Why did he want dirt on Trump?
“Why did he want dirt on Trump?”
Because he’s an egotistical jerk, like most of the establishment anti-Trumpers. Trump treats them as if they are less than what they think they are, and he exposes how ordinary they are. They hate him for this. It’s not just that he’s from the outside. If he were the same person, but kissed their rings and paid homage to their delusions of grandeur, they would embrace him. Instead, he calls them out for being incompetent. These are very flawed and unimpressive people who have been found out. They hate him more than you can imagine.
Probably because at the time, Trump sounded like a mouthpiece of the Kremlin on foreign policy.... though I think Trump was doing that deliberately to appeal to the fringe Bernie Sanders/Antiwar.com/libertarian/Russian emigre crowd and win their votes [or at least sow confusion among the traditional Democratic Party base], as Bannon mentioned such a tactic of temporary cultivation of votes when asked about the strange ‘big tent’ coalition the campaign was setting up.
Trump has since changed his position once he had access to intel briefings, as Bannon predicted he would, but during the campaign he did spew out the same talking points on Iraq and Syria as pro-Russian trolls have always done.