What Cuomo ran here is like “The Last Hurrah,” the novel. In the movie by John Ford, after World War II, a politician named Frank Skeffington — which was really [Boston Mayor] James Michael Curley — ran the same kind of race he'd been running for years and got smoked by a young upstart.
Cuomo’s almost run kind of “The Last Hurrah.” He's run this kind of campaign that, oh, he’s got the endorsement of The New York Times, he's got the endorsement of the New York Post, and he's raised $40 million, he's up on TV, he's got all the police unions, and all the unions in town and all the union bosses. It didn't matter.
What this kid got was 5,000 people canvassing in Brooklyn by going door-to-door, the Working Families Party and the DSA. People should understand they’re the rising power organizationally.
Tonight should be a wake up call to the populist nationalist movement under President Trump, that these are very serious people, and they need to be addressed seriously, not dismissed, like so many of the pundits have done.
A lot of folks have seen echoes of Trump in Mamdani, insofar as their anti-establishment authenticity and their resonance with working class voters. Do you see them as part of the same political wave?
I've said for a while populism is going to be the wave of the future. Now, this is much more radical than that — but, yes. Listen, the managed decline of our country by the elites is the basic undertone of what this kind of political revolution in the country has been.
Not that he’s got the same type of qualities as Trump, but it's anti-establishment. And I think what he showed people is he's a fighter. And so, you know, game on. Game respects game.
Who's better positioned to harness that insurgent, anti-establishment sentiment heading into ‘26 and ‘28, the left or the right?
I think it’s going to be a fight for both.
One thing I think that is pretty evident tonight is that the structures of the two parties — Democrat and Republican — don't really matter. The energy is in the populist right, Trump, and what Mamdani is, what I would call the neo-Marxist left. The Democratic Party was basically worthless here. The Republican Party, as a party, was worthless.
Look at these numbers tonight. [New Jersey Gov.-elect] Mikie Sherrill and [Virginia Gov.-elect Abigail] Spanberger are going to win by 15 points. At one time, [polls] had Mikie Sherrill winning by 1 or 2 points. Last I saw, she could win by 10, 12, 14, 15 points. These are blowouts.
Democrats had a theme tonight. The theme was stop Trump, anti-Trump. We’ve got to beat Trump. It was all Trump, Trump, Trump, and the Republicans in New Jersey, particularly New Jersey, and in Virginia had no theme whatsoever.
The official Republican Party just wants to tap Trump along and then be done with him, be done with MAGA, and get back to what they want to do — neocon, neoliberal.
[Virginia Gov. Glenn] Youngkin, I don't know what he was doing in Iowa, because his political career ended tonight. He destroyed the Republican Party in the Commonwealth of Virginia, for maybe a generation. Did you see these [state] House losses? They lost seats they thought were impossible to lose.
And this is going to become a national issue immediately, because there's no doubt Democrats are going to try to go 10-1 in House representation [through redistricting], and the wind’s to their back, and they're going to go all in right now.
And the House itself may hang in the balance, given what happened in California and Virginia. You saw [Maryland Gov.] Wes Moore is going to jump right on the bandwagon. He comes out of MSNBC right about 10:30 at night saying, “Hey, I'm calling together a commission, and we're going to look at fairness.” You're going to see a lot more of this springing up.
What do Republicans need to do differently to avoid a midterm bloodbath next year?
I think it's going to be very simple: You’re either with MAGA or you’re not. The Republican Party has no following. It has a bunch of donors, and it has the Fox TV network, and it has Karl Rove and all these worn-out ideas you see in the House and the Senate. It's just embarrassing. The Republican Party is just a husk. When Trump is engaged, when Trump's on the ballot, when Trump's team can get out there and get low-propensity voters — because that's the difference now in modern politics — when they can do it, they win. When he doesn’t do it, they don’t.
So [candidates have] got to make a decision, and I think President Trump ought to force their hand.
You double and triple down with Trump. If you're not prepared to do that, you're going to get smoked, because you're not going to see Trump voters come out, like in Virginia, just like in New Jersey.
Is embracing Trump enough? Or do these candidates actually need to embrace populism and economic nationalism?
I do believe that the White House is going to pivot now back to even a bigger focus on domestic policies, not just affordability, but job creation, making sure that the Big Beautiful Bill is fully implemented, making sure that all these investments that have been talked about actually get made.
I think the commerce secretary tomorrow should be designated by the president to make sure that these things are done, that ground is dug, that these plants are starting to be built. I think it’s now time to double and triple down on President Trump's agenda. If you execute the agenda, we're going to be in good shape. He’s got a populist agenda. He's got a nationalist agenda. You’ve just got to get on with it.
To that point though, President Trump is getting some of his lowest approval ratings ever right now. Why do you think that is?
First, I'm not so sure. They could never properly gauge President Trump — we’ve talked about this for a long time. But that being said, I think people need to feel that the economy is working for them. I don't think there's any doubt about it. The program is the right program. It just needs to be executed. And I think people need to feel that it's being executed.
Spending so much time in the Mideast, spending so much time in Ukraine, I understand he's trying to bring world peace and trying to make sure that the world doesn't slide into an even deeper element of the Third World War, but his domestic program is fantastic. He's got a great team with [Treasury Secretary Scott] Bessent and company.
Has his fixation on international affairs distracted him from his domestic agenda?
I don’t think it’s a fixation. Look, we are on the precipice of deeper involvement in a Third World War. I think what he's trying to do in Ukraine, to bring that to a conclusion, would go a long ways to settling things down, particularly on the Eurasian landmass.
I keep saying the Middle East is a sideshow, and that Israel's a sideshow to the sideshow. I think it's way past time to tone that down and just say, “Hey, look, you got the Gaza thing under control, it's going, but no more.” They're already kicking the dust up, “Oh, the Iranians are acting back up.” No more of that.
I think the thing in Venezuela, the hemispheric defense, the focus on Latin America, it ought to be quickly brought to a head, if you can negotiate something with these guys or not. And the international does have a direct impact into what's happening here domestically.
But I think what [critics are] going to throw at him tomorrow is that President Trump hasn’t focused on any of this, and the Democrats are doing it, and that's why they're winning from the suburbs of Northern Virginia to the suburbs of New Jersey to Manhattan. You have to combat that, because that's just going to be the reality of the narrative. You’ve got to go back on that and show that nobody can do it better than President Trump, and I think it's time now to get on with it.
Do you think affordability is going to be the keyword of the ’26 election?
I would just say the economy overall. Remember some of the exit polls, people didn't focus on affordability, but the economy. It's twofold, not just affordability across things, but also jobs.
We have to put American citizens first. Not just America first. American citizens first. I think President Trump’s agenda is perfect for that.
I think President Trump will go around and maybe give more speeches and more things domestically, maybe take a few less international trips for the next six months or so, and just get focused back with the American people. The American people love him when he’s focused on this, and I think you’re going to see it.
What do you hope Trump does first thing when he wakes up in the morning?
Two things I would do. Number one, get [Assistant Attorney General] Harmeet Dhillon and the Justice Department to go out and file suit against this scam of [California Gov. Gavin] Newsom on this redistricting plan that went against the constitution of California. I would get the Justice Department to file suit, go get a [temporary restraining order] immediately, and then hit this thing and drag it out for a year.
And number two, I would get DHS, the State Department and the Justice Department looking immediately at Mamdani, who I am convinced did not get citizenship in a fair and honest way, and get those two things rolling.
In addition, I think he ought to sit there and listen to Mamdani’s speech again, particularly the part where he challenged President Trump when he said, “Turn the volume up.”
President Trump's got a great saying: “No games.” And so if this guy wants to take on President Trump, so be it.
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