Feb. 7, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
48:54
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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Go back and listen to what Steve Bannon told PBS's Frontline in 2019. The opposition party is the media. | |
| And the media can only, because they're dumb and they're lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time. | ||
| All we have to do is flood the zone. | ||
| Every day, we hit them with three things. | ||
| They'll bite on one, and we'll get all of our stuff done. | ||
| Bang, bang, bang. | ||
| These guys will never be able to recover. | ||
| But we've got to start with muzzle velocity. | ||
| So it's got to start, and it's got to hammer. | ||
|
unidentified
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What does it work? | |
| Muzzle velocity. | ||
|
unidentified
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Muzzle velocity. | |
| Bannon's insight there is real. | ||
| Focus is a fundamental substance of democracy. | ||
| It is particularly the substance of opposition. | ||
| People largely learn of what the government is doing through the media. | ||
| So if you overwhelm the media... | ||
| A record-setting number of executive orders. | ||
| Everybody pardons. | ||
| Violence, nonviolence. | ||
| Including assaulting police officers. | ||
|
unidentified
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Birthright citizenship. | |
| We live in unprecedented times right now. | ||
| If you keep it moving from one thing to the next... | ||
| So far so good. | ||
| Is this legal? | ||
| If you give it too many places, it needs to look. | ||
| You've never been deported before? | ||
| You'd have to feel it. | ||
| All at once. | ||
| All federal grants and loans will be halted. | ||
| Look, there is a purge happening. | ||
| Frankly, unprecedented in its nature. | ||
|
unidentified
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Guantanamo. | |
| DEI. The Gulf of America. | ||
| No coherent opposition can really emerge. | ||
| It is hard to even think coherently. | ||
| Donald Trump's first two weeks in the White House have followed Bannon's strategy like a script. | ||
| The flood is a point. | ||
| The overwhelm is a point. | ||
| The message wasn't in any one executive order or announcement. | ||
| It was in the cumulative effect of all of them. | ||
| The sense that this is Trump's country now. | ||
| It is his government now. | ||
| It follows his will. | ||
| It does what he wants. | ||
| That he is limitless. | ||
| If he says that birthright citizenship is over, then it's over. | ||
| Or so he wants you to think. | ||
| In Trump's first term, people said, don't normalize him. | ||
| In a second, though, the task I think is a little bit clearer. | ||
| Don't believe him. | ||
| Because Trump knows the power of marketing, the power of belief. | ||
| If you make people believe something is true, you make it likelier that it becomes true. | ||
| He clawed his way back to great wealth by playing a fearsome billionaire on TV. He remade himself as a winner after the 2020 election by refusing to admit he had ever lost. | ||
| The American presidency is a limited office. | ||
| But Trump has never wanted to be president. | ||
| What he's always wanted to be is king. | ||
| And his plan this time is to first play king on TV. If we believe he is already king, if we believe he already has all that power, we will be likelier to let him govern as a king. | ||
| We will then give him that power. | ||
| Don't believe him. | ||
| Trump has real powers, but they are the powers of the presidency, the powers Joe Biden had. | ||
| The powers Barack Obama had. | ||
| The pardon power is vast and unrestricted. | ||
| And so he could indeed pardon the January 6th rioters. | ||
| Federal security protection is under the discretion of the executive branch. | ||
| And so, yes, Trump could remove protection from Anthony Fauci and Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and Mark Milley and even Brian Hook, this largely unknown former State Department official who's under threat from Iran, who even donated time to Trump's transition team. | ||
| I would be very happy to put President Trump's record in the Middle East against any other president. | ||
| All of this, it was an act of astonishing cruelty and callousness. | ||
| This from a man who nearly died by an assassin's bullet months ago. | ||
| As much as anything ever has been this to me, this was an x-ray of the smallness of Trump's soul. | ||
| But it was an act that was within his official power. | ||
| But the president cannot rewrite the Constitution. | ||
| Within days, his birthright citizenship order was frozen by a judge, by a Reagan appointee, who told Trump's lawyers, I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. | ||
| It just boggles my mind. | ||
| Then, a judge froze Trump's spending freeze. | ||
| He froze it even before it went into full effect. | ||
| And shortly thereafter, the Trump administration rescinded the entire order, in part to avoid a court case. | ||
| And it seemed pretty clear they would lose. | ||
| What Bannon wanted, what the Trump administration wants, is to keep everything moving fast. | ||
| Muzzle velocity. | ||
|
unidentified
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If you're always consumed by the next outrage, you can't look closely at the last one. | |
| Then the impression of Trump's power remains and the fact that he keeps stepping on rakes is missed. | ||
| The projection of strength obscures the reality of weakness. | ||
| Don't believe him. | ||
| You can see this a few ways. | ||
| Is Trump playing a part? | ||
| Is he making a bet or is he triggering a crisis? | ||
| Those, I think, are the options. | ||
| And I'm not certain that even he knows the answer. | ||
| Trump has always been an improviser. | ||
| But if you take it as a bet, a calculation, then here is a bet he's making. | ||
| Maybe this Supreme Court, stocked with his appointees, gives him powers no peacetime president has ever possessed. | ||
| Perhaps all this becomes legal now that he has asserted its legality. | ||
| It's not impossible to imagine that bet paying off for him. | ||
| So what if the bet fails? | ||
| What if Trump's arrogations of power are soundly rejected by the courts? | ||
| Then comes a question of constitutional crisis. | ||
| Does he just ignore the court's ruling? | ||
| To do that would be to attempt a kind of coup. | ||
| I wonder if they have a stomach for that. | ||
| The withdrawal of the OMB order, to me, suggests they don't. | ||
| Because bravado aside, Trump's political capital is thin. | ||
| Gallup is Trump's approval rating at 47%. | ||
| That is about 10 points beneath Joe Biden in January of 2021. Both in his first and his second terms, he entered office with approval ratings below that of any other president in the modern era. | ||
| And so I thought these defenses of Trump's firings were telling. | ||
| It is the belief of this White House and the White House Counsel's office that the president was within his executive authority to do that. | ||
| The law says he's supposed to do a 30 days notice. | ||
| He didn't do that. | ||
| Do you think he violated the law? | ||
| Technically, yeah. | ||
| Do you believe that it's legal? | ||
| By definition, it's his administration. | ||
| They work for him at the pleasure of the president. | ||
| And if it's illegal, it should be legal. | ||
| So then ask yourself, why isn't Trump trying to make it legal? | ||
| There is a reason Trump is doing all this through executive orders rather than submitting these same directives as legislation that passed through Congress. | ||
| A more powerful executive could convince Congress to eliminate the spending he opposes or to reform the civil service to give him the powers of hiring and firing that he seeks. | ||
| And there's a good reason to do that. | ||
| To write these changes into legislation would make them both more durable and would allow them to argue their merits in a more strategic way. | ||
| He would be reforming the entire system. | ||
| But Republicans at the moment, they have only a three-seat edge in the House. | ||
| Smallest majority since the Great Depression. | ||
| They have a 53-seat majority in the Senate. | ||
| Trump is obviously doing nothing to reach out to Democrats. | ||
| If Trump tried to pass this agenda's legislation, it would fail. | ||
| And that would make Trump look weak. | ||
| Trump doesn't want to look weak. | ||
| He remembers John McCain humiliating him in his first term by casting the deciding vote against Obamacare appeal. | ||
| Congress is a place where you can lose. | ||
| What Trump wants you to see in all this activity is command. | ||
| What is really in all this activity is chaos. | ||
| They have convinced themselves that speed and force is a strategy unto itself. | ||
| That it is in a sense a replacement. | ||
| For an actual strategy, for thinking and talking things through, for consultation, for planning things out. | ||
| Don't believe them. | ||
| I had a conversation a couple months ago with someone who knows how the federal government works about as well as anyone alive. | ||
| And I asked him what would worry him most if he saw Trump doing it. | ||
| What he said was he would worry most if Trump went slowly. | ||
| If he began his term by doing things that made him more popular. | ||
| That made his opposition weaker and more confused. | ||
| If he worked by stealth, if he tried to build strength for the midterms while slowly expanding his powers and chipping away at the state in the places where it was weakest, where people couldn't really see him doing it. | ||
| But Trump didn't do any of that. | ||
| Instead, muzzle velocity. | ||
| And so the opposition to Trump, which seemed so listless and absent after the election, now it's beginning to rouse itself. | ||
| There's a subreddit for federal employees where one of the top posts reads, This non-buyout really seems to have backfired. | ||
| I'll be honest, before that email went out, I was looking for any way to get out of this fresh hell. | ||
| But now I'm fired up to make these goons as frustrated as possible. | ||
| As I write this, it's been upvoted more than 39,000 times. | ||
| And civil servant after civil servant is echoing the initial sentiment. | ||
| In Iowa this week, Democrats flipped a state Senate seat in a district that Trump had won easily in 2024. The attempted spending freeze gave Democrats their voice back as they zeroed in on the popular programs Trump had imperiled. | ||
| Trump isn't building support here. | ||
| He's losing it. | ||
| Trump isn't fracturing his opposition. | ||
| He's finally uniting it. | ||
| This is the weakness of the strategy that Bannon proposed and that Trump is following. | ||
| It is a strategy that forces you into overreach. | ||
| To keep the zone flooded, you have to keep acting. | ||
| You have to keep moving. | ||
| You have to keep creating new cycles of outrage or fear to keep the media and the opposition overwhelmed. | ||
| But then you overwhelm yourself. | ||
| They are flooding their own zone. | ||
| I don't know that Trump sees his own fork in the road coming. | ||
| He may believe he's a power he is claiming. | ||
| That would be a mistake on his part. | ||
| It would be a self-deception that could doom his presidency. | ||
| But the real threat... | ||
| Is if he convinces the rest of us to believe he has power he does not have. | ||
| The first two weeks of his presidency have not shown his strength. | ||
| He is trying to overwhelm you. | ||
| He is trying to keep you off balance. | ||
| He is trying to convince you of something that isn't true. | ||
| Don't believe him. | ||
| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
| Pray for our enemies. | ||
|
unidentified
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Because we're going medieval on these people. | |
| 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
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Mega Media. | |
| I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience. | ||
|
unidentified
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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
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War Room. | |
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| Welcome. | ||
| It's Thursday, 6th February, Year of the Lord, 2025. Wanted to play that. | ||
| For Measure Kline, right there, they understand flood the zone and how they're trying to combat it by focus, focus, focus. | ||
| They're still getting overwhelmed, and they will continue to be overwhelmed because President Trump is taking actions in every different vertical and pushing the envelope here. | ||
| Later, we're going to have Ben Berquam and Benzman on about the deportations effort and going after the cartels effort. | ||
| President Trump also signs, or Pam Bondi, I think, he signs an executive order. | ||
| With Pam Bonney, he's going to hit up a task force to make sure the government doesn't have any anti-Christian bias in it. | ||
| That's going to be quite interesting. | ||
| But today, we're getting a beat back in federal court. | ||
| President Trump then, I think, put the entire USAID on leave. | ||
| So there's a lot going on. | ||
| Do I have Natalie? | ||
| Is Natalie up at the White House yet? | ||
| We're trying to get this up. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Can we go there? | ||
|
unidentified
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Not? | |
| Fine. | ||
| I'll keep it right here. | ||
| We're good. | ||
| Natalie, so you heard the open right there. | ||
| They understand the flood the zone strategy. | ||
| They're trying to fight back. | ||
| A lot of this is taking place in federal court. | ||
| Of course, all of your embeds in the federal government are fighting back and leaking. | ||
| Folks should understand, this is the White House. | ||
| It's got peddled down and no break. | ||
| Things are coming out. | ||
| Everything President Trump gave a great brief to the press on his populist tax cuts. | ||
| We'll get to that. | ||
| Natalie, give us a sense of the White House. | ||
| How's it going? | ||
| And particularly on the resistance, ma'am, to flood the zone. | ||
| Yes, well, I'm always honored to sit in that press briefing room and have a front row seat, not just to the press briefings, but more importantly to the resistance, which, of course, is, I think, the bedrock of it becoming more and more each day. | ||
| The mainstream media, before we get into all the lawsuits, or I guess we should say the law fair, I just want to give, I guess it's a little bit of an exclusive, put our audience inside the room as I was getting ready to come out here and do this hit. | ||
| I have to say it was really, I mean, from my perspective, a glorious feeling going on in that press briefing room. | ||
| But every single mainstream media journalist looked so dejected. | ||
| I was listening to their conversations. | ||
| They're all so tired. | ||
| They're like, I don't even know how to cover this. | ||
| I think the quote of the day has to be, it's just all dismantling. | ||
| It's dismantling everything. | ||
| And I wanted to turn to him and say... | ||
| Well, yes, exactly. | ||
| And that's what the American people elected President Trump to do. | ||
| But in terms of pushing back against this dismantling, getting into the serious stuff, I think today, I think last night, was really the most intense I've ever seen MSNBC really engage with the resistance, even saying that word, which sort of wasn't really spoken out loud all that often, saying it explicitly. | ||
| And that's because today, on various verticals, you've seen the lawfare that they've been planning. | ||
| We had the Department of Labor lawsuit earlier today, keeping Doge preemptively. | ||
| Out of their hair, obviously Treasury, with the exception of two individuals having read-only access to what's going on up in Treasury with Scott Bessent. | ||
| That was what we covered this morning. | ||
| But since then, about an hour before we came to air, the infamous buyout offer, the fork in the road email, a district judge here in D.C., a Clinton appointee, stepped in and essentially said that we won't be able to roll that out. | ||
| They're going to have an additional hearing on Monday. | ||
| Natalie, hang on one second. | ||
| We're going to take a short commercial break. | ||
| We're going to come back. | ||
| The resistance in federal court with certain administrative judges. | ||
| President Trump still keeping the pedal down. | ||
| Signing executive orders. | ||
| Taking executive actions. | ||
| All next in the war room. | ||
|
unidentified
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Biden has put a temporary stop on President Trump and Elon Musk's attempt to buy out the federal workforce, ruling that both the administration and the labor unions who brought the suit need more time to brief their arguments, meaning that until next hearing, the next hearing, which is, by the way, scheduled for Monday, all employees who may have taken the buyout must be told the offer is blocked until at least next week. | |
| There are still major questions, though, about what's going to happen after that. | ||
| First and foremost, whether the offer is legal, but also, even if it is, whether the government has the money to fund the buyouts. | ||
| After all, Congress has not allocated any money for that purpose, and there is still a looming fight over a shutdown. | ||
| One of the members of the engine room just, you know, said, hey, look, what Trump's, it's kind of blitzkrieg. | ||
| It's to overwhelm and develop and continue to move on, not stop, bang, bang, bang. | ||
| Natalie, and these people are smart, and they're particularly using what they've got, which is media, which they've been a little bit overwhelmed, but also to use the courts now, and to use your brilliant term, the embeds that infest this government, of the two and a half million... | ||
| Civilian, I think we got 40,000. | ||
| Was it 40,000 takes on the buyout? | ||
| Was that the number? | ||
| I think it was about 2% of the entire workforce. | ||
| I think we need to add at least another zero to that. | ||
| I guess maybe, hey, the silver lining of postponing this till Monday is that I guess more people can sign on. | ||
| But to go back to this concept of embed, Steve, because I think that really gets to the heart of it, right? | ||
| The concept of civil society, but most importantly, civil service and civil servants at that, right? | ||
| That was sort of the cornerstone of their resistance since they lack any institutional power right now. | ||
| And the group that actually... | ||
| We were sued to stop this fork in the road email memo. | ||
| was actually Democracy Forward, the group that we've been talking about extensively, the consortium of over 200 resistance-type groups. | ||
| You've got the ACLU's, the SPLC's, every woke group that exists under the sun and probably is receiving your taxpayer dollars. | ||
| But they all represent and basically create this group called Democracy Forward. | ||
| But remember, the first step that they took when they set up this new group was to create something called Civil Service Strong. | ||
| And it was a very activist approach. | ||
| I always described as sort of the impeachment that could have been right. | ||
| They were instructing federal service, federal servants to basically become whistleblowers, how they could best do that, how they could best file lawsuits themselves, citing discrimination. | ||
| And I think, frankly, Steve. | ||
| The best and most interesting, frankly, insightful part of the whole Democracy Forward operation is that one of their board members was actually a DOJ career civil servant under both Biden. | ||
| And President Trump in the Voting Rights Division. | ||
| And I think that that speaks to the concept of embed with rather metaphorical significance that the same guy who wants to now make the case that all of these civil servants are not doing anything to oppose President Trump's legislative agenda. | ||
| Well, that's now the very same guy who's on the board of the organization suing President Trump for trying to rid his administration of people just like him. | ||
| But I will say a bright spot today. | ||
| Obviously, there was a lot of outrage. | ||
| I was going to say media outrage, but I think not from the outlets that are just a few feet away from me because they're all on the take from USAID. But President Trump ordered GSA to rescind any federal funding, subscriptions or otherwise, going to outlets including, but not limited to because they're investigating it, Politico, the BBC, and the New York Times. | ||
| So maybe that's why there are the long faces in that press briefing room. | ||
| Talk about the morale at the White House. | ||
| I mean, these folks are working now seven days a week, 18-hour days. | ||
| I understand the euphoria when you first get there, the intensity, but they're under onslaught. | ||
| They're getting the bad looks. | ||
| From the media, and as you know, the White House briefing room, which is still right there. | ||
| It's not moved over to EOB. It's right in the middle of things. | ||
| What's the energy you're seeing from EOB and from the West Wing? | ||
| What's the energy, the intensity? | ||
| How are we doing? | ||
| Well, frankly, I think Doge needs to get to work in the press briefing room, but I'll leave that aside for a second. | ||
| Look, I think that what it has come down to, obviously, they have embeds. | ||
| They've done the burrowing in of all the presidential appointments under President Biden, turning them into career civil servants. | ||
| They've tried to mount the best resistance that they can. | ||
| But unfortunately, and you know we are not, shall we say, sunshine soldiers. | ||
| We are winter soldiers here in the war room. | ||
| We call shots. | ||
| We call balls and strikes. | ||
| Every person, for the most part, you know, there's always some issues, but who has been appointed under President Trump, I think particularly at the Department of Justice, has been an absolute killer. | ||
| And I think that there's, if you really get down to it, a certain level of agency and autonomy that a lot of these individuals have in terms of feeling comfortable to actually push back. | ||
| And carry out their own mandate that I think if you really get to the core of it, much like the resistance is very systemic, well thought out and well planned. | ||
| I know you aren't allowed to say the words Project 2025, but this is a resistance, a sort of pro-Trump resistance that's been being planned for a very, very long time, right? | ||
| We had four years to plan this. | ||
| And I think what you're seeing is execution. | ||
| And I know the comm shop has been working overtime to really message and push back against a lot of the sneers coming from the mainstream media. | ||
| I think one point, an example that really showcases this is that the mainstream media is trying to take a bunch of laps and dunk, not just on the White House, but on the sort of, you know, ex-brigade saying that, oh, well, some of the grants that you guys have identified, they're actually not coming from USAID, but rather they're coming from the State Department. they're actually not coming from USAID, but rather they're coming And I think that that logic, Steve, actually proves why President Trump's federal funding freeze needs to be implemented, because it's not just USAID. | ||
| There is something rotten within the entirety of this government that's not just USAID. | ||
| And I think President Trump and, like I said, the Twitter researchers, the Twitter investigators, the Doge people are really getting to the bottom of it. | ||
| And it really is firing on all cylinders. | ||
| And like I said, Steve, the real tell. | ||
| I wish the audience I would do anything I could to bring you guys inside that room with me. | ||
| They're an absolute meltdown. | ||
| I believe I heard everyone say, I can't believe it's not Friday yet. | ||
| I can't believe the week's not over. | ||
| It feels like we've been here for months. | ||
| It feels like this is the longest week ever. | ||
| It's just about dismantling. | ||
| How do we cover it? | ||
| And then another quote, I don't think that people want to read about all these stories about these random agencies being shut down. | ||
| And I was like, no, we do. | ||
| And we're going to. | ||
| Well, this is what deconstruction administrative state is, right? | ||
| They're seeing it right now. | ||
| They're copying you, yeah. | ||
| I think going through and looking at the numbers and what Elon's doing in that regard is very powerful. | ||
| And obviously with USAID and others, I'll talk in a little while about, I think we've got to start getting serious about... | ||
| Where we're going to have the big cuts, because the 14th of March is not going to go away, and that's when the government runs out of money. | ||
| Last thing before I let you go, Ezra Klein, this thing is going super viral on the left with the indivisible group, Democracy Forward, the media. | ||
| They feel Ezra Klein's giving them a way forward, particularly that Trump really doesn't have any power. | ||
| He has the projection of power. | ||
| And if they just pick, if they don't go after everything, as we keep saying here, focus is power, focus is power. | ||
| They're trying to say the same mantra to pick and choose where you fight Trump. | ||
| Do you believe that as you see it, the left is the left is picking that up right now? | ||
| Kind of sounds like the foil to Curtis Yarvin. | ||
| You know, I don't. | ||
| I don't necessarily, I can't put myself in the mindset or the shoes of the resistance types, but as someone who has read, I think, every pamphlet available in terms of what they're telling their audience. | ||
| I attend all their town halls. | ||
| I watch all of the rhetoric that they're putting out there. | ||
| I think, truly, Steve, part of it is cope, right? | ||
| They need the idea that what they can do actually has some effect. | ||
| And I think up until yesterday... | ||
| Their efforts to push back through the media were really not all that successful. | ||
| I think today they've started to see some legal and lawfare victories, albeit temporary, right? | ||
| They're not the permanent injunctions that they're pushing for, so we'll see how that works out when President Trump's team actually has the opportunity to push back. | ||
| But this mindset of civil society, I think the biggest lie, frankly, Steve, being pushed on sort of the grassroots left right now is that they actually have a voice. | ||
| In the resistance movement, because this is something that's not happening, right? | ||
| That's sort of the, I think, juxtaposition of our show versus the left-wing grassroots, right? | ||
| Our resistance is driven by the people who view this show, and it's against the party elites. | ||
| Democrat resistance is driven by the party elites, oftentimes against their own grassroots. | ||
| But the grassroots... | ||
| What they want to see come from the party, the more populous left-wing stuff, they're never going to get. | ||
| So they're sort of fighting for a pyrrhic victory, right? | ||
| They're only fighting to make democratic power brokers and elites kind of have that institutional power. | ||
| It's the people like Norm Eisen. | ||
| It's the Victoria Nulands. | ||
| It's the regime change people. | ||
| You're talking about an existential threat, not just to Democrats, but to the sort of just neocon, for lack of a better word, world order. | ||
| In the same way, sure, it's the Soros groups too, but it's also the International Republican Institute that thinks that we need to be the world's policemen. | ||
| So it's an interesting thing that we're definitely going to be tracking here, but I think the audience just needs to remember groups like Indivisible, Democracy Forward, Democracy 2025, and of course Democracy Docket, Mark Elias' group, these are what we need to be focusing on. | ||
| Don't get lost with the shiny toys. | ||
| That's the hotbed of resistance. | ||
| Natalie, very proud of the work you're doing. | ||
| The one person is kind of trying to coordinate all this and see it. | ||
| It's just amazing. | ||
| So where do people go for your social media, ma'am? | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| Natalie G. Winters on all social media platforms. | ||
| Thank you for having me. | ||
| And thank you to the audience for letting me stand inside that really depressed briefing room. | ||
| So great. | ||
| They're depressed for all the right reasons, ma'am. | ||
| Deconstructing the administrative state. | ||
| Natalie Winters at the White House. | ||
| Want to thank Real America's Voice. | ||
| Want to thank President Trump's White House comms team. | ||
| Want to thank Susie Wiles, the chief of staff, everybody, for making that available. | ||
| I think we're making good use of it. | ||
| Mike Davis is going to join us. | ||
| I want to make sure that we understand the legal, the chop blocks that are coming after us, and also Cash Patel. | ||
| A little drama there. | ||
| Today with Cash, some great news on a... | ||
| A executive order to make sure there's no bias about Christianity or Christians in the government. | ||
| Catherine O'Neill worked at the State Department trying to get her on to talk about that. | ||
| That was her line of work. | ||
| Birch Gold, president, put out a populist tax policy this afternoon. | ||
| You're going to love him. | ||
| We're not all the way there, but man, he is really throwing down hard. | ||
| Birchgold.com. | ||
| Go check it out today. | ||
| Talk to Philip Patrick and the team. | ||
| Mike Davis, next. | ||
|
unidentified
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Here's your host, Stephen K. Mann. | |
| Okay, President Trump's tax policies. | ||
| I'll get that tweet here in a second. | ||
| People have been tweeting it out. | ||
| Basically, President Trump reconfirmed no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on Social Security. | ||
| He's going to do away with carried interest. | ||
| He's going to do away with any kind of tax breaks for Bayonair's own sports teams. | ||
| It's pretty powerful. | ||
| More about manufacturing, tax breaks for manufacturing here. | ||
| Pretty incredible. | ||
| Great first start. | ||
| I mean, pushing this through, and the big one was no tax on Social Security, which means we've got to, to all the doers out there, Time now to stop failing and trying to change the subject. | ||
| Where are your cuts? | ||
| We need to do. | ||
| What we need to do is the trillion dollars you promised us. | ||
| So where are they? | ||
| Maybe they're south of the Potomac. | ||
| I think they might be in the Pentagon, some of them. | ||
| And some of them may be in SpaceX. | ||
| Just saying. | ||
| We'll get to all that a little later. | ||
| Mike Davis, lawfare, legal, the chop block in President Trump. | ||
| So just give an objective. | ||
| They're hitting us with lawsuits everywhere, state level, federal level. | ||
| What's working and what's not? | ||
| And what's the mindset we have to have to power through these lawsuits? | ||
| President Trump ran on a campaign of bringing this much-needed reform to Washington, D.C., including... | ||
| Cutting wasteful spending, ending the weaponization of intel agencies and law enforcement, ending discrimination against women and girls in sports and in locker rooms, against the anti-Christian bias. | ||
| President Trump is delivering on what the American people elected him to do, and he is using his Article II power. | ||
| Under the Constitution to do this. | ||
| And so the people who don't like this are running to these activist judges and getting temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions to stop this. | ||
| And I would advise the Trump Justice Department to move forward boldly and aggressively and seek expedited review by the appellate courts and use the emergency docket at the Supreme Court aggressively if you have to for these activist judges who are trying to stop the president from asserting his Article 2 power. | ||
| We had a judge A Reagan-appointed judge in the D.C. District Court, Judge Royce Lamberth, who was a pain in the ass on January 6th. | ||
| He's this old, decrepit judge who barely can walk, as Julie Kelly will talk about. | ||
| He should just step down from the bench. | ||
| He issued an injunction, I think it was yesterday, saying that it's a cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution. | ||
| To not give prisoners their transgender pills and surgeries, which is just absolutely insane. | ||
| And it's these activist judges, whether it's left-wing judges appointed by Obama or Biden or these washed-up, weak Republican judges from a prior era, we cannot tolerate this. | ||
| These appellate courts to step up and slap down these activist judges with their nationwide injunctions, which I don't understand how are constitutional, and get the Supreme Court again to step in on the emergency docket if we have to. | ||
| Okay, hang on for one second. | ||
| Are you saying you want the Justice Department, that you're going to see activist judges all over at the first line, at the district level. | ||
| You want the Justice Department now... | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Aggressively seek emergency relief from the appellate courts, emergency relief from the Supreme Court of the United States on the emergency docket. | ||
| And I would say, at the Article III project, I am so sick of the D.C. District Court. | ||
| I'm disgusted by it. | ||
| I'm disgusted by what they did to these January... | ||
| Six defendants. | ||
| So we're going to come up with legislation at the Article 3 project to rein in the D.C. District Court, this D.C. District Court that politically persecuted January 6th the defendants, this D.C. District Court that put a 75-year-old Christian in prison under the FACE Act, this D.C. District Court that politicized and weaponized our justice system. | ||
| To go after Trump. | ||
| This is unacceptable, and these D.C. district court judges need to get reined in. | ||
| There needs to be oversight by the House and Senate, Judiciary Committee, Oversight Committee, Appropriation Committee, and we need to pass legislation to take away the power, to take away the jurisdiction, to take away the power from these D.C. district court judges. | ||
| judges. | ||
| They are a bunch of partisan activists from, again, from Obama or Biden, or they are weak, feckless Republicans. | ||
| And it's unacceptable. | ||
| And there needs to be consequences. | ||
| And we're going to push very hard at the Article III project for that to happen. | ||
| On another topic, you're the Article III project because you deal with the courts. | ||
| As you look at this, given that you clerked for Gorsuch, as you look at this on anything you've seen Doge doing today, and look. | ||
| Elon's out there, and I want him to focus more on real cuts, but he's doing his line diagram for the system. | ||
| He's trying to lure his guys everywhere. | ||
| And you've got President Trump doing executive orders. | ||
| And Mike Johnson looks like he's agreeing with him. | ||
| He's Speaker of the House. | ||
| John Thune seems like the Senate's fine with it. | ||
| Do you see any constitutional conflict between the Article I powers and the Article II powers of the executive branch as you see it right now? | ||
| Any real kind of conflict or crisis? | ||
| No, I mean, Congress has the power to legislate, and the president under Article 2 has the power to faithfully execute our laws, and he has to take care that they are executed in an appropriate way. | ||
| And when you have, for example, a federal agency like USAID that is subverting That's funding BLM, right, through the Tide Foundation that goes to BLM so they can do their riots. | ||
| That's funding our enemies abroad. | ||
| That's a big problem. | ||
| And the president, when you're dealing with an agency that has foreign policy implications, then the president has more power as commander in chief to do more than he does with domestic agencies. | ||
| So I am all in on cutting wasteful government spending and doing it in any way that you legally can do it because it's refreshing to finally have a Republican administration that's not part of the uniparty that actually wants to go in I am all in on cutting wasteful government spending and doing it in any way that you legally can do it because it's refreshing to finally have a Republican administration that's not part of the uniparty that actually wants to go in and cut spending in Washington, D.C. | ||
| Republicans have been talking about doing this for decades. | ||
| Newt Gingrich tried it back in 1998. | ||
| They tried it for a couple of years and then Republicans went back to being big spending drunken sailors with the Democrats. | ||
| And it's nice to have an attitude adjustment with President Trump this time cutting in and actually trying to take a hammer to these government agencies. | ||
| For example, the New York Times is reporting that USAID – this is breaking news – that USAID, which has 10,000 employees, the Trump administration, according to three sources, is looking to cut that down from 10,000 to 290 employees. | ||
| So those are the types of things the Trump administration can do to rein in these out-of-control agencies that are wasting hundreds of billions of dollars of American taxpayer money every year. | ||
| The other thing that's breaking right now, he has said that they're putting all of the USAID, I think, on leave, on temporary leave. | ||
| Can the executive branch, in the unified theory of the executive, does he have the power, one, to basically send him on some sort of temporary leave? | ||
| Number two, does he have the power, does he have to go back to Congress in the appropriations process, does he have the power to go from $10,000 to $290,000, sir? | ||
| Well, it's amazing. | ||
| For four years, these federal bureaucrats, five years, these federal bureaucrats threw a fit and got to work from home because of COVID. And then President Trump brings them back to work, and they're throwing a fit that they get brought back to work. | ||
| And now President Trump's going to send these USAID people back home, and they're crying again. | ||
| So I'm not sure which way they want to go. | ||
| Do they want to come into the office and work, or do they want to stay home? | ||
| But does President Trump have that power? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Under Article II of the Constitution, the president runs the executive branch. | ||
| He's the head of the executive branch, and he gets to hire and fire people. | ||
| And statutes that prevent the president from hiring and firing federal executive branch employees are unconstitutional under Article II of the Constitution. | ||
| A lot of this is pushing towards impoundment. | ||
| Do you think that to pay a letter or somebody at OMB would just sort of get on with it? | ||
| Because this is about the president saying, hey, I understand there's an appropriations process. | ||
| I understand that's a law. | ||
| I understand that's a statute. | ||
| But that's a ceiling. | ||
| And if that's a ceiling, I'm the chief executive of the government by the Constitution. | ||
| If I deem that the program is not hitting, is not doing what it's supposed to do, I can go in and take that. | ||
| I can go say there's no more Green News scam or no more USAID and there's $30 billion around. | ||
| I can lay my hands on that and do something else with it or just have it pay down the deficit. | ||
| Do you think that pay a letter and vote and others, maybe the White House counsel or people over at DOJ, ought to start teeing up and let's go force the impoundment issue right now? | ||
| I love Mark Paoletta, and I love Russ Boat. | ||
| This impoundment thing got President Trump impeached in the first term, so what the hell? | ||
| Let's do it again. | ||
| Let's get him impeached for the third time. | ||
| But, you know, I mean, if you think about it, think about what the opposition to this is saying. | ||
| You had, what, $180 billion go to Ukraine and Zelensky, and Zelensky said, well, I... I didn't get $100 billion of that $180 billion. | ||
| So where the hell did that $100 billion go? | ||
| And if the president doesn't have the Article II power to take care that $100 billion is not sent to an oligarch's rat's nest, then we might have a problem under our Constitution. | ||
| The president has a constitutional obligation to take care that the laws are faithfully executed, and that includes appropriations by Congress. | ||
| And if these appropriations are being misspense, if there's fraud, then the president has a duty to make sure that doesn't happen. | ||
| We talked about this on Friday. | ||
| What happened at the FBI on the J6 investigation? | ||
| What happened at DOJ with the laying off of some of these prosecutors? | ||
| I talked to you about, hey, do you think they're going to try to come back and get another day with cash? | ||
| It turns out today, instead of coming in for a vote, They went in high dungeon and said, we have to kick it a week. | ||
| We need more investigation. | ||
| And Durbin and these guys want to go next week. | ||
| What is your assessment of where we stand in the process with Kash Patel? | ||
| I was the chief counsel for nominations on the Senate Judiciary Committee in the first term for President Trump. | ||
| Chairman Chuck Grassley, my former boss, is the perfect person to lead President Trump's Justice Department nominees and judges through the process like he did. | ||
| The first time. | ||
| Kash Patel, as we know, is a controversial pick. | ||
| He says Mike Davis-level stuff when he goes on his podcast. | ||
| And Chuck Grassley has got him through this Senate Judiciary Committee process unscathed, right? | ||
| And so what happened is the Democrats wanted to open up another hearing like they always do. | ||
| Chuck Grassley told them no appropriately. | ||
| And with this one-week holdover, this is routine. | ||
| I know people are freaking out about this today. | ||
| This is part of the Senate Judiciary Committee rules, that nominees get nominated. | ||
| They have pre-hearing stuff that they have to do, paperwork they have to submit, meetings they have to do. | ||
| They have their hearing, which we did two Wednesdays ago with Cash Patel. | ||
| And then they have written questions after their hearing, which Cash has. | ||
| Respond it to and submit it. | ||
| Then you have two markup meetings where they debate the nomination. | ||
| The first one they debate, generally they hold over the nominee for another week, which they just did today. | ||
| And then they had the committee vote, the markup vote the following week, which they'll do next Thursday. | ||
| This is all routine. | ||
| Chuck Grassley has this under control and Kash Patel will be our next FBI director because of Grassley's strong support. | ||
| Mike, quick break. | ||
| I want to bring you back for a minute about the Christian executive order. | ||
| Next. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Here's your host, Stephen K. Mann. | |
| Mike Davis, so over it with Pam Bondi at DOJ. She's going to be in charge of a task force to go through and see if there's any bias or any prejudice against Christians or Christianity in the federal government. | ||
| In your mind, how would that work? | ||
| Well, President Trump issued an executive order today calling on these agency heads to establish a working group. | ||
| And Pam's going to chair, Attorney General Pam Bondi's going to chair that working group. | ||
| And their job is to root out this anti-Christian bias that we have throughout our executive branch. | ||
| It's so pervasive. | ||
| They don't even try to hide it. | ||
| And they're going to make clear that Christians are welcomed into the public square and any anti-Christian bias is going to be eliminated immediately and dealt with appropriately. | ||
| The war on Christians and frankly, the war on Christians and Jews is is over under the Trump administration. | ||
| Mike, Article three, now more than ever, we got to get up. | ||
| The second round of nominations are coming. | ||
| We've got a huge tractor pulling for us because they're slowing everything down. | ||
| Rust vote. | ||
| His vote tonight is not going to come until later. | ||
| You've got cash, obviously, and all the second and third tier people that really make things run. | ||
| Where do they go for Article 3 and how do they sign up for your program? | ||
| Article3project.org. | ||
| Article3project.org. | ||
| You can donate there. | ||
| You can follow us on social media. | ||
| The most important thing the War Room Posse does is take action. | ||
| And it's up on your screen right now. | ||
| We have Kash Patel. | ||
| We have RFK. We have Tulsi. | ||
| We're going to have Todd Blanche as the Deputy Attorney General. | ||
| Harmeet Dillon to head the Civil Rights Division. | ||
| Gail Slater to run the Antitrust Division. | ||
| President Trump is bringing in bold, fearless reformers, and these senators have gotten an attitude adjustment from the War Room Posse. | ||
| We've done nearly 200,000 contacts to our home state senators, and we're getting President Trump's nominees across the finish line, including Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, and others. | ||
| is we're going to keep going at the Article III project until every one of these nominees is confirmed. | ||
| And we're going to be with President Trump at the Article III project with the War Room Posse every second of every day for the next four years. | ||
| Amen. | ||
| Social media, late at night, your Twitter feed is enlightening. | ||
| You can go to... | ||
| M-R-D-D-M-I-A. M-R-D-D-M-I-A. And that's where I'm coming in hot, particularly after 9 p.m. | ||
| I don't know what happens to me then. | ||
| I turn into a monster. | ||
| I don't know what happens to you either. | ||
| I think the smoking lamp may be lit. | ||
| I have no idea, but it's enlightening on the dark night of the soul. | ||
| Let's say that. | ||
| Mike Davis, we love you, brother. | ||
| Keep fighting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Lindell, what does it tell us that the President of the United States, I want to think about this for a second. | ||
| The President of the United States, in a nation that was formed as the New Jerusalem, has to sign on the 6th of February in the year of our Lord, 2025, has to sign an executive order that says a working group of department heads and led by the Attorney General of these United States. | ||
| underneath him kind of his deputy chief law enforcement officer to make sure they go through a six and a half trillion dollar federal government and spending and probably 80 to 100 trillion dollars in assets in every aspect of american life with 10 million employees right that had They have to go through to make sure they rid itself and report back to him on the bias against Christians and Christianity. | ||
| What does that tell you, sir? | ||
| Well, I'm living in Steve. | ||
| Let's start. | ||
| I'm gonna have Pam Bondi. | ||
| I hope she's watching. | ||
| Start with Keith Ellison, the Attorney General of Minnesota, attacking a Christian Recovery Network, the Lindell Recovery Network, Steve. | ||
| They're going all in attacking that. | ||
| And for what? | ||
| Because we want to help- Addicts and people in addiction get to our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. | ||
| I mean, start with that guy. | ||
| You can't make this stuff up, why Christians are targeted. | ||
| And boy, I praise the Lord that we have a great president that's going to address this. | ||
| Because once we said it earlier today on the show this morning, you guys, we're in a spiritual battle of evil versus good. | ||
| Of historical, biblical proportions. | ||
| We're in the greatest time to be alive because we're living it. | ||
| We're the ones that are gonna be pushing through and helping get rid of, we know how it ends. | ||
| Good wins in the end and evil is gonna go down. | ||
| But Steve, I lived that with Keith Ellison. | ||
| It's been horrific these last couple months as he's attacked my Lindell Recovery Network, the Christian Network. | ||
| It's disgusting. | ||
| Real quickly, Mike, your fight against Ellison is getting to epic proportions, and they're trying to shut down the Christian network. | ||
| That's what they're trying to do. | ||
| His recovery network, they're trying to shut it down. | ||
| What do you got for us as far as deals go at the end of the day? | ||
| Well, you guys, we've still got the crosses. | ||
| We're keeping them up for the war room posse. | ||
| But you guys have all responded to the MyPillow 2.0 commemorative. | ||
| If you've never tried one, we use these for everything. | ||
| The multi-use MyPillow, $9.98. | ||
| You got five to choose from. | ||
| I'm very humbled. | ||
| The one that we hold in the flag is almost gone. | ||
| Once they're gone, they are gone. | ||
| And 998, we want everyone at the War Room to ask you to get one or more. | ||
| The limit of 15, it's a strict limit of 15. Promo code WARROOM. Go to the website. | ||
| We want everybody to get involved. | ||
| You guys have done so much for helping my pillow in the country. | ||
| There's the crosses. | ||
| We're gonna leave them up. | ||
| This is a War Room exclusive, saving 30%. | ||
| Free shipping on your entire order. | ||
| All the War Room Posse specials that are still there. | ||
| And you guys have exclusives. | ||
| And we just think, I know my employees and I thank you all every single day for supporting us. | ||
| When there are others out there canceling us, the War Room Posse was there. | ||
| And my employees love to hear from you, 800-873-1062. | ||
| You're going to get a USA operator, someone that will talk to you and help you and is behind helping our great nation. | ||
| You're the best, Lindell. | ||
| We'll see you tomorrow morning. | ||
| MyPillow.com, promo code WARROOM. Go check it out today with all the specials you only get from the MyPillow team. | ||
| Okay, the right stuff is going to take us out. | ||
| The next hour, Catherine O'Neill was in the White House with President Trump. | ||
| She was everywhere. | ||
| On the campaigns, in the White House. | ||
| She, over at the State Department, worked this problem every day. | ||
| This bias against Christianity and Christians. | ||
| She's going to join us. | ||
| Also, Ben Berquam and Todd Bensman. | ||
| Todd Bensman working on pieces right now about the kinetic activity that might come to the cartels. | ||
| What is it really going to take to stop fentanyl? | ||
| What is President Trump prepared to do? | ||
| Also the Mexican president. | ||
| And Ben Burquam. | ||
| The ICE raids. | ||
| Where are we going? | ||
| Where are we headed? | ||
| And how are you going to get 10 million people out of here? | ||
| All important. | ||
| On a Thursday, action-packed. | ||
| There's the nation's capital right there. | ||
| The right stuff. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Short break. |
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