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Nov. 23, 2024 - Bannon's War Room

48:57

Episode 4078: Mainstream Meltdown Over MAGA Trump Cabinet; Taking Over The Treasury

Participants

Main voices

steve bannon

39:23

Appearances

scott bessent

01:20

Clips

jake tapper

00:08

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Show episode speakers

Speaker	Time	Text
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Are you implying that the Fed and the Treasury are working to basically infuse more liquidity into the system to help Biden in his re-election?
scott bessent ▲ ● ▼		I'm making two different—I am seeing the shades of gray.
		And with Yellen, she is a political appointee.
		In an editorial or a piece I wrote two years ago, three years ago, I called her one of America's great public servants.
		In my letter yesterday, I called her a political apparatchik.
		And she has crossed the Rubicon and is Clearly on a political mission.
unidentified		Scott Besant.
		Because all week long it's been who's going to be Donald Trump's Treasury Secretary.
		And even though there are many, many outlandish or unqualified picks, Scott Besant is a super qualified guy.
		Now, a week ago when the battle was between Howard Ludnick and Scott Besant, Ludnick's camp was trying to crush Besant because he once worked for George Soros.
		But the absurdity of that is, if you actually want someone, and I'm not saying you should, but if you want someone from the investment community, Anybody who's a true baller has either worked for Soros, Julian Robertson, or Michael Milken.
		That's where we are.
		So the argument that he was once with Soros is silly.
		But I want to ask you...
		Scott Besson is unlikely to buy in to the mega-tariffs and the plans that Donald Trump wants.
		And what we need is a Treasury Secretary who's going to create stability.
		So what's going to go down here?
		Well, we don't really know yet because Besson, like other people in the Trump camp, has talked out of both sides of their mouth on tariffs, okay?
		On the one side, they say, look, America used to be funded with tariffs.
		Alexander Hamilton was a tariff guy, so we're going to get funding from tariffs.
		On the other hand, they talk about it as a negotiation tool.
		You can't have tariffs as a revenue.
		In other words, we're going to spend based upon this revenue.
		If it's a negotiation tool, in other words, we can get rid of it if somebody else is going to lower their tariffs and create free trade.
		So we don't really know what they're after.
scott bessent ▲ ● ▼		On the other side, I would point out that Steven Mnuchin, the President Trump's Treasury secretary, did what was extremely prudent during COVID.
		You know, he left office on January 19th, January 20, 2021. There was $1.6 trillion in that account because of the COVID crisis.
		Again, this is a buffer.
unidentified		Wow.
scott bessent ▲ ● ▼		The Treasury Secretary and the Federal Reserve Chair are risk management positions.
scott bessent ▲ ● ▼		Are you willing to risk the liquidity of the U.S. government to get your president re-elected?
unidentified		Wow.
		There can be very, very different treasury secretaries.
		Some end up being a pillar in the administration that end up advising the president having a center of power on their own.
		Others end up just simply doing the bidding of the president.
		Oh, this is a great point.
		So we don't know yet.
		First of all, we don't know what the policy is that could be asked to defend.
		When you talk about telegenic or not telegenic, I wonder about whether or not this person in that position is going to be somebody who is going to stop or foster the president from taking extra constitutional measures.
		That's the most important question.
		He had certain people in his first administration who stopped that from happening.
		And when you talk about normal, I think, Donnie, what you may mean is that somebody who can stop the president from deploying the military against American civilians.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		People should understand that outside the chief of staff, the second most important job in the American government is the director of office of management and budget.
		That coordinates all of federal spending, every program.
		It's an immense and it's a huge staff.
		It's a quite complicated but very important job.
		We've all been told, right, that Francis Collins and Tony Fauci are, you can't get to them.
		That no control over them, no management of them.
		They had this massive budget.
		They're like lords of the manor up there in Capitol Hill and nobody crosses them.
		Russ, what happened during your time at OMB with this part of the medical administrative state in our government?
unidentified		Steve, thanks for having me.
		That's exactly what I saw, is I saw a National Institute for Health that you could not get them to do reforms, you could not get them to accept cuts.
		If you propose reforms to them, they would go straight to the hill and say this is not something that we're willing to accept.
		They wouldn't send things to the Office of Management and Budget so that we could do the job that we're supposed to do for a president to make sure That anything that they're going to do in an agency aligns with what the president actually believes.
		This is what the administration, administrative state is.
		This is what the Imperial Congress does.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		That's Russ!
unidentified		And he's going to be right there at OMB to execute that plan.
		A bunch of, some of these people work for him.
		Now, Donald Trump tapped former NFL player Scott Turner to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
		Turner is a leader at the America First Policy Institute, a group that, like Project 2025, has been planning for months to overhaul the federal government in a second Trump term.
		The president-elect named far-right conspiracy theorist Sebastian Gorka to a key national security role and a Fox contributor as his Surgeon General pick.
		Rounding out the list, Trump will nominate Scott Besant, a billionaire hedge fund executive and top campaign fundraiser, to be his treasury secretary.
		Back in the days when, I don't know, journalists sort of mattered, right?
		They still do.
		Thank you very much.
		Hold on a minute.
		I'm sorry.
		When you say that, that is the greatest gift to Steve Bannon, who wants to destroy all journalists.
		So I'm going to kick you right out of here.
		The point I would make is accurate, but I'll let you finish.
		When we were to get a hint or a whiff of a conflict, it would blow up into a very big deal.
		True, true.
		It is just not the case anymore.
		I don't know why that is.
		I don't mean to denigrate journalism.
		I'm a lifelong journalist.
		I'm a huge supporter of journalism, but I just don't know where and how it matters anymore.
		People care about their problems being solved.
		If my bread costs less and I'm not worried about immigration and I don't feel quite as bad, they don't even know what a conflict of interest is.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		This is the primal scream of a dying regime.
unidentified		Pray for our enemies, because we're going medieval on these people.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Here's another time I got a free shot at all these networks lying about the people.
unidentified		The people have had a belly full of it.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		I know you don't like hearing that.
		I know you try to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it.
		It's going to happen.
jake tapper ▲ ● ▼		And where do people like that go to share the big lie?
unidentified		MAGA Media.
jake tapper ▲ ● ▼		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.
unidentified		Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		It's Saturday, 23 November in the year of our Lord, 2024. I gotta give a hat tip to our, uh, the production staff here.
		Fantastic.
		The content staff here, um...
		Because we don't know how much longer we're going to have them.
		I think they may step in and actually help save this country by going into the administration.
		Wow.
		That's one of the best, if not the best, cold open I've ever seen.
		Kind of going down through the years, starting back in February of 2021 with the Russ vote, who came on here to walk through everything related to the pandemic and what President Trump had done and, of course, what Biden was doing and the blockage they got with Tony Fauci, etc.
		Had Scott Besson's first appearance, I think it was January of 2024. First time he started doing media.
		And, of course, all of it.
		I'm going to play different parts that we're going to talk about what's important here.
		The signal, not the noise.
		But I do want to say one thing.
		Stephanie Rule, if we can get ready to replay that.
		I start my day...
		After doing my early, early pre-dawn, you know, routine, and then catching my news, I start my day with Mika, and I end my day with Stephanie Ruhl.
		I watch her show every night.
		So, Stephanie, don't worry about, you know, going to give...
		Yes.
		Overall, the media is the enemy.
unidentified		Right?
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		And, you know, you're a hater, although with a small H, not a capital H like Mika.
		But, you know, and we're kind of sad that MSNBC is getting spun off, and we're sad that Rachel Maddow had to take a $5 million cut.
		She was making, what, $30 million a year.
		One night a week.
		Nice work if you can get it.
		That's kind of populist, isn't it?
		We start with Mika, and we end with Stephanie.
		And I actually think that Stephanie may one day, what I would recommend strongly, strongly, MSNBC, get your rings up.
		Dump Joe in the intern problem.
		You know, President Trump, Gates and President Trump kind of went separate ways for a while.
		Maybe some issues, couldn't get the votes.
		Joe's deal baggage, Mika.
		He's deal baggage.
		Cut him loose, get Stephanie Ruhle, and, you know, have her co-host, have her barrier wingman.
		The show's ratings will skyrocket because Stephanie Ruhle's a former investment banker.
		You have to have, and to take on the administrative state and the deep state, and to basically get the country back on a correct footing, you need, every administration, you've got to have fire breathers and you have to have steady yetis.
		You've got to have some people that are just the stability, organized, going to do it.
		But you also need those that bring the heat, like a Pete Hegseth, like a Matt Gaetz, like a Kristi Noem, like an RFK Jr., like a Tulsi Gabbard, just to pick some random names.
		Because the way the government works in the cabinet positions, the cabinet positions You're essentially helping craft the direction of the government and the direction of President Trump's second term in Trumpism in the age of Trump, because this is where we are.
		But mainly those jobs are jobs where you're trying to communicate.
		You're trying to communicate to the American people.
		You're trying to communicate to our allies.
		You're trying to connect with media and global media.
		You're trying to connect with foreign leaders geostrategically so they understand the direction we're going.
		And you have to make it smart and you have to make it accessible.
		And that's a very rare gift.
		And that's why he has something.
		President Trump, he's the best.
		This is why I call him a McLuhan-esque figure.
		What do I mean by that?
		It's all from Marshall McLuhan, a professor at Washington University out in St. Louis who became the genius of kind of modern communications theory back in the 1950s with the rise of television coming off of radio.
		The first two real mass communication Apparatus that we had that changed the direction of the world, right?
		So, and he's McClellan-esque in that he knows in modernity, in the modern world, so much of this is mass communications, and it is connecting with, and particularly in a democratic form of government or in a constitutional republic that, you know, goes forward with democracy, which is 50% plus one vote.
		Kind of winner take all.
		That you have to communicate.
		And you have to be able to communicate and drive the narrative with your ideas.
		And then you follow them up with the execution of those ideas.
		That's what President Trump understands.
		In this, in the government, and I said that back when Russ first came on here.
		In February of 2021, Russ Vogt's first hit.
		I'd known Russ for years.
		He was the deputy.
		He had been around and been, I think, chief of staff, been on the Hill.
		I met him when he was Mulvaney's deputy at OMB.
		The deputy kind of runs the shop.
		And OMB was so important to me because as a young naval officer, I came out of the fleet, out of the Pacific fleet, the 7th fleet, off my ship.
		We were in the, I guess, the North Arabian Sea and Persian Gulf towards the end during the hostage crisis.
		And I came back as a special assistant.
		We can just take that down just one toe.
		Fine.
		Good.
		Right underneath the voice.
		Perfect.
		We're going to go out with Nicole McGrady, who graced us as a photographer.
		She came to the Dan Floyd's book open the other day and took some tremendous photographs.
		of Dan Flett's launch of his photography book.
		I came back as a Special Assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations over in the Pentagon.
		I showed up, went to President Reagan's inauguration and then showed up for work the next day.
		It became very evident to me as a young man because the Reagan administration started and they had a young guy named David Stockman In a job called OMB that nobody understood what it was.
		I think it came up, I think it was a job created I think in the 60s or 70s.
		David Stockman essentially ran the government, became the most important guy initially in the Reagan administration.
		Office of Management budget coordinates everything and President Trump has announced a quite frankly a quite serious Team of executives to basically get the finances of this country set and unlock the economic powerhouse that we are, the entrepreneurial economic powerhouse that we are.
		Office of Management Budget.
		Russ Vogt will return.
	He was President Trump's OMB Director for, I think, the last two years of the administration, first term.
	Scott Bessent is now going to be, I think, the 79th Secretary of Treasury, following in a long line from Alexander Hamilton.
	Also, Sebastian, Dr. Gorka, frequent contributor on the show.
	We used to carve out a time every week to have him on.
	He is Deputy National Security Director for Counterterrorism, where Seb has worked for decades and decades and decades.
	Short break.
unidentified		Back in a moment.
		All week long, it's been who's going to be Donald Trump's Treasury Secretary.
		And even though there are many, many outlandish or unqualified picks, Scott Besant is a super qualified guy.
		Now, a week ago, when the battle was between Howard Lutnick and Scott Besant, Lutnick's camp was trying to crush Besant because he once worked for George Soros.
		But the absurdity of that is, if you actually want someone, and I'm not saying you should, but if you want someone from the investment community, Anybody who's a true baller has either worked for Soros, Julian Robertson, or Michael Milken.
		That's where we are.
		So the argument that he was once with Soros is silly.
		But I want to ask you, Scott Besson is unlikely to buy in to the mega-tariffs and the plans that Donald Trump wants.
		And what we need is a Treasury Secretary who's going to create stability.
		So what's going to go down here?
		Well, we don't really know yet because Besson, like other people in the Trump camp, has talked out of both sides of their mouth on tariffs, okay?
		On the one side, they say, look, America used to be funded with tariffs.
		Alexander Hamilton was a tariff guy, so we're going to get funding from tariffs.
		On the other hand, they talk about it as a negotiation It's a negotiation tool.
		You can't have tariffs as a revenue.
		In other words, we're going to spend based upon this revenue.
		If it's a negotiation tool, in other words, we can get rid of it if somebody else is going to lower their tariffs and will create free trade.
		So we don't really know what they're after.
		Well, I mean, it's the scene in, what's his name?
		Spares Bueller's Day Off.
		Like, you know, anybody, anybody, did this tariff help?
		No.
		It pushed us further into a recession or a depression.
		Haven't we learned our lesson?
		He loves it on the campaign trail, because for people who don't know how it works, you know, it goes back to the America first, made in America, and the question will be, does he really do it?
		Remember the movie from Young Frankenstein, Abby Normal?
		Yes.
		Okay, there's the Abby Normal ones, we know which one.
		This is a normal one.
		This is a solid one, and to your point earlier, the thing about him that maybe separated him from Rowan and...
		And the other guy is that he was the most loyal of the bunch.
		That's coming from you.
		So that seems to be the thread that's kind of pulling everybody together.
		I don't know how he is telegenically, because that's the other thread.
		If you look at just about every one of his other picks.
		Now, Treasury is not out in front as much as some of the other types of picks, but it'll be interesting to see.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Okay, if you go to Getter, I think I put up, if you pull that, that the critical path here Is that you have the CR, so the government runs out of money on the 20th of December.
		And there's two schools of thought up, I think, right now, they're looking to kick it into the first part of the Trump, the first, they kick it into the first 90 days of the Trump second term.
		That would be to kick it past January 20th.
		So President Trump, OMB, Treasury, all of it, all his cabinet heads have it working with Capitol Hill and the appropriations bills.
		They're also talking about maybe slipping in an omnibus.
		Now, this city, everybody's gone.
		Everybody's left and kind of gone for Thanksgiving, the House and the Senate.
		There are some people working.
		The transition folks are working.
		But unless they're doing it behind the scenes, and they could well be doing it behind the scenes because there is a school of thought.
		And when you hear people say, oh, we want to clear the decks for President Trump, that's Washington talk for we want to get a last payday for our lobbyists, right?
		We want to make sure the lobbyists get paid the last time before Trump comes in with more serious people about this.
		So let's assume for purposes of this discussion that it gets kicked into the first 100 days of Trump.
		So you got to do a budget and you have to, you know, worry about what that budget is going to be deficit because there's going to be a, you know, a tax number that's around, I don't know, four and a half or five trillion.
		And the spending now looks like I think under Biden is six, six and a half train.
		So you have a gap of one to one and a half trillion dollars.
		So that's December 20th, we run out of money, and something has to be done, either an omnibus bill or another CR. On 2 January, actually technically the way the edit said it was in the first 10 days of Trump's administration, technically I believe, and I think this number is correct, That the McCarthy deal runs out essentially on the day after, the first day back from the Christmas holidays, I think it's January 2nd or January 3rd, that we hit the debt ceiling.
		Now the Secretary of Treasury, which at the time will still be Janet Yellen, Can manage, as we said, receipts.
		In fact, where I first met Russ Vogt, or really shouldn't say met Russ Vogt, but spent time with Russ Vogt, was in May and June of 2017, when we knew that we were going to hit the debt ceiling and have to come up with a new budget on September 30th.
		We were thinking downrange.
		Russ Vogt's the first guy that kind of broke down.
		I talked to him, and he came down and broke down what we call the waterfall.
		Because cash is coming in on tax receipts, on tariffs, on fees, on revenues all the time throughout the year.
		Obviously there's some big payment times I guess around April 15th and other times where you get a ton of cash but cash comes in the entire time.
		And to make sure you don't default on government securities.
		You've got to pay the interest, and sometimes these things roll over.
		You have to pay the short-term notes or roll them over and refinance them.
		You have to apply that cash.
		It's like you're doing any bankruptcy or a company that's getting close and getting some financial problems.
		You prioritize your payments.
		And Russ walked through the mechanics of how, hey, this is the waterfall.
		This is how cash comes in.
		And we kind of worked out a plan that you can go a pretty long time.
		My point.
		On January 2nd, we don't run out of cash.
		Now, the government's out of actual money to spend on the 20th.
		I think that CR will get kicked into the Trump administration.
		Then he hit the debt ceiling.
		But you're going to have cash coming in, and you can manage that for a while.
		Back when President Trump, I think, hit the debt ceiling under Mnuchin, I think they went three or four months at least.
		And you can stretch it out.
		The cash comes in.
		You can do some very smart things.
		And, of course, that's part of in this transition when we say you have landing teams and then beachhead teams.
		Remember, a landing team and a beachhead team.
		This is one of the things I think the landing team, and I assume once they get these technical details worked out about transition, which I understand I don't think are totally worked out yet.
		The meetings between this and between Treasury, I think, in that handoff, because remember, you've got to relieve the watch.
		You've got to relieve the watch on January 20th.
		In the relieving the watch process, that will be a big one for Treasury, obviously.
		And then you've got to deal with the debt ceiling.
		Because you've got a debt ceiling, and then all of a sudden you're going to pass a budget that somehow is going to have...
		At least a trillion dollar deficit.
		Kobayashi just pointed out that we've added over two trillion dollars just in the last 12 months.
		His tweet the other day laid out it was two trillion dollars and we're on a path at one time of a trillion dollars every hundred days.
unidentified		If you stretch it out.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Point is, you're going to have at least another trillion dollars added to the national debt.
		There was also a report yesterday—oh, it was up on the great Citizens Free Press.
		And, of course, that's one of the things we go to.
		I go to, obviously, multiple times a day.
		If you start with Morning Mika, you've got to keep your eye on Citizens Free Press and Breitbart and Revolver and, you know, the Gateway Pundit, all the great sites that we have, news sites.
		The projection is you could hit $50 trillion at the end of these four years.
		That's another basically $12 or $13 trillion now.
		I have not done the back of the envelope math to verify that, but we're on an unsustainable path.
		And this is what President Trump's walking into.
		Now, on top of all that, and I think this is April 15th, the tax year, when taxes have to be paid, I believe on April 15th or thereabouts, you basically have the reversion of the tax cuts, the Trump tax cuts, that were the fundamental bedrock of the Trump economy.
		And when people vote, And when people were in the ballot bar, and they did the exit polls, so many working class and middle class people said, hey, I'd like to go back to the economy of 18 and 19, where we had low inflation, we had low interest rates, you had full employment, because I think unemployment was under 3%, or around 3%.
		You had African American and Hispanic employment were all-time highs.
		You had wages For unskilled workers rising at record rates, I think you had, definitely for the first time in history, blue-collar worker wages rising faster than white-collar.
		Non-college graduates higher than college graduates, but college graduates and white-collar are rising also.
		And what people never give them credit for.
		Janet Yellen, who was the chairman of the Federal Reserve, was actually taking liquidity out of the market.
		Remember, we talk about the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve after 2008. They put all this debt on just to force liquidity cash into the system to save the system.
		It's up to, I think, $8 trillion, and they may have taken it down to $6.5 or $7 trillion now.
		But Janet Yellen, at the time, President Trump inherited liquidity.
		I think it was $3.5 trillion on the Fed's balance sheet that Obama had used and Geithner had used and Bernanke had used, his team had used to infuse the system with cash.
		To avoid a meltdown, a financial collapse.
		Yellen, in Trump's second and third year, starting the first year, started doing what you call quantitative tightening.
		She was taking liquidity out of the system.
		They took almost a trillion dollars of liquidity.
		That's a headwind.
		That's a headwind.
		And you do that so you can start to deflate.
		So you don't have asset inflation.
		You don't have some sort of bubble.
		You try to take the air out of the balloon slowly.
		And this was President Trump's economic plan.
		That was all laid in in the first days of 2017, really 2016.
		The same time we're talking about now for the second term was when the economic plan and the tax cuts and the deregulation were all kind of laid in.
		And that was the predicate that was laid in in 2017 because it takes a while to kick in.
		It kicked in in the second half of 18 all through 19.
		And so by Christmas of 19, you were like a house of fire on an economy.
		And then the pandemic hit, right?
		The pandemic hit.
		President Trump was heading towards a roaring reelection in the fall of 2019 because of where the economy was.
		World peace in an economy that was on fire. - Okay.
		Okay.
		Philip Patrick's going to be with us later.
		We're going to talk about a lot of these topics.
		Birchgold.com slash Bannon.
		End of the dollar empire.
		Understand that we're the prime reserve currency.
		And no Rachel Maddow and your producers, you get it wrong again.
		We're actually trying to save the dollar.
		We're saying the elites in this country are destroying the dollar.
		That's why I call it Welcome to Thunderdome.
		These fights we're going to have over budget and money because money is power in this town.
		The currency of power.
		Birchgold.com.
		Check it out.
		Or Bannon at 989898-TEX. Short break.
		Back in the warm in a moment.
unidentified		Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon.
unidentified		Okay.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		If you look at the Getter post, I'd then call it Welcome to Thunderdome because I gave this speech a year ago in Pinehurst to the Cleta Mitchell had me down and my kid sister.
		Let me down for the Republican club there.
		In the whole speech was the convergence of two things that are going to happen upon President Trump assuming his second term.
		Yes, called shot back in November of 23, like from the very beginning.
		We knew President Trump was going to return.
		He said, hey, here's what's going to happen.
		You're going to have this financial and economic crisis that's been building and they're exacerbating it.
		Also, you should know, and I'll have more details next week, but they're playing all kind of games right now.
		And these are deeply serious games with the system to try to chop block Trump.
		Biden, in the administrative state and the deep state, absolutely, Biden, let's set that aside, it's kind of irrelevant, him.
		The administrative and deep state, because they're the enemy here, they are absolutely bound and determined to make sure that President Trump, one, can't govern, and two, his second term is a failure.
		So when they're sitting up there saying, oh, we have to have unity in one America, it's all crap.
		It's a bald-faced lie.
		And you can tell on three, at least three major components.
		Number one, what they're trying to do at the southern border to still get as many people through here as possible and cause even more chaos.
unidentified		Okay?
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		Number one, including even a nap.
		Number two is what they're doing financially.
		They're playing all kind of games right now with America's debt and what's going on, and that's all going to be sorted out.
		We'll be able to give you more details about that, but stand by that of what they're doing and playing games right now to make sure that President Trump hits the wall right of the box.
		What I call Thunderdome, right of the box in his second term.
		And number three is this metastasizing and, quite frankly, incredibly dangerous, incredibly dangerous what they're doing in Ukraine.
		And, of course, the International Criminal Court has indicted Bibi and, I think, his war minister, Minister of Defense, also.
		What's happening in this Ukraine is as scary as it gets.
		Because now you have a place where conflict has run rampant in the 20th century.
		They call that part of Ukraine and Belarus and Russia, that kind of area down by Stalingrad and Kursk, with Belarus right there in Ukraine, in that part of Eastern Europe all the way running up to Poland, it's called the bloodlands.
		There's an amazing book that kind of goes through this.
		It's called The Bloodlands, and it's just not World War II. It started well before that.
		It started really with the Bolsheviks and their revolution, and then the starvation of 5 million, the murder, essentially by starvation of 5 million Ukrainians.
		By the Bolsheviks in the 1930s.
		Okay?
		By starvation.
		In an act of conscious.
		Over there in the bloodlands.
		And hey, when that place spins out of control, it can spin.
		Hard.
		It's spinning out of control now.
		Egged on by Biden.
		So those three lines of work.
		The integrity of the southern border, which they've already obviously initiated and exacerbated an evasion is one of the reasons they got tossed by some of the reasons the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas is now MAGA. From being blue and then purple, it's now MAGA. Because those folks are American citizens.
		They say, hey, we'd like to have a little protection down here.
		You got all this what's happening on the balance sheet and this debt.
		When you're at $36 trillion and you're adding it like you're adding it, and interest is over a trillion dollars, and you got over a trillion dollar defense budget to support the American empire, the scale of this is called the law of large numbers, right?
		You can get whipsawed.
		You can get whipsawed.
		And just the ability to take corrective action doesn't happen overnight.
		Just to work its way through the system takes a while.
		Not simply to make the decisions, make sure the decisions go through the system, but it's like turning an aircraft carrier around.
		I was on a destroyer.
		Destroyer's like a sports car.
		You put the rudder over, boom!
		Put an engine back.
		You can pivot like that.
		You can't do that with an aircraft carrier.
		The American economy, the American capital markets, and the whole thing at the Fed and the Treasury, that's an aircraft carrier.
		You put the rudder over hard to, like, we've got to make a course change.
		It takes a while to kick in.
		It just does.
		And then you have this geopolitical situation in the Eurasian landmass.
		That's that side.
		I've got Thayer coming up.
		Because two other very important things.
		Thayer's coming up.
		I'm trying to get Dr. Thayer on here for a few minutes at the top of the hour.
		I haven't had time really to drill down on a lot of it.
		We've been accumulating, talking to people behind the scenes, but down at APEC in, I think it was Peru, right?
		Peru, with this regional meeting that Biden went to, she lays out the four red lines.
		That the Americans must agree to, if we're to have joint co-prosperity to pull a term from World War II or the lead up to World War II, the Japanese called Asia the co-prosperity sphere before they ran the tables in 1941 to try to control it all.
		The Chinese are laying at the same thing.
		For us to be kind of partners in developing the world together, you have to agree to the four things.
		One of them is Taiwan, in that it's a region, it's a province of China, which means they really have control, essentially, of the advanced chip design, and we're just going to have to live with it.
		They won't do a military invasion, but we have to agree that it's just a province, not an independent country, okay?
		Number one.
		Number two, and this is the tell in the ticking time bomb.
		It's the reason we had the new federal state, guys.
		It's one of the reasons I was a co-founder of the new federal state of China.
		That Lao Beijing, all this talk of democracy and all this talk of freedom and all this talk of self-determination has to stop.
		Inside the Chinese Communist Party, the thing that they fear and they're spending all their time on is the thing called legitimacy.
		They understand that the United States essentially handed the country After backing the Kuomintang and Chiang Kai-shek after the war, the war didn't end in China until the Civil War played in 1949. And whoop!
		Right out of the box, they set the Korean War, which is all because of the Chinese.
	Because we finally ended up fighting the Chinese military.
	So I would argue that, hey, the Korean War is just the tail end of the fighting in World War II when you really look at it.
	We handed it over to the Chinese Communists in 1949. Yes, we did.
	And a guy named Senator McCarthy called him out.
	And laid it out on the Senate floor, and General Marshall quit 90 days later.
	That's called a scalp.
	And of course, the Chinese people revolted in 1989 at the same time the Russian people revolted.
	And Tiananmen Square happened in June of 1989, and six months later, the Berlin Wall came down.
	Nobody ever makes that connection.
	Ever.
	Why do we make it here?
	Because, wait for it, the Russian people and the Chinese people, I'm talking about the everyday Russian peasant, serf, person there, that fought in the trenches of World War II, exactly with Lao Bajing, the common man in China, have been our allies and are our allies.
	Their countries are not our allies because they're run by gangsters.
	Gangsters that, quite frankly, we installed.
	Yes, yes, yes.
	In 1989, when it was all about to fall in Tiananmen Square and they had these riots all over there, Bush sent Scowcroft 30 days after and said, yo, if you chill here and quit running tanks over, you know, tank man...
	We can cut a deal and let you in the, you know, because we can let you in the World Trade Organization.
	We can give you most favored nation status and Wall Street, these wolves on Wall Street to start shipping all these jobs over here because you can pay slave wages.
	And we like slave wages because we have higher gross margins.
	Right?
	Pretty simple.
	That means we're going to make more money.
	We're going to screw the Lao Bai Jing of America, the common man, and we're going to screw the Lao Bai Jing of China because they're going to be slaves, but hey, tough break for some swell guys and gals.
	So right now, they don't want that democracy.
	That's the key.
	You want to get peace and prosperity in the world?
	Support Lao Beijing from overthrowing these dictators.
	And they're worse than Hitler.
	You can't ever say anybody's worse than Hitler.
	Well, hey, the Chinese Communist Party's killed a couple hundred million of Chinese.
	Let me repeat that.
	As much as they did in Korea and some of the backing they did in Vietnam, although that was mostly the Russians, they've killed a couple hundred million of their own people, starved them to death, you know, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, just starving.
	Mao was sat there all the time to say, let's get some nuclear weapons.
	Hey, if they kill a couple hundred million of our people, we'll recreate, not a problem.
	Got less males to feed.
	They did the one-child policy.
	So geopolitically, geostrategically, and with the balance sheet of our country, 2025, as 2024 has been, but 2025 is going to roll in to be one of the most important years in the history of our nation.
	Because there, the cavalry's finally arrived.
	Donald Trump is the John Wayne of this.
unidentified		Look at the old John Ford movies.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		You know, Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Rio Grande, the three, the Cavalry Trilogy.
		It's John Wayne.
		Well, that's Donald Trump.
		I'd actually argue the searchers.
		He's John Wayne.
		He's Ethan, was it Ethan Allen?
		Not Ethan Allen.
unidentified		Ethan.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		He's the John Wayne character.
		The Cavalry finally came for the homesteaders.
		Right?
		They were under siege.
		But they're playing games all the time, and that's why these financial announcements of these people with the team around Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, and the White House Counsel's Office...
		And hey, here at the War Room, we're going to have to...
		The show's going to stay the same for you guys at home, but we're going to have to revamp.
		We know that.
		Why?
		A ton of our contributors, people coming here all the time, they're giving you great information.
		They're going to go in the Trump administration, as they should.
		I tell everybody...
		Hey, run to the sound of the guns.
		Right now, President Trump needs support.
		There's plenty of work to do.
		And plenty of billets.
		There's 4,000.
		Saddle up.
		Get up there and support him.
		Because, man, there's a lot of work to do and not a lot of time to get it done.
		You have to move with urgency.
		We've probably got a year to get stuff done.
		Probably.
		A year.
		Ride to the sound of the guns.
		Get down there.
		Get a job.
		Get to Washington.
		Get in and do it.
		And with our production team, too.
		But we'll be fine.
		We'll figure it out.
		Hell, we figured it out.
		The guys did such a magnificent...
		Men and women here did such a magnificent job during my four months in a federal prison.
		Didn't miss a beat.
		Well, now they're back in the saddle.
		I'll commit to them.
		I'll be next man up.
		How about that?
		We won't miss a beat here.
		But this is deadly serious.
		And we pride ourselves on covering this in a serious way.
		We're not going to chase shiny toys.
		We're not going to chase shiny ponies.
		This country hangs in the balance.
		And don't think that they're sitting there just clapping of President Trump.
		Why are we talking about the unitary theory of the executive?
		Write this down, Warren Posse.
		This is nomenclature.
		Unitary theory of the executive.
		And you've got all kinds of things that are going to fall off that.
		This whole thing about the executive can actually put, with the House, can put the Senate into recess.
		Or the impoundment issue.
		Stay tuned for Russ's vote and maybe, I don't know, a random guy like a Mark Paoletta, just don't add a random name, over hammering on impoundment.
		And folks, I know this, they're all on MSNBC saying, oh, they're going to go to, hey, let's roll.
		Let's go to the Supreme Court.
		We got the Chevron exemption deference overturned to take down the administrative state brick by brick.
		Some of these are going to be challenged.
		I got it.
		I think they should be challenged.
		We need some clarity.
		This is why it's so important to stop those judges up there on the hill in the Senate.
		I'm still not sure.
	I think we won.
	We definitely got the four appellate judges that didn't get there.
	I'm not so sure I count it as a total victory.
	I'm counting it as a mini-victory.
	But this is where the fight's going to be.
	The fight's going to be on money and power and geopolitics.
	You're going to get the woke stuff, all that.
	I'm not saying those are shiny toys.
	They're not.
	And they're important.
	But that's not the main thing.
	You've got to get the de-woke out and change what they tried to do as Bolsheviks to destroy the customs and traditions.
	The Four Olds is what they call it in China.
	The CCP went after it.
	The Four Olds, our traditions, our customs, all of that.
	You've got to do that.
	But you've got some other work you've got to get done.
	Or we're going to distinguish our crap sideways.
	Short break.
	break back in a moment welcome back even Ethan Edwards, the engine room tells me.
	I should remember that.
	Ethan Edwards at the searchers.
	Um...
	So those are, and Natalie and Mike Benz and Darren Beattie are doing an amazing job talking about the resistance.
	So there's many different angles of attack, as they should.
	These people have a different philosophy about the country.
	They have a different philosophy about the governance of the country.
	Hey, that's fine.
	It's called democracy.
	We're ascendant and we're winning and they've abandoned their voting base.
	That's where they're all up there every day.
	You know what the word is now?
	Oh, we need more populism.
	Hang on.
	How populist are you going to be when you're controlled by a bunch of left-wing billionaires and you have the credential class all up in the, you know, all these people that get all these phony college degrees and they've got to be, oh, they work at marketing companies and they're going to do this.
	You control the credential class, particularly, let's face it, low information, relatively low propensity, Taylor Swift crowd.
	Didn't work out for you, did it?
	Nope.
unidentified		Nope.
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		And you have abandoned your voting base because you're just not that into economics and you're certainly not into economics where the working class, the middle class, the people actually put their shoulders to the wheel every day, get a piece of the action.
		Pretty simple.
		Pretty basic.
		And, oh yes, like ideas like the underpinnings of the Judeo-Christian West as far as our values go, and they like the idea of sovereignty and territorial integrity and self-determination, the kinds of things you're shipping tens of billions and hundreds of billions of dollars over to Ukraine as a globalist to do, they like that here in the Rio Grande Valley.
		And as long as we deliver, and I think you're seeing President Trump putting a team together that will deliver, On both security and border security and making sure that some American citizens are taken care of first, not foreigners, and certainly not people that have come to the country illegally.
		And this is why it's not the people's fault either.
		Those folks, by and large, 99% is not their fault.
		They're invited in.
		Of course, if you and I were in the same situation, we'd run after El Norte.
		The people, and it's a crime, We're the people that did it, initiated it, conceived it, initiated it and exacerbated it.
		That's a crime.
		That's a crime.
		And that has to be investigated.
		And look, just because Pam Bondi doesn't come at you and in your face like a Matt Gaetz, don't think she's not tough enough.
		And the team around her tough enough.
		And the team coming out of the White House Counsel's Office is tough enough to pursue where it needs to be pursued.
		There's no retribution here.
		But there has to be accountability.
		There has to be accountability.
		Big piece in the New York Times, they say, hey, the whole thing on Democrats is all based on legal strategy.
		Put Trump in prison.
		Put the people around him in prison.
		Put Bannon in prison.
		How'd that work out for you?
		How'd send him in prison?
		Did that work out fine, Nancy?
		Did that work out good?
		How good did that work out?
		Trying to put President Trump in prison?
		How'd that work out for you?
		Navarro, did that work out well?
		We won.
		You lost.
		Okay?
		And not only lost.
		You lost and got blamed for the losing.
		Got blamed for it.
		And now you're a pariah on your side of the football.
		And President Trump comes in here and is trying to, with all this resistance of all these NGOs and outside groups and all this and the administrative state, and that's what the unitary theory of the executive is.
		It's to say, within the executive branch, we have to get something straight and we gotta get it straight up front.
		The Constitution's got three jobs the guy called the President is elected to do.
		He's the chief executive officer of the government.
		He's commander-in-chief of the armed forces.
		The military services report to civilian control who the people elect.
		And he's the chief magistrate and the chief law enforcement officer of the United States government.
		They have not wanted to admit to that since Nixon and Watergate where they basically hoved off The Justice Department to be their own deal.
		Because they understood how powerful they had when they had Kennedy.
		They had Bobby and Jack.
		They couldn't go back to that, but they're going to do it their own way.
		Take it away from the executive and make it a permanent part, a permanent center.
		Because everything that's come through justice, make it a permanent center of power.
		We're breaking that.
		That is the purpose of this exercise.
		And yes, Weissman and all you guys, you can whine and you can cry and you throw your toys out of the pram.
		That is going to happen because we have hammers, right?
		Whether that hammer is Todd Blanch or Emil Bovee or the administrative guys or pay a letter over at OMB or Bill McGinley, the White House Counsel's Office, and hundreds and hundreds of more.
		That are coming in and understand what the administrative state is, how you've had a fourth branch of government to essentially enslave, destroy and enslave the American people.
		This is how you did it, and it's being broken up.
		And President Trump is that blunt force instrument that is leaving blunt force trauma on you.
		And this, we're just at the top of the first inning.
		Heck, I haven't even gotten to the good stuff yet.
		But these people, they have a different philosophy.
		They've built an empire and they control that empire.
		We're kind of the rebel forces or the outlaw forces to do this against the dark star.
	Hey, and the odds are long still, folks, of whether it can actually be done or not because they still have their grip on the levers of power and the levers of money.
	So don't think this thing's far from certain.
	That's what I'll tell everybody.
	If you want to help out, clearly on the outside, the Warren Posse and others, all these great groups have been outside.
	But if you got a hankering to help out, there's plenty of jobs.
	And President Trump needs support, gonna need support.
	Because remember, there's two and a half million employees, civilian employees, bureaucrats, a couple of million in the military.
	Four or five million contractors at levels of kind of mayoral expertise, what consultants do.
	I added up that there's 10 million.
	Other people say there's 10s of me.
	I think it's about 10 million, but that's a lot of folks controlled by 4,000 political appointees, 3,000 President Trump.
	Hopefully, with Sergio Gore and the team down there doing such a great job, as many as 1,000 or more hit the beach on the afternoon of the 20th of January.
	I will continue this in the second hour.
	We've got a lot to do.
	Philip Patrick's going to join us.
	Hopefully Bradley Thayer, maybe Matt Schlapper.
	It's going down in Brazil.
	Going to get a lot to it.
	Birchgold.com.
	Philip will be here in the second hour.
	Make sure you go check out today.
	Particularly the 401ks and IRAs.
	Everything you do tax-deferred or tax-free.
	Also, our good friends down at...
	And this is one of the biggest stories of the day.
	The biggest story of the day was yesterday.
	I think the education board voting to put Christ back in the classroom in public schools.
unidentified		Hello!
steve bannon ▲ ● ▼		In Texas.
		Patriot Mobile.
		Those folks fighting the good fight down there.
		They believe in your values.
		Stop giving your money to people that hate you.
		Go to PatriotMobile.com slash Bannon right now.
		See what the services they provide for your mobile phone.
		In fact, I think you can get a free mobile phone.
		You can get into one of their deals.
		Short break.
		90-second break.
		Back in a moment.

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