April 7, 2023 - Bannon's War Room
48:39
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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This is what you're fighting for. | |
| I mean, every day you're out there. | ||
| What they're doing is blowing people off. | ||
| If you continue to look the other way and shut up, then the oppressors, the authoritarians get total control and total power. | ||
|
unidentified
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Because this is just like in Arizona. | |
| This is just like in Georgia. | ||
| It's another element that backs them into a quarter and shows their lies and misrepresentations. | ||
| This is why this audience is going to have to get engaged. | ||
| As we've told you, this is the fight. | ||
| All this nonsense, all this spin, they can't handle the truth. | ||
| War Room, Battleground. | ||
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| Peter K. Navarro in for the Admiral today. | ||
| I am at peternavarro.substack.com. | ||
| I'm going to promise you something here, and let's see if I deliver it by the end of the hour. | ||
| I'm going to give you the best advice. | ||
| 20 minutes yet to date on the thread of the Chinese Communist Party. | ||
| That's going to come in the bottom of the hour with one of the best hidden experts on China, Communist China, by the way, in the world. | ||
| But first, what I want to do is quickly bring on a gentleman who, whenever I guest host, I love to have him on. | ||
| He's one of my favorite folks. | ||
| He has the most insightful takes. | ||
| on the political environment. | ||
| What I want to do with Richard is look at this big picture of 2024 and what the real battleground states are going to be. | ||
| You might think that the battleground states are always the same battleground states, but that's not true at all. | ||
| I've only gone through a couple of cycles with the boss in 2016. | ||
| It was all about the Rust Belt, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. | ||
| These were the blue wall states that would crumble under the weight of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. | ||
| But when we got to 2020, to at least the surprise of what was a fairly inept campaign run by Kushner, Georgia came into play, as did Arizona, which were traditionally Republican strongholds we didn't have to worry about. | ||
| And now, with this stunning election this week of an avowedly pro-choice, radical Democrat for the Supreme Court in Wisconsin, which has swung the balance there, we have to ask ourselves the question, is Wisconsin lost? | ||
| So, Richard, my brother, come on in. | ||
| Greetings. And once you just kick off, you've got some charts there. | ||
| Wax eloquent on this debacle in Wisconsin, sir, if you would. | ||
| Hey, thanks for having me on, Peter. | ||
| As always, I'm really most happy to be here with you. | ||
| You know, before we throw up the charts, I just want to say this to remind everybody, because I think it's important for Republican voters to remember this. | ||
| Before Donald Trump, whether you're talking about Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, before Donald Trump, the blue wall, whatever we're talking about, whatever combination of states to get to 270 we're talking about, the Republican Party was a party of losers. | ||
| They lost. | ||
| Repeatedly, from Herbert Walker Bush on, they did have W get in there, barely, if you remember. | ||
| And then in 04, W was reelected at one time having a 90 % approval rating. | ||
| He was elected with a few thousand votes that all came down to the state of Iowa. | ||
| So it's important to remember that the state we're going to look at now, Wisconsin, Republicans had not won since 1984 at the presidential level. | ||
| Reagan, of course, carried it. | ||
| He handed over the banner to Herbert Walker Bush, who went on to win in a pretty easy electoral vote landslide. | ||
| Yet, Wisconsin rejected Herbert Walker Bush for Dukakis in 1988. | ||
| Pennsylvania, Michigan went to Bush, but those states became more democratic over this period. | ||
| And Wisconsin became the easier state for MAGA, I would say, for Trump, not Republicans, for Trump to carry. | ||
| And it may pull the hardest. | ||
| It may look to be the more difficult of those three. | ||
| But at the end of the day, in 2016, it was the first state to be called for Trump out of the three. | ||
| And in 2020, it was the closest of them. | ||
| So if we can start with that, can we look at the 84 and 88 maps? | ||
| Because when you overlay them, what you have is four decades of history. | ||
| I'm going to take you through six maps, three images. | ||
| And you have four decades of history and four decades of lessons that Republicans, especially the establishment that came to dominate the party after Reagan, have not learned. | ||
| To the left you have on your screen, 84, that's Reagan's map. | ||
| It may look pretty familiar to everybody, especially looking at the northwest of Wisconsin. | ||
| You will see those three. | ||
| We call them lumberjack country. | ||
| And it's Ashland, Bayfield and Douglas. | ||
| All right. And these are very important because Republicans typically get creamed up there. | ||
| Reagan lost them, but he did well. | ||
| He was in the 40s. | ||
| This is the voter that people can't understand. | ||
| If you're a Politico, Peter, like we are, you can't understand how could somebody vote for Obama twice, maybe at least once, then vote for Trump, maybe even again vote for Trump or vote for Biden and now be back on the Trump train, but never consider voting for another Republican like Mitt Romney or Dan Kelly, all right? A traditionalist, a traditional conservative or a severely conservative fake technocrat like Mitt Romney, all right? | ||
|
unidentified
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And to the right you have to- Richard, quick question, just quick question. | |
| Those, that area up there, I know the state pretty well, but what is it that drives the economic boat up there? | ||
| Is it farming, mining? | ||
| There's no cities up there to speak of. | ||
| There's no big urban population. | ||
| This is like I tell people think about it if you're looking back in 84. | ||
| Think of the guy who's on like the bounty paper towel thing. | ||
| I mean this is like lumberjack country but it's got ancestral democratic roots because it's the birthplace of progressive labor, Peter. | ||
| Whether it's farming, whether it's industry, whether it's timber. | ||
| Right? So almost akin to this state's version of the Iron Range. | ||
| Now, there are liberal pockets, but that's the history of that area. | ||
| And looking at 1984's map and comparing it to 88, you also see the western part of the state go Democratic. | ||
| It's very important. | ||
| This is why at the Public Polling Project, Big Data Poll, if people want to go and help us crowdfund and fund it, this is what we do. | ||
| We don't just look at white versus black versus Hispanic. | ||
| This is important to look at national origin, ethnicity, because now you're talking about the western part of Wisconsin. | ||
| You have tons of ethnic Norwegians there in Minnesota. | ||
| You also have Norwegians and Scandinavians. | ||
| These people have been Democrats for years, but they were a Reagan Democrat, right? | ||
| And then they came around very much to be Trumplicans, all right? | ||
| In the right side, again, I just want to make sure everyone understands, that's Dukakis beating Herbert Walker Bush. | ||
| Keep that 84 map in your mind and let's go to the next image you're going to see to the left is Trump beating Clinton in 2016. | ||
| Boom! Look at that. It's almost identical, Peter, with a couple of counties here. | ||
| It's almost identical. | ||
| And to the right, you have Mitt Romney getting his butt whooped by Barack Obama. | ||
| And what do you see? You see up there, deep, deep victories for Obama in lumberjack country and western Norwegian Wisconsin breaking for Barack Obama and meanwhile not going for Trump. | ||
| Notice it's light blue in the northwest of Wisconsin. | ||
| If you want to win Wisconsin as a Republican, you cannot get beaten up there Where you're like Mitt Romney in the 30s, Trump, Johnson, which we're going to look at in a second. | ||
| I'm going to hang for a second. | ||
| They get in the 40s, the mid-40s, Peter. | ||
| It is not a bloodbath. | ||
| All right? And then they hold on. | ||
| This is like pure MAGA to me. | ||
| This is like Reagan Democrat, Trump Democrat, pure MAGA, economic populism. | ||
| That's what it presents to me as. | ||
| These folks are the black, brown, blue-collar Americans who are struggling every day. | ||
| They're aspiring, and they don't respond to the Mitch McConnell Republican Party, full stop, right? | ||
| They hate technocrats. | ||
| They hate corporatists. | ||
| They hate plutocrats. | ||
| Frankly, they hate what the Republican Party image is outside of Donald Trump. | ||
| That's just a fact. | ||
| If we go to the next one, and by the way, in this map, there we go. | ||
| Notice Johnson's map. | ||
| It's almost identical to Trump's. | ||
| It's literally identical to Trump's. | ||
| A little bit of different shades because of the margins. | ||
| But Johnson had the benefit of running with Trump on the ticket in 16. | ||
| All right. And he had that image. | ||
| He did not break away from Trump. | ||
| He did not throw him under the bus like Mark Kirk did. | ||
| Just to be clear, Richard, is this 2020 the Johnson win or? | ||
| This is 22. Yeah, this is 22. | ||
| 2022. Okay. | ||
| And what you'll notice there is you have counties like Salk, Which are basically central, just north of Dane County, a little bit northwest of Dane County. | ||
| And Polk, Rusk, still sticking with Johnson while they abandon these traditional Republicans. | ||
| Yeah, who's Kelly? I don't even know who Kelly is, so I've got to assume a lot of people out there don't. | ||
| And by the way, he's been beaten like this before. | ||
| And this is something that you would think the Republican Party would have prepared for, that he is seen as a tough on crime, traditional conservative, which Trump is tough on crime too, but he also was for second chances, right? | ||
| Literally, the second chance. | ||
| He was also for economic nationalism. | ||
| He was also against nation building. | ||
| He was also not a technocrat. | ||
| He was also a blue-collar billionaire, right? | ||
| It's that term, that phrase. | ||
| Very different. Walker was able to punch very much into the same voters that we're talking about during his first two elections. | ||
| Definitely third, but sometimes you just appear on the ballot one too many times. | ||
| But I would argue that. | ||
| Walker was folksy, and he was also appealing to these people who really just want somebody, even if they don't agree with you on everything, Peter, they want to know where you stand, where you're coming from, and that they can basically look you in the eye and know what you're going to do. | ||
| Richard, hang on just one second. | ||
| I want people to be clear here, because you're talking about when you say Walker, that's Scott Walker, who was the governor. | ||
| And then try to run against Trump in 2016. | ||
| Now, Kelly, just to be clear, that's the guy who just got beat? | ||
| Is that the judge who just got beat? | ||
| And is that the map from this last election or the one where he got beat before? | ||
| This is the last one. | ||
| I know the colors are different, but everyone should assume the green is the blue and Kelly is the orangey tan. | ||
| We just didn't get a chance to swap them out yet. | ||
| We had to grab one from Wikipedia. | ||
| If I had the live one, people can go to People's Pundit daily. | ||
| It's archived for everybody to see. | ||
| The only difference in 2020, Peter, is that Door County, which is that little peninsula county. | ||
| It's a very It's not a large population county, but it's the peninsula county on the eastern side, which you can see Kelly lost here, went for Biden by less than 100 votes, I believe. | ||
| Very, very small amount. | ||
| Johnson carried it by maybe 40 votes, something like that. | ||
| Trump also carried it by a very—I mean, it's a very tight county, but it's a county that's indicative of how some of these, again, these ethnicities matter. | ||
| And these voters that we're talking about, Johnson really benefited from taking it to big pharma, being anti-interventionist. | ||
| I know I've heard some absurd arguments. | ||
| He is not for endless funds to Ukraine and others. | ||
| He may be not as MAGA, obviously, as Trump, but he went after Fauci. | ||
| He has held people's feet to account on Russia. | ||
| These are skeptics. | ||
| They are skeptics, but they're also, many of them, low propensity. | ||
| So Trump, it's a bit of a two-punch. | ||
| He drives out these voters that will just not vote for Republicans. | ||
| They'll stay home if they don't like the Democrat, but he also wins some of those voters who will vote for the Democrat. | ||
| So let me try it. | ||
| What I'm hearing, Richard, is that all is not lost in Wisconsin, but the only way to win is the MAGA populist economic nationalist message. | ||
| Now, what about the spin that the left-wing media is putting out that this judge lost, the Republican lost, because the election deniers are losing and the anti-abortion folks are losing. | ||
| How much truth is in that? | ||
| How much one must worry about that in the 2024 race, particularly in Wisconsin? | ||
| You know, that's ludicrous. | ||
| Kelly was not a MAGA guy at all. | ||
| He told the Trump campaign to stay away. | ||
| There were headlines locally and nationally saying Kelly doesn't want Trump anywhere near Wisconsin. | ||
| You think those voters don't see that? | ||
| They buried the lead there, Richard. Of course they buried the lead. | ||
| And I will give you this. | ||
| The abortion voter was more motivated to come out and vote for their person. | ||
| Kelly was arguing about, I'm tough on crime. | ||
| If you're trying to juice rural turnout, nobody in rural America cares about that. | ||
| That's appealing if you're Donald Trump, for instance, and you're making this I'm the law and order candidate. | ||
| That's how you're getting so much more in urban areas than other Republicans are, by the way. | ||
| Trump outperformed Kelly and Dane. | ||
| He outperformed him in Milwaukee. | ||
| He definitely outperformed him in Green Bay, Brown County. | ||
| I mean, so he gets this other side of the vote. | ||
| He's not juicing rural turnout by being a traditional conservative. | ||
| And by the way, we had this election in 19, and we had the midterms in 18, before Wisconsin came down. | ||
| To a care in 2020, Republicans got stomped in 18 and 19. | ||
| So once again, it's Trump. | ||
| It's a Trumpian message. | ||
| It's MAGA. It's MAGA. All right, let's- Republicans are- Let me just say it again. | ||
| Republicans are losers. | ||
| I want to maximize your value here, Richard. | ||
| Let's pivot now to the bigger question above this, right? | ||
| Tell me, as you see it, Where the presidential election is going to be won or lost, what are the new battlegrounds? | ||
| Is it Georgia and Arizona plus what? | ||
| I mean, what do we have to worry the most about? | ||
| I think there's been some give and take, and to answer that question, I really do think it depends on who the nominee is going to be. | ||
| So I do think that some nominees, the Rust Belt's off the table. | ||
| It's off the table. If some of these potential hopefuls end up being the Republican nominee, if 40 years worth of election results in Wisconsin, in Pennsylvania, in Michigan can't convince these people, then I don't know what else to tell them. | ||
| But I am saying now, definitively, there is... | ||
| No other person on the board outside of the former president who is going to carry Macomb County, Michigan. | ||
| That's not going to happen. | ||
| You're going to fall short in Juneau. | ||
| You're going to lose Salk. | ||
| You're going to get crushed in Douglas, in Ashland. | ||
| You'll be in the 30s like Mitt Romney. | ||
| You'll get wiped. And all of the talk about abortion in Waukesha, Trump carried Waukesha by 21 points. | ||
| Kelly barely carried it the other night. | ||
| Or, you know, mid-teens. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right, so... It matters, Peter. | |
| Let me summarize here. | ||
| What I'm hearing, Richard, is that the only candidate that can take the blue wall states, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, would be Trump. | ||
| Now, what are the other states? | ||
| How much in jeopardy are we in Georgia and Arizona? | ||
| Because those two states stink to high heaven to me. | ||
| I'm scared to death of those. | ||
| What unlocks those states, and is there any other states where really the battleground's going to be? | ||
| This is another...Arizona and Georgia, I just want to focus on for a second, will be competitive no matter who the nominee is. | ||
| Why? What happened? | ||
| Unlike North Carolina, for instance, Peter, that's why Republicans have done a better job, MAGA or not, have done a better job in that state because It's only 42-44 % urban vote. | ||
| Years of rhino Republican gubernatorial policy had turned the economies of Arizona and Georgia into professional class economies. | ||
| So they brought in all of these educated whites in urban areas, and once that urban vote share It became 60 % or more. | ||
| It became difficult. | ||
| I showed a graph in Arizona the other day. | ||
| If you look at going back beyond Trump, you go back more than 14 years and look at the different presidential and midterm cycles, you can see that the Republican share of the vote in urban and suburban Arizona has been on the decline, what ironically it ticked up in 2020. | ||
| With Trump at the top of the ticket. | ||
| So that's irony for you. | ||
| But they are going to be competitive. | ||
| You just had Katie Hobbs veto a signature verification reform bill, which was bipartisan in the House in Arizona. | ||
| She did that for a reason, obviously. | ||
| But I will say this. I didn't poll any other potential Republican nominee, but Georgia, for instance. | ||
| In our last poll in Georgia, it wasn't a final poll, but our last poll, we did have Walker up by one. | ||
| We didn't poll the second round, and it ended up being, I believe, Warnock almost by one, so very close our polling there, and yet still Trump was up 11. | ||
| In Rasmussen, they had him up by 10 or 11. | ||
| Emerson, the same thing. | ||
| So what I'm saying is the Republican candidates in the midterm polling were trailing. | ||
| They were underperforming Trump in all of these states. | ||
| I didn't poll any other nominee. | ||
| I'm just saying that when it comes to a presidential cycle, you're going to be looking at another 800,000 to 1.2 million votes. | ||
| So it's a different ballgame than what we saw in 2022. | ||
| Nevada, if we compare that, we nailed Joe Lombardo's victory. | ||
| Laxalt, we had him up by one. | ||
| So again, he lost by a half a point, something like that. | ||
| Very close. Yet we still had Trump pretty much running away with the state of Nevada, which people who have followed me a long time know that I have repeatedly said that I don't believe it's that much of a competitive state. | ||
| It's close. But that Republicans are always overrepresented in the polls and shouldn't get their hopes up. | ||
| But this time it was different. | ||
| We knew how Washoe County was going to vote for Lombardo. | ||
| We knew that he would only trail in Clark County by about four or five points. | ||
| Well, if we were right about that, and Clark County is telling us it will swing to Donald Trump and he could carry it by about four points, and he's ahead in Washoe by five points. | ||
| Six was the other poll we had done. | ||
| Then, obviously, if we were right about those races, we were right about the state of the presidential race. | ||
| So I actually do think that that state would be in play as well. | ||
| However, again, it matters who the party's nominee is. | ||
| Who the nominee is. Okay, Richard, let me... | ||
| In Virginia, it's quite a little jeopardy here. | ||
| I got a question for you. | ||
| Looking into your crystal ball... | ||
| Give me the state most likely to be the surprise state to go for a Republican in 2024 that isn't now maybe Minnesota or something, and what would be the surprise state that the Democrats might be able to peel off the deck from the Republicans? | ||
| Yeah, so you really just said it for me. | ||
| It's always been. I mean, Nevada would not be that much of a surprise to people. | ||
| New Hampshire would not be. | ||
| Minnesota would be. | ||
| And in 2016, we nailed that. | ||
| We thought Hillary would take it. | ||
| We had a Hillary 2.2. | ||
| She won it by about 2.3, if I remember, or 2.1. | ||
| So we were very close. You said it before, Peter. | ||
| The Trump campaign was not handled well in the final stretch there. | ||
| Particularly once COVID hit. | ||
| They should have made a better showing in Minnesota. | ||
| That would be one that I do think. | ||
| It's always hard with the Twin Cities. | ||
| But there was a couple of key questions we asked. | ||
| And we believe that's why Trump lost. | ||
| The media had a lot to do with it. | ||
| But he also, campaigning matters. | ||
| How you message matters. | ||
| When we asked the people of Minnesota who they believed was most likely to start a new conflict, and they are anti-intervention in that state, they told us Trump. | ||
| So all of the media is pounding about Trump saying he's crazy, he's going to start World War III. Yeah, that's counterfactual. | ||
| Let me say one thing about Minnesota. | ||
| It really kind of broke my heart that the Kushner crowd running the campaign didn't go more for Minnesota because that Iron Range, which you referenced earlier, we spent a great amount of time Romance in the Iron Range, not for political reasons, but for economic reasons. | ||
| We ran on things like steel tariffs. | ||
| The Iron Range is the place where it all happens. | ||
| It is exactly like that place, the lumberjack country in Wisconsin. | ||
| They're progressive Democrats historically, but they're populist. | ||
| I think we could have really boosted the vote If we had had an inclination. | ||
| But what's the other part? | ||
| The Democrats, what would you fear that they could surprise pick off? | ||
| And we'll finish up with that. | ||
| Again, and I know this is going to be blowing people's heads off because they think that it's so secure after 2020 and 2022, but I really do believe a Mike Pompeo kind of candidate, a Mike Pence kind of candidate would lose the state of Florida. | ||
| I do think they would. Yeah, interesting. | ||
| Yeah, I do. I mean, Peter, I spent 15 years there, Peter. | ||
| I know where every vote in that state comes from. | ||
| There are a lot of transplants from the Northeast. | ||
| They like the new Republican Party, but they do not like the Bush Republican Party. | ||
| You go back to that, it's over, you squandered all the gains. | ||
| I will tell you again, they also think Iowa and Ohio Are, you know, solidly Republican. | ||
| Iowa will slip away from you in a second if you nominate a traditionalist establishment Republican. | ||
| But also the other one, and maybe this wouldn't be that much of a surprise to people, but they better keep their eye on it, is North Carolina. | ||
| Because Governor Cooper, yeah. | ||
| That one was worrisome in 2020. | ||
| I mean, I spent... | ||
| a lot of time focusing on that particular state and I was pleasantly surprised that we did so well so people should be careful about that one as well. | ||
| Don't take it for granted because Cooper understands The mistakes that prior Republican governors have made. | ||
| And he's inviting Apple and others like Apple, these woke corporations, into Wake County. | ||
| And they need, in order to staff these companies, they need to basically, they need labor for their professional class economies. | ||
| And when you do that, boost the share of the vote in these urban centers over time. | ||
| Look, Georgia. Atlanta has its own little mini Tinseltown now, folks. | ||
| I mean, you know, just watch Showtime original series or anything on Vice, and you'll see at the end of the show, that wasn't filmed in Hollywood. | ||
| That was filmed in Atlanta, Georgia. | ||
| So they know that it takes time for these things, but economics is politics. | ||
| So when Trump goes, I'm going to boost Generac in North Carolina, you know, that's like a nightmare for Democrats because, of course, that brings goods-producing services. | ||
| That brings industry. It doesn't bring professional class. | ||
| So North Carolina, I think that Republicans are too secure with. | ||
| Richard, I'm going to give you 60 seconds to hawk your wares. | ||
| I want everybody to know how they can support what you do, because I'm telling you, this guy is the best in the business. | ||
| Tell them how they can support you and where to go. | ||
| The best thing they could do is go to Big Data Poll and scroll down. | ||
| They'll see the public polling project. | ||
| They can learn all about it. | ||
| We'd love to have people support. | ||
| It's the only poll totally funded by the public, by normal people. | ||
| No corporations, no business interests. | ||
| So we just do the best job that we can do for you. | ||
| And of course, they can follow along with everything that we're doing on Locals. | ||
| peoplespundit.locals.com. | ||
| Even if they don't sign up to be a supporter, Peter, you know, we have YouTube, we have Rumble. | ||
| I could be nuked off of YouTube tomorrow talking like this. | ||
| So go to peoplespundit.locals.com. All right, my brother, we got the music pushing us out. | ||
| Next time you're on with me, I'm going to make you play that Gibson guitar, baby. | ||
|
unidentified
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You can perform and do a song, okay? | |
| That's Richard Barris. | ||
| When we come back, I'm going to come back and we're going to do the best 20 minutes on Communist China. | ||
| You could see. Go to peternavaro.substack.com. | ||
| peternavaro.substack.com. | ||
| Help support me in my legal defense. | ||
| That's the place you can do it. | ||
| We'll be right back with a surprise guest you're going to love, Peter Navarro. | ||
|
unidentified
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Out. Stephen K. Bannon. | |
| Peter K. Navarro in for the Admiral. | ||
| I promised you the best 20 minutes on Communist China yet in the war room, which does a wonderful job on this. | ||
| I want to start off by saying that in 2006, I wrote a book called The Coming China Wars. | ||
| It was the first in my trilogy where there was a whole chapter on how China, Communist China, had infiltrated 54 countries in Africa. | ||
| Fast forward, over time, they've used this thing called debt diplomacy, where they go in with a big checkbook, and they write a lot of money, build a lot of infrastructure in exchange for two things. | ||
| One is access to the markets of Africa. | ||
| And what happens there is they'll come in and start selling their cheap made-in-China crap, put the local merchants out of business, so they destroy the merchant sector of African countries. | ||
| And then what they do with the loans they give to these corrupt dictators is get these countries in debt, and then they encumber their resources. | ||
| And so it goes. | ||
| And so Vice President Kamala Harris went there last week to try to romance them. | ||
| The top line there, Communist China is providing now all of the infrastructure to Africa through Belt and Road. | ||
| Meanwhile, we're throwing a bunch of money trying to feed them, give them some medicine, and fight terrorism. | ||
| It's just not resonating with the people. | ||
| What I want to do now is bring on Alex Gray. | ||
| I have called him In Trump Time book, The Mozart of Foreign Policy, he's a young man, 31 years old at this point. | ||
| He was my top aide in the White House. | ||
| He and I were on the Trump campaign in 2016 and published a couple of really good articles about China as part of that campaign. | ||
| And he then went to, he kind of stepped down. | ||
| I like to joke it kind of stepped down. | ||
| He went to be the Chief of Staff to National Security Advisor Robert O'Brien in the White House. | ||
| So Alex, let's bring you into the conversation right now. | ||
| I want to ask you, just head up, did Kamala Harris help or hurt the United States with her trip? | ||
| What should she have done? | ||
| And then let's talk more broadly about China going around to the various hotspots, Taiwan, and then where you were at in the South Pacific, boots on the ground. | ||
| Sir, let's start with Kamala Harris. | ||
| Thanks for having me, Peter. It's great to be back on The War Room. | ||
| Look, Kamala can go and visit as many African countries as she wants. | ||
| It doesn't make any difference as far as the United States is concerned and our ability to manage the China competition. | ||
| She can go and strike deals, talk about giving aid to African countries. | ||
| The problem is what we're really concerned about in most of Africa is competing with China for key mineral resources, key natural resources, rare earths, critical minerals. | ||
| The real problem we have is because of the environmental lobby, because of the free market ideologues, we don't have a domestic capacity in the United States. | ||
| to process the rare earths that the military needs to meet its critical requirements. | ||
| And so Kamala can go and do these goodwill tours, but her administration is the same one that's holding up the permitting for the type of rare earth processing that you and I fought for the whole time we were in the White House. | ||
| So I don't care whether she wants to go and do a goodwill tour when her colleagues in Washington are keeping us from being independent of China for the type of critical minerals the F-35 requires, our submarines require, so it's a wholly counterproductive visit. | ||
| And just let's note these rare earths are also a critical component of virtually all the high-tech products that consumers Whether it's automobiles these days or whether it's their iPhone or anything in between. | ||
| I think Alex's point is well taken. | ||
| China, by the way, has just on its own over 90 % of the rare earth-based materials. | ||
| If they are able to corner the market in Africa as well, they close all of us out. | ||
| Meanwhile, we don't have This is the kind of thing that those folks just don't understand. | ||
| Before we move to Taiwan, we spoke earlier in the day, and you had a top line on, the only way we're going to beat Communist China is. | ||
| Fill in that blank for the War Room Battleground audience, if you would, Alex. | ||
| Yeah, Peter, the only way we're going to beat Communist China is to get over this free market, ideological stuff you and I dealt with for four years in the White House, where the ideologues refuse to understand that it's the Trump trade policies that you fought for, that I tried to help you fight for. | ||
| It's the commitment to a manufacturing economy that can actually sustain our military so we can deter a conflict, and God forbid if we have to, win a conflict. | ||
| It's having the type of merchant marine that's capable of actually supporting our troops in wartime. | ||
| It's having all the critical production capacity. | ||
| Right now, we can barely repair our own submarines. | ||
| We've got four shipyards that can do that type of heavy repair. | ||
| In a wartime environment, we would be totally overwhelmed trying to do that sort of thing against a pure competitor like China. | ||
| So what I'm saying, Peter, is it's time for the next president to get out of that Bush-era mindset and move us towards the Trump heartland. | ||
| Let's rebuild the type of economy that we need so we can also have a defense industrial base that can take on communist China. | ||
| And we also talked a little bit about the Ukraine crisis. | ||
| What has that revealed to you vis-a-vis our shortcomings in terms of our industrial policy that you're advocating? | ||
| Yeah, Peter, what I've noticed is we're talking about sending relatively antiquated weapon systems like javelins that have been around for decades, anti-tank missiles, artillery shells, things that are not the type of cutting edge Naval and air systems that be used most likely in a Taiwan scenario with the Chinese Communist Party. | ||
| And we're struggling to even get those in a timely manner to Ukraine. | ||
| Whatever you think of the Ukraine conflict, it's shown that our industrial base doesn't have the capacity to surge. | ||
| It doesn't have the resilience that it needs. | ||
| And we would be hard-pressed right now, not only to continue to do what we're doing in Ukraine, where our European allies are not pulling their weight by far, But also, we would be incredibly hard-pressed to try and do, on a much larger scale, with much more sophisticated equipment, this type of surge if we were, God forbid, in a conflict with China. | ||
| So I think what this has revealed, Peter, is we have to have leadership in the White House that says no more blind ideological commitment to a mythical free market Look, we're all capitalists, but we have to get beyond the idea that the free market is going to solve some of these industrial-based problems. | ||
| You and I, we worked together on the Executive Order 13806, historic effort to figure out the weaknesses in our industrial base. | ||
| President Trump signed it. | ||
| We have to have top-down leadership to figure out how to fix this industrial base, because China's not China's not operating on mythical notions. | ||
| These guys already have a larger navy than we do. | ||
| They've got the largest merchant marine in the world. | ||
| And in a real conflict, they're going to be churning out equipment, ships, planes, faster than anyone can imagine. | ||
| So we've got to be ready. I would be remiss here in not emphasizing what Alex said. | ||
| When we were in the White House, he spearheaded the effort in my office to do what effectively was the first major defense industrial base assessment that we had done in decades, and that was done through coordination with the Pentagon and other agencies of government. | ||
| Regrettably, the lessons that we put forward in that have definitely not been learned by the Biden regime. | ||
| Let's shift now to the issue of Taiwan. | ||
| The joke around Beijing and Shanghai What do you call an American aircraft carrier? | ||
| A target. And the essence of the Chinese, the Communist Chinese military strategy in the South China Sea and the East China Sea is asymmetric warfare. | ||
| It's the notion of being able to take down a multi-billion dollar aircraft carrier with a million dollar missile. | ||
| And so they have the largest missile arsenal in the world. | ||
| It takes seven minutes to shoot a missile from the mainland of China and hit The palace in Taiwan. | ||
| One of the things I loved when we were in the White House, you came up with a list of the kinds of things Taiwan could be doing asymmetrically to fight back. | ||
| Give me your assessment of what McCarthy did with the Taiwan president, whether that was smart, and more broadly, what the Biden regime should be doing in terms right now of our Taiwan policy. | ||
| Look, Speaker McCarthy's meeting with Tsai Nguyen That's fine. | ||
| It's just talk. I don't think it moves the needle one way or the other. | ||
| I think it is important that the speaker showed that he's not going to be bullied by Beijing into not having a meeting that he wanted to have because the CCP says don't do it. | ||
| So to me, that's fine. | ||
| Where the rubber meets the road is, one, the Taiwanese have to continue to grow their defense spending. | ||
| They're well below what they need to be at in terms of percentage of GDP. For the existential threat that they face. | ||
| And we have to put pressure on them in a way that we haven't with too many of our allies until President Trump came along. | ||
| We have to put that pressure on them that we're only going to have their back if they make the type of commitment that we need to see from them to show they're serious about resisting invasion. | ||
| You know, Peter, the types of things that they need to do, they're not sexy. | ||
| They're not the types of things that, you know, I think a lot of the Taiwanese generals and admirals want to do. | ||
| But they're things like, They need to be buying sea mines. | ||
| They need to be buying mobile, portable, anti-ship missiles that can be put on the back of a truck and moved around beaches to target landing craft if the Chinese come ashore. | ||
| They need to be buying Stinger missiles. | ||
| And I've argued publicly every police station in Taiwan should have multiple Stinger missiles. | ||
| The cops should be trained in how to use them. | ||
| And so they can start targeting the Chinese helicopters that come in prior to the invasion to lay the predicate for the amphibious assault. | ||
| They also need to take a page from the Ukrainians in one instance, which is they need to have gun clubs. | ||
| You know, Taiwan doesn't have a gun culture particularly, but they need to get one because, as the Ukrainians have learned, One of the most potent examples of their resistance has been these groups of volunteers who taught themselves in the years after the Russian invasion in 2014 how to shoot, and they formed up in an organic way, and they've been incredibly effective at halting the Russian advance. | ||
| The Taiwanese have to get serious about their own defense, and they have to start forming those type of self-defense collectives. | ||
| So I think these are all tangible things they could be doing. | ||
| What I'd like to see is the Biden administration holding them accountable and holding ourselves accountable to spend the type of money we need to spend on the type of systems. | ||
| You mentioned missiles. Right now, we don't have nearly the arsenal and the stockpile of sophisticated anti-ship and anti-air missiles that we need to have in the Pacific theater to deter and to defeat China. | ||
| And those are the types of investments that the Biden administration isn't making and needs to be making. | ||
| Alex, on the issue of defense expenditures by Taiwan, is it that they can't afford it? | ||
| Or are their politics sufficiently split between pro-mainland and anti-mainland that it's difficult to do that? | ||
| What's going on there? | ||
| They're basically relying on the kindness of a United States, which can be an uncertain trumpet, to say the least. | ||
| Yeah, Peter, this is a domestic political issue in Taiwan, where you have one party, the KMT, that traditionally has been much closer to the mainland and to the Chinese communists. | ||
| The former president of Taiwan of the KMT party, Ma Ying-jeou, was actually meeting with Xi Jinping just a couple of days ago, While the current president was in the United States. | ||
| Just to give you an idea of the divisions within Taiwan, the Taiwanese economy is one of the most resilient, most vibrant, robust in the world. | ||
| They can spend significantly more than 2 % of their GDP on defense. | ||
| You look at what Israel spends, you look at what some of the countries in Europe spend, there's no reason Taiwan should be, given the existential threat, spending anything less than 5 % of GDP. And by the way, if they develop this, use some of that productive capacity to produce their own weapons, that would generate prosperity and higher wages and all of that. | ||
| The mine thing has always been a bug of mine because it's the porcupine strategy, like the single best way to repel the Chinese because they're going to come in boats would be to salt those seas. | ||
| In the few minutes we have remaining, I want to leverage your expertise. | ||
| Tell the audience first what you did out in places like Micronesia. | ||
| The problem here is the projection of soft power by the Communist Chinese, handing out a bunch of money, taking over the governments. | ||
| In the South Pacific and basically setting up the same kind of chain of islands that the Imperial Japanese used to attack the Americans first and then to resist the Americans. | ||
| Talk a little bit about that, Alex, because you were really out there in the trenches. | ||
| Yeah, thanks, Peter. So I was the first person President Trump created a role that was director for the Pacific Islands within the National Security Council. | ||
| And the purpose of that role, first time that ever been created, was the realization that China was moving in heavily, as you say, through soft power, but ultimately with the goal of establishing military bases all through the islands that U.S. Marines and soldiers had given their lives for to recapture in World War II from Imperial Japan. | ||
| And so what I set out to do with my NSC colleagues and colleagues throughout the Trump administration was to build a U.S. presence in the region. | ||
| We really had retreated, taken it for granted, and retreated since the Cold War, to resist Chinese domination. | ||
| And you describe very well debt-trap diplomacy, what they do with Belt and Road. | ||
| They take what they call elite capture. | ||
| They go into these small developing islands, and they pay for the elites to go and spend months in Beijing. | ||
| They wine them and dine them. | ||
| Sometimes they turn them into formal assets. | ||
| Sometimes they just exert influence and make them agents of influence when they return home. | ||
| You've seen this in the Solomon Islands. | ||
| You've seen this in a little country called Kiribati. | ||
| The Chinese are determined to take over these islands. | ||
| And the reason this matters for Americans is the same reason it mattered to our parents and grandparents in World War II. These islands are strategically located between the west coast of the United States, Hawaii, and East Asia. | ||
| If you're trying to move U.S. Navy ships and aircraft to Taiwan or the Korean Peninsula in the conflict, you have to get past these islands. | ||
| And if the Chinese have military bases, if they have access to these islands, they're going to be able to prevent our passage through them. | ||
| And that's incredibly dangerous. | ||
| So these look like obscure spots on the map. | ||
| But they are a life and death struggle in our effort to keep the CCP from dominating East Asia. | ||
| Is there any sign that the Biden regime has any clue about this? | ||
| Have they picked up your cudgel and continued your noble efforts, or is that a dead letter? | ||
| Well, they certainly have focused on it, but it's much more been climate change and The rights of indigenous people. | ||
| Some of these things, I understand where they're coming from on some of the historical issues that we faced in the region with nuclear testing and things like that. | ||
| But what they've ignored is the fact that the Chinese are focused on using soft power, using elite capture, using loans to build substantive military hard power bases all across this region. | ||
| And simply apologizing for past U.S. actions or talking about climate change isn't going to move the needle in terms of our ability to keep those sea lanes open for the U.S. Navy. | ||
| So to me, it's been an astrategic approach that's much more focused on ideology than it is on what the United States has to do strategically to continue our preeminent position in the region. | ||
| Yeah, and we see exactly that same playbook where we began talking about Kamala Harris in Africa, talking her progressive woke issues. | ||
| This has been great, Alex. | ||
| Give us your coordinates. | ||
| How best can they communicate? | ||
| You're out there in Oklahoma and very politically involved out there, and that's a good thing. | ||
| How can the War Room Posse Help you work at the grassroots out there on these issues. | ||
| Yeah, you can follow me on Truth Social, and you can also follow me on Twitter. | ||
| And I'll tell you what, right out here in Oklahoma, we are at the front lines of Chinese influence in the United States. | ||
| The Chinese are buying property all over Oklahoma, buying up our farmland, and we need every Oklahoman to be engaged on this issue. | ||
| This isn't just something in the Pacific and East Asia. | ||
| This is a battle we're fighting at home, too. | ||
| All right, my brother, we're going to get you on Getter, too. | ||
| It's been great. | ||
| We will see you the next time on The War Room. | ||
| Now, I'm just going to finish up here. | ||
| For some information about what I'm doing, it's all about the Substack right now. | ||
| Peter Navarro on substack.com. | ||
| Please go there, peternavarro.substack.com. | ||
| Bandits War Room is, every day, it's a heavyweight 15-round fight. | ||
| It goes the distance every time. | ||
| What I'm trying to do is give you short little jabs that you can absorb to try to do the best short-form podcast at Substack. | ||
| So, peternavarro.substack.com. | ||
| The Adam will be back tomorrow. |
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