Stephen Bannon, the architect of President Donald Trump's populist campaign message and his former chief strategist, is on a mission to build a network of populists across Europe, The New York Times reported.
"All I'm trying to be is the infrastructure, globally, for the global populist movement," he told the Times in an interview posted Friday.
On Saturday, Bannon will headline the annual conference of France's far-right National Front, and will be introduced by its leader, Marine Le Pen, the Times reported.
He might later meet with the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban, whom Bannon says he admires as a "hero" and "the most significant guy on the scene right now."
Earlier this week, Bannon was in Zurich to meet with leaders of Germany's far-right Alternative for Germany party, the Times reported.
But Bannon is mostly based in Italy, where populist forces won more than half the vote last Sunday.
According to Bannon, the vote also represented a rejection of Pope Francis, who has urged tolerance for migrants.
"This vote was a rejection of the Pope," Bannon, a Catholic who has been a longtime critic of the Pope's politics, told the Times. "The Pope likes to see himself as a radical and an anti-establishment revolutionary for the little guy; the little guy put the Pope in his place on Sunday."
According to the Times, Bannon currently is working on a project to create a think tank to "weaponize" populist economic and social ideas, and sees that work spreading to Europe, where he hopes populist websites in the image of Breitbart News, either owned by him or others, will spread those ideas.
"They see what Breitbart did and they want it in their own language," Bannon said. "That's the key. Right now, my sites are in English, they want one in their own language," he said, calling that "phase two."
Bannon told the Times he's also weighing whether to buy a name-brand outlet, like Newsweek or United Press International, or to start a new one, or to connect entrepreneurs with capital or invest himself.
"Whether I do it or a local entrepreneur does it," he said, "there are going to be these populist nationalist news sites that pop up in the next year online. That will only take these things to the next level."
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