Bannon crisscrossing US to pitch GOP mega-donors: report

Former White House strategist Stephen Bannon is meeting with major GOP donors to convince them to pull funding from reelection campaigns of Senate Republicans who do not support President Trump’s agenda, and to back their their primary challengers instead, according to Politico.  

Bannon met last week with Bernie Marcus, a co-founder of The Home Depot and longtime Republican donor who has reportedly given more than $2 million to a PAC backing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), a central figure in Bannon’s populist insurgency against establishment lawmakers.

The Breitbart News boss has reportedly met with many of the party’s top donors over the past few weeks, in an effort to unite them against McConnell, who Bannon and others have blamed for the GOP’s struggles to pass ObamaCare repeal and other high-profile agenda items backed by President Trump.

{mosads}Bannon announced last week that he will seek to field challengers against each sitting Republican senator except for Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas).

Marcus adviser Steve Hantler told Politico that Marcus has given the Senate until the end of the year to pass major legislation, after which he will consider his options of candidates to support in the 2018 midterm elections. 

Bannon has also met with McConnell donor and Texas financier Ed Bosarge and Foster Friess, a Republican donor from Wyoming who Politico reported had indicated he has become frustrated enough with the Senate to potentially back an outsider candidate against the state’s junior Sen. John Barrasso. 

So far, Bannon has been on the winning side of one victory against the GOP establishment, with the defeat of the Trump-backed candidate Luther Strange in his Alabama primary run against Judge Roy Moore last month. 

He has also taken credit for Sen. Bob Corker’s (R-Tenn.) decision not to seek reelection.