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Feb. 5, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
48:55
Episode 4246: Cleaning Out The Corruption In The Plumbing Of Government
Participants
Main voices
d
dave brat
06:33
s
steve bannon
30:47
Appearances
n
natalie winters
04:42
r
rachel maddow
02:19
Clips
c
chris hayes
00:22
j
jake tapper
00:08
| Copy link to current segment

Speaker Time Text
rachel maddow
Blumenthal today on Capitol Hill telling reporters essentially that Democrats are ready to make Republicans work for it.
As Senator Blumenthal's office told us just this hour, Democrats know they can't unilaterally stop Trump's nominees from getting confirmed in the Senate, but they do plan to make Republicans work as hard as possible for it.
They can make Republicans use up as much valuable floor time as possible on each and every nominee, and that's what they plan to do.
Slow the whole thing down as much as they are capable of.
Now, that is along the lines of the advice that's been coming from one of the driving forces behind some of the protests you've already seen this week.
Ezra Levin of Indivisible says Democrats should look back to the Republican playbook from 2009, just after Barack Obama was elected with a Democratic trifecta.
When Republicans were in the minority and Democrats controlled the House and the Senate and the White House, he says think what you will about Mitch McConnell and the Republicans' plan.
That was a very effective legislative tactic from A party that found itself in the minority.
What are you watching for in their actions that you think might really make a difference?
unidentified
It sounds good, Rachel.
And I will say, I think we are in a much better place right now with Senate Democratic leadership and the Senate Democratic Caucus than we were a week ago.
That said, today, today, 22 Democrats voted for another Trump secretary.
Twenty-two of them.
So I like to hear from Senator Blumenthal.
I like to hear from other senators that they are starting to agree to blanket opposition.
I want to see the votes.
I want to see the votes.
And until we see those votes, I think what they're going to be hearing from their constituents is a demand that they fight back.
rachel maddow
Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader in the House, I was interested.
He put out last night, I think it was last night, it might have been yesterday afternoon, a 10-point plan for all Democratic members of the House.
And it had a lot of different things that they're going to try to do and ways they're going to brief each other and communicate on things.
But the last thing was, essentially, I command you, as Democratic leader of the House, to go to your home.
To hold town hall meetings and to hold other events with constituents and people who are in your district about what is going on right now.
And I want you to do it, he said, literally today.
And if you cannot do it today, you need to do it this week.
And we will be surveying every Democratic member of the House to see whether or not they do this.
Now, as we have seen Democratic members, including in Virginia last night, start to do these town halls, they're packed to the rafters.
People are desperate to be able to hear from one another.
I love this move.
unidentified
I love this move from Leader Jeffries.
I think this is a very good move.
What I would encourage every single Democrat on the House side to do is use that convenient power that you have.
People are going to show up.
If you build it, people will come.
If you are out in this country and worried about what's going on, you've got to show up to these means.
And one big benefit of Jeffrey's calling for Democrats to do this is, you know who isn't holding public town halls to explain exactly what's going on in the Treasury Department, to explain exactly what was going on with the OMB funding freeze that attacked Meals on Wheels and Head Start?
You know who's not explaining that?
Republican members of Congress.
They are embarrassed by it.
So what a great opportunity to create contrast with the Republicans and say, look, we are here, we are listening to our constituents.
And what our role is, people around the country are worried, show up.
Show up not just by yourself, but get a group together.
Get Indivisible members or Working Families Party members or MoveOn members or whoever are your friends and family members and community.
Get them together and show up in person.
That demonstrates to your elected officials that you actually care about this.
chris hayes
Cash Patel has yet to come up for a vote, but today, just before we went on air, Pam Bondi was confirmed as Attorney General.
It was a party-line vote, all Republicans voting for her, all Democrats voting against, with the exception of John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who voted for her.
Do you have any confidence at all that she will uphold the rule of law at Maine Justice?
unidentified
I don't, unfortunately, because there's a lot to admire and like about her.
Until you get to...
Areas that are what you might call Trump-sensitive.
And she showed in the hearings that when she got to a Trump-sensitive area, it was like a plane flying into the Bermuda Triangle, and all the navs and comms went haywire, and you just couldn't get a straight answer out of her.
And then when you flew back out of Trump-sensitive areas, she went back to normal again.
So when she's that frightened of Trump and that subservient to Trump that she goes haywire when it's a Trump-sensitive area, it's a really bad sign about being able to restrain truly dangerous people like Kash Patel.
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
I've got a free shot of all these networks lying about the people.
chris hayes
The people have had a belly full of it.
steve bannon
I know you don't like hearing that.
I know you've tried 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.
Here's your host, Stephen K. Baff.
steve bannon
It's Wednesday, 5 February in the year of our Lord, 2022.
Dave Bratt joins me riding shotgun today.
Um...
Our own Natalie Winters is going to be all over today, and we're going to have her back at 5 o'clock.
Is she up right now?
Because I know she's got a bolt.
Natalie Winters.
So the resistance, Natalie, is coming from many different areas.
People should understand they're going to slow everything down in the Senate to a crawl.
They have to do this because now groups that you've identified, like Indivisible, Indivisible is trying to do the playbook that War Room did in January of 2021. They have to have a rally point.
They don't have a rally point right now, just like we didn't have a rally point.
Everybody on this side surrendered or crushed.
Go back to 2021. Remember how bad it was when President Trump went to Mar-a-Lago.
You need a rally point.
They have selected Indivisible to do this, you can tell.
And the Indivisible people are not dumb.
Okay, they're not dumb.
They've identified McConnell's playbook from 2009 in the first years of Obama.
For you guys who are not there, McConnell did what I call a great rearguard action to try to slow down as much as possible.
Natalie, you've seen this.
You're also saying, hey, we told you, they're flooding the zone with lawsuits everywhere.
They're going to try to use the courts and go into these liberal areas.
And they're really going to come off everything DOGE is doing to try to get to the plumbing and get the plumbing right.
And there may be some issues on that, on data mining and AI. We'll get to that later.
But just even the DOGE efforts, in particular, they're freaked out because...
Two things.
Number one, we're getting rid of the FBI guys.
You see how that's working.
Number two, we're taking out USAID, which is a railhead of money for them to do all this nefarious activity, everything from shutting down conservative media to funding the invasion of the southern border to being a CIA cutout, doing things in Ukraine.
USAID is the scab that's got to be picked.
But you're particularly focused on some of these lawsuits you say is going to be quite problematic.
Natalie Winters.
Stand and deliver, ma'am.
natalie winters
Of course.
Well, the frivolous lawsuits are all that they have.
And to the point about USAID, I think if you look at any department that this city has gotten rich off of due to the fact that there are no audits, right?
All these weird NGOs that no one has ever looked into in the name of what?
Promoting democracy abroad.
USAID is the linchpin of that.
And that's why they're melting down, because they know the gravy trains over.
But more acutely, Steve, when we first started covering the resistance, when I put together that montage of the six-hour phone call that I watched, who put that phone call together?
It was indivisible.
That was one of the leading voices.
That guy is who Rachel Maddow has always had on as sort of the point person when it comes to discussing anything resistance-related.
And you're so right, they're culturally appropriating the war room in terms of their lobbying tactics.
I want to get really granular for a second on lawsuits there, too, that have been brought against President Trump, the DOJ, for what they're trying to do over at the FBI. One of them is coming from some far left.
It's called the Center for Employment Justice.
You can imagine what their politics are.
But you don't have to imagine that much because the chief attorney listed on the case is a former Democratic Senate candidate.
But I want to flag, you know, we're all about receipts here in the war room.
I guess we're all about opposition research, too.
This lady, an individual, the attorney by the name of Pam Keith.
Has been out tweeting for years during the Biden regime about how every single MAGA member of the federal government needs to be fired.
Don't just take my word for it.
I'll read you her tweets.
Quote, America needs industrial strength disinfectant of the MAGA bacteria in our institutions.
Clean the wound, Mr. President.
Fire them all.
Next quote, if we are to remove MAGA at the ballot box, then you must, must, must, in all caps, remove MAGA from our institutions.
Fire DeJoy, fire Flynn, fire Ray.
Quote, it is time for the Biden admin to remove MAGA from our government.
That's now the same attorney that is representing nine anonymous FBI agents citing political retribution for President Trump's decision to fire them, or at least have them answer a survey about their actions related to January 6th.
And last point, the second lawsuit that they've brought, which is coming from a group representing, they say, FBI agents.
This is a group that came under fire for giving out, I believe, $1,000 gift cards to agents who bent the knee to the BLM mob.
This is a group that lobbies every government shutdown to try to get FBI agents paid.
And funnily enough, they lobbied to keep Ray in place.
So there are a bunch of political partisan hacks, and I think that that's just what we need to remember.
These lawsuits that are coming out, it's basically just the new form, albeit watered down because they have no power, but of the impeachment that would have been if they had any semblance of power.
But instead, they're relegated to activist types like Indivisible, like these far-left NGOs, going and crying on MSNBC. Play it again.
Yeah.
steve bannon
Now keep going.
I want to go, okay, here's what I want to do.
If Denver and my crack production team can play again Ezra, I think it's Levin, of Indivisible.
Tell me when you got this thing ready to go.
I want to play it again.
You're the first one, Natalie Winters, as you normally are.
You're the first one to warn us about Indivisible weeks and months ago.
This is becoming the go-to spot.
The reason is they have these calls.
They have 50,000 people on it.
I want to single this guy out.
Let's play this for a second.
Go ahead.
rachel maddow
What are you watching for in their actions that you think might really make a difference?
unidentified
It sounds good, Rachel.
And I will say, I think we are in a much better place right now with Senate Democratic leadership and the Senate Democratic Caucus than we were a week ago.
That said, today, today, 22 Democrats voted for another Trump.
steve bannon
What I want you to see there, we'll put up, is he's going full 12 o'clock high.
He's got the little bomber.
This pencil neck's got a little bomber jacket on, right?
Just go get a barber.
You're quite stylish, Steve.
unidentified
People want to be you.
steve bannon
No, he's trying to be Gregory Peck.
Hey, Ezra, right here.
This is called a man.
That's a man.
That's Gregory Peck and 12 O'Clock High.
That's not you.
The look is not working.
That being said...
These guys, they're going to do something, I can tell you.
This is where the resistance is going to come from.
They're the rally point, because the Democrats are shattered.
How dangerous is this indivisible, and we've got to put stink eye on them, ma'am.
natalie winters
Well, the Washington Post, one of the reporters just quote tweeted me saying that I need to find better mentors.
But I would say, hey, the tip of the spear of your resistance is trying to culturally appropriate Steve Bannon.
So I think I have a pretty good one.
But look, I have read all of Indivisible's, you know, kind of casework, their blueprints of how to plot the resistance.
These people are extremely organized down to the point where they have itemized tables of how to best lobby and, you know, intimidate.
Basically peer pressure your lawmakers on your phone calls.
They've advocated for all of their members to write op-eds specifically in local papers because they have more traction.
They're setting up I think the more nefarious kind of angle to what Indivisible has done,
which is part of that group Democracy Forward that we were talking about yesterday, is just the idea that they want to weaponize Career civil servants and effectively turn them into, for lack of a better word, embeds, exposing the Trump administration.
And that's why they're melting down so heavily about these people being removed from the building, because they can't be whistleblowers if they're not proximal to President Trump.
So that's sort of the crux of it.
And that's why they're melting down.
And last point, Steve, what was Rachel Maddow's monologue about yesterday entirely?
I guess that was two days ago.
On Monday, the same day that USAID is getting crippled, she's begging, groveling, and imploring her audience to donate and support independent media, civil society groups like Indivisible, because they know that gravy train's ending.
steve bannon
Fabulous.
You're on it.
You're on watch, and you're now doing it from the White House.
Social media, where do they get you, Natalie?
natalie winters
Natalie Juenters on all platforms.
unidentified
I will see you at 5 from the White House.
natalie winters
I like saying that.
steve bannon
Better mentors.
Wow.
Guys are getting personal now.
Thank you, ma'am.
Great work as usual.
See you this afternoon.
Short break.
Dave Bratsworth has got a lot to go through today.
Be back in a moment.
unidentified
Here's your host, Stephen K. Band.
steve bannon
So we're hitting on our fronts.
I want to talk about a lot of stuff coming out of the Republican conference today.
And the topic will be focus.
You have people like Byron Donalds and others being accused of going Chip Roy today and getting snarky and mean, I think, at the conference over here.
Here's the issue.
And I want to make sure we bifurcate.
You have to get the preliminaries.
It's like in ice skating.
You have to get the preliminaries done.
You have to ace the things you have to do, the compulsory.
You have to ace those to be able to dance freestyle on Sunday night and win the gold medal.
You have to get the basics done.
They have to be done.
And we have to get tens on those.
People are moving at a million miles an hour.
It's great.
You've got scale, depth, and urgency.
Scale, depth, and urgency of what President Trump's doing in these verticals.
But let's pull back, right, to our matrix.
Let's pull back to what we've talked about from the beginning, from the very night we won.
You have three big things that have to get done.
Number one, you have to end the kinetic part of the Third World War.
Only President Trump can do that.
Principally in Ukraine, number two is in the Middle East.
And extract American involvement from that.
Number two, you have to simultaneously begin the mass deportations.
Let me continue to put the word mass in there.
Mass deportations of, I don't know, approximately 12 million illegal alien invaders that have come here just from 20 January of 2021. Let's not worry about anybody who came in beforehand.
You just can't.
Maybe if the criminal's in jail, yes, but I'm saying that's a small percentage.
You've got to focus on what Biden allowed in the invasion.
That's enough.
It'll take us years to do that, but focus on that.
And it's mass deportations.
Number three, in neither one of those, even the beginning of the kinetic part of the Third World War is not existential right now, if you handle it and extract it.
And the deportations are...
The invasion's horrible, but you got the army there now, that's the first step of stopping it, you have much more awareness, even Abbott's sending the National Guard there.
The existential is the financial part.
Even, I haven't pulled it up yet, but Bill Ackman, even Bill Ackman had a tweet last night, and Ackman goes through $36 trillion in debt, the refinancing of that's driving inflation, that has to be cut, the way to do it is doge.
The thing itself is to get the grips around the spending.
Morning Joe does, I think, a 12-minute segment on eggs today.
The price of eggs.
unidentified
Trump promised the price of eggs, the price of eggs, the price of eggs.
steve bannon
You're only going to get inflation down when you get the inflationary aspects of a Keynesian, right, at this low employment, I get my economist here, this is a Keynesian stimulus.
You're juicing into the economy all the time.
At a $6.5 trillion of federal spending, approximately, and with $4.5 trillion coming in, approximately, that gap is $2 trillion.
The Congressional Budget Office concurs me.
Now, there's some debate about dynamic scoring and undynamic scoring.
I won't bore you with the details.
But just roughly, it's $2 trillion.
We're talking about reconciliation bills and, you know, do these things for the border and the taxes.
Let's be blunt.
The whole thing with Jason Smith and these guys over there on Ways and Means is the $4 trillion of President Trump's tax cut.
You have to renew the $2.6 trillion that goes to people, couples under $400,000 and everybody underneath that.
And maybe even juice that a little bit.
And you've got to take care of the pass-throughs to the small entrepreneurs, which is another couple hundred billion dollars.
So let's say of the four trillion, it's up to three trillion of that.
A trillion dollar, the tax cut, I'm saying, one, it should not be a tax cut for the wealthy.
In fact, there should be a tax increase until we close the gap because they're the ones, the corporatists, the lords of easy money, the oligarchs in Silicon Valley, they're all welfare queens.
They all want goodies and support from your dollars.
And the place to start is the defense budget.
And I'm a hawk.
And I've got skin in the game to show I'm a hawk.
As my daughter does and the rest of the family.
We're hawks.
But we're bigger hawks.
The ticking time bomb on our national security is this debt because it's inextricably linked with our ability to face The Chinese Communist Party.
And we're crippling ourselves every day.
Okay, so let me pull back.
President Trump in his geoeconomic and geostrategic rethinking, this goes back to, you know, we're free market capitalists.
One, we believe there should be more capitalists.
There's not.
Right now we're in a world's, the world's system is mercantilist, essentially.
Where they're grifting off of, the whole world is underwritten, as President Trump said the other day in his tweet, is underwritten by working men and women in this country.
That's why we are protectionists.
That's why we look at external revenue service.
That's why we look at the golden market here that you've created, the little platoons that Burke talked about, that's given the stability and civic underpinnings of this economy, of which, by the way, you guys are all dialed out of, except for a tiny piece.
On the income side, which is not increasing.
Geostrategically, President Trump, in amazing focus, goes, hey, how about this?
Hemispheric defense.
I think I've heard that before.
Oh, yeah, that's right.
The revolutionary generation and the founders.
James Monroe being the biggest.
And James Monroe, as people know, was, I believe, an officer at Valley Forge with...
With General Washington as a junior officer, as Hamilton was.
And John Marshall.
Many of the people, the most loyal to General Washington and then President Washington and really the people that built the American system.
That was a system of economics that came out of the report on manufacturers.
And we...
As economic nationalists and guys that think, you know, Hamilton was fantastic.
He went a little further deep on certain things, right?
Had a little too much, a little bit kind of a globalist on the, I mean, nationalist, but kind of admired the British Empire a little too much.
And I don't know, like a lot of individuals, you know, had a thing with the ladies, right?
Just did.
He was not, he was a very imperfect instrument, but a great man.
And I would argue one of the greatest of the founders, the American system.
Backed by Monroe.
Backed by Marshall.
You notice the American system was really backed a lot by those that saw the sacrifice in the war.
Because they're all thinking it's the Declaration of Independence.
A bunch of lawyers writing a beautiful document.
That was just a beautiful document to set the table for an invasion that already started.
I think we finished the Declaration on the 2nd, ready for signature on the 4th.
The British Expeditionary Force landed in Staten Island on, wait for it, the afternoon of the 2nd.
The revolutionary generation knew they were going to war.
This was the largest expeditionary force in world history at that time.
Maybe as bigger than, at least modern history, bigger than Xerxes coming to Greece to shut down another democracy from Persia.
Gosh, how that's interconnected today, right?
So, the hemispheric, and you send Rubio the first time to Panama, he's got a 30-minute meeting, and the guy walks out, the president walks out to the stick, says, I'm out of one belt, one road, and we told you, they pulled the contract yesterday, they began to pull the contract from Hutchinson, Wampoa, the huge trading company in Hong Kong that runs the port of Hong Kong and runs the port of Panama, they're throwing him out.
He's taken that in Greenland.
We had Tom Dans, a very moving ceremony yesterday, laying the wreath where the Dorchester sank with the four chaplains, two Protestants, a Catholic, and I'll throw in a rabbi.
Right?
Sank out there in the North Atlantic, freezing to death immediately with hypothermia on a merchant marine ship.
So in Greenland, you've got the extension of Fortress America, the extension of 2.0.
If you add the island chains in the Pacific, you've hermetically sealed the United States, throw on top of it an iron dome, and we're good to go.
In Ukraine, Zelensky, who used one of the crudest terms, and I've been known to throw out a couple of crude terms.
I got it.
I'm an Irishman and a naval officer.
Sometimes it just slips.
And I run a little hot sometimes.
He is one of the crudest descriptions for Tucker Carlson.
What has Tucker Carlson done?
Stood up for his nation and want to know where the grift is.
And this is a guy on Piers Morgan comes yesterday.
On Piers Morgan.
And Zelensky's sitting there and says this crude thing about Tucker Carlson on the day after he told the Associated Press, I only got $77 billion.
I don't know what Marjorie Taylor Greene and Bannon and all these guys are wanting about.
What are they talking about?
I only got $77 billion.
I know you allocated $179 billion, but hey, I don't know.
I just got $77 billion.
It's an open secret in this city.
It's an open secret with the CIA. It's an open secret in New York and the city of London that they've been stealing with both hands.
Open secret.
They're stealing with both hands.
And right now, we're a little too bogged down in that.
I'm not going to address Gaza because it's about focus and about opportunity costs.
And we've got a shredder we're going into.
Here's the shredder.
It's not simply the reconciliation bills.
The reconciliation bills are trying to accomplish things and do things that are...
Good to haves, and actually saying the tax thing, yes, nice to have, you have to have, as Scott Besson says.
However, we have something fundamental that nobody wants to talk about.
And now I'm sitting inside the conference because we're hammering it.
On the 14th of March, at midnight, the government's out of money again.
It doesn't matter if Elon's over there, he's got the checkbook, he's finally gotten back, he's gone to OMB where it's allocated, and then gone back to the thing, got the checkbook.
Just stopping him, writing checks.
That's not cutting spending.
That's just slowing it down.
I kind of dig it in one aspect of it.
It puts them on notice.
Your money just can't flow.
However, midnight on the 14th is the moment of decision.
We're either in or we're out.
Do we actually shut down?
President Trump, does he actually shut down his own government from funding?
Gold, all-time high.
Okay, gold, birch gold.
Think gold's at 28. By the way, breaking news over at Zero Hedge Twitter.
Our own Jason Trenert of Strategius has been named the Assistant Secretary of Treasury for Financial Markets.
unidentified
That's great.
steve bannon
That's fabulous.
We've lost the entire economic team, it says, for E.J. and Tony and Dave Brett.
This is how desperate I am.
I got a failed pro tennis player here that finally had to make a living.
So he went to work.
He taught at a college of poets.
I'm kidding.
Brad's my go-to now in all things economics.
And by the way, to show you Brad's stepping up to the plate.
He's been...
Coming to me all night with these detailed mathematical calculus formulas that proving he's like a mad professor now, saying I've figured it out.
He's on the whiteboard.
I go, Dave, stop, stop.
I said, no, Besant's gone.
Peter's on CNN this morning.
Peter was great on CNN, Navarro.
You got Besant, vote.
They're slowing down vote.
They just said they're going to do 30 hours.
They're so apoplectic on vote.
Rachel Maddow, every night, she's back to work five nights a week.
She ain't happy about it.
She's on vote every night.
Morning Joe's doing 15-minute segments on the price of eggs.
Just for the Republican caucus over there.
Look, only 170 people went to Doral.
That is a warning flare.
Why didn't everybody go?
What I'm hearing is that people are very upset that there's not enough serious work going on this budget.
And look, the reconciliations are fine, and there's no plan for that.
Lindsey Graham and the Senate, you should know, is coming forward with the two.
They're coming forward with the border and energy, etc.
They're not doing it because they're friends of War Room.
Remember, the Senate's moving at the donors.
The donors are very concerned that if you have one...
Big, beautiful bill.
It's easier to vote down.
They've got to get those tax cuts.
I actually think it's easier if we bifurcate it.
First of all, we've got to get the border.
They don't have the money right now to do what Homan and these guys want to do.
Remember, it's mass deportations.
The onesies Tuesday they're doing now is heroic.
I love the optics.
We do know, though, from people there, it's getting harder.
It's administrative warrants.
Pam Bonney is going to change that.
Pam is going to be at the White House at 1130. We may cut to the Oval Office.
She may be in with the president.
We'll cut to Pam Bondi.
He got approved last night.
19...
Seagal Chata out in Nevada has sent me...
19 attorney generals are suing now, I think, on Kash Patel.
They want...
So, what was said on Rachel Maddow the last three or four nights, they're digging in now.
They're shattered.
They don't have a leader.
John Stewart's telling Schumer, you've got to get off TV. But they're trying to regroup.
They're trying to look at a rally point, just like we did in 21. Remember that.
And they're going to have it, and they have many more resources.
They still have the media.
These guys are far from done.
This is why USAID has to get done, because you're taking out a funding pool.
Okay?
So I want to go to...
Oh, Birch Gold.
The price of gold hit another all-time high, I think, overnight.
I'm not here hawking gold.
What we're making available to you is...
And you're thinking.
And we know the audience loves receipts and loves details.
It's very important, we believe, for you to understand in all the range of financial alternatives, you need a hedge against times of turbulence.
That's what gold's always been.
How gold's performed over the last couple of years has traditionally not had gold performance.
Dave Brett knows this.
I mean, I think we picked it up as like $1,100 an ounce or $1,200.
You've never had these kind of moves.
The moves are going...
Because of the decrease of the purchasing power of the dollar.
Why is that?
Okay, let me think for a second.
unidentified
Hang on.
steve bannon
Oh, the deficits, the federal spending.
The railhead all gets back.
The apparatus has more control over you.
They're more involved in every aspect of your life, right?
Inflation goes, and now it's embedded.
Bill Ackman, can we put up the tweet from Ackman?
You know, Ackman's no fan of Warren, but he is...
A major axe on Wall Street as a hedge fund.
I think he runs Pershing Square Capital.
Pershing Square Capital, as you know, is one of the little squares there in New York that are dotted with him.
And he's saying, he has a whole thing about Elon Musk and about letting Doge do their work and find these cuts and do this in supporting President Trump and Elon Musk.
But his preamble is the mantra of the war room.
Is that at $36 trillion and adding a trillion dollars every 100 days or so and having deficits still annually at $2 trillion in perpetuity?
Because, ladies and gentlemen, this is as far as the eye can see.
He's saying it's not sustainable.
Plus, he gets to the point in having to refinance that.
He gets down to having to refinance that, a third of it essentially every year at higher and higher rates because that's what's happening.
that you're embedding inflation.
That you can only take away when you cut the deficits.
We're not talking about, in your lifetime, the lived experience of this audience.
We will not get to ever taking off a dollar, the principal amount of the debt.
It won't happen.
The struggle now, even Elon Musk went for two trillion off the 6.5 now to now one trillion off, and I'm not faulting him.
I think he's understanding it's a lot more complicated.
It's not like a company.
And this is my point about the OMB where the money was, which I think shocked everybody that, wow, it's everywhere.
Head Start, Meals on Wheels, and every congressional district, they were getting blown up down at Doral.
This is why President Trump retracted the memo, but remember, not the content of the memo, which was slow down payments.
And it shows you everywhere.
It also shows you complexity in Medicaid.
Medicaid, you would think Medicaid and Defense Department would be the two you look at.
Medicaid ain't so easy.
Because since corporations haven't been paying anybody and not picking up health care, Medicaid's in there.
And it's going to MAGA, particularly working-class Americans.
That's just a reality you have to face.
So with all that, it gets down to Elon then cuts to a trillion dollars starting next year, and what he's going to do is identify $4 billion a day between now and October 1st, the new fiscal year, to identify and kick in.
And my point is, yo, I got that.
But right now, I know you're doing the line diagram, but...
This weekend, sit down and just round up to the nearest hundred billion.
You do this in restructurings all the time.
You're not going to get to the fifth decimal place.
You don't need to get to the fifth decimal place.
The thing's so big and out of control, and this is what's out of control, is the spending.
Elon is out like I was a junior officer on a Navy ship.
You have to, what's called fight the ship, you have to understand how a combatant as a system works.
And you also have to learn when the enemy gets a vote, when you're in combat and things start blowing up, you have to know the system well enough that you can revert on damage control and do other things.
You've seen this if you've ever watched some of the war films about Navy ships.
Elon's engineering brain is doing the same thing.
OMB memos to find out where the cache is, how much percentage of it's out there, and where does it go.
And he goes to the railhead, then back to Treasury that actually writes the checks.
And, you know, in Trump's version of the world...
Hey, the way you control a company is to control the checkbook.
You don't sign any checks.
You can slow down payments.
You can stretch out.
You can make vendors a permanent part of your capital structure.
People do that all the time in restructurings, right?
I'll give you 10% now.
You've got to stretch your payments out.
If vendors want to keep selling stuff, they have to do it.
It hurts them, but hey, that's just the life.
Everybody in the audience knows that.
You run a small business.
But at the end of the day, The appropriations bill is a law.
It's a law for a reason.
It's statutory.
They vote on it, they negotiate it for a year, they allocate it, and it goes into a, first a treasury where the payments go, then OMB had a manager, had a look at it.
But it's a law.
President Trump's theory of the case, and Mark Paoletta, and Jeff Clark, and Russ Vogt, you know, three guys have been on the show a lot, have this theory of the case of impoundment.
In the theory of the case of an impoundment, like in the Green News scam, when President Trump signs an executive order and says the Green News scam is over, right, that the $300 billion they're saying, remember the headline of the Financial Times, $300 billion, President Trump can grab that because the trillion dollars was a ceiling and he can, in the unified theory of the executive, chief executive, he can make a determination and give me that money and I'm going to reallocate that to Tom Homan, etc.
Okay?
This is...
By the way, it's an interesting theory.
We happen to believe it's correct here in the war room.
But nine people in black robes across the street are eventually going to make a decision on that.
And here's the thing.
The 14th, this train's left the station and it's hurtling down to a conclusion.
Everything should be put aside right now for the next 30 days.
And Elon should sit down with the president.
I understand you're doing this stuff and running around and shutting down the FBI. And God bless you.
We need it.
However, the main thing...
If we don't have the political will and the votes to cut it, then let's just have an adult conversation.
Then we've got to figure out how to finance it.
But right now, we're kidding ourselves.
And this is why you're seeing Byron Donalds.
And this is why you're seeing Eli Crane and Andy Biggs and the same guys.
And Byron Donalds gets it.
He's going to run for governor of Florida.
He wants to be part of a team that got something done in the House.
Dave Bratt.
dave brat
Yeah, well, that's the main point right there.
It's back when I came in with Paul Ryan and Speaker, and I assumed these guys had a plan.
There was no plan.
And so now why is Elon, all the pressures on Elon for this trillion because the House and the Senate have totally failed.
And the American people are starting to see right now with these stories converging, Barrasso and Lindsey Graham versus the Speaker Mike Johnson in this debate over the one big beautiful bill.
How in the world do we not have our ducks in a row, right?
The left is planning to come after us.
Schumer is going bananas right now.
MSNBC is blowing up.
The time will come.
When they attack, and we're not ready to go.
I mean, we're doing great work right now, but the House and the Senate aren't responsible for any of it.
Joni Ernst wrote an article yesterday, was in an article yesterday.
She's scared of USAID. She says they're coming after her.
USAID is threatening her.
steve bannon
Oh, stop.
What do you mean USAID is threatening her?
What does that mean?
dave brat
$50 billion.
They said you can't look to a U.S. senator.
You can't look at these contracts.
You can't look at this classified stuff because you might leak it.
They work for her, right?
And so...
This is the problem.
The House and the Senate have been letting this go on for 20 years.
And now it's all coming out, right?
And so the House and the Senate are going to look really bad as this news emerges.
And so, getting back to your egg thing, this inflation and eggs are up, it's total gaslighting.
Prices went up 22% under the Biden regime.
Inflation is 3% this year, so prices are up 25% over the past five years.
25% out of your retirement account, by the way.
Not just eggs.
Your retirement account is worth 25% less.
That has not sunk into the average American person yet.
steve bannon
It sank into the bricks?
dave brat
Yeah.
steve bannon
This is why they tried to buy together to have a gold bank.
And President Trump said, hey, look, I love the bricks, 100% tariffs, and you keep messing around with the dollar, right?
dave brat
And people are getting confused about the causes of inflation.
Friedman had it right.
It's always when you print $9 trillion M2, you're going to get inflation.
It's money printing.
steve bannon
Explain that.
dave brat
What's M2? M2 is the amount of money in your economy, right?
And so if you print way too much money, you're supposed to print the percent change of GDP growth.
Skip the details here, though.
What matters is people think government spending causes inflation.
It does not.
It appears to because every time we spend government spending is $2 trillion, the Federal Reserve comes in and accommodates it.
That's the big word for the day when it comes to the Fed.
The Federal Reserve accommodates their spending.
So that interest rates don't go through the roof.
That is not really their job, right?
They're not supposed to be accommodating and making it easy for our government to run $2 trillion deficits.
But when you have the Uniparty and no congressional oversight from the House and the Senate, again, I repeat myself, for the past 30 years, the Fed gets us into the 0708 financial crisis, creates the Tea Party movement.
That leads into this populist movement that's international in scope.
It is clear in the field right now.
The left is apoplectic.
But it all comes down to this $36 trillion in debt.
That's $36 trillion.
Where do you see that in our economy?
What's that $36 trillion in debt done for you, as Steve says, every day?
Where do you see it?
Do you see it in the cities?
Do you see it in human capital?
Do you see it anywhere?
It's crowding out our ability to do anything.
steve bannon
Hang on one second.
We're going to take a short break.
I've listened to the audience.
Dave is in the room.
He's at the mic.
Short break.
back in a moment.
So Birch Gold, make sure this is about turbulence.
Won't you be as smart as possible?
The end of the dollar empire.
Make sure you go and get it.
It's been on fire, the request for this.
Modern monetary theory.
People are digging it.
Brad's going to be here.
We got records coming on the geopolitics and capital markets because, quite frankly, this is every March 14th.
And I'm telling you now, what's going to happen is going to be extend the CR for one year.
Extend the CR for one year.
And that means we're going off last year's spending, which is...
It's still Biden's numbers.
We have to face the reality.
We kick this thing into the can to make sure that President Trump gets a shot at doing the budget.
We have to do it.
Johnson and these guys, everything should be dropped right now.
The focus should be on this.
Focus is power.
Focus is power.
I would actually say focus oftentimes is a superpower.
Focus is power.
It's one of the reasons we were one of the elements with you and you were the major element of turning this thing around.
Because we focus on going after the illegitimate regime every day and able to get a rally point like they're trying to do right now over on the left.
And all I'm hearing all day, my phone's been blown up.
People tell me, hey, they're coming with lawsuits.
They're trying to slow everything down.
They're trying to slow to get through the hundred days and the six months and then basically try to entangle President Trump and everything.
This is why we don't need to entangle ourselves in more things.
The list of stuff we have is monumental.
It will return America to its greatness.
But you have to rank order those of what we have to do.
As much as it's positive, and things are positive, when you look at Gallup and these others, it's about 48 or 49% approval, and it's about 47% disapproval.
Now, I know in groups we break out, and I would say, actually, this thing could be in the mid-50s.
But even that...
Given what you're trying to accomplish, which is huge, is amazingly important.
Patriot Mobile.
I'm on the 28th, Friday night the 28th in Tarrant County.
If we can get that up.
Poso is going to be with me.
So I'm going to give a major address down there to the Tarrant County Republican Party.
Patriot Mobile is putting it on.
Patriot Mobile.
Your Christian values backed up every day by Glenn Story and the team.
Just absolutely amazing.
So I'll be down there on Friday.
We'll probably be doing the show from around down in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
We'll figure it out and get notification to you about what we do.
Also, it's CPAC. We're going to be at CPAC in very special.
I think we're working on some special accommodations given the size of the show and the amount of people we're bringing at CPAC.org.
Put in War Room.
You get a huge discount.
Tickets are $76.
Essentially giving them away to the War Room Posse because they want another huge turnout of the couple thousand that we brought last year.
So pretty amazing.
Also, Patriot Mobile and Birch Gold.
Birch Gold, make sure you go and get all the access, the information.
They got a great thing.
Investing in gold during the age of Trump.
Second term.
Read it, understand it, and talk to Philip Patrick and the team.
Professor, you've been chomping the bit here.
dave brat
Yep.
Cameron, you got the chart with the equations up at the top.
This is wonky.
I'm not going to make it wonky.
steve bannon
This is wonky?
No, this is beyond wonky.
You don't get this at Harvard Business School.
My brain is frozen right now.
dave brat
That's the problem, right?
Here's the fundamentals.
There's three things.
This is the solo Nobel Prize winning economic growth model.
Solo 50 years ago.
Three things in that equation cause growth.
Capital stock.
The capital stock in China right now is $100 trillion.
In the U.S. of A, it's only $70 trillion.
Hate to be a downer.
We're doing great things right now.
Elon, Trump, everything.
That's just to stop the dumpster fire, right?
They're just stopping the bleeding.
They're stopping the Marxist-Leninist overtake of this country.
But to rebuild, if you don't rebuild your capital stock, and we haven't even started.
Trump's putting all the right moves in place for that to occur.
Three things in that equation.
Capital stock, human capital, the literacy rate in downtown Chicago for the poor kids is 12% of the kids can read in the third grade.
You tell me how that's the American citizen first that the liberals care about.
And third is technological growth.
So he's got the techno brothers on board, but we'll see if they can put policies in place that help the middle class.
Next chart, Denver.
I just want to bring this one up.
I'm giving this talk at the Atlantic Council in a couple hours with some of our friends from Ukraine.
unidentified
Hold it.
dave brat
Stop.
steve bannon
Stop.
The Atlantic Council is the word.
dave brat
I know.
unidentified
I'm a convertum.
steve bannon
You're there as a populist nation.
That's the biggest globalist.
dave brat
Yes, I'm going full on.
Look at this chart.
You can go back to 1981, Denver.
There's India and China, the big red balls, making $2,000 a year.
In 1980. I see all those yellow balls to the far right, the rich ones.
The further to the right you are, the richer you are.
All those yellow balls are what's known as Protestant Christian countries in Western Europe.
The free market system, all humanity made $500 a year for all human history until we chose, it's a social choice, the free market system.
This does not go against anything in the Trump agenda.
He's trying to get back to a level playing field where the globalists and the European elites and Canada's true dough and Mexican criminal class, not the people.
We love all the people everywhere.
But the elitists have been ripping off the United States forever.
Canada's spending on defense is 1.4 percent.
It should be 4 percent.
And they're lecturing us.
What I want to point out on that graph right there, those Christian countries, this is by Bradford DeLong, a top economist at Berkeley.
I don't think he's a Presbyterian.
The probability of the Christian countries growing like that is 1 in 10,000.
There's a 1 in 10,000 chance that all those Christian countries grew the fastest in the world.
At random.
It didn't happen that way.
Our most recent Nobel Prize in Economics went for the outstanding contribution that private property rights and the rule of law is helpful to economic growth.
No kidding.
So is the Christian religion.
So is a morality.
All of our founders knew that.
steve bannon
I agree, but this is the underpinnings of the Judeo-Christian West.
dave brat
Yeah, that's right.
steve bannon
Those ethics and those values.
dave brat
Yeah, that's right.
steve bannon
And the work ethic, the husbanding of resources, the stewardship.
All of it.
Old Testament and New Testament combined.
All of it, right.
Led to the underpinnings of that that make these successful societies, correct?
dave brat
Yeah, and you can copy the cookbook.
Japan did, but then MIDI, their manufacturing, got too tight with the government, and they had lost a decade or two.
Like, we're about ready to have.
steve bannon
What do you mean by that?
dave brat
Well, our culture's fading, too.
We're going to these techno-bros.
steve bannon
I thought we were heading to a new golden age.
President Trump tells me that.
We're going to get that story in the next, okay.
The right stuff.
What does the right stuff mean to you?
dave brat
Right stuff is the Judeo-Christian West and everything that goes with it.
steve bannon
It's indefinable, but you know it when you see it.
And I see it in Dave Bratt.
Bratt, when are you going into Treasury and get a real job?
It's coming.
Don't go to the Atlantic Council.
dave brat
I'm waiting for the invisible hand.
It's going to happen.
Something will happen.
steve bannon
Short break.
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