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Sept. 14, 2024 - Bannon's War Room

01:08:40

BANNON SATURDAYS: Zero Tolerance: Steve Bannon Interview | FRONTLINE | From Oct 22, 2019

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Speaker	Time	Text
unidentified		the the
		Bye!
		do do
		the the next one. Bye!
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Well, Andrew had been Matt Drudge editor.
		He had been one of the launch editors for Arianne Huffington and The Huffington Post.
		He always had a vision of what a news site could be.
		At the time, he was a blog, right?
		And he kind of—people posted stuff that were citizen journalists.
		Andrew had this big vision of what a real news site could be.
		We were the blog kind of for the Tea Party, this Tea Party energy, you know, right after the financial collapse in the spring of the next year, in fact, on—Rick Santelli had this rant, this very famous rant that took place when the first TARP thing was being talked about, and he was basically saying, All the working-class people are paying for this, right?
		That rant initiated this group of kind of disparate people to have a meeting and basically have people come out on April 15th on Tax Day, April 15th of 2009.
		That was the beginning of the Tea Party.
		And Andrew saw very quickly, as I saw, that there was this real populist power in this, that this was something totally different.
		This wasn't—this was not standard Republican Party.
		This was a whole new deal.
		And so we started covering that, and Breitbart became the blog site for that.
		Andrew wanted to do a new site.
		We were able to raise some money.
		And in 2011, we closed on the money, and we decided that the center of gravity of our political coverage had to be in Washington, D.C.
		And we released this house right in back of the Supreme Court, and we called it the Breitbart Embassy.
		And the reason was, we were an embassy in a foreign capital.
unidentified		Right?
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Because everybody told us—I mean, we were lectured by guys saying, you're not going to have any access, you're going to have to play the game to get access.
		And we kind of said, hey, we're going to just kick down doors.
		How about this?
		We're going to be totally different.
		And so we called this place the embassy for the simple reason that, you know, we thought we were in an embassy in a foreign capital, that this was owned and run by the permanent political class.
		And so a handful of people, like Peter Schweitzer and others, Matt Boyle and Andrew, we started this news site.
		Now, unfortunately, Andrew died tragically, you know, four days before the site was to be launched.
		He was working 20 hours a day to build the site, to perfect it.
		He had these—he was quite a visionary when it came to new media and how people accessed information.
		And so the whole site you see today was really his creation.
		He created every component piece of it, including how news flowed through the system, how we promoted things, etc.
		And so that was this kind of rowdy, And remember, the one thing we—the decision we made very fundamentally—and I kind of was, I think, a big influence on Andrew on this—I said, look, attacking Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama, we're so far removed from having any influence over that, because at this time we're a very small site.
		I said, we're the populist.
		you know, kind of economic nationalist part of this.
		Let's attack the real enemy.
		And the real enemy is the Republican establishment.
		What we're going to do is just go after the House leaders, the sheriff, we're going to go after Mitch McConnell,
		we're going to go after the donors.
		We're just going to go hard at kind of this— this kind of Paul Ryan philosophy.
unidentified		Why did you think Boehner and Cantor were vulnerable?
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Because they were vulnerable, because there's a huge disconnect.
		Remember, the one thing is Democrats they have lined up.
		They have actually, at least to hear recently, donors in their base kind of line up.
		The Republican Party is totally dysfunctional.
		It's essentially a working class party.
		The votes all come from working class or lower middle class people, predominantly.
		Right?
		And it doesn't represent their interests.
		This book written by a guy called, you know, What's the Matter with Kansas, where he kind of walks through how the donor class, the singers and the Kochs, these kind of libertarians, had this entirely different concept, this kind of Austrian school of economics concept, that the political apparatchiks—remember, the consultant class, The political class around it and the donors all line up perfectly.
		Unfortunately, you've got a working-class party that, for instance, trade.
		You know, massive legal immigration, which the Chamber of Commerce pushes all the time, and more legal immigration and trade are just two sides of the same coin.
		Right.
		The two sides of the same coin, it's suppression of workers' wages.
		OK, mass illegal immigration is to flood the zone against predominantly black and Hispanic working class so that you've got unlimited, you know, unlimited labor pull and you can keep wages down for higher margins.
		The immigration and H-1B visas are the same thing in the tech area, that you don't have to hire American citizens.
		I can do it with these visas to increase margins.
		Trade is the same thing.
		Trade is just you're competing against foreign labor in foreign countries unfairly, and so all of it is to suppress But they weren't going to let that happen.
		have higher margins, therefore higher stock prices, therefore more wealth, of which the
		workers don't own any piece of.
		And so our thesis was not just the cultural stuff, but the economic stuff.
		You have an ability to reform this Republican Party and make it a true populist entity.
unidentified		But they weren't going to let that happen.
unidentified		They were going to resist that in almost— They did, and we took them down.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		We took down Cantor.
		Remember, we took down Cantor with Dave Brat.
		We took the first time in the history of the republic that a sitting majority leader had ever been beaten.
		Remember, he was beaten in a primary.
		Cantor was up here in D.C.
		on the day of the primary and schlepped down there last night.
		Fox News, when they came on last night, didn't even know Dave Brat's name.
		This was unknown.
		And we had worked it with Laura Ingraham.
		I mean, we had been—Breitbart had been all over this.
		We had Dave Brat on our radio show, I think, every week for the 10 weeks' run-up to the election.
		We saw real vulnerability.
unidentified		Did you know it was coming?
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		You definitely knew it was coming.
		That also happened to be my home district, but I could feel it.
		I knew that a guy like Brat could—they were very weak.
		They were very weak.
		They didn't have a grasp.
		And this Tea Party revolt was picking up.
		You had the huge Tea Party revolt in 2010, which we won 62 seats.
		The Republican Party didn't see that coming.
		That was all grassroots-oriented, which played out over time.
		Remember, today, the 2000—really, Obama's 08, and particularly the primaries, In the 2010, I think changed American politics pretty fundamentally, because the concept got to be mobilization versus persuasion.
		I don't believe we live in an era of persuasion anymore.
		People are so saturated with this all day long, they kind of know where they come out.
		You just got to motivate them to get out there and vote.
		You got to motivate them to go door to door.
		So the 08 Obama primary that completely caught Clinton by surprise, It was all about mobilization.
		The 2010 Tea Party, particularly the House part of it that was absolutely, you know, the biggest in the history, I think, since the Great Depression, 1932, was about mobilization.
		That's why Romney didn't want to have anything to do with it in 2012, right?
		He washed his hands of it.
		And that's why in this very room in January 2013, they had this huge controversy between—the Republican Party did the autopsy that said, oh, the reason that Romney lost was because we didn't reach out to the Hispanic community, we didn't talk about DACA, we didn't talk about, you know, open borders, immigration policy.
		And a young guy named Stephen Miller, who was on the staff—he'd been with Michelle Bachmann for the Tea Party revolt, we were very close to.
		Stephen Miller and Jeff Sessions and myself had a dinner in this very room at basically the same week that Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes had this dinner with Schumer and Rubio in New York to talk about the Gang of Eight bill.
		And we just came down and looked at this.
		There was a lawyer at Hunt & Williams in Richmond that wrote a three-part piece, I believe it was, for RealClearPolitics.
		His name is Sean Trendy.
		He looked at the same analysis coming out of 2012, which, remember, all the donors thought Romney was going to win in a landslide.
		He looked at the same thing and said, the inability of the Republican Party to connect with working-class voters is the single biggest reason that they're not winning.
		And that's where Sessions and I talked about, we're going to take trade from No. 100 Right?
		It's not an issue.
		The whole Republican Party's got this fetish on free trade.
		They're like automatons.
		Oh, free trade, free trade, free trade, which is a radical idea, particularly when you're against a mercantilist opponent like China.
		So we're going to make trade from No.
		100 to No.
		2, and we're going to take immigration from about No.
		3 to No.
unidentified		1.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		The one and two issues will be immigration and trade, and that will be focused on workers, right?
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		And we're going to remake the Republican Party.
unidentified		Wait a minute, that's like the anti-autopsy report.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		180% out.
		Autopsy, and I told Ryan Slater to his face, it was a total joke and another donor-driven lie, OK?
		No statistics in the victory in 2016 showed that.
		By the way, all the guys in the verticals, the Jeb Bushes and the Marco Rubios and all these other guys, Chris Christie, all the geniuses and their staffs all bought into the autopsy, remember?
		They thought we were crazy.
		You know, we had Palin in eight and hoped that she had run in 12, and she just—you know, it just didn't work out.
		I actually worked with Lou Dobbs and tried to get Lou Dobbs to run in 12 as a populist, because it was Lou Dobbs' economic ideas on his TV show all the time, particularly China and immigration and trade.
		And Lou Dobbs, for a host of reasons, didn't do it.
		And here I actually tried to talk Sessions into doing it.
		I told Sessions, just like I told Palin, you're not going to be president of the United States.
		But remember, if we win the primary, and you will win the primary, you control the Republican apparatus.
		You take over the RNC for the whole next cycle.
		You can turn the RNC—you can turn the Republican Party into a worker-based party.
		The goal is to get control of the party.
		You're not going to win the presidency against this.
		That'll take time.
		And Sessions goes—I remember, he said—it was about five hours.
		We walked down those front steps.
		And he said—he turns to me and goes, it's not me.
		I'm not going to do it.
		He says, but our guy will come along.
		We'll find our guy.
		And that guy, a couple of years later, turned out to be Donald Trump.
		Trump comes up, and really, the key moment is coming down the escalator.
		At the top of the escalator, if you go back and look at the polling, I think Trump was in seventh place, right?
		At the bottom of the escalator, in the speech, and particularly when the media— And in the speech, when he starts going on to not just the immigration part and trade, which nobody's ever talked about, but when he starts doing the over-the-top stuff, and I go—I said, you watch.
		They're going to bite hard, and they're going to bite hard and blow this off.
		I'm sitting there watching this thing on TV.
		When he starts talking about the Mexican rapists and everything like that, I go, oh, my God.
unidentified		I said, this is—I said, he's just buried everything.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		They're going to go—CNN is literally going to broadcast 24 hours a day.
		By that—he goes to Iowa, I think, that night.
		It's all they talk about.
		He goes from No.
unidentified		7.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		He's at 1 and never looks back.
		The next day polling, Trump's gone to 1.
		In fact, I think it's the next day, the day after, Don Lemon has him on for the most classic Trump interview in human history.
		Lemon's sitting there hammering him.
		You've got to show us some facts.
		You've got to show us some facts.
		And Trump—it's a TV—it's a phone interview.
		Trump goes, Don, Don, somebody's doing the raping, right?
		It's just—so—but— It was the mainstream media that catapulted Trump from—because remember, when people—at the top of the escalator, nobody still thought, even though he had filed his financial report, right, which in hindsight, you know, is the financial report, but nobody thought—they thought it was a marketing ploy to get a better deal at The Apprentice, etc.
		The mainstream media catapulted him.
		To the number one, and then it was within 30 days we had the Fox News.
		The first—on August 1, I think it was, was the debate when Fox News, when Murdoch and Ailes, or particularly Murdoch and Ailes, being part of the Bush apparatus, decided they were going to kneecap Who's in the war?
		Well, the war was Fox and all the conservative media—National Review, Weekly Standard, The Republican.
		Basically, it's a racket.
		They went through everything and came out and did a hit like the left would do on somebody.
		And that's when all war broke out.
		That's when Breitbart—that's when you had to choose sides.
unidentified		Who was in the war?
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Well, the war was Fox and all the conservative media, National Review, Weekly Standard, the Republican.
		Basically, it's a racket.
		It's a racket, because the people are over here.
		The voters are focused on illegal immigration, trade deals, jobs.
		You know, why income inequality?
		Where is my pay raise?
		Basic nuts and bolts stuff that people—the sovereignty of the country.
		The National Review Weekly Standard neoliberal neocons are kind of a donor—beck and call the donors.
		It's a total disconnect on foreign policy.
		And remember, one of the powers of Trump and the basic thing is that America's in decline, and the elites are OK with that.
		This is about managed decline.
		So whether it's health care, the southern border, NATO, China, Iran, pick it, right?
		The education system, we're in managed decline, and the elites are fine with that.
		And what's looked at is the Republican elites are OK, because they're kind of the junior partner in the punching bag of Obama and these progressive Democrats, and they don't do anything.
		They kind of agree with him at the end of the day.
		Remember, after 2014, the reason Obama becomes kind of a hero to the Breitbart staff—we call him, you know, Honorary Honey Badger, because we're humping this thing in 2014, Ebola, the border, and all of a sudden, he gets smoked in the midterm elections, OK?
		What does he do?
		He calls a press conference for the next day.
		This is the shellacking?
		He gets shellacked.
		He loses the Senate.
		He shows back up.
		He gets smoked.
		He calls a press conference, and all CNN and everybody, New York Times, is he going to listen to what the people are saying?
		Is the country going in a different direction?
		Obama going to listen?
		He gets up there, and he goes, OK, guys, here's how it is.
		I'm president of the United States, and you're not.
		He goes, here's 10 executive orders I'm going to sign immediately.
		And by the way, you know that DACA thing?
		I got a DAPA.
		I'm adding the parents onto it.
		How do you like that?
		I'm sitting there going, this guy's my role model.
		I said, he just got smoked, and he comes out and hits you right in the mouth.
		This is a leader.
		Remember, Boehner collapses.
		We get to omnibus.
		Everything we fought for, we just won!
		We just won!
		And Boehner does this omnibus bill, gives him Planned Parenthood, gives him DACA, everything he's wanted, and more.
		That's when you realize the Republican apparatus is the Washington generals to their Harlem Globetrotters, right?
		But that is this thing that builds up.
		And so when you get to the Fox situation, Fox has chosen a side.
		It's so evident in that debate that they're there to kneecap Donald Trump, OK?
		They're there to take him out.
		And that's when we go, OK, so we run— 20 stories on Megyn Kelly.
		I get Tony Lee and Matt Boyle, my two hammers.
		They go right after Megyn Kelly.
		We're going to linsky her, right?
		We're going to cut her out from the, call her out from the herd and just hit her nonstop.
		And after about 48 hours, I get a call from Ailes, who was kind of a mentor, but remember, in building Breitbart, I never allowed anybody at Breitbart to go on Fox, ever.
		I went on a couple times without films— Because?
		Because National Review, Rich Lowry, Tucker Carlson at the time, Daily Caller, none of those guys existed unless they were on Fox.
unidentified		All their own Fox, their guys are on Fox, they're a subsidiary of Fox.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		They're just—when Aos calls them up, they've got to line up in a certain way, and this was the payoff.
		He calls them up, they've all got to line up in back of the Megyn Kelly.
		We're independent.
		We don't need Ailes.
		I don't need Ailes financially.
		They're not going to do anything for me, right?
		So we've never had anybody—I was never on Fox.
		None of our reporters are on Fox.
		If you want to come here and get some story and get a dredge link and go on Fox, you're in the wrong line of work, because it's not going to happen.
		We're Breitbart, and we've got our own point of view.
		We're going to do it our own way.
		And this is where it came down to.
		All the rest of them line up with those—with anti-Trump, and Ailes calls me up.
		He says, you've got to knock off these stories.
		She's crying.
		She's all upset.
		She's getting death threats.
		That sounds like a personal problem.
		I said, we're not backing off.
		We're going to put more stories up tomorrow.
unidentified		And he goes, you've got to come.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		What are you guys—he says, no, you're not going to pull what the left pulls.
		This is the typical drive-by.
		You're going to go into a guy's Twitter feed?
		You're going to go into 14 years of a show, and this is what you're going to come up with as Rosie O'Donnell?
		It doesn't roll like that.
unidentified		OK?
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		We're all in now, OK?
		And if you don't like it, that's your problem, because I don't owe you anything.
		You have no bearing whatsoever on how we do.
unidentified		What were the stakes for you, Steve, at that moment?
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Well, the stakes were the countries.
		To me, it's about the country.
		You finally have somebody in Trump that is now— Giving voice to kind of this voiceless working class and lower middle class has had no representation.
		They've been voting for Republicans that work exactly against their economic interests.
		Look at these trade deals.
		You know, you have all this theory of free markets.
		These free markets against a mercantilist power is destroying the manufacturing base of the country, right?
		You have these guys who are Chamber of Commerce that—look, the state of Texas is controlled by Republicans.
unidentified		You know, you have Republican—why can't you shut down—why can't you shut down the border?
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		The reason is, they want the labor.
		The Republican Party donors want the cheap labor.
		That's the point.
		So you finally have a guy that's speaking in a nonpolitical vernacular, and you can tell he's connecting with people already in the rallies.
		I said, this is our guy.
		He's a very imperfect instrument, but he's an armor-piercing shell, OK?
		And here's the other thing.
		They're scared to death.
unidentified		He gets in the Oval Office, he sits down, and the weight of it all, the responsibility to heal, the inclusion moment, or the division moment, or the fight back moment, and everybody said he's going to pivot.
		He has to pivot.
		But he didn't pivot.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		This is not in on the joke.
		Here's the joke.
		The American elite have allowed the nation to decline.
		They are in to manage decline.
		And this is not about political party.
		This is the primitive political class, OK?
		It's sponsorship on Wall Street and in corporate America.
		They have this kind of—this political apparatchiks.
		Down in Washington.
		But they are in managed decline to unacceptable outcomes to average citizens.
		Managed decline for unacceptable outcomes to average citizens, because they don't have to bear the brunt of it.
		They don't bear the brunt of the health care system in collapse.
		They don't bear the brunt of the education system in collapse.
		They're taken care of.
		To wit, they bring about the largest financial collapse in the country, and they're better off in 10 years.
		Why wouldn't you like this system?
		The system's working great for them.
		It's not managed decline for them.
		They're making more money on the way down than they made on the way up.
		And so that's where Trump is a rallying cry for that.
		Remember, the lead-up to the inauguration is, we're going to hit the deck plates running with these executive orders.
		We've got this whole system.
		Tell me about that.
		An outside organization had done this theoretical analysis to show that every executive order that was still around from Obama and from Bush—and we had this whole thing.
		We had a whole tiger team of the White House counsel guys, the deconstruction of the administrative state, which is a huge element.
		Remember, you've got two forms of populism.
		You have right-wing populism.
		You have left-wing populism.
		Right-wing populism is about deconstruction of the administrative state.
		Bernie Sanders and AOC is about more inclusion of the state.
		We're both populists, but they want more state intervention.
		We want less.
		In fact, we want to start to take apart certain parts of the apparatus.
		And so that whole thing is basically focused on the deconstruction of the administrative state.
		At the same time, saying, hey, we're nationalists.
		This is about the nation.
		The nation's concerns have to come forward.
		We had, in the first 100 days, every day, we're going to be hitting with either three executive orders or whatever.
		Number one is that the Democratic Party is shattered.
		They don't know if they're coming or going, right?
		They've got one group that's doing identity politics, another group that's a Clinton centrist.
		I said, We've broken them right now.
		They have no idea.
		They're going to have their own internal civil war, right?
		They'll keep them occupied for a while.
		So what we've got to do is just hit, hit, hit, and keep it—it's momentum, momentum, momentum.
		The opposition party is the media, and the media can only, because they're dumb and they're lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time.
		And the one thing they'll mainly focus on is either they do the horse race, or once the horse race, who's in, who's out.
		It's like the high school, who are the cool kids in the cafeteria, right?
		Because it's easy.
		It's the reason they do the horse race stuff all the time, right?
		And they won't do the basic, what are the core things that are going on in the country.
		I said, all we have to do is flood the zone.
		Every day we hit them with three things, they'll bite on one, and we'll get all of our stuff done.
		Bang, bang, bang.
		These guys will never be able to recover.
		But we've got to start with muzzle velocity.
		So it's got to start, it's got to hammer, it's got to muzzle velocity.
		When you get anything in life, remember the house is five to seven against, right?
		To get something done, you've got to go through these certain stages of momentum and keep forcing it.
		And so otherwise, just pure inertia, right?
		Or the loss of energy.
unidentified		So did you know that with the travel ban and lots of other things that came, just the chaos that appeared to be chaos, that wasn't apparently chaos, that you'd lose some, that you might lose Correct me if I'm wrong.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Didn't the Supreme Court of these United States say that the travel ban, as written—and by the way, they would have said the first travel ban was 100 percent constitutional.
		Is that not just a fact?
		Yes, it is, OK?
		We knew the travel ban was bulletproof, OK?
		Also, look at the other EOs we did that day.
		The other EO is really what galvanizes and everything about border enforcement and about tying together all the laws that are out there and giving Kelly the actual momentum to go do it.
		So no, the—and the travel ban had been worked on—remember, this is something that Miller started working on in early November.
		This was all pushed through the interagency process.
		Here's the thing that's so phony about the media.
		Every time you do an executive order, you have to get basically a legal opinion.
		The Office of Legal Counsel of DOJ has to basically give you a sign-off thing that this thing is constitutional.
		Otherwise, you just have guys doing executive orders all the time.
		There is a governor unit to the system.
		That governing unit is the Office of Legal Counsel telling you you can actually do this or not.
		So we were—we thought we were on very strong grounds constitutionally, and operationally we thought we were on strong grounds, too.
		And the other thing I would say is that, you know, knock on wood, but there hasn't been a terrorist attack—there has not been a terrorist attack since the extreme vetting went in.
		Remember, Trump, and to his credit, wanted to stick with the original.
		The backing off of the original was because of literally Mattis and other people about Iraq being an ally in the war to take down the physical caliphate of ISIS.
		And there were some, you know, some changes to that.
		But President Trump, from the very beginning, goes, no, I've done the analysis.
		I've had you guys walk me through it.
		I signed this thing originally.
		I'm sticking with this.
		The Supreme Court will eventually back us up after we get out of this crazy 9th District.
		This is what I'm going to stick with.
		It was the staff that went back.
		The people kind of blinked, right, because you've got some people in the White House that are a little more sensitive than other people, right?
		Some people blinked, and we got the second version.
		The second version was proved constitutional after all the—all the, you know, all the things.
		And it's been very effective.
		That's the other thing.
		It's been a very effective process.
unidentified		You hit him right away at the Pentagon of all places, right?
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Yes, yes.
unidentified		Your idea?
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		I think a collective idea, the way to do it, because it was about national security.
		The way to do it was to do it at the Pentagon.
		Actually, the interesting thing, I think the more powerful of the two that day was the second E.O.
		that really organized everything, of all the different laws of the country, put it on one document signed by an E.O.
		that empowered the Department of Homeland Security and the attorney general actually to start enforcing—to enforcing—you don't need to change one immigration law in the books.
		They're all there.
unidentified		Right?
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		You just need to start enforcing them.
		Remember, General Kelly was not an ideologue like Stephen Miller and myself and others.
		He was a guy who says, hey, if it's the law of the land, I'm going to enforce the law.
		This gave him—this brought him to high relief, this.
		And I think it was only the L.A.
		Times.
		That weekend, the L.A.
		Times actually wrote the article.
		I thought they were the smartest.
		They said, hey, everybody's focused on this travel ban.
		Actually, one that has much bigger implications is this other one.
		So, no.
		But my point is that every day we were hitting—you know, we were going to hit them with additional stuff.
		And after that, it started—you can tell in the White House, we had the two camps start to develop, the more globalist— you know, establishment camp and more of the kind of
		disruptors, populist, nationalist camp.
		And then everything eventually became a knife fight shortly thereafter.
unidentified		When did you know you were in the knife fight?
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		The first wakeup call is when everybody didn't say on the victory address,
		Oh, yeah, this is amazing.
		This is great.
		Why don't we do this?
		It was kind of, meh.
		I said, no, no, no, no.
		This is like a Trump rally speech, you know.
		And it was all, we should bring the country together.
		And to me, look, there's times for that, and there's times not for that, OK?
		We didn't win an election.
		He won an election to basically come after the permanent political class and the elite in this country and hold them accountable for what they've done.
		And here's what they've done, OK?
		They've then taken off the backs of the taxpayer, the little guy, and they've saved themselves with this explosion of the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve, which is just free money for them.
		They've destroyed the pension programs.
		They've destroyed the ability to save.
		Nobody owns anything.
		They have a neo-feudalistic system.
		Yes.
		It's not time to bring the country together.
		It's time to take on the elites in this country, take the torch to them, hit them with a blowtorch.
		And that's what the Trump—and look, my only time in the White House, the only thing I—and I never apologized, but the one thing I look back in hindsight, I wasn't— Tough and strong enough.
		We should have been much harder, OK?
		I should have fought harder for some of the things—I'm not saying I compromised on, but I said, OK, that's the way it's got to be.
		I should have been tougher.
		This country has a massive problem, and now you're seeing it.
		And what I told the donors, I said, you may hate my guts, OK?
		Because remember, in the Oval Office, I'm the guy arguing for a 44% tax on all income over $5 million, because I told the donors, I said, if we don't get this thing sorted, you're going to have a left-wing populism, and they're not coming for your income.
		They're coming for your assets.
		OK, it's going to be just like Europe.
		You know, I've told these donors that you've got to understand something.
		We have to make fundamental changes to this neo-feudalistic system.
		People have to start to get ownership.
		They have to get ownership in the companies.
		They have to get ownership in real estate.
		Incomes have to start to rise.
		The Wall Street Journal can't go through a meltdown when wages are starting to rise.
		You know, inflation coming back, you know, incomes rising.
		So there has to be fundamental change.
		And so I knew right away that something was going on.
		There were all kind of knife fights during the transition, but it really got ugly after about the second weekend there.
		And it really started to get ugly, not about immigration.
		They were ugly.
		The biggest fights were about China and trade.
		And that's because—the reason is, we had so many Wall Street guys—and look, I worked at Goldman Sachs.
		We had Goldman Sachs guys in there who are basically the IR department, the investors.
		Goldman Sachs and Wall Street is the investor relations partner, you know, for the Chinese CCP, this radical cadre that runs China.
		This is not about the Chinese people.
		This is about a radical cadre that runs the Chinese Communist Party, that has a totalitarian, mercantilist system that is incompatible.
		Incompatible with the system we have in the West.
		One side will win and one side will lose.
		So very early on, in the first couple of weeks of the administration, this confrontation with China and its economic war became the most explosive thing.
		It's where all the knife fights came, all the McMaster stuff, the Cohen stuff, Mnuchin, myself, Jared, the nationalist and the globalist divide.
		Was because of that, and then many, many other issues, whether it's, you know, getting—putting stuff in the—because remember, Obama and Bush, the globalists, support this kind of—they turn the military into kind of this humanitarian expeditionary force, right?
		They want to be everywhere, sticking their nose in everybody's business.
		They're just dying to get up into Syria.
		Syria's a place they've got to get up into, because the Russians are in Syria.
		Right?
		And my point is, hey, American foreign policy for 50 years has had one thing in the Middle East—keep Russia out, OK?
		And Obama's watch and Kerry's—whatever they're doing with Iran, Russia got a foothold in the Middle East.
		Well, you ain't going to get them out of there.
		OK?
		It's just not going to happen.
		And so anything that you're doing, get up there.
		They want to get it on with Russia.
	They are maniacally focused on Russia, a country with an economy smaller than New York state, that's in a total demographic death spiral, that doesn't make anything, that has—it wouldn't exist if Germany and these countries in Europe wouldn't do natural gas deals with them.
	Yet we have an existential threat.
	The greatest existential threat we've ever had in the country's history is this totalitarian, mercantilist society in China.
	Which has One Belt, One Road, Made in China 2025, and 5G rollout converging to take away advanced manufacturing in perpetuity, and yet you have the corporatists and you have Wall Street, who have all made money—remember, The decline of America is inextricably linked to the shipping of its manufacturing base to China.
	It's the Wall Street faction.
	This is what Donald Trump understood in 2010.
	Donald Trump's—Donald Trump today, when he goes out and speaks about China, you could literally take it from what he said in 2010.
	He understood the facts of the case then.
	And it's been the biggest—the biggest thing we've done as a government is, in two years, we now are confronting China in the true economic war they've been running on us.
	That is the single big—when history looks back on this thing, All the other Twitter madness and everything, they will look at the signal and the noise, and the signal is a great power struggle, as we personified or manifested in the first national security document that ever came out of the—the first national security plan that came out in December of 2017 said,
	Global radical jihad is a problem.
	It's a containable problem.
	Here's how we're containing it.
	Now the two great threats to the country are—it's a great power struggle.
	And they put Russia in there, but it's basically—China's gone from a strategic partner to a strategic competitor, right?
	And then today, you're seeing the Secretary of Defense say today, we've got three issues—China, China, China.
	That is what Trump reoriented, and from the very first days of the administration, the nastiest, The story—I know you know Sessions very well and really closely collaborated on the immigration stuff for Breitbart.
unidentified		The story that the day that Sessions and Trump are in the Oval Office and hear that Mueller's been picked and the president By all accounts loses it on whether it's true or not, loses it on Sessions.
		Sessions goes to the car and is in tears and resigns.
		He's brought back up by Reince, I guess, and you talk to Sessions with Reince.
		Take me in there, can you?
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, I think we got Sessions back and we couldn't have Sessions resigning, so we got Sessions back and, you know, talked to him and realized to just put the, you know, let's not do anything in haste.
unidentified		What kind of shape was he in?
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think he was—I think he'd had better days, right?
		I think he's—you know, he's kind of an unflappable guy, really, when you see him.
		He's very solid, you know, and really the driving force of this kind of populist revolt for many, many years before Trump came on the thing.
		And so I'm not just fond of him.
		I really consider him a mentor in a lot of regards.
		And I realize many conservatives are very upset, because—and even I was.
		He did not seem to be very focused on Hillary Clinton or Uranium One.
		He's just a—it's just the way he is.
		You just got to take it the way it is.
		And I did pull him off to the side into my—into the war room, and we talked, and I said, is there any doubt in your mind?
		I said, you were there from the beginning.
		I said, you were the very first guy.
		In fact, in this very room, I paced up and down for two hours on the phone with him when he was in an airport in Memphis in an SUV waiting for Trump to show up.
		Where that day they were going to go down to northern Alabama, and he was going to endorse him on a stage.
		And what Sessions told me, he says, you don't understand, Steve, this is—I'm never coming back from this.
		He says the establishment will come.
		They hate this guy so much that this will—and although I'm kind of outside of this immigration and the trade stuff, and I'm hammering them all the time, this will be looked at as I'm a traitor.
		And, you know, you don't come back from this.
		So it's either we've got to win or, you know, my political career is over.
		And I said, we're going to win this.
		I said, this is a huge endorsement.
		You know, I think it was right before Super Tuesday.
		And so he was there from the very beginning.
		And so we just came in, and I said—I said, I've got a question.
		You were there from the beginning.
		You saw the whole thing.
		You rode shotgun with me the entire time.
		I said, is there any doubt in your mind That this was divine providence that put us here, right?
		That this just didn't happen.
		That this—something's worked here, because he's a very imperfect instrument, but we're here.
		And what you're doing on immigration, what you're doing on counterterrorism, everything that you're doing, the real work that you're doing, which Sessions and Miller and these guys were on fire about getting stuff done, the deconstruction of the administrative state, all of that, all the real work.
		That we would have never been able to do it unless we won, and we won.
		There was something that was there, and that's why we shocked everybody.
		I said, there's any doubt in your mind?
		He goes, no doubt.
		I said, you're sure it's no doubt?
		He says, no doubt.
		I said, and you're never going to quit?
		He says, I will never quit.
		I go, no matter how bad it gets, because I'll never quit.
		I go, fine.
		I just wanted to make sure we're in sync, just make sure we're in sync.
		And that's why I knew he was going to hang in there.
		And he had some—he had some very, very, very tough days.
unidentified		So we're in the summer of 2017.
		Yes.
		The president is waffling on DACA.
		You recognize that.
		He's talking in press conferences about feeling for the kids.
		He knows kids.
		He's got kids himself.
		You're concerned.
		You call Chris Kobach, and you guys have a plan.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Can you tell me about what you— Yeah, I don't know if I would call it waffling.
		Look, the president, if you go back and look at— President Trump, candidate Trump, citizen Trump, you know, he's always—and he looks at this, I think, holistically, right?
		Not just from a policy perspective.
		And this has followed him from the time he was a private citizen.
		So he is, on anything on immigration, on the wall, on asylum, on, you know, gaming the system, he's always had, you know, a more holistic, I think, idea or concept than someone I would say would—or said to be the immigration hardliners or people that think that we have to, you know, control our sovereignty and also protect our low-skilled workers, particularly Hispanic and African Americans.
		What Kobach Because Chris is, I think, considered the top lawyer in the immigration debate on our side of the football.
		And so it was decided that he was going to talk to certain attorney generals in the spring of 17 about bringing a suit, particularly Louisiana and maybe Texas teaming together, so you go to the Fifth Circuit and actually bring something up on DACA and get it into the court system to ultimately prove that it's obviously unconstitutional.
		What happened is, I think the Texas attorney general wrote a letter to Jeff Sessions and said, this is essentially what we're going to do.
		Sessions—and when you say waffling, the president, a lot of times he's thinking through his policy and getting feedback.
		Remember, he is a marketer, and he's trying to figure out in his mind what is the right way to go.
		And like I said, if you talk to Stephen Miller or Jeff Sessions or myself, people that have been with the president You know, for—even before the campaign, there have been people that talked to him about immigration for years, Lou Dobbs.
		You would see that this is one that—I'm not saying he's ambivalent, but he's always trying to think through a more, what I would call, holistic solution than some of the immigration hardliners.
		And what Sessions did is then gave a pretty important speech.
		in the fall of 2017.
		At the same time, all these debates were going on in the budget and debt ceiling, and DACA was part of that, and said that essentially it was unconstitutional and they were going to go forward.
		Kelly then came out in the—I think 2018, early 2018—said we're going to phase it out, which was, from the hardliners' perspective, not what we wanted.
		We wanted to be more aggressive than that.
		Certain progressive liberal left-wing groups Did they help?
		went to court, it's in the court system today.
		And so DACA is one that I think is emblematic, quite frankly, about a lot of the ambivalence
		throughout the entire country on certain issues of immigration.
unidentified		Did they help?
unidentified		Did that suit help pressure things?
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		I think what it was is it brought in high relief.
		You know, people have argued for a long time that what President Obama did was unconstitutional and that this should be taken care of and then dealt—and then deal with the situation once you prove it's unconstitutional.
		I think what Kobach and the attorney generals wanted to do was to get this up at the right level and let's get on with it.
		Let's quit having all this kind of disparate movements.
		And I think that's why the Texas AG took the lead, wrote a very powerful letter, really put the attorney general on notice.
		Jeff Session, obviously being a hardliner on immigration, came out with his speech, which I think was a pretty seminal speech at the time, in the fall of 2017.
		And I think this is one of the benefits of Trump's presidency, is that it brought, you know, All this stuff had kind of been going in different directions and things were never really brought to conclusion or at least brought to the venue where you could determine, make some determination.
		I think that that was, I thought it was a big help and quite frankly is what we intended to have done very early on.
unidentified		So let me now jump to January 9th and January 11th.
		This is 18.
		This is the White House meeting where there's a bipartisan group that's come over from the Hill that's now meeting in the cabinet room.
		It's being broadcast on CNN.
		I'm curious to know where you are around this time because it looks in that meeting like the president's about to agree to do a clean Dream Act or dock a deal.
		Kevin McCarthy has to kind of pull him back, right?
		So there's that, and then there's a day, and on the 11th, President calls Durbin and Graham from the Hill.
		They're on their way over to the White House because he wants to sign something.
		That's what he's told them.
		They get there, and there's a group of hardliners.
		Representative Goodlatte's there.
		Senator Cotton's there.
		Help me understand what's changed, what's going on in these two days.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Well, once again, I think this is—it shows how the president's trying to think through this.
		Remember, Durbin and Graham just don't appear in January of 2018 in the Roosevelt Room.
		They are in the spring of 17.
		One of the reasons that Kobach is kind of brought into the mix, and we start talking to the attorney generals, there is a huge movement behind the scenes in the spring of 17, led by Durbin and Graham, and certain elements, certain more progressive elements in the White House.
		In fact, this is where General Kelly has essentially jumped at a hearing and said, hey, you know about this DACA thing?
		We're way down the road, and Kelly knows absolutely nothing about it.
		General Kelly is so upset that he's saying, hey, he informs the chief of staff, Reince Priebus, and others.
		Right?
		Maybe some of the progressive elements working with Durbin and Graham, but this can't happen again.
		If you're going to start talking about DACA, you know, this is my purview.
		This is my vertical.
		I've got to be in the loop.
		So the Durbin-Graham thing is from almost the beginning of the administration.
		You have this, you know—and I wouldn't—it was kind of the moderate element.
		You know, Kelly gets involved, and there's going to be this decrease in DACA.
		That's what comes out of this.
		But those two elements—and here's what's interesting.
		ideologically tied to the left in a large sense.
		They give some happy talk about border security, but they're very inclined to agree.
		And I think in January, you start to see this play out.
		You know, Kelly gets involved, and there's going to be this decrease in DACA.
		That's what comes out of this.
		But those two elements—and here's what's interesting.
		You call Goodlatte and Cotton or Goodlatte particularly hardliners.
		From the hardliners' perspective, they're, you know, they're moderates.
		But that is the voices you're hearing, and President Trump is—it's a Socratic process.
		You know, he's thinking this through as he goes along.
		Remember, on DACA particularly, Where he's very hardline on the wall.
		He's very hardline on asylum.
		You know, many of these things, like birthright citizenship today, about the ability to go on welfare immediately, public services.
		You know, President Trump is extremely—his default position is tough.
		On DACA, it's the one that he's, I would say, ambivalent on, and searching for an answer that he thinks is right, right?
		Searching for a solution that fits Donald Trump.
		And I've always respected that, and I was very open about, hey, here's—and I've always said, and one of the reasons I seem to take, you know, sometimes extreme positions on issues, that's how you can get to compromise.
		If you take these extreme issues, positions, and you identify it clearly of what it is and the tradeoffs, that allows people room to actually have a discussion and a debate internally.
		But January 18 will go down, I think, as one that— And some of the reasons I think things have dragged on to date.
		I think the progressive groups went to court right after that, and we still don't have the clarity on DACA.
unidentified		But thinking back to sort of the early immigration work that you and Sessions and Miller were involved in and know so well, when you're watching the meeting on the 9th, are you worried?
unidentified		Are you freaking out?
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		No, I'm not freaking out, but it's—it's part of the process.
		You just have to—you just have to—you just have to—you just have to work the program.
		Somebody's got to get in there.
		You know, we have to get Stephen.
		These things are going to happen.
		They happen on other issues, too.
		It happens on national security, with people wanting to take kinetic military action and other people who are more inclined to do economic warfare.
		This is the way—you know, here's the thing about Trump, and this is why I think he is a stabilizing force.
		He looks at all options, and he's going to take the option he thinks is best and one of the ones that's maybe argued the best and has the most backup to it.
		And in DACA, yeah, am I concerned?
		You're always concerned, particularly when you hear that, hey, I want to sign—you know, guys are coming up because I want to sign something.
		So yeah, you've got to be concerned.
		But at that time, particularly with Stephen in the White House and Sessions was still—and even Kelly, who was never a DACA hardliner, Just knowing he had reasonable voices around, I knew it would settle out.
unidentified		Let me ask you about zero tolerance.
		So we jump now to May.
		The significance of the announcement to you, to Miller, to Sessions, the message that it's sending to the base, but then also I'm interested in when the president does back off of it.
		What are you thinking?
		What are you watching and seeing?
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		One of my concerns with this is that I think zero tolerance is the most humane, because I think it stops—he's trying to stop the cartels from this human trafficking.
		You know, you should be all over, you know, safe third-party country.
		You should be all over, you know, trying to stop the trafficking, human trafficking.
		The zero tolerance to me is the policy to do it.
		Concerned about is this takes a major messaging operation.
		You have to explain—the American people are kind of detached on the details of what's happening on the southern border.
		They're particularly detached, I think, about the reality of what's happening in Central America.
		They're detached about, you know, this cauldron.
unidentified		Right?
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		That's on the southern border, particularly how it's been not just militarized by—particularly in northern Mexico in the cartel wars of the Mexican authorities against the cartels, but how the cartels are winning.
		You know, in many regards, northern Mexico and even some of the southern United States along the border, as people down there will tell you, are like Afghanistan to a degree that it's an actual war going on and an insurgency.
		And so my concern at the time is that, you know, not just people hadn't thought three moves down, but maybe the messaging is not well enough, and the battlefield's not prepared enough.
		It just kind of dropped.
		And understanding President Trump— He's always going to respond to what he sees in the media, and he's a marketing guy.
		He's going to respond.
		If this thing's not—not meshes properly and people don't understand what you're trying to accomplish, then I think you could have some blowback.
		And in fact, that's what happened.
		And I think this is—I think this goes to the fact of not just the White House communications department, but also Stephen, Attorney General Sessions and a broader group, that you really have to think three or four moves down in order to serve the American people and to make sure that you're doing that— you're doing the right thing for this biblical tragedy that's coming up from Central America and now on the southern border of the United States.
unidentified		But ultimately the president feels like the rollout and the public sort of criticism is, it's messy, it's fierce, it's pretty aggressive and he has to withdraw.
unidentified		What are you feeling at that point?
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Look, it's ultimately the right policy that you're going to have to do something, and the something is now, I think, going to galvanize what the real issues are when it's the Mexican government.
		Think about where we've come in that time frame since the president did back off.
		You now have a third-party, I think, agreement with Guatemala, which is the Northern Triangle.
		You have to have—you're well down the road of having one with Mexico, although you're not there.
		We have this thing about, you know, the asylum seekers will stay in Mexico, the Stay in Mexico program that I know the courts are involved in.
		We'll have to see how that plays out.
		The Mexican government has also brought Mexican Marines up to the I do believe that zero tolerance is the correct policy, right?
		You can't just have unlimited, open economic migration.
		You have to make people go through the ports of entry.
		pretty dramatic decrease given other comparable time periods here recently.
		So I wasn't thrilled at the time.
		And the reason I wasn't thrilled, I do believe that zero tolerance is the correct policy, right?
		You can't just have unlimited open economic migration.
		You have to make people go through the ports of entry.
		You have to stick to the political—you know, the political asylum system.
		And so I thought at the time it was mishandled.
		And it wasn't Trump's fault.
		It was the people around him who very well-intentioned understood the policy but maybe didn't understand the dynamics of what was going to happen, not just from the media but from the execution.
unidentified		Let me ask you about the midterms and the caravans that sort of are covered around this time.
		My understanding is that Miller is really keeping a close eye on that, giving that information to the president.
		Can you take us in there a little bit?
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, the caravans started coming up from Central America, and look, I thought some of the stuff was overhyped about, you know, Soros is in back of this, or who's in back of it.
		Look, what's happening in Central America, okay, with those economies and those countries, is a tragedy of biblical proportion.
		Nobody faults The people in Central America.
		I mean, it's a horrible situation.
		But the solution to that, just like in Europe, the solution to North Africa is not in southern Italy.
		The solution to the problems, the economic problems in Central America is not on the southern border of the United States.
		It's not in Texas or New Mexico or Arizona or California.
		You know, that—we have to find a solution there.
		And I think the caravans obviously became— You know, pretty dramatic, particularly some of the media coverage of it.
		President Trump got involved.
		I think that—I think the 18 midterms were totally mishandled by the Republican Party because they did not make it a total referendum.
		I think we would have held the House if we had had the ground game that went out and made this a referendum on Trump's presidency.
		I was advocating very early on, went on Fox, went on a lot of news shows.
		I went around the country with a film called Trump at War to those battleground districts.
		We kind of knew the 25 to 30 that were going to be in play, and make the case for Trump's overall policies, not just focus on immigration, but do it on China, the economy, and immigration, particularly what he's trying to accomplish.
		I think that part of the caravan, I think, got overdramatized.
		And I also don't think that we did a particularly good job of empathy with the people coming up.
		Look, I'm as hard-line on immigration as you can possibly get, and that is to protect the sovereignty of this country, to have the rule of law, and particularly to protect—because I'm a populist—protect working-class Hispanic and African-American And so I think that there are solutions to solve it.
		The first, I think, is breaking the cartels.
		can't be on their backs, and that's where it's always going to be unless we solve this.
		And so I think that there are solutions to solve it.
		The first, I think, is breaking the cartels.
		That's why you have to have a zero-tolerance policy.
		But I do think that it got into too much, and what we can't do is demonize the people themselves.
		They're in horrible situations in these countries.
		We understand that, but we can't get into the business of economic migrants, and that's why we have to have more engagement, I think, in Central America to help sort this thing out.
		And the solution for these problems, to me, is on the southern border of Mexico and in the Triangle countries of Central America.
unidentified		Let me ask you a little bit about this.
		We jumped over it, but, you know, you leave at a certain point, and I wonder about that mission on immigration.
		Does that go with you?
		Does that—you know, do you find that there's more you can do outside?
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		As President Trump says, I'm his top student.
		So he—look, these are core issues with Trump from the beginning.
		This is why he ran for president.
		People forget.
		Look, this guy's 70 years old.
		He's a multi-billionaire.
		He's got a great family.
		He's buying championship golf courses throughout the world.
		I mean, this is—you know, this is not just a life well-lived.
		This is the way that you live your best life at the end of your career.
		You know, him to step into this cauldron and literally have his face ripped off every day, Right, is that it was—he felt it was a call and a duty.
		A big part of that is this whole situation with mass illegal immigration.
		It was one of the cornerstones of the campaign, the entire immigration, both the mass illegal and also the legal immigration issues.
		So no, this was core.
		Look, I do think, when I left and I went on the outside, because I thought I had—I took one year of my life, from basically August 14 to go on the campaign to August 14.
		I'm not a staff guy and I felt I'd have a lot more impact.
		And I think I've had more impact.
		I mean, one of the things we're doing is we have this group that's actually building a physical wall on the southern border.
		Now, we're augmenting President Trump's program.
		He and the Army Corps of Engineers are building big swaths of wall, which you need, but there's those niches in the mountains, in the deserts that the Army Corps either can't get to or they bypassed that you need to have built.
		And so I feel like I've been more active on the immigration issue on the outside.
		Now, I do admit you probably lost a little bit of the sting And Jeff Sessions was for a long time.
		maybe some of the debates that happen internally.
unidentified		But you've got somebody that's still there.
unidentified		I mean, Stephen is, and— And Jeff Sessions was for a long time.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Remember, all the problems that President Trump had, he and Sessions had over collusion
		and that part of the Justice Department.
		If you look at somebody that is actually implementing the Trump program,
		Stephen Miller's internal working group, OK, which really got under the hood inside
		the federal government in the apparatus, and that's why Stephen has kind of
		retreated from the public eye, because he's actually running something
		that's quite significant about actually getting stuff done.
		Jeff Sessions did the same thing.
		I mean, as far as the Trump agenda on immigration, He would have never had a better attorney general than he had with Jeff Sessions.
		I mean, those two, from the dinner we had, those two who stayed behind, at least for a while, really started to execute on the president's plan, and that's why I think we've made such tremendous strides.
		I mean, we've made huge strides on this whole immigration issue in the last couple of years.
		A lot of it unheralded, and that is because of Stephen Miller, Jeff Sessions, and the people at the working level that have made this work.
unidentified		Yeah, I mean, the legacy that Sessions leaves at Justice, for instance.
		I mean, the amount of work that he was doing there from day one.
		It's extraordinary.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Yes, I think that—I think you would say that immigration was the central organizing factor in the Justice Department to bring everything together to actually help execute on the president's plan.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		I think it's been extraordinary.
unidentified		And help me a little bit on that detail on what Stephen Miller is doing now with sort of stepping out of the public eye.
		I mean, we've tried to get to him for a few interviews for this project and it hasn't happened.
		But what is the mission?
		I mean, he still represents what you guys set out to do.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think he's accomplishing that.
		I think if you see what's happening, all the work that's being done, you know, and now you see it every now and again pop up into the public sphere.
		All of that work is coming out of the Stephen Miller Working Group.
		I mean, Stephen is a very detailed policy guy.
		You know, we got him on the—we got him on the campaign as a speechwriter.
		You know, a speechwriter is like his third hat.
		He's really—he was a policy guy.
		And so he's done—he really—immigration policy has been his thing for many, many, many years, you know, so it's—you know, at Capitol Hill.
		So even before he worked for Sessions.
		So he's, you know, and I think this working group he has has been very effective.
		It's been methodical.
		And it's also been below the radar, which I think has also been very helpful.
unidentified		Help me understand what you guys have accomplished at this point.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think if you start—look, first off, we've brought border security now up to the forefront, and he's building the wall.
		There'll be, what, 500 miles of replacement wall alone.
		And remember, replacement wall, they mock Trump all the time.
		Oh, you just replace—remember, the wall that's originally there, the Normandy barriers and others, were in the high-volume areas of coming across.
		So it's very important to do the replacement wall, and I think they're actually quite smart at doing that.
		Then he's got all this new wall.
		I mean, in Trump's administration, you're going to have—you're going to have— A lot of the wall built, plus you have enhanced awareness by Border Patrol of border security, also with ICE.
		You really have had a real execution on the issue of internal enforcement.
		And I realize that's been controversial.
		Of course, Democrats want to do away with ICE.
		They want to do away with Border Patrol.
		But he's done a real—he's done an effective job.
		I don't think they've quite gotten to the employees—the employers, excuse me, as they should.
		But I think they've done a very effective job.
		I think he's also started to bring up the whole—this controversy over economic asylum, which really was not addressed in the Obama administration.
		Remember, they say kids in cages and all that.
		That all started during Obama.
		In 2014, it was Breitbart, because Border Patrol came to us With the photographs, it was Breitbart that broke all of those stories about kids in cages with the Obama administration.
		We broke it, and then, you know, CNN and Huffington Post and the BBC jumped on it right away.
		And so this has been going on for a while, and I think now you're seeing some resolution of this, the whole accomplishment of the safe third party, of really getting an asylum system that works, that's going to work both for asylum seekers and for the people in the United States.
		I believe this is why President Trump—now, we got 29% of the Hispanic vote.
		I think President Trump, because of economic policies and his enforcement, is going to get, I believe, 40% of the Hispanic vote in 2020 because of these policies.
		So I think if you look at—we now have a couple of very innovative programs on legal immigration.
		I don't think they're hardline enough, but you're starting to see that debate and discussion with Tom Cotton and other people putting forward bills.
		So now you really have a policy and you have an engaged debate.
		And I don't—you know, you have Durbin, you have people on the left, they have an opinion, and look, they have political power, too.
		But now we're engaged in really a debate for years and years and years and years and years.
		We just let this drift.
		And you go down—everybody that watches this show should go down to the border.
		They should go to El Paso.
		They should go to the Rio Grande Valley.
		They should go to some of these border towns as Americans and talk to the people in these border towns, right?
		And now every town in the country is becoming a border town because of the influence of the cartels and the drugs and the human trafficking.
		But for many years we let this drift.
		And this is what I really admire about Trump, whether it's China, whether it's the Middle East, whether it's immigration.
		He's not going to let these problems drift.
		He's a businessman.
		Businesspeople are into providing solutions.
		He's not a politician.
		Politicians all talk, and they will let stuff drift.
		Right now, we actually are engaged as a nation, and I think in 2020 it's even going to be more of a centerpiece in the national debate, as it should be.
		You know, I believe, look, we're going to win some, we're going to lose some.
		You know, we lost in 18.
		We won in 16.
		That's what a democracy is about.
		But at least now it's a fully engaged debate about what the issues are, what the stakes are, and quite frankly, what direction we want to see the country go.
unidentified		How potent of an issue is immigration as we look to 2020?
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		I think it's going to be like in 2013, going back to that dinner where he said, hey, trade is number 100 and immigration is number three.
		2020 is going to be shaped, I think, by two things, by China and the trade, really the economic war in China, which brings in many elements of Iran, Saudi Arabia, all of that into one, and then immigration.
		And it's really about globalization versus This, to me, is going to be what the real debate is on 2020.
		come down to what is a nation?
		What is the sovereignty of a nation?
		What is it to mean to be a citizen?
		What type of deal should you have if you are a citizen?
		This to me is going to be what the real debate is on 2020.
		I think it's a great debate to have.
		And I think I know people have very different opinions on this.
		That's what a democracy is about.
		And I think that Trump is the perfect candidate for us to bring this up.
		And I think you're going to see on the Democratic side, as they select somebody that comes through their primaries, you're going to see—I think they're going to be a little more radicalized.
		I think you can already see this.
		But I think it's a great debate to have.
		And to me, those two will be the central defining elements of the 2020 campaign.
unidentified		So, lastly on immigration, I mean, this film starts off with the embassy meeting.
unidentified		Now we're seven years later, but at the point in which you sort of look back and you think about everything you set out to do at that meeting, everything you dreamed about doing, what did you accomplish?
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		How do you— If we had sat there that night, because the dinner went on for, you know, five hours or longer, If that night we had said that in the fall of 19 going into 20, we would have made this, these two issues, the centerpiece of American politics and, quite frankly, changed American politics.
		Remember, American politics today, what's going forward, you're either going to have populist nationalism or you're going to have populist socialism.
		But the populist movement, OK, which I think is great, Right?
		Even on the left, I'd rather have a populist than these elites of either side running things, that you have populism.
		And at that time, it was a word nobody knew.
		You know, nationalism was like this horrible word, right, to defend the nation-state.
		If we had said that dinner, oh, you know what, in seven or eight years, this will be the defining—this will be the nomenclature people use.
		And actually, the trade will be No.
		1, probably, about China, and immigration No.
		2, but both inextricably linked because, you know, they're two sides of the same coin, that we would be having that, and that—and that, you know, networks like PBS would be doing specials to talk about this.
		I would have said, well, then, Jeff, we definitely—you definitely got to run for president.
		Sessions was very wise that night.
		He says, I'm not the guy.
		But that person will come along, and these issues will be up and manifested in that, and I think we've seen that.
		I think we've seen that in American political history.
unidentified		I think you said that that figure was the imperfect instrument.
unidentified		Now, looking back?
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		He's the first—look, Donald, for all the grief he gets in the media, you know, he knows—he has human failings like everybody else.
		A lot of that's the false bravado and the false front in the Trump.
		You know, he didn't have to do this.
		It was a duty, I think, he felt.
		And he did it for his country.
		He's a patriot.
		And, you know, he's not perfect.
		None of us are perfect.
		But if you look at what he's accomplished, and particularly what I'm most proud of, is the stability he's offered.
		Let's take about those times he goes back and forth.
		There's still—it's the signal and the noise.
		The signal's very strong that this is going to be a big issue.
		We're not going to back down on it.
		We're going to solve it, but we're going to solve it in a way his default position, we're always going to solve it in favor of citizens.
		One of those citizens are Hispanic, African-American, Muslim.
		We're going to solve it on the side of the citizens, OK?
		And that is what a nation-state is, and that is what nationalism is.
		And so I think his default position, although I'm sure in this film you're going to see times he's doing it this way and that way, if you look at—that's the noise.
		The signal couldn't be stronger.
		And I think that's what we're going to come to ultimately.
		Look, he shifted the Overton window, right?
		We are now debating All the topics on Donald Trump's turf, OK?
		In January 2013, that looked like a pipe dream.

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