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May 27, 2023 - Bannon's War Room

48:51

Episode 2763: Accountability for the Failing Administrative State

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peter navarro

23:00

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jake tapper

00:10

katy tur

00:12

steve bannon

00:22

steve stern

00:29

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Speaker	Time	Text
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		This is the primal scream of a dying regime.
		Pray for our enemies, because we're going medieval on these people.
		I got a free shot at all these networks lying about the people.
unidentified		The people have had a belly full of it.
unidentified		I know you don't like hearing that.
peter navarro ▲ ● ▼		I know you try to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it.
peter navarro ▲ ● ▼		It's going to happen.
jake tapper ▲ ● ▼		And where do people like that go to share the big lie?
jake tapper ▲ ● ▼		MAGA Media. I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience.
unidentified		Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose?
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved.
unidentified		War Room, here's your host, Stephen K. Babb.
peter navarro ▲ ● ▼		Peter K. Navarro in for the Admiral today, it's Friday before Memorial Day, right here in the belly of the beast.
		I can't tell you how pleased I am to have a guest with me today who was my top bureaucrat, I use the term in all the best sense of the word, in the Trump White House.
		He's written a book You report to me.
		And what it should say here, based on his conversation with the president himself, the cover should have said, you report to me with a quote, Donald Trump, because that's the story behind the story that I'm going to have him tell, not me.
		But the story I want to tell quickly about David Bernhardt, he's the secretary of interior.
		And the way I met David was one day it came to my attention that there were Chinese Communist drones that the Interior Department was buying and deploying.
		For interior use, and I knew full well that the data that would fly through those drones could likely wind up in Communist Chinese hands, so they're basically mapping our territory.
		So I called up the Secretary of Interior from the White House and said, hey, here's what's going on.
		Can we bring those down?
		Eight hours later.
		Eight hours later. And so when I talk about my expression in Trump time, which was the title of my first White House memoir, get it done as quickly as possible.
		I always use David Bernhardt.
		So you report to me, David Bernhardt.
		Welcome to the War Room, sir.
		Steve Bannon was actually trying to get you for over a month because he actually paid for you report to me.
		You can get a free one, but somehow your publicist, you know, whatever.
		But you called me.
		We're here with me.
		Tell us about the book, David.
unidentified		Well, thank you so much for having me.
		I really appreciate it, and I'm thrilled to be here.
		That was a heck of an introduction.
		And bottom line of this book is it highlights the reality that with a little leadership and clear direction, consistent direction from the president, you can get a lot done.
		And the fact of the matter is that it takes a lot of effort to move these agencies, and it's work, but at the end of the day, we can get people to understand that every one of us That has ever worked in government ultimately reports to the American people.
peter navarro ▲ ● ▼		This could have been called moving the deep state.
		I mean, you speak from vast experience because you actually served with President George W. Bush for many years.
		You love Donald Trump, not just as a man for the person he is, but for how he moved mountains in agencies.
		Can you give us a little contrast between the Bush bureaucracy below the president and what you encountered in Trumpland?
unidentified		Yeah, absolutely, and I really go into that in the book, and the fact of the matter is that in the, and this will be a particularly enlightening example, in the George W. Bush administration, you had some folks who didn't want, weren't interested in helping with the agenda.
		And what that meant is that they would delay things, maybe they wouldn't be involved, but you could go around them and you could find sufficient folks to always get the job done.
		There was never a question about ultimately driving forward with the mission.
		Trump administration, my experience was really right from the day after the election.
		What you saw was a series of articles, announcements of, quote, resistance, efforts to resist from day one.
		And I think it became socially acceptable within the Civil Service for a much larger percentage of folks to be willing to actually affirmatively resist the policies of the new president.
		And they did that through a whole host of mechanisms that we lay out in the book.
		Now, the vast majority of civil servants, they just want to do their job and move forward.
		But the number...
peter navarro ▲ ● ▼		Are you being kind?
		Because that certainly wasn't my experience.
		My experience was these people, they get in there, they work their way up the chain, they feel entitled, and they figure that they're smarter than whoever sits there and that they're going to make the decisions and shape policy.
		That was my experience.
unidentified		Well, I think that the experience that you just laid out is the experience of the folks at the most senior levels of the civil service.
		There's a lot of folks every day, particularly in an agency like the Department of the Interior, where you do stuff on the ground.
		You're cutting trees.
		You're managing roads.
		I mean, you're doing stuff. That really requires effort and productivity and outcome.
		The higher you go, it's interesting, and we lay this out and you report to me, the higher you go in the administration, the more in government, the more and more partisan It becomes generally the civil service is about two Democrats to every Republican.
		As you get to the senior executive service, it's three to one.
		And so you have an even higher degree of policy proclivity at those highest levels.
		And those were the people, you know, when you're in the White House, those are the levels of government you're working with.
peter navarro ▲ ● ▼		The biggest deep-stater, I think, that afflicted us in the Trump administration, hands down, at least in the last year, was Fauci.
		But I think the second most damaging person in the healthcare bureaucracy was this woman named Deborah Birx, who was in the West Wing.
		And you use her kind of as the poster girl for how the deep-state...
		Can you tell that story for us?
unidentified		Absolutely. And this was stunning to me, Peter.
		It's absolutely stunning. This girl wrote a book after she left government.
		And in her book, she describes what she calls a workaround.
		And what she called a workaround was essentially She would write a document that was going to go out to the public related to the stuff that she was working on.
		She would send it up to be reviewed through various levels, just like anyone else would do.
		And she would get comments back.
		And those comments back were things that maybe she liked, maybe she didn't.
		And she would make the changes in some places, but then reinsert her views in other places and send it back through the process as, quote, a workaround.
		Now, in the real world where most people work, that would be blatant insubordination.
		It wasn't caught, which is on the folks that were reviewing, to be fair.
		But more importantly, she wrote a book explaining how awesome it was she did it.
		And that, to me, epitomizes just how far we've gotten from an understanding that, hey, policymakers are there because a person was elected to the presidency and the policymakers define what the policy is.
		They don't define what the law is and they don't define what the facts are, but to the extent there's policy discretion, That discretion rests with the representatives of the elected official.
peter navarro ▲ ● ▼		You're just the political appointee, and you'll be gone in a few years, and they'll have their friendlies back in.
		This is the worst side of the deep state.
		Tell a story.
		I love this story about...
		Buy this book. You report to me.
		Bannon loves this book.
		The fact that he actually shelled out his own money for you tells it.
		But what does this mean?
		Why is this title so important, both to what you experienced and also to 2024 in the presidential race?
unidentified		So I came up with this title for two reasons.
		First off, obviously, everybody in government reports to the American people, so they all report to you and me.
		But more importantly, for the specific title, it comes from my first conversation about serving as secretary.
peter navarro ▲ ● ▼		You said to state you were the deputy secretary.
peter navarro ▲ ● ▼		The second in command at Interior to the Secretary Ryan Zinke, who got in trouble for various indiscretions, and what happens next?
unidentified		So there's a question.
		Ryan's resigning, and Secretary Zinke's resigning, and I'm asked to come over to the Oval Office.
		And to be very clear, I'm very nervous about this meeting because it's the first time I've ever been summoned to the Oval Office individually.
		You worked at the White House, so that's a daily occurrence for you.
		For the Deputy Secretary of Interior, that's a big deal.
		So I walk over there, and I don't know what's going to happen.
		I have no idea if this is going to be a good meeting or a bad meeting.
		I'm not very comfortable with the situation, and I walk into the Oval Office, and you go through this threshold, and you walk over to the Resolute Desk, and the President's sitting at this big desk, and man, I must have been sweating bullets.
		So I sit down, and here's what's amazing about President Trump, one of many things.
		I sit down, and it's clear, I think, to him that I'm not very comfortable.
		And here's the President of the United States, and he spends five or ten minutes just talking to me, getting my blood pressure down before we have a conversation, which said a lot to me about the man, you know, the individual, just how How nice that was to an employee that was very uncomfortable.
		And we talk about the job.
		We talk a little bit about the situation.
		We talk about his priorities in Interior.
		And he basically tells me, look, you're going to be running this place for a while, this Department of the Interior.
		And so I say to him, well, sir, can you tell me who I report to?
		And he looks at me and says, what do you mean you report to me?
		And I'm sitting there thinking, well, the Constitution, sir, I understand what the Constitution says, but who do I really report to?
		Like, I got to get my work done.
		You report to me.
		And I thought that was unlikely because I served in the Bush administration.
		And it had taken, I had seen examples where it literally took months to have a conversation between the secretary and the president because of the processes of the White House staff.
		So I left the White House, went back to the department, and a few days later I had to make a decision that I knew was going to be controversial and the White House would read about it, and I couldn't surprise them.
		So I didn't know what to do.
		I picked up the phone and called the president's secretary because I figured she could bail me out, like she would know the right person to talk to.
		And I called her.
		Her name was Molly. I said, hey Molly, this is the junior varsity quarterback in Interior.
		I'm the temp. I am going to make a decision.
		It's going to make some news.
		I need to talk to somebody.
		Who do I talk to? And she laughed and said, the president will call you right back.
		And I thought, sure.
		And I hung up the phone.
		In about 20 minutes, the president calls, and I explain this in the book.
		And here's the amazing thing about President Trump.
		This just blew my mind.
		I pick up the phone. I tell him, number one, what I'm doing.
		And I'd taken over during the government shutdown.
		I was going to reopen some of the national parks.
		And in doing this, his first statement to me was, the shutdown's been going on a while.
		Why did you take so long to do this?
		And I said, well, and I explained it.
		And then I said, he...
		Then he said, this is going to be controversial.
		And I said, yes, sir.
		And here's the amazing thing about President Trump.
		He says, David, If it's going to be controversial and you're the new guy, maybe you should say that I directed you to do it, which is exactly the opposite any politician in America would want to do.
		And then he said, and this was really important to me, he says, David, you're running the Department of the Interior.
		Make decisions you need to make and get going with them.
peter navarro ▲ ● ▼		He hit his mark.
		Isn't that cool? We got 27 seconds to the break and he hit his mark.
		That is another reason why I love David Bernhardt, former Secretary of Interior.
		In my book, literally, I wrote future Secretary of Interior under Trump.
		You report to me. We'll be right back.
		He's going to tell us what to do in terms of cleaning up the deep state.
		No one knows better than David Bernhardt.
		Navarro here for Bannon.
		We'll see you in a second.
		I'm with David Bernhardt, former Secretary of the Interior, wrote a wonderful book, You Report to Me.
		We're going to go right back to him.
		I just want to... I buried the lead yesterday when Steve and I were talking, and I mentioned my Substack.
		It's peternavar.substack.com, peternavar.substack.com.
		One thing I want to tell you...
		Besides the fact that if you pay for a subscription, it's a modest sum, it will help my legal defense fund, but everyone who is a paid subscriber gets an autographed copy of my Taking Back Trump's America book.
		And by the way, in the chapter on cabinet appointees who I recommend for Trump, Come January 2025, this guy is one of the few survivors that I recommended highly.
		So, David, you report to me.
		You know, I looked at this and I said, you know, this is a great title, but the cover sucks.
		I thought it sucked just because they didn't have any graphics or colors or anything like that.
		But President Trump had a very different take.
		Tell us a little bit about your trip to Mar-a-Lago to give him this book.
		And then the page 115 on, which is what the posse is here today for to listen to, because this is your solution to blowing up the deep state.
unidentified		Well, first off, you're absolutely right.
		I met with the president.
		I actually think the cover is great, by the way.
		I'm really excited about the cover.
		And I think the title you report to me was fantastic.
peter navarro ▲ ● ▼		I love the name of it. Yes.
unidentified		And the president looked at President Trump looked at this book.
		And his first question was, is this my quote?
		And I said, actually, it is your quote.
		And he said, oh, David, you would do so much better with this book if you would put quotations on the book and then put Donald J. Trump.
		He said, you'd sell a lot more books.
		And I said, well, you know, sir, I wrote this book for the American people and for you.
		And if you'll just take and have everybody that you deal with read from page 115 forward, we can have a much better outcome going forward for America.
peter navarro ▲ ● ▼		Now, don't bury the lead. You also told him you didn't care about how many books you sold.
unidentified		And what did he say? He said, selling books is really frickin' important.
peter navarro ▲ ● ▼		He wanted a picture on there, too, right?
unidentified		He did, absolutely. He said, you know, if you're not going to go with the quote, you ought to go with the picture, and you really ought to change the cover.
peter navarro ▲ ● ▼		So 115 on, what's that all about?
		This is a very serious matter.
		My experience...
		With the deep state and I had really extensive experience in the various skiffs where we would meet for these PCC processes, which is like insane.
		It's like I always thought that before I went into the White House that The purpose of the bureaucracy was to implement policy the way the president wanted.
		And the PCC process that Bush put in basically turns that upside down where everything's got to bubble up from the bottom of the bureaucrats.
		But how do you get rid of the bad seeds here?
		How do you make sure that these...
		People who are being paid on the taxpayer's dime obey the wishes of the chief executive.
unidentified		Well, I think first off, you have to have a strong chief executive.
		A chief executive that has a clear and consistent message to his appointees.
		Number two, which is something you spend a lot of time talking about, is you've got to get the right people in these agencies as your appointees.
		And the people that you put in, Need to be the people that have the courage and the competency to make decisions themselves with the assistance of the career civil servants that you need.
peter navarro ▲ ● ▼		You were on the transition for the first term.
		I mean, how hard is it to find those kind of people?
		Let's be honest, how hard is it going to be fined the next time around?
		Everybody I know is either a target of the Injustice Department or going to grand jury.
		I mean, they harass you.
		How hard it is to find people that are willing to be loyal to the agenda of a president like Donald Trump?
unidentified		Well, so I think first off...
		The people exist. At Interior, we had a very good team, a core group of team that worked on the transition, worked on the beachhead, worked all the way through.
		So we were all on the same page, number one.
		So they're findable. But that was in 2016, early 2017.
		I think there's an entire core of those people this time around, a much bigger core.
		You're confident in that. Because there's a lot of folks that were younger political appointees that served in the Trump administration.
		And here's what they learned, things that I didn't learn in the George W. Bush administration.
		They learned how to get stuff done.
		They learned how to work for a leader that was consistent, and they learned how to go.
		And so I think you have this entire cadre of folks that served as Schedule Cs, which is the more junior political appointee that I initially was, that served as deputy assistant secretaries.
		You have a whole group of people that can go back on day one and hit the ship.
		So number one, that's fantastic.
		And the next administration is better positioned because of it.
peter navarro ▲ ● ▼		So you got a strong executive.
peter navarro ▲ ● ▼		You got find the right people.
unidentified		What's next? And then really what you have to do is I believe you have to move forward with some of the initiatives the president drove to rein in unions and do some creative things with the civil service in terms of like Schedule F was something that was very...
unidentified		What does that mean? It basically was going to recategorize some of the positions within the civil service.
peter navarro ▲ ● ▼		I mean, you can't fire these people or move them very easily, right?
unidentified		Depending on their position.
		The other thing is a lot of the you can't hold people accountable is self-inflicted within the agencies.
		It's the agency's own guidance and directives have made it harder than it really is, and that underbrush needs to be cleared out.
		Can you do that? You can do some accountability.
		Firing involves a series of appeals, and we need to look at farther reforms like moving to a more at-will environment.
		What I highlight in the book is employees except for veterans were at will until the 60s.
peter navarro ▲ ● ▼		So is this a legislative thing that you have to do?
unidentified		That would be a legislative thing.
peter navarro ▲ ● ▼		You can't do it by executive order.
unidentified		But 90 % of it can be done administratively and should be done administratively.
peter navarro ▲ ● ▼		Like what? If I'm writing an executive order, should Trump do it by executive order?
unidentified		What would that be? I absolutely think he should basically ask every secretary to maximize their utilization of accountability factors and that they should go through their own agency and get rid of their own self-inflicted policies that they've put in place that add unnecessary process.
		There's a lot of unnecessary process that has burdened these agencies from accountability.
		But more importantly, If policy makers will just say, I'm the one making the decision.
		I'm the one making significant decisions.
		I'm going to own the decision.
		I'm going to be held accountable for it.
		And I want your input, civil servant.
		I want your input. I want to know the facts in the law, but I'm going to own the decision.
		You can move things much, much more quickly.
		And you need to, you know, as a leader, you have to be willing to be held accountable.
		Much of the inertia in the bureaucracy is because the senior leaders in the government don't actually want to be accountable for anything, and so they basically hope that somebody else will make the decision.
		If you look at the law, For the law that established the duties of the Secretary of the Interior, it uses the term, the Secretary shall supervise all functions of the Department of the Interior.
		I've always thought that that was a wonderful term because supervise is active.
		It's not just, I'm going to go show up at a ribbon cutting, but I'm I need to be active, and it's an element of accountability.
		And that accountability is what people need to be respectful of and be responsible.
		Governing is serious.
		We need serious people to go into these jobs, and we need them to say, Give me the ball.
		I'll make the decision.
peter navarro ▲ ● ▼		What about this PCC process that just drove me nuts?
		Again, for the posse here, it's like if you wanted to do an executive order, it had to go out to low-level bureaucrats across the relevant agencies for comment.
		Work its way up the chain to the secretary level and then back to the president.
		And my view was, screw that!
		It's like, no, the boss wants this done.
		It goes to the agencies.
		You tell us how to do it.
		You don't mess with the policy.
		But that's not the way that the lame chiefs of staff we had...
		Do you have to do that process?
unidentified		Of course not. You don't, right?
		At the end of the day, that's the leaders of these agencies and OMB saying, here's the level of review we want.
		And it really is about everybody's authority.
		All of the authority in law for the Department of the Interior rests with the Secretary.
		And then the secretary has delegated it down.
		And in the book, you report to me, I highlight that the delegations down have caused a lot of challenges because it moves things farther and farther down.
		And there's no, you know, ultimately, when I was solicitor, I would have assistant secretaries and policy makers, they were desperate for me to tell them they didn't have authority.
		Because if I said, you only have one choice, they wouldn't have to choose.
		And they wanted to be able to tell their, they wanted to be able to tell a constituency, look, my hands were tied.
		I had no choice. Instead of, I wanted to make this decision or that one.
peter navarro ▲ ● ▼		Strong leadership. Alright, posse.
		Let's move the needle today on Amazon.
		You report to me this is the best book you will read about cleaning up the deep state.
		So honored to be with former Secretary and future Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt, although he doesn't want to jinx anything.
		Do you have any social media or anything like that?
unidentified		I'm on Truth. I'm on all of those great things.
peter navarro ▲ ● ▼		What's your handle, brother?
		David Bernhardt. That David Bernhardt.
		All right, last words, anything?
unidentified		Thanks for having me. I'm thrilled to be here.
unidentified		Steve Bannon did more for moving the ball than anybody can imagine.
peter navarro ▲ ● ▼		It's true. When he got in there, he was a tornado.
		Action, action, action.
		When we come back, we're going to get an update on the weaponization of government out in the great state of Texas, which isn't looking so great today.
		David Bernhardt, from the War Room, you are the man.
unidentified		We'll be right back, posse. Good afternoon.
		Thank you all for coming. It's great to have you here in our office.
		By proceeding with this illegal impeachment scheme to overturn a decision made by Texas voters just a few short months ago, The corrupt politicians in the Texas House are demonstrating that blind loyalty to Speaker Dade Phelan is more important than upholding their oath of office.
		They are determined to ignore the law.
		They have denied me the opportunity to present the evidence which contradicts their politically motivated narrative, and they are showcasing their absolute contempt for the electoral process.
		Every politician who supports this deceitful impeachment attempt will inflict lasting damage on the credibility of the Texas House, which I served in.
		The House is poised to do exactly what Joe Biden has been hoping to accomplish since his first day in office, sabotage my work as Attorney General of Texas.
		Their plot imperils critical litigation my office has brought against the Biden administration to end the federal government's attacks on our constitutional rights and the rule of law.
		There is no other state in this country with so much influence over the fate of our nation.
		And this is solely because of the relentless challenges I bring against Biden's unconstitutional policy agenda.
		Under my leadership, our state has sued Biden nearly 50 times to end his unlawful tyrannical policies.
		In fact, this week, while the Texas House was killing essential bills on crime and illegal immigration and plotting their illegal impeachment scheme in secret, it was business as usual for me.
		I was launching lawsuits against the Biden administration and predatory corporations.
		On Tuesday, I sued the Biden Department's Homeland Security to end his illegal use of CBP-1 app that brings more aliens into the country.
		On Wednesday, I announced a lawsuit against global hotel chain Hilton for violating Texas consumer protection laws.
		On Thursday, I sued Biden's IRS over his devastating new policy that will impair child support services in our state and across the nation, putting millions of children at risk.
		Then, I announced an $85 million settlement that we secured with Volkswagen and Audi over the violations of Texas environmental laws.
		For us, it's pretty routine.
		As Attorney General, I'm leading dozens of urgent challenges against Biden's unlawful policies.
		My lawsuits threaten his destructive attempts to open the borders, obliterate our Second Amendment rights, and destroy our country with extremist, tyrannical regulations.
		In addition to defending Texas from illegal federal policy, my office works night and day to solve cold cases, fight human trafficking, prosecute Medicaid fraud, and hold predatory corporations accountable when they harm the public.
		For this crucial work to continue, the political theater must come to an end.
		I'm grateful for the outpouring of support I've received from so many Texans who understand this process is unjust and unethical.
		The fact that I was prohibited from presenting evidence to defend myself reveals that this shameful process was curated from the start as an act of political retribution.
		This vote is expected to take place Saturday at 1 p.m., and I want to invite my fellow citizens and friends to peacefully come let their voices be heard at the Capitol tomorrow.
		Exercise your right to petition your government.
		Let's restore the power of this great state to the people instead of to the politicians.
		I hope the House makes the right decision, but if not, I look forward to a quick resolution to the Texas Senate where I truly believe the process will be fair and just.
peter navarro ▲ ● ▼		Oh, my, my. Here we go again.
		Peter K. Navarro in for Stephen K. Bannon.
		You are here. In the war room.
		And yeah, here we go again.
		Let's think about this now.
		We've got a Republican in Texas who wants to secure the border down there and is fighting hard.
		You've got a lot of Texas interest down there, corporate interest who loves that cheap labor coming across.
		And you got the Biden regime.
		So there's that.
		I remember Ken Paxson was one of the few attorneys general in the country.
		When the November of 2020 fraud, otherwise known as an election, rolled around, actually sued at the Supreme Court level to get a legal counting of the vote.
		So he had the chutzpah to do that.
		He's fighting for Second Amendment rights.
		And here's what...
		This just frosts me.
		This guy literally...
		Got elected, just got elected, and he won by 12 % over his nearest rival.
		And all of these allegations were out there for the voters to sift through.
		They're baseless as far as I can see.
		And yet, you've got the Uniparty in the Texas legislature wanting to impeach this guy.
		And like, okay, who else do I know that they tried to impeach who wanted to secure our borders and stood up for the American people rather than the corporate industry?
		Oh yeah, Donald Trump.
		Oh, they did it twice.
		Twice. So we'll follow this one later.
		Yeah, who knows?
		I don't know. Maybe there's evidence, but they didn't allow him to present anything in his defense.
		And in this modern era of the corporate media, you're guilty until...
		Until the next election rolls around, where they'll try to bury you in mud.
		So let's see what happens.
		We're going to try to get a hold of Paxson and get a few words out of him for the posse.
		But in the meantime...
		Really chalked this one up to the weaponization, yet another weaponization of the judicial system of now the legislative branch in Texas as a way to take out political rivals.
		It's really kind of shameful the depths we're facing.
		We're going to. Let's shift a little gears now.
		I want to talk debt ceiling and the possible deal that might be coming up.
		If Cameron can pull up, got a couple of clips for us.
		Denver, let's run those and see what we got here and then we'll wax eloquent.
unidentified		Brilliant. He's energetic in any given day.
		Of course, he can be difficult about any given thing.
		I think we all acknowledge that.
		But Kevin McCarthy's stock is trading at a higher level today than it ever has.
		I think his conference understands that he's made good on his promises to open up the House.
		And his commitment to not waive the 72-hour rule, making sure the public and members have a chance to review this deal whenever it's done, is an example about how he is changing how the House works for the good.
		Do you think the White House underestimated him?
		I do think the White House has underestimated him every step along the way.
		And it generates a little fatigue, I'll admit, among House Republicans.
		Oh, Kevin McCarthy will never be speaker.
		Well, he was. Oh, Kevin McCarthy will never get limits, save, grow, done.
		Well, he has. Oh, Kevin McCarthy will never be able to pass bills off the floor week in and week out with such a tight margin.
		Well, we've never lost a single bill yet in five months on the House floor.
		So all the White House does to Kevin McCarthy is underestimate him, and all Kevin McCarthy does is win.
		That's all fine by me.
		How do we get rid of it?
katy tur ▲ ● ▼		How do we not have this crisis every two years where the entire country worries about us defaulting and plunging us into a recession and everyone losing their jobs?
unidentified		Yeah, look, after I left the White House, I co-wrote an op-ed with a top staffer, former top staffer, Senator McConnell.
		He had been my counterpart in the negotiations.
		And we said, just end the debt limit.
		You could just flat out repeal it.
		You could raise it by four quadrillion dollars.
		There's bipartisan legislation in the House that would basically make it automatic.
		Along with just even having a budget proposal.
		So there's a lot of different ways to do that.
		And no other country has anything like this.
		It really is just downside.
		There's no upside to this.
		I think really for ultimately for either party.
peter navarro ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, Jason Furman, the old Council of Economic Advisors for the Obama-Biden regime back when wanting to get rid of this debt limit, which gives the only leverage you, the American people, have to...
		Stop the Reckless Spending here in the Swamp.
		About an hour ago, I dropped the Substack, PeterNorah.Substack.com, and the feature basically is looking at what a deal might look like that McCarthy and Biden might cut.
		And I'm nervous, frankly, about the fact that Kevin's sticking around by himself, To negotiate something behind closed doors because the rumors that are coming out are suggestive of the convergence of a deal that the posse won't like and the American people don't need.
		Here's what they're talking about.
		They're talking about...
		Steve and I talked about this yesterday a little bit.
		They're talking about extending the clock in a way where the debt discussion won't come up before the presidential race is over.
		And Steve and I both agree that this would be a really healthy debate to have for this country as part of the presidential race.
		Steve says they're kicking the can down the road, number one.
		But number two...
		I don't think Kevin McCarthy truly understands the bargaining power he has and what really needs to get done.
		I mean, if you think about it...
		What the Democrats have done over the last several years of the Biden regime is they passed a series of massive expenditure bills without any negotiation, conciliation, mediation from the Republican side.
		Essentially, they had majorities In the House with Pelosi and in the Senate with Kamala Harris is the VP with a tie-breaking vote.
		So they didn't have to do anything to accommodate the Republicans.
		And so the bills that they have passed are not only in terms of scale, unprecedented.
		And going to create a massive deficit, the likes of which we haven't seen ever in our history.
		But there's disgusting features.
		As Chip Roy pointed out in his letter yesterday, for example, American taxpayers are going to be...
		It's the full... The Biden Green Program is the Full Employment Act for the Chinese Communist Party.
		Basically workers there.
		We're going to make the EVs and Tesla plants and ship them back to us and we're going to lose our jobs.
		There's that. There's the IRS. Doubling in size, which is crazy.
		And when we come back from the break, I'm going to explain what things should look like.
		But the point is that why the hell is Kevin McCarthy negotiating in a way which is significantly weakening their original demands?
		Hey, they went into it and say, hey, here's our demands.
		We know we're not going to get this.
		Why start a negotiation like that?
		We need spine.
		We need backbone. We need resolve.
		And when we come back, Posse, I'll explain kind of what the economic stakes are involved.
		Peter K. Navarro in for Stephen K. Bannon.
		You are here in the war room.
		I'll be back for the home stretch here.
		Stay with us. Peter Navarro.
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		We really need to do.
		We've got a few minutes left in this week, the week before Memorial Day.
		Just look, Memorial Day is a very somber day, always been for me and for this country.
		You know, we basically...
		I have to give great thanks to our veterans who stand at the front lines and serve.
		And it particularly grieves me, having served in government and seeing now that the lives that people gave for our country are now juxtaposed against the kind of weaponization of our political institutions against patriots.
		And that's got to stop.
		And what I've been doing is really working as hard as possible in support of the Trump 2024 effort to try to get the message out.
		This debt ceiling debate is going to be the most important thing that Congress does before the November 2020 presidential race.
		And it's going to have consequences for years to come.
		I'm urging Kevin McCarthy right now to do two things.
		One, to hold fast, to not give in, not take the first or second deal that's being offered because they're crappy deals.
		You're holding a strong hand now.
		You need to play that out on behalf of the American people and the American taxpayers.
		And the reason you need to do that is not just because a lot of the Biden expenditures on green energy are going to ship jobs to communist China.
		A lot of the Biden expenditures are going to double the size of the IRS to terrorize middle class families.
		A lot of the expenditures that Biden has done are going to force black, brown and blue collar Americans to subsidize the luxury EVs.
		Electric vehicles of the upper-income Americans.
		To be honest with you, people on our side of the fence who are in upper-income brackets, they don't want these subsidies.
		Not at the cost that we're going to have.
		Kevin, if you're listening, brother, argue this on the economics.
		If you don't get the kind of cutbacks that Russ Vogt has helped you craft.
		You're going to institutionalize stagflation, simultaneous recession and inflation for a decade.
		This is what's at stake.
		So when you argue this case to the American people, you need to argue this not just on all these other issues about jobs to China and IRS terrorism, but most importantly that The Democrats say it's going to be a catastrophe if you don't pass.
		It's going to be a bigger economic catastrophe if you don't hold the line.
		So we need to hold the line.
		Fear not. Hold fast.
		Summon up the courage of the patriots.
		We've just begun to fight.
		You come up with all the cliches we know from the patriots of America.
		And please, do not desecrate Memorial Day by coming up with a deal that looks like surrender.
		Peter Navarro here.
		Just as we go out, if you get a chance, peternavarro.substack.com, peternavarro.substack.com.
		As I mentioned, paid subscribers will get an autographed copy of the Taking Back Trump's America book, which really is the MAGA blueprint.
		for winning in 2024.
		And every day is just another day where we dig deeper into the morass of the economy problems, the endless wars that we're facing.
		By the way, Biden, they don't want to cut the budget, the defense budget.
		Oh, big deal. A lot of that money is going to Ukraine.
		Okay, that's not to defend America.
		All right. Bow your head for Memorial Day and have a great weekend, America.
		You are in the war room.
		You are the posse. You are the most important folks on the ramparts in today's political wars.
		Stephen K. Bannon salutes you, as do I. Cameron in Denver, great job today.
	Steve will see you in the morning.

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