Dec. 17, 2024 - Bannon's War Room
48:55
Participants
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| If they are unreasonable, I'll give you a different answer, an answer that you'll be shocked to hear. | ||
| If they're unreasonable, if they're opposing somebody for political reasons or stupid reasons, I would say it has nothing to do with me. | ||
| I would say they probably would be primary. | ||
| But if they're reasonable, fair, and really disagree with something or somebody, I could see that happening. | ||
| But I do believe that if they're unreasonable, I think we have great people. | ||
| I think we have a great group of people. | ||
| How far can Donald Trump push these members? | ||
| How far can he push them to say, you're going to do what I say or else? | ||
| Do you think they're willing to cross him on Pete Hegseth, on Tulsi Gabbard, maybe even on RFK Jr.? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, the good part is we're starting to see the system actually play out. | |
| We said, well, there's not going to be any guardrails. | ||
| Well, I mean, there kind of still is. | ||
| And to Joe's point, it's like, these guys aren't up for the job. | ||
| You can get somebody else. | ||
| We'll be nice. | ||
| We'll do it politely and quietly, and then we'll give you everything else that you want. | ||
| So I think that's how it's going to play out. | ||
| But you think about Pete. | ||
| I mean, the Pentagon would swallow him up in one week. | ||
| That's what I was saying. | ||
| You've pushed aside all the other horrific steps of judgment. | ||
| You look at his lack of inexperience, but I've said it time and time again. | ||
| You know, that's a job. | ||
| I'm sure you and I think we can do most jobs. | ||
| I don't want that job. | ||
| I remember Chris Lake called me up and he said, hey, I may be able to take the CNN job. | ||
| I go, let me tell you, there are two jobs you don't want. | ||
| I said this. | ||
| There are two jobs in America you don't want. | ||
| The CNN job because of the bureaucracy and the Pentagon. | ||
| And I said that like three years ago. | ||
| But the Pentagon's even harder. | ||
| The bureaucracy will swallow you up whole unless you really have been walking those corridors for years. | ||
| I mean, that was all the services committee, you know, for four terms. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And even if. | |
| Even then, it was like... | ||
| I mean, the weapons systems, the training, the tanks, the guns, the bullets, the satellites, the bureaucrats, the cybersecurity. | ||
| I mean, like... | ||
| The housing, the benefits. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's wild. | ||
| It would swallow anybody. | ||
| He's not up to the task. | ||
| If you want to reform the Pentagon, you're exactly right. | ||
| You better get somebody that knows the Pentagon. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Tell me about how you at the ACLU are thinking about... | ||
| Your plans to try to defend American civil liberties in this term versus the first term. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, we've been planning for almost a year. | |
| We were anticipating the possibility that he would win this election. | ||
| So we've spent thousands of staff hours studying Project 2025, tracking the campaign promises, going back and playing back what happened in Trump 1.0 to see what might happen with Trump 2.0. | ||
| And so we've been trying to get ready for this whole period of time. | ||
| Clearly we can't run the same playbook. | ||
| They're going to be more aggressive. | ||
| They're smarter. | ||
| They're faster off the block. | ||
| They're running the gauntlet on many of the policy issues that they didn't dare try last time. | ||
| They're going to run the ball down the field. | ||
| And so we have to be much smarter and much better prepared. | ||
| Litigation is going to be key. | ||
| The courts still are a place we have to turn to. | ||
| We have to be wide-eyed that the courts are also increasingly conservative, and he will appoint new judges onto the courts. | ||
| It's also true that Biden appointed a record number of judges on the courts, and so not all is lost. | ||
| But good lawyers are going to have to earn their pay by picking the right clients, the right cases, the right theories. | ||
| Where do you file? | ||
| Where do you settle? | ||
| Where do you really push the envelope? | ||
| And that's what really we're working through right now. | ||
| If you're not going to play ball, then you're going to be an enemy. | ||
| And so you either settle a defamation lawsuit the way that ABC did, or you kind of kowtow in advance and you kind of say, you know what, I've done the cost-benefit analysis and it makes better sense for me and my financial bottom line to be able to keep a safe distance from you if you're Donald Trump. | ||
| Yeah, the ABC settling that defamation suit really was not helpful to anyone in the press, frankly, because that only has emboldened people in Trump world. | ||
| You know, if you talk to the lawyers this weekend over what happened, they're very, very happy. | ||
| Like, you know, this is fantastic. | ||
| You know, this opens up the path for them to sue other news outlets, other individual reporters. | ||
| And they're absolutely discussing this. | ||
| I mean, the moment they were done with the ABC suit, the discussion shifted to, ooh, who's next? | ||
| Maybe it's CBS. We really didn't like that 60 Minutes thing. | ||
| And then on Sunday night at the New York Young Republican Club gala, which I attended, you know, the keynote speaker was Steve Bannon. | ||
| And Steve Bannon was talking about it's time to prosecute the news media and people on this network as well. | ||
| And so what has... | ||
| Previously been confined to the ethers of the MAGA universe is now coming out to the fore and they're feeling emboldened to do it. | ||
| And I think we should take this extremely seriously because they're saying it out loud now. | ||
| When you talk to regular Americans who aren't lawyers, who aren't people who are engaged in this fight in a practical, paid to do it as part of their job kind of way, and you hear people feeling intimidated, feeling overwhelmed by the pace at which we're getting sort of alarming news about the extremism of their plans, what do you tell them about the prospects for holding line? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The local governments, you know, the state attorneys general, the governors, the mayors, we have this whole plan around a firewall for freedom, we call it. | |
| The idea that these local officials can really play an important role in stopping the worst of the government abuses. | ||
| How so? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, for instance, when they're going to try to detain and deport all these hundreds of thousands, up to a million people, that's an operation that they have the legal power to do, to do the raids, but the logistics... | |
| And they're going to need mayors and governors or city councils to either give them access to police officers or not, jails. | ||
| We're going to house all these folks, right? | ||
| And so part of what we're doing is we're preparing executive orders and we're organizing our folks to put pressures on elected officials so they don't roll over. | ||
| They should sever these relationships they have with the federal government on immigration enforcement. | ||
| They should make sure that our prisons and our jails are off limits. | ||
| They should begin to think about what actions they could take to pardon immigrants who have a criminal record because they drove on a suspended license. | ||
| Well, let's take them out of harm's way. | ||
| They could do that now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let's commute. | |
| They could do that now in the transition. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And so part of what we've got to do is we've got to swarm our allies in some of these places. | |
| And even in red states, you have some blue mayors. | ||
| And so there's a whole game plan for this. | ||
| And I think part of what we're trying to do is breaking it down, what can be done by the courts and lawyers, what can be done by citizens, what can governors do, what can mayors do, and really have a game plan for that. | ||
| When people look at the fact that there haven't been large-scale protests thus far the way there were pretty soon after the election in 2016, I tend to look at that and think the American people are smart, people are marshalling their resources and choosing for the right moment. | ||
| Do you see it the same way? | ||
| Totally. | ||
|
unidentified
|
When he starts deporting all these folks, ripping apart communities, the idea that you're never going to move that many people through the immigration system without ripping apart citizens and immigrants. | |
| It's going to rip the basic fiber of our lives. | ||
| And that's when people are going to say, oh, that's not what we bargained for. | ||
| We've got to turn out. | ||
| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Pray for our enemies, because we're going medieval on these people. | |
| The reason I got a free shot at all these networks lying about the people. | ||
| The people have had a belly full of it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And where do people like that go to share the big lie? | ||
|
unidentified
|
MAGA Media. | |
| I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? | |
| If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved. | ||
|
unidentified
|
War Room. | |
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| My dad, and this was a big laugh for him, you know, he was a phone company guy, and they would talk about internally what they were trying to do, what they were trying to accomplish, and he would talk, they would quote the Pogo, remember Pogo? | ||
| Old cartoon, I think, from the 50s and 60s. | ||
| I've met the enemy and he is us. | ||
| That should be the mantra for the MAGA movement and the, I shouldn't say he is us, but it's the MAGA wing of the Republican Party, which is total votes is, I don't know, 75 to 85 percent. | ||
| I think if you look at President Trump's, a good count of that would be towards the end of the primary season when it was Nikki, Nikki, Nikki, Nikki, Nikki, when Birdbrain held out, and I think she was getting 15 to 20 percent of the vote. | ||
| Then eventually all those people came home. | ||
| Remember, all these Republicans weren't going to do it. | ||
| Now, you still have the never-Trumpers. | ||
| That's the kind of Rich Lowry, National Review, bow ties and chamber music, cocktails on the Upper East Side, the equivalent of the New York Conservative Party. | ||
| A lot of William F. Buckley types. | ||
| I was a big fan of Buckley, but that was back then, not now. | ||
| If you see what's happening, and you're going to have two examples of this. | ||
| One is the nomination process. | ||
| Well, President Trump has actually thought through, you can see he's thought through over a long period of time. | ||
| His victory, which was quite different than 16, because 16, we were just scrambling every day to get to a win. | ||
| You could tell in the four years that he was kind of the lion in winter. | ||
| Having had the election stolen from him, having made a conscious decision to come back and do this, understanding what the stakes were for him personally and for the country, he really started to think through what exactly we're trying to accomplish here. | ||
| How is this going to be different than the first term? | ||
| And how are we really going to make America great again? | ||
| You know, I hated And I was quite vocal about this, the slogan or whatever, the catchphrase in 20 members, make America great again, again. | ||
| No, we were not quite there yet. | ||
| It's going to take a long time to make America return to a former great and it's going to probably take decades. | ||
| But you have to start with a foundation that is a total reversal. | ||
| This is what you have to hit it with, which Robert Bartley used to say, muzzle velocity. | ||
| When you have an idea, a concept, a construct, just sitting there talking about it, even sitting there making a decision about it, doesn't make it happen, doesn't make it a thing, doesn't make it a presence, doesn't make it flow through the system. | ||
| Think about populist nationalism. | ||
| When we first started on this journey back after the 2008 I mean, I was mocked and ridiculed. | ||
| And the first year after I took over Breitbart, after Andrew died, I was vilified by the limited government conservatives, right? | ||
| Because, you know, they know better. | ||
| These are the folks that didn't lift a finger to actually limit the size and scale of the government. | ||
| It kept getting bigger. | ||
| Why? | ||
| They're controlled opposition. | ||
| Controlled opposition and kind of an authoritarian system, it's just performative. | ||
| It's there to make you feel happy, right, as the control function does what it's gonna do. | ||
| We didn't get in this shape, folks. | ||
| The country didn't get in this shape. | ||
| Unless both parties were part of it. | ||
| And this is why I say Republican and Democrats are irrelevant. | ||
| It's a nomenclature or a name that doesn't – it's the two sides of the same coin, neoliberal neocons. | ||
| That's the Washington consensus. | ||
| That's the Wall Street consensus that runs the United States of America, the American empire. | ||
| And this is the jam we're in. | ||
| Because during the Biden regime, the empire started to get even the true neo-Marxist, neo-Marxist element of it on the society side, the cultural side, started to come forward. | ||
| Not just the transgender radicalness, but all of it. | ||
| And what they're trying to do in the propaganda side. | ||
| Department and the education of your schools, thank God, the young men in this country, being red-blooded American boys, stood up and rejected that. | ||
| And on their shoulders, President Trump rode to the president. | ||
| His third victory for his second term. | ||
| A second term that may lead to a third term. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| That's all in the future. | ||
| Maybe that's a work in progress. | ||
| I don't care if the left's melting down. | ||
| I don't care if the New Republic is melting down. | ||
| We do have a pretty good track record, I think, of throwing an idea out there and then, over time, working that idea. | ||
| Working the problem, as we call it. | ||
| Gotta work the problem. | ||
| Now, where's all this going? | ||
| There are two things happening, folks. | ||
| On the nominations, they're trying to... | ||
| Oh, you heard it right there. | ||
| Oh, there's so many more qualified people. | ||
| Yeah, these are all trial balloons. | ||
| Pete Hex is a trial balloon. | ||
| Kash Patel is a trial balloon. | ||
| Tulsi Gabbard, Bobby Kennedy. | ||
| I would beg to differ. | ||
| President Trump has thought something through. | ||
| He took a bullet to the head, and four months later, one in a landslide, I think he gets the team that he selected. | ||
| And we're here to put our shoulder to the wheel to make sure he gets it. | ||
| But alas, on Capitol Hill, Polly Pockets Johnson and the team are about to surprise you with a 1,500-page CR. All next in the war room. | ||
|
unidentified
|
For example, the day after Donald Trump had that crazy rally at Madison Square Garden, I rolled the dice and I called him on the phone. | |
| And he answered! | ||
| Of course he did! | ||
| What'd he say? | ||
| And I wasn't calling to chit-chat. | ||
| I said, Mr. President, this is Stephanie Ruhle. | ||
| You made a lot of comments last night, blah, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And it was not an on-the-record conversation. | ||
| Long story, so I'm not going to get into what he said, but I called for one reason. | ||
| I said, you just said a whole bunch of public things. | ||
| I'd like to sit down for an interview with you. | ||
| We got five days before the election. | ||
| So we didn't get into anything. | ||
| There's nothing for me to report. | ||
| I called him and said, I want an interview with you. | ||
| Obviously, he said no. | ||
| But my point is... | ||
| I was able to get to him by dialing his phone. | ||
| Now, that might be completely apeshit and you're like, I can't believe people know this guy's phone number. | ||
| But the reverse of that, if I were to want to connect with VP Harris or President Biden, there's 50 people between me and that. | ||
| I could write a note that maybe could get to somebody to get somebody, then through Pony Express and a pigeon, something might end up in a mailbox near them. | ||
| And I called DJT to say, yo, can I have an interview? | ||
| He told me to go f*** myself. | ||
| But I still was able to connect with him. | ||
| But he still picked up. | ||
| That's Stephanie Rule from one of our favorite shows, the 11th Hour at MSNBC every night. | ||
| I think it's a fantastic show. | ||
| That is so true. | ||
| People have his phone number, and they call him. | ||
| Think about it. | ||
| The day after the rally was the... | ||
| Run up to the election. | ||
| That was the week. | ||
| You know, later that night, I'd be released from Danbury. | ||
| I mean, that was the heart of it. | ||
| You had to turn out, I don't know, 50 million people in one mass mobilization. | ||
| So President Trump's got a couple, three things on his mind. | ||
| She calls him up. | ||
| I'll take a shot. | ||
| And Stephanie Rule's not on his speed dial list. | ||
| She's a known hater. | ||
| But he takes a call. | ||
| And what I liked about it, she pitched the idea, hey, it was a great rally, how about an interview? | ||
| And President Trump tells her, go F off, which is great. | ||
| You see, the great and the good now are all coming to Mar-a-Lago, and they're all lining up to kiss his ring in his posterior, right? | ||
| You're seeing them all. | ||
| And I have a huge problem with Walmart and all these guys that they didn't just fight him. | ||
| They were trying to destroy him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Facebook, Google, all of them. | |
| Well, Twitter at the time, Elon owns that now. | ||
| But Walmart, all corporate America. | ||
| And corporate America, and this is why Robbie Starbuck, what Robbie Starbuck has done is so unbelievably important. | ||
| Robbie Starbuck's working on getting local prosecutors to bring criminal charges against these companies, which not just civilly, it should be massive class action lawsuits, massive class action lawsuits by MAGA against these corporations trying to destroy people. | ||
| Remember Target, Target would just rather run you out of the store. | ||
| It's not acceptable. | ||
| The American people reject it, but now they've got to pay the price just because they're all going to go down there and grease everybody up. | ||
| Think how outrageous. | ||
| Zuckerberg spent $450 million. | ||
| 90% of it went against us in 2020 because he had to put 10% aside because they said they told the justifier, well, we kind of spurred around. | ||
| No, dude, you targeted Trump and you targeted Trump voters. | ||
| And now you go down with a million-dollar check. | ||
| For the inauguration. | ||
| This is why in 2016 I didn't go to any of the inauguration events. | ||
| None. | ||
| I went to the speech, no black type of speech, no balls, no nothing. | ||
| Zero. | ||
| Not interested. | ||
| Why am I not interested? | ||
| I don't want to hang out with those people. | ||
| That's who ends up being these inaugural balls. | ||
| It's all these guys writing checks and they're greasing you up and all they want is to get a meeting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's all, it's all, it's greasy. | |
| And they're greasy. | ||
| One thing I did was go to the White House. | ||
| We set up shop immediately, but then right after the speech, and then President Trump, the parade was amazing. | ||
| President Trump stood down there on that podium for the entire time, watched the parade, which is extraordinary. | ||
| It's always my favorite part of the inauguration. | ||
| On Capitol Hill, we're about to get it, and I think, and I've been saying this, don't want to say I'm right again, I know it gets obnoxious, Johnson, there's a fiasco. | ||
| Okay, so what's going to happen in the next 48 hours? | ||
| Another called shot for the war room. | ||
| He's put up something because he's weak. | ||
| The short-term CR. Remember, the government runs out of money on Friday. | ||
| Now... | ||
| Why do they do that? | ||
| They do that because right before Christmas everybody wants to go home. | ||
| So it's the pressure to get everything done. | ||
| Now we have two alternatives. | ||
| The one alternative is some big omnibus or CR that takes it for the whole year and takes it out of President Trump's hands. | ||
| Particularly, specifically takes it out of Russ Vogt's hands. | ||
| The guys at OMB. And takes it out of Vivek and Elon Musk. | ||
| Because of all this complexity of what's going to go on on the deconstruction of the administrative state, we are going to be your Sherpa that actually cuts through the fog of war and shows you the signal, not the noise. | ||
| Not the happy talk, not a bunch of congressmen going up for open mic night over there last week when they're sitting there going, yeah, at Iowa State they have a research program on, you know, two-headed cows that ought to be cut. | ||
| It's not about that. | ||
| It's not about these little research programs. | ||
| It's not about people. | ||
| All these memes, everybody's walking in, it's going to be like The Apprentice, you're fired, you're fired. | ||
| It's not the point. | ||
| We got a, not just simply a problem, we have a crisis. | ||
| Don't think we have a crisis? | ||
| France, South Korea, Germany, Canada, I'm just naming the big four, have all turfed out their governments here in the last, I don't know, 10 days, 12 days. | ||
| Canada's on the brink, everybody on the finance side quit. | ||
| What, they quit? | ||
| Part of it was President Trump's tariffs, and what I'm really proud of is that in the finance minister, and President Trump's no fan, he just lit her up on True Social this morning, lit her up, because he's not a fan. | ||
| Although, I would tell the president, she was just, the reason she was kind of obnoxious sometimes, she was just fighting for the Canadians. | ||
| Very tough to get to an agreement with her. | ||
| But she quit yesterday and she sent a letter. | ||
| She sent a letter when she resigned and she said to Trudeau, you are not taking seriously enough, and I quote, the aggressive economic nationalism of President Trump. | ||
| The aggressive economic nationalism. | ||
| Poetry. | ||
| Pure poetry. | ||
| Aggressive economic nationalism. | ||
| And she's saying, hey, I don't know if 25% tariffs are right or not, but I'm telling you, he's coming hard with something. | ||
| And he means it. | ||
| He's not bluffing. | ||
| And he said, your budget has... | ||
| Wait for it. | ||
| Does not keep our powder dry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It has too big a deficit. | |
| I think I'm hearing something consistent throughout the world. | ||
| Why did... | ||
| The French government fall the exact same reason. | ||
| As I keep saying, the world has, I don't know, $300 trillion in debt everywhere, at every level, from your credit card to the student loans, your car loans. | ||
| Every country in the world added up. | ||
| Every county government, every municipality, every water project, every state government. | ||
| Our federal government and every other government in the world. | ||
| Roughly $300 trillion. | ||
| And I keep warning... | ||
| We're going to have a margin call, a global margin call, and when that happens, you're going to be in the whirlwind like you're going to make 2008, the 1929 crash, and the 1907 panic that got you the Federal Reserve and the national income tax look like a church social. | ||
| But it's coming. | ||
| And why is it coming? | ||
| Because the folks that you get in office want to kick the can down the road. | ||
| We're going to have a CR here, and I heard they had a Donnybrook over in the conference. | ||
| What happens is that they come in when they have somebody, that they have the Republican conference. | ||
| They all go over there. | ||
| It's a big kind of a conference room. | ||
| And they get up and they have an open mic and leadership stands up on the stage. | ||
| And Johnson, after working so long with Hakeem Jeffries, while he worked with Hakeem Jeffries, clearly he didn't dial in everybody. | ||
| You've got everybody from Jason Smith over at Ways and Means to Chip Roy and MTG and everybody. | ||
| You've got the far right. | ||
| You've got the guys running the tax deal. | ||
| You've got the moderates. | ||
| And they're all thrown up there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why are they thrown up? | |
| Because of you. | ||
| They realize you've had a belly full of it. | ||
| And they realize that you went out and knocked on doors and did canvassing and worked phone banks and trained up to be integrity. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| You delivered. | ||
| We held the House. | ||
| We took the Senate. | ||
| And you took the presidency. | ||
| So you're not—and by the way, when state legislatures all over the country just did great things, except in places I still can't figure out, like North Carolina, where Trump wins bigger than ever, and we lose across the border. | ||
| I still can't figure that deal out, but we're scratching away down there. | ||
| But you're ready for a fight. | ||
| Just because it's Christmas, hey— You know, Joseph and Mary had to take a long trek when Augustus Caesar said, everybody go back to the, remember, all of that. | ||
| How's the Gospel of Luke start? | ||
| It's all about taxes. | ||
| It's all about taxes. | ||
| French Revolution, taxes. | ||
| American Revolution, taxes. | ||
| Beginning of the New Testament, taxes. | ||
| What happens? | ||
| Roman Emperor, he's just taken over from Julius Caesar. | ||
| He's got to get this thing organized. | ||
| Most importantly, he's got to figure out how to pay for it. | ||
| Here's how they're going to pay for it. | ||
| Taxes. | ||
| And not taxes on the wealthy that are running the deal in each province. | ||
| They want to tax on everybody. | ||
| That's where they send them back to their home. | ||
| Hey, what we got to do is get them back up to the tribes. | ||
| They could be scattered out. | ||
| Go back. | ||
| Go back to where you kind of were born and you're from. | ||
| We're going to do a head count. | ||
| That's where we're going to start taxing. | ||
| Money and power. | ||
| That's what we're talking about. | ||
| A CR coming your way, baby. | ||
| That is not exactly what folks bargained for. | ||
| Another just beautiful job by Speaker Johnson. | ||
| I don't think we're going to be using that term long. | ||
| Not that we have a deep bench of hammers over there you can choose from. | ||
| We're going to drill down this more. | ||
| Why are governments throughout the world cratering? | ||
| Next. Stephen K. Band. Speaker Johnson's living in La La Nair. | ||
| He's down in this conference. | ||
| He's getting blown up. | ||
| Was it Burleson? | ||
| Burleson's not exactly... | ||
| He's a good man. | ||
| Really good guy. | ||
| From, I think, near Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri. | ||
| Or close to it. | ||
| In Missouri. | ||
| Good man. | ||
| He's sitting there. | ||
| Lawler said this has not been member-driven. | ||
| Members didn't know anything about it. | ||
| And now they get this thing dumped on them. | ||
| It's like a Christmas tree. | ||
| It's got all kind of goodies for the special interests and for Democrats. | ||
| Democrats, we run the deal, but it's because you don't need their votes to get through. | ||
| But of course, Polly Pockets, Johnson knows that 100 Republicans are not going to vote for this minimum, so he's over there getting Democrat votes. | ||
| That's what you got. | ||
| He's the Democrat Speaker. | ||
| I said that from the beginning. | ||
| Y'all don't listen to me. | ||
| Democrat Speaker, he's going to trade you out. | ||
| Burleson's sitting there going, quote, it's a dumpster fire. | ||
| So now you've got a firestorm going down there. | ||
| But here's what he's saying. | ||
| And this is what happens when you have these... | ||
| People are not leaders. | ||
| He's sitting there going, hang on, hang on, hang on. | ||
| Don't get all over me. | ||
| I get important meetings with David Sachs and Vivek Ramaswamy. | ||
| Dude, that's fine to come by for a courtesy call, but quite frankly, you're not relevant to what they're doing. | ||
| Here's what you've got to be relevant in. | ||
| We want a skinny CR. When I say skinny, like two pages. | ||
| That just kicks it to January, to March, you know, March 20th. | ||
| It gives President Trump January to February, February, March. | ||
| It gives him 60 days. | ||
| And it gives Russ Vogt and guys 60 days to actually get this thing together and get the appropriations bills done, all of them. | ||
| They're kind of teed up, get them all through the House, all through the Senate. | ||
| It's a process. | ||
| This is just supposed to be a tip to a process. | ||
| What did you do? | ||
| And didn't breed anybody in on this. | ||
| Because I asked them all, has anybody read it? | ||
| No, it's totally secrets behind closed doors. | ||
| It's all McCarthyism again. | ||
| Behind closed doors, behind closed doors. | ||
| And I tell people when they're behind closed doors, there's some bad stuff coming. | ||
| And we got plenty of it. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Audience, because once again, get ready with the machete. | ||
| We're going to have to cut our way. | ||
| You're going to have to cut the path through this. | ||
| It's just going to have to happen. | ||
| Just like you had President Trump's back from January 2021, even before then, but I say when it got down to it, when they stole the presidency from him and went to Mar-a-Lago. | ||
| You were the most, and not just loyal, you were the smartest and toughest and you learned more and you did precinct strategy, you did voter integrity, anything that was asked you did. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| You were the vanguard and the cadre in the vanguard for the greatest comeback in world political history, not just American political history. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| We're going to have to do it again and here's why. | ||
| So let's take, let's just do a simple exercise. | ||
| 400 days from today, This is roughly the first anniversary, the end of year one of President Trump's second term. | ||
| The end of year one. | ||
| And I think we're all in agreement that we probably have to get a lot of what he wants to accomplish then with the midterms coming up in the second year. | ||
| Just do the math. | ||
| And if you don't believe me, go to the National Debt Clock site. | ||
| Is that 100% accurate? | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| Is it pretty damn close? | ||
| Yes, it is. | ||
| And we're talking about scale of numbers that if you're directionally there, it's good. | ||
| They're better in the direction. | ||
| Plus, they give you a couple of other alternatives. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They'll do a couple of other CBO, other guys. | |
| But the number 400 days from now, folks, is $40 trillion. | ||
| We say, Stephen, that's impossible. | ||
| You know, we're only, I don't know, 36 and a half trillion today. | ||
| Of which, when President Trump turned over the watch, I think we were at $23 trillion. | ||
| And all of President Trump's essentially was added for the pandemic. | ||
| Yeah, we did not balance the budget, but we came pretty close. | ||
| I think it was $500 billion the first year. | ||
| I'll go back and check the math. | ||
| And I was a big advocate, let's just close this deal. | ||
| Let's close this thing up. | ||
| We just got to make some cuts, like in defense. | ||
| Trump was very close except for the pandemic. | ||
| But now it's a runaway train. | ||
| And so, oh, you know, nobody cares about deficits, Steve. | ||
| Nobody cares about debt. | ||
| You talk about nobody cares, but I beg to differ. | ||
| They care about it because it's seeped into every aspect of your life. | ||
| Remember, your life is run by the 10-year treasury. | ||
| That's what everything's priced off of. | ||
| But it's seeped in as we refinance this. | ||
| This inflation has seeped in. | ||
| This is what President Trump said the other day. | ||
| It's not so easy to get out. | ||
| And we're warning, pal, if you don't want to get on a collision course with the president and the White House and the posse, don't cut rates today. | ||
| The last thing we need is a rate cut. | ||
| If you do that, it's just Biden, you're just doing it to be spiteful because you know you're going to quit or be fired. | ||
| So you're just doing it to try to embed inflation in there even more. | ||
| The $40 trillion is got to be, the third of that's got to be refinanced. | ||
| And not just that, it's the pattern recognition of the velocity. | ||
| And particularly, we're picking up velocity. | ||
| It's still essentially a trillion dollars every 100 days. | ||
| In fact, if you do the math between where we are now and the 40 trillion, guess what? | ||
| Wait for it. | ||
| It's about a trillion dollars every 100 days. | ||
| That's not sustainable. | ||
| It's not sustainable. | ||
| At some time, the world that has to take dollars starts to puke them back up. | ||
| My big fear now is you're seeing the collapse of the international monetary system. | ||
| Potentially, you're seeing the collapse of that. | ||
| And with that is going to come something that's going to be not good. | ||
| All you guys do is cry and whine and bitch and moan about the post-war international rules-based order. | ||
| No. | ||
| That order that might have worked at the time when you, in the 1990s, the Bush regime allows the Chinese Communist Party to come in with slave labor, with slave labor, And then Wall Street, because it's to their advantage, ships all the high-value added manufacturing jobs to China for the slave labor of the Lao-Beijing. | ||
| No. | ||
| That's in the post-war international rules-based order. | ||
| The system starts to get gamed. | ||
| They game the system. | ||
| They game the system. | ||
| They game the system to leverage off the slave labor of the Chinese people. | ||
| And to ship all the high-value-added manufacturing jobs up there and gut the United States of America and leave you as a serf, a Russian serf. | ||
| This is why kids under 35 years old don't own anything, are not going to own anything. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why? | |
| They don't have enough high-value-added jobs like in the old days. | ||
| You start as an artist and you start as an apprentice. | ||
| You start, you know, my dad started pulling a cable in a sewer for the phone company before he came in alignment. | ||
| But, hey, you work your way up. | ||
| You've limited immigration. | ||
| You have control of your money so your dollar actually means something. | ||
| You don't have runaway inflation. | ||
| You don't have the massive drop in purchasing power of the dollar. | ||
| That's how you have a robust working class. | ||
| A robust middle class. | ||
| The people kind of go up. | ||
| It's escalation. | ||
| Not going up the escalatory ladder of nukes. | ||
| You're going up the escalatory ladder of economic life. | ||
| Which we used to have in this country. | ||
| But you don't have it. | ||
| And why don't you have it? | ||
| You have a decaying middle class. | ||
| You have an under-the-gun, anxiety-ridden, pressure-ridden working class that can't even go to work on a subway safely. | ||
| They don't have an education system that kids can go to that's not destroyed. | ||
| Or a healthcare system that they don't go to that's not destroyed. | ||
| That's why you go into all the great hospitals, you know, Beth Israel, go to all the great hospitals in the New York City area that used to be private hospitals, all turned over to the state because they can't afford to be private anymore. | ||
| You go in there. | ||
| It looks like a war zone in the emergency room. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Nobody has any insurance. | ||
| They just go to the emergency room for everything. | ||
| And you have all the crime and everything, all the disease, all the crime. | ||
| It's all there. | ||
| They're not living like Americans. | ||
| And that is not acceptable. | ||
| And one of the reasons is, is you have, on Capitol Hill, like a dog and pony show. | ||
| It's all performative. | ||
| Johnson comes out there and he gives you that deep voice. | ||
| On Fox, they just roll him around, ask a bunch of softball questions. | ||
| Because the lobbyists, this is a lobbyist thing. | ||
| You know, you got from MTG and Chip Roy to Lawler. | ||
| Lawler is not a fan of the War Room. | ||
| Lawler is not a fan of MAGA. And you got those two and everybody in between, Burleson and the whole crowd. | ||
| This is not member-driven. | ||
| We didn't know anything about this. | ||
| This thing looks like a Christmas tree. | ||
| Why do you have a provision in there that Haiti's got, like, most favored nation status or some tax-free zone for Haitian T-shirts? | ||
| Which may or may not be a good thing. | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| It doesn't sound great, but who knows? | ||
| But that's not what it should be in a CR. Because we're going back, President Trump's best, one of his best sayings, no games. | ||
| I don't want any games. | ||
| Be straight. | ||
| We got a game going on Capitol Hill. | ||
| You think it's bad now? | ||
| For President Trump to take these ideas and turn them into actual reality, It's going to take more than executive orders. | ||
| And I want to go back to one of my favorite scenes. | ||
| I may play it later, maybe at 6 o'clock, from the movie Lincoln. | ||
| Because this is a lesson for us today. | ||
| President Lincoln's sitting there. | ||
| And they're all over him of, why do you need all these amendments to the Constitution? | ||
| This is not easy. | ||
| We've got to do a heavy lift, and you've got to get a proof. | ||
| Why do you need this? | ||
| And he gets up on their grill and says, the Emancipation Proclamation, which changed the direction of the war... | ||
| Because up until Antietam, up until Sharpsburg, the fall of 1862, the war was about keeping the Union. | ||
| After that, because Lincoln wasn't winning. | ||
| The North was not winning. | ||
| And many of the generals in the North were Democrats. | ||
| And it was all this talk of treason. | ||
| Who's really, you know, how can we be that bad? | ||
| How can these guys go to West Point and this be incompetent? | ||
| How can Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson and Jeb Stewart, how are these guys who all went to West Point? | ||
| How could they be running to the tables on our guys? | ||
| What's happening? | ||
| Is there treason? | ||
| Are they not fighting? | ||
| Is it just they want to negotiate settlement, which had some truth to it? | ||
| Let the South go in peace. | ||
| He says, hey, I got a fix for that. | ||
| I'm going to put out a proclamation that frees the slaves. | ||
| Or, because his lawyer, the Attorney General said, it's an executive order, and you can only do it as a wartime necessity, you can only free them in the states currently under rebellion. | ||
| You can't even free them in the places we could actually control. | ||
| And Lincoln said, an executive order goes away. | ||
| When my administration is over, the executive order goes away. | ||
| It goes away. | ||
| And that means, what are we going to tell the world? | ||
| That they're enslaved again after we lost 600,000 people and destroyed half the country? | ||
| That the slaves are slaves again? | ||
| How is that going to play? | ||
| He said, we're out upon the world stage. | ||
| That's exactly where we are with President Trump. | ||
| It's not chattel slavery, but it's economic bondage. | ||
| Of the working class in this country, and quite frankly, now the middle class. | ||
| So how do you start to do that? | ||
| Yes, President Trump, we can do executive orders like we did back in the first term, right? | ||
| And you can do executive orders on the border. | ||
| And you can do executive orders here and here. | ||
| But if you want to take this on and if you want to make it permanent, if you want to actually do it, you have to do things called pass laws. | ||
| And to do that, You have to have the House, and you have to have the Senate, and you have to man up, you have to do it. | ||
| And part of those laws is the appropriation process. | ||
| Remember, the appropriation process, when you spread the money around, when you deal it out, it's a law. | ||
| It's not some sort of just random, oh, we're going to spend this there, this, and no. | ||
| It's a law. | ||
| Just like the border. | ||
| Just like reorganizing the government. | ||
| Short break. | ||
| Birchgold. | ||
| Birchgold.com. | ||
| End of the dollar empire. | ||
| Modern monetary theory. | ||
| The idea that broke the world. | ||
| It's our new release. | ||
| Next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Here's your host, Stephen K. Vann. | |
| So Melanie Zanona, I think she's over at Politico now. | ||
| She was at CNN. She's reporting... | ||
| Johnson tried to sell his members on his CR plan this morning. | ||
| It did not go over well. | ||
| The griping stretched the gamut from Freedom Caucus to committee chairs and even moderates. | ||
| It's very... | ||
| This is according to her. | ||
| It's very clear Democrats are going to need a heavy lift to carry this bill. | ||
| This is where you are. | ||
| This... | ||
| If we're this on the CR... And he's hid it from his members to drop it on them and put the gun under the head because the funding runs out on Friday. | ||
| Essentially, he screwed the caucus. | ||
| This is the easy one. | ||
| This is as close to a layup as you can get. | ||
| You just had to have something skinny. | ||
| Kick it into—which, as you know, we're not fans of short-term Sierras. | ||
| We hate them. | ||
| However, if the purpose is to get it to after January 20th so that Russ Vogt and Scott Besant and Hassert and Navarro and the economic team around a guy named Donald John Trump can get their hands on it and do what they want to do, | ||
| even with a first pass with Vivek and Elon and their team— Not a whole doge, but at least, you know, a lick and a promise. | ||
| I'm down. | ||
| I got that. | ||
| I think we can support that. | ||
| I think we'll go there. | ||
| But that's not what this is. | ||
| And to hide it, this is easy. | ||
| Think of the conversations we're had, and I know we're getting technical, but we need to get technical because I need you to be inside and have inside baseball so all this crap you're going to see on Fox you're not going to believe. | ||
| They're going to try to jam everything in one reconciliation bill. | ||
| Reconciliation is the kind of gimmick they have to get it through so you can get past the Senate filibuster. | ||
| We need to, because Trump needs to hit it on January 20th with the border. | ||
| And actually with money that's written into kind of a law, which the reconciliation bill would be. | ||
| So he's got it. | ||
| He's going to do a bunch of executive orders, but on January 20th, baby, we're rolling. | ||
| Holman's rolling. | ||
| Miller's rolling. | ||
| We got legislation. | ||
| We're going. | ||
| And the tax bill and everything they're going to do will come in March and April. | ||
| Why do they want to jam them together? | ||
| Well, I'm just going to let me guess. | ||
| Let me think. | ||
| Oh, that's right. | ||
| They want to hide all of the goodies for the lobbyists and for the wealthy and for the billionaires so they can put a gun to the war room's head, folks, and say, oh, abandon all you and your people. | ||
| You want to deport 15 million people? | ||
| You want to build a wall? | ||
| You want to secure the border? | ||
| You want to do this? | ||
| You want to do that on the border? | ||
| Ba-bing, ba-bang, ba-bung. | ||
| Well, how can you vote against this? | ||
| Yeah, sure, it's got a few tax things in there for lobbyists. | ||
| But, hey, you want to secure the border. | ||
| You want to build the wall. | ||
| You want to deport 15 million people. | ||
| This is the price. | ||
| This is the admission ticket. | ||
| We're not falling for that. | ||
| So if Johnson doesn't even have the stones to do the simple stuff, how do you think we're going to do? | ||
| We're going to be in a firestorm. | ||
| Look, they're all down kissing his ass down at Mar-a-Lago with their little checks. | ||
| Oh, here's a million dollars. | ||
| Please forgive me for trying to destroy you for four years. | ||
| Excuse me, for eight years, but really destroy you when I had a free shot on goal starting in January 2021. When then we supported you and MSNBC were doing ads, they're sitting there, they're cackling outside the courthouse in New York, cackling. | ||
| They're starting cackling in Georgia. | ||
| They're sitting out there, Rachel Maddow with that cackle, cackling in front of the federal court in D.C. That crowd, that crowd of corporate CEOs and Zuckerberg and Surgey and all the tech titans, all down there. | ||
| So now we got to see her. | ||
| I told you this was going to happen. | ||
| Little Polly Pocket shows up, and hey, he had every opportunity. | ||
| Steve Bannon's not the boogeyman here. | ||
| He had every opportunity to bring Lawler in, to bring Burleson in, to bring Chip Roy in, to get MTG in, to get all those Ann Wagner. | ||
| Pick them. | ||
| All the moderates, all the never-Trumpers, bring them all in. | ||
| Have common decency to say, guys, you know, I think, no. | ||
| You know why? | ||
| Johnson knew and planned from the beginning that he was going to need Hakeem Jeffries. | ||
| Hakeem Jeffries, speaker of the frickin' house. | ||
| We didn't hold the house. | ||
| We held Hakeem Jeffries' house. | ||
| Because we're going through the same madness again. | ||
| And Johnson went to him early on. | ||
| You talk about investigations. | ||
| Hey, show me your text messages. | ||
| Show me your phones. | ||
| Cash. | ||
| I got somebody we should start with. | ||
| Oh my gosh. | ||
| He's sick in the FBI. Hey, they're government gangsters, aren't they? | ||
| What the hell has he done? | ||
| Here's... | ||
| On Friday, it's out of money. | ||
| So you know what I say? | ||
| Let it go. | ||
| Let it go. | ||
| There should be 200 and whatever Republicans vote no on this. | ||
| Make the Democrats pass the whole thing. | ||
| Hell, Johnson's a Democrat. | ||
| He's a Democrat. | ||
| He holds the Bible up. | ||
| He's got the New Testament wrapped up tight. | ||
| He can talk happy talk on a handful of social issues. | ||
| You know, checking his son's porn site. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| All this crazy nonsense. | ||
| He does all that. | ||
| He goes down there. | ||
| He's a big, deep Christian. | ||
| Except when it comes to showing courage and being courageous. | ||
| And maybe bringing people in so it's not a surprise. | ||
| So now the media can sit there with a big old shotgun to your head and go, oh my gosh, no social security checks. | ||
| It's going to be cold. | ||
| It's going to be dark for Christmas Day. | ||
| Granny's going to freeze. | ||
| The parks are going to be closed. | ||
| Smithsonian's not going to be open on Christmas Eve. | ||
| Not going to get any mail. | ||
| No Christmas presents going to go over. | ||
| CNN's going to have that big camera everywhere. | ||
| Kids crying. | ||
| No Santa. | ||
| NORAD's not going to be able to track. | ||
| NORAD's not going to be able to track Santa on Christmas Eve. | ||
| NORAD will not do it. | ||
| You remember as a kid, everybody sitting there got Santa. | ||
| He's leaving the North Pole. | ||
| It's not going to happen. | ||
| Because the government's going to shut down. | ||
| Because the government's out of money. | ||
| The government's out of money. | ||
| You understand this is all just fiat currency. | ||
| This is just all funny money. | ||
| It's $40 trillion. | ||
| It's funny till it's not. | ||
| Folks, take your number two pencil out and write this date down. | ||
| 20 January of 2026. $40 trillion. | ||
| We've put... | ||
| Twenty-one trillion dollars on the balance sheet of the United States of America since the moment that Donald Trump won the presidency on 8 November of 2016. I want you to chew on that one. | ||
| We'd been around for 200 years and only the Iraq war. | ||
| I mean, we only had a couple train at the turn of the century. | ||
| They get blown out of control with the Iraq and Afghan war, the fiascos of the bailouts, and Obama's bailing people out, and Bush is destroying the economy. | ||
| All this madness of the neoliberal neocons that wrecked this nation. | ||
| We're playing more games right now on Capitol Hill. |
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