Op-ed by Fareed Zaharia @ WashingtonPost.com, June 1

ROME -- The Republican Party faces dim prospects in the midterm elections. But it doesn’t have to be that way, says Stephen K. Bannon, the chief ideologist of the populist wave that brought Donald Trump into the White House. “If the Republicans continue on the path they are on,” Bannon told me Thursday, “they will lose 40 seats in the House and President Trump will be impeached.” He presented an alternative that strikes me as clever, and it’s a strategy that Trump himself seems to instinctively get.

Bannon was in Rome to learn from and provide support to the unusual coalition of populists and nationalists who together won half the vote in Italy’s recent elections and have formed a government. Bannon sees that sort of coalition — mixing left and right, old and young — as his goal for the United States. “Europe is about a year ahead of the United States. . . . You see populist-nationalist movements with reform [here]. . . . You could begin to see the elements of Bernie Sanders coupled with the Trump movement that really becomes a dominant political force in American politics.” (This column draws on an on-air interview he did with me for CNN, as well as a subsequent conversation.) [.....]