Feb. 27, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
48:52
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
About 30 seconds left, but I do want to ask you about the response you're hearing from your fellow journalists with Trump in the White House now dictating which journalists can access Donald Trump. | |
| Yeah, look, this is a big deal. | ||
| I understand that a lot of Americans probably don't care too much and don't feel sorry for reporters when they shouldn't. | ||
| It's not about us. | ||
| It's about them in a way, because what's happening now is the President of the United States is saying for the first time in generations that he gets to decide who is inside the pool that gets closest to him in terms of asking questions. | ||
| That's never been, in my lifetime anyway, and I've been covering this going back to 1996, the prerogative of a president. | ||
| Now he's saying he chooses, and if he doesn't like your coverage they've made very clear and barring the Associated Press, you could be expelled from that pool. | ||
| So now we have a government-organized, government-run, government-controlled press pool. | ||
| And that's an issue of great concern, not just to mainstream publications, but to publications on the left and right, which have a lot at stake as well. | ||
| It is very concerning. | ||
| And, you know, again, one more indication of where this administration under Trump's leadership wants to head. | ||
| You just talked about how important the work that Elon Musk is doing is. | ||
| If you pass a continuing resolution, won't that just refund all the programs that he says he's cutting that are full of waste, fraud and abuse? | ||
| No, look, that's why I say you add anomalies to a CR. You can increase some spending. | ||
| You can decrease some spending. | ||
| You can add language that says, for example, the dramatic changes that have been made to USAID would be reflected in the ongoing spending. | ||
| It would be a clean CR, mostly, I think, but with some of those changes to adapt to the new realities here. | ||
| And the new reality is less government, more efficiency, better return for the taxpayers. | ||
| And I think that's something everybody should welcome. | ||
| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
| Pray for our enemies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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? | ||
| MAGA Media. | ||
| I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? | |
| If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved. | ||
|
unidentified
|
War Room. | |
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Band. | ||
| Thursday, 27, February, year of our Lord, 2025. | ||
| You're in the War Room podcast. | ||
| A lot going on in the White House today on Capitol Hill. | ||
| Throughout the country, President Trump just put out a true social talking about the tariffs that are going to come next week to Mexico and Canada. | ||
| Specifically talked in Mexico about the fentanyl, about the war with the cartels, all of it. | ||
| Another big day at the White House today, Sir Keir Starmer. | ||
| The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom arrives and there will be a lot of talk about NATO, a lot of talk about the follow-on visit the next day, Ukraine, the Ukrainian war, particularly bringing peace to that part of the world. | ||
| Also, the rapprochement of the United States and Russia, all of it. | ||
| The President, I think, is also going to sign some executive orders for another packed day. | ||
| Brian Glenn joins us. | ||
| Brian, you spent part of the day on Capitol Hill. | ||
| Obviously, and I'll get back to it in a second, you saw Caitlin Collins and Speaker Johnson finally talking about what War Room's been talking about for months, the 14 March deadline in this end-of-year CR. We'll drill down more in a second. | ||
| Brian, the schedule of events today. | ||
| Sir Keir and the British come in the afternoon. | ||
| Walk us through what's going on at the White House. | ||
| Yeah, good morning, Steve. | ||
| A little bit later this morning, Stalmer and the press from the U.K. will make their arrival here just outside the West Wing. | ||
| They'll meet briefly with the president. | ||
| And then at about 1220, they'll have a bilateral meeting in the Oval Office. | ||
| And then a little bit later at 2 o'clock, they'll have a much bigger press conference in the East Room. | ||
| And from what I understand, a lot of the focus, Steve, is on Ukraine and obviously Stalmer. | ||
| It's very much for U.S. support as far as providing security aid after the ceasefire, if you will, the ending of this war. | ||
| And, of course, President Trump has not guaranteed that. | ||
| And, of course, they'll talk about mineral rights and all kinds of stuff, maybe even tariffs, as that seems to be hitting the headlines this morning. | ||
| So it'll be a busy day here. | ||
| What, Steve, we're 38, 40 days in this administration, and we've seen just about everyone heads of state come through here. | ||
| Well, Sir Keir is going to be there for number one. | ||
| He's committed 30, I think 30,000 combat troops to a peacekeeping force. | ||
| That's essentially three, roughly three divisions. | ||
| The British don't have it. | ||
| They don't have the finances to underwrite it. | ||
| They don't really have the troops to do that. | ||
| So he's a lot of big talk, just like Boris Johnson was. | ||
| The British have been big talkers. | ||
| In this Ukraine war, and it's one of the reasons such terrible destruction, President Trump's pretty adamant about the mineral deal tomorrow. | ||
| There's no American security guarantee. | ||
| This is absolutely central. | ||
| If you look at the deal, there's no American investment. | ||
| There may be some companies come over there, but no U.S. government direct investment and no security guarantee. | ||
| Sir Keir, you're 100% correct, Brian, is going to be there to try, just like Macron the other day, as Macron tried to confuse the situation, try to talk President Trump into being part of some peacekeeping force or Or back up. | ||
| President Trump's response yesterday, Brian, as you know, was saying, hey, if American companies are over there, that'll be a security guarantee enough. | ||
| Kind of implied that the U.S. would step in if it was any problem. | ||
| So those are all huge issues. | ||
| In the cabinet room yesterday, he threw down that the EU, which the British broke off with from Brexit, he says the EU was set up to challenge the United States to cause problems for the United States. | ||
| And he says, listen, I'm thinking about a 25% tariff. | ||
| On all the goods that come from the EU, that would obviously, Great Britain's not part of that. | ||
| But President Trump reiterated this morning, Brian, on a true social that, and I think next Tuesday is when he's going to do the State of the Union also, or the first time, it's kind of the update on where the country is not officially a State of the Union. | ||
| But President Trump said, hey, unless Mexico steps up to the plate, the 25% tariffs are going in, and he's not happy where discussions with Canada are going. | ||
| Any thoughts on that, sir? | ||
| Yeah, no, you're right. | ||
| And, you know, I think he's playing, once again, leadership. | ||
| He's not threatening. | ||
| He's just saying, hey, look, this is what's going to happen. | ||
| And also, you could add 10% on top of that, Steve, to China. | ||
| He's going to impose an additional 10% of already the 10% on China. | ||
| So I do want to make a mention, Zelensky. | ||
| We'll be here tomorrow. | ||
| So that should be interesting. | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| As he comes at the end of the week, does he sign the minerals deal? | ||
| Did we get that done? | ||
| What do the talks look like after today when he leaves? | ||
| So much at this White House. | ||
| So much going on. | ||
| I hope, Brian, you know the president pretty well. | ||
| He's a great deal guy. | ||
| He says, hey, he lives for deals. | ||
| He's done deals all his life. | ||
| I hope a conditioned precedent for Zelensky... | ||
| Being allowed in the United States is that the deal is either signed or going to be signed. | ||
| I hope it's no happy talk, and he's going to try to pull, which he's already trying to pull, a bunch of other conditions. | ||
| But I think Zelensky's here, should consider himself, be lucky to be here, as we're no fan. | ||
| And I would consider tomorrow he signs this deal. | ||
| It's ritual humiliation, let's say. | ||
| Brian, so Sir Keir shows up right afternoon. | ||
| Real America's voice to be covered and alive. | ||
| As you know, we wait for the... | ||
| The dignitaries will show up on the West Wing. | ||
| There'll be a color guard. | ||
| Secure, be there. | ||
| It looks like 1220. Some sort of bilateral meeting, called a bilat, in the Oval Office. | ||
| I'm sure the president will make time for a press avail today. | ||
| Brian, if you're in there, I know you're tossing a question. | ||
| Then later, at 2 o'clock, there'll be a joint press conference. | ||
| So this is a relatively short meeting, as they've got it. | ||
| I think the president's... | ||
| I'm not saying he's doing this out of courtesy. | ||
| But he's kind of heard these pitches before. | ||
| He wants to, you know, reestablish we are, they are, you know, we have a special relationship and next to France, one of our oldest allies and obviously most important allies in the 20th century. | ||
| But it's going to be, it looks like a relatively quick meeting. | ||
| I think we'll get plenty of access to the president today. | ||
| And Brian Glenn, we hope you keep your streak running. | ||
| That you're the first guy called, you're the first person called in the East Room. | ||
| Just, hey, I'm not, you know, you're on DiMaggio's streaks. | ||
| Not that we're counting, not that we're noticing, right? | ||
| Somebody get Rob Siegel on the phone so I can get a heads up about this press conference. | ||
| And there's no bets in Vegas on that. | ||
| There's no prop line in Vegas on that as well. | ||
| But the Oval Office, that meeting is only scheduled for about 20 minutes before they break. | ||
| I think they're going to have lunch and then later meet at 2 o'clock. | ||
| Now, 2 o'clock ought to be pretty good. | ||
| I love those press conferences. | ||
| He'll go for probably an hour in the East Room, as he normally does. | ||
| You know, it's interesting to think how many world leaders we've seen here. | ||
| Brian, I love both of them. | ||
| I love the press avails in the Oval. | ||
| I love them in the Cabinet. | ||
| And this is why I played Peter Baker at the New York Times as the start. | ||
| We can't reinforce how important it is. | ||
| When you see the Cabinet Room yesterday, the president going over an hour and 20, you see the different types of reporters there. | ||
| You see the press avail. | ||
| Hopefully it will take place in the Oval today. | ||
| That press pool is now not just a mainstream media that's attack, attack, attack, attack, give misinformation. | ||
| Now it's been opened up. | ||
| You've got Newsmax. | ||
| You've got Real America's Voice. | ||
| You've got The War Room. | ||
| You've got Daily Signal, The Blaze, Breitbart, Daily Caller. | ||
| So it's opened up many to the podcasters. | ||
| I think it's a breath of fresh air, better questions, sharper questions, and questions of people that are trying to... | ||
| Extract from President Trump information on what's happening, not just snarky attacks, and I think it's just been fantastic, sir. | ||
| Well, if I sent Cameron a video that maybe in the break you guys can ingest and take a look at, that is the head of the WHCA on MSNBC now. | ||
| He's a new host on that MSNBC. He left Politico. | ||
| You should play that. | ||
| And that sets the tone of the why I think Karen Levitt made that excellent idea and the decision to remove their authority in that briefing room. | ||
| It's comical. | ||
| What this gentleman, this he-him is saying. | ||
| I'll let you guys look at it in the break. | ||
| Okay, hold it, hold it. | ||
| Brian, since you've done some producing here today, it's great. | ||
| Let's go ahead and play the clip and we'll have Brian comment. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He has a hard time running against Vice President Harris because she's a black woman. | |
| You remember, actually, when he would tussle with the women that would ask him questions, our colleagues on the White House beat. | ||
| Reporters. | ||
| You know, he held his kind of most angry self for black women, right? | ||
| If they asked him a question, he would have the worst things to say about them. | ||
| So you're seeing that, right? | ||
| I can think of three at the top of my head. | ||
| And when he talked about Joe Biden got worse. | ||
| Harris was born like that, right? | ||
| That's different. | ||
| That's a dog whistle to folks to say, you know, the white guy just got older and it got worse, but the black lady was born dumb. | ||
| That is the kind of thing that Donald Trump is saying and selling the folk. | ||
| Man, that hate coming right out there, Brian Glenn. | ||
| They can't control it. | ||
| The hate coming out. | ||
| That's your White House. | ||
| He's a new host on MSNBC. I'm pretty sure he's going to join the weekend crowd and take over the kind of... | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| Well, I can say maybe he's Boy Reed now. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Maybe they've replaced him a little bit. | ||
| So Joy Reed would do Boy Reed on that. | ||
| And, you know, we'll see how long that show lasts. | ||
| No one's watching that. | ||
| He's one of the senior guys. | ||
| He's one of the senior guys from Politico, but no fan of President Trump. | ||
| So that's exactly the senior White House, I think, for Politico. | ||
| I think he's going to get a new job, new show on MSNBC. It'll be pretty amazing. | ||
| Brian Glenn, anything else? | ||
| A big packed afternoon. | ||
| Brian Glenn will be there. | ||
| Natalie will be back here at 5 today. | ||
| She's going to be reporting live from the White House. | ||
| We'll get it all from her. | ||
| Brian Glenn throughout the day. | ||
| Brian, what's your social media? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Hit me up at Brian on True Social, at BrianGlennTV on Instagram and X. And as always, thanks for having me on, Steve. | ||
| We'll see you back here later, probably tomorrow. | ||
| Thank you, brother. | ||
| Appreciate you. | ||
| E.J. and Tony, the financial numbers, economic numbers came out, job numbers came out. | ||
| I asked E.J. and Tony, but I'm going to replay the Caitlin Collins. | ||
| Finally, CNN woke up to the fact of the CR. Speaker of the House Johnson, a very interesting response on some of the inside baseball that's going on. | ||
| We'll break all of that down. | ||
| Next in the war room, like I said, active day on Capitol Hill, active day at the White House. | ||
| On Capitol Hill, I hope they are now focused on the work at hand, and that is a CR. I've noticed kind of a sea change here in the last, I don't know, 24 hours, and people realize, hey, the big fight right now is to keep the government, President Trump's government, open. | ||
| How are you actually going to do that? | ||
| Because people are not enamored with end-of-the-year CR, but there may be reasons for that. | ||
| The White House, I think, is organizing their strategy to focus on that. | ||
| Now they've got this budget resolution done for the reconciliation, which is really about the taxes, and we'll talk more about that. | ||
| E.J. and Tony's going to be here. | ||
| Jim Rickards is going to be here. | ||
| He's going to get a lot into geopolitics and capital markets. | ||
| President Trump... | ||
| And that's why this week you had France, you had England, and you've got Zelensky, Tamar. | ||
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| Take your phone out. | ||
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| Short break. | ||
| Back in a moment. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Here's your host, Stephen K. Mann. | |
| Okay, the fight's on many fronts. | ||
| We're going to get to the economics in a second, but the legal and particularly the federal courts are huge. | ||
| We're bringing in Josh Hammer. | ||
| Josh, and if Denver can put up, you put up a tweet last night that had attached a, I guess, a ruling or a declaration from the chief justice. | ||
| Walk us through. | ||
| Can you read that, your tweet? | ||
| What did you say? | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| And why is this important in this overall fight for President Trump to get his agenda implemented? | ||
| Yeah, Steve, so great to be back with you, first of all. | ||
| So last night, Chief Justice John Roberts of the United States Supreme Court basically stepped in for the first time, from what I can tell, to finally swat down one of these lower court judicial insurrectionists who was trying to bring the entirety of the Trump administration to a halt. | ||
| So what I put on X was I said, Chief Justice Roberts to lower court judicial insurrection. | ||
| FAFO, which, you know, I'm not going to say a bad word on Airstie, but F around, find out. | ||
| That's basically what it's saying there. | ||
| And, you know, this is what many of us have been calling for for weeks. | ||
| So let me just kind of lay the scene briefly here. | ||
| You know, what we're seeing is not just judicial activism, Steve. | ||
| I used the words very carefully there. | ||
| I mean, this is a full-on judicial insurrection, going back to the very first days of this administration in power. | ||
| By the way, those of us with a long enough memory to remember the first Trump administration, this is nothing new. | ||
| So the first Trump administration from 2017 to 2021. By my count, I believe it was 65 so-called nationwide injunctions, which, by the way, is more than the first 44 presidents of the United States combined literally in all of American history faced there. | ||
| So they basically picked up in January just last month as if they hadn't lost a beat over the past four years. | ||
| So whether it's a judge in Washington State or Ohio or Washington, D.C. or Florida, Hawaii there, the notion... | ||
| That you can issue a TRO, a temporary restraining order, and thereby try to bring a federal executive branch policy, an executive order to halt there. | ||
| It's completely anathema. | ||
| It's bat crap crazy. | ||
| That's not how the separation of powers works. | ||
| At a very fundamental 35,000-foot altitude view, the judicial power of which Article 3, Section 1, Clause 1 of the Constitution speaks, Steve, is the power to render a judgment in a case or controversy, a.k.a. | ||
| Well, Thomas Jefferson, for instance, he famously described this in an 1804 letter to Abigail Adams as making the judiciary a despotic branch. | ||
| This is what Abraham Lincoln railed on and on against. | ||
| He famously, in his first inaugural address in March of 1861, said that the candid citizen must confess that he who allows the final decisions in constitutional law to be decided by that. | ||
| He said that that would be to basically allow us to cease to be our own rulers there. | ||
| So this is all coming to a halt. | ||
| And it's about time that the Supreme Court finally, finally, finally swat away. | ||
| Now, this exact case that Chief Justice Roberts stepped in last night, it's from Washington, D.C. It's from a district court judge by the name of Amir Ali. | ||
| And the so-called temporary restraining order in question basically would purport to require the Trump administration to continue the slush fund of all foreign contracts and contractors, billions, billions of dollars when it comes to the State Department and USAID. | ||
| The problem, Steve – there's a lot of problems here. | ||
| There's all what I just said. | ||
| But even on the specifics here. | ||
| You can't even issue a temporary restraining order when it comes to an executive order in the first place. | ||
| That's actually not how administrative law works. | ||
| If you want to kind of go there, you need a final agency action from, let's call it the State Department there. | ||
| That didn't happen here. | ||
| They're trying to sue just an executive order. | ||
| So it's wrong on the actual substantive underlying law as well. | ||
| But the broader point is the more important one, I think. | ||
| Which is, I think, I predict, and I really hope, that this is going to be the beginning of a more active SCOTUS, of a more active... | ||
| Nine justices on the Supreme Court that are going to get more involved in patrolling and policing this lower court judicial insurrection, which they have every power in the world to do. | ||
| The Supreme Court of the United States is the only court in the country that is literally established by the Constitution. | ||
| So it's the only one that is required. | ||
| All the other lower courts basically just exist at Congress's discretion there. | ||
| And it's kind of implicit in that understanding there and that hierarchy and that structure that SCOTUS has the power to swat down all of these lower court administrative stays, temporary restraining orders, preliminary injunctions, whatever legalese they want to call it there. | ||
| They can and they must get involved when these lower courts exceed their legitimate jurisdiction. | ||
| The big question – and I'll end on this. | ||
| The big question here is when will SCOTUS hear a direct challenge to the entire practice of these so-called nationwide injunctions in the first place? | ||
| These so-called nationwide injunctions are completely unconstitutional. | ||
| It is not part of the judicial power of Article 3. It is an illegitimate remedy there. | ||
| The Trump administration, the first time around, and I fear, Steve, my fear, is that unless and until SCOTUS directly weighs in on this, and the DOJ, the acting solicitor general of the United States, Sarah Harris, they can get that cert petition nicely teed up, God willing. | ||
| But unless and until SCOTUS cleanly rules that the lower courts cannot do this, they cannot bring the entirety of the executive branch to a screeching halt with one puny little one-paragraph order in some random judicial chambers out in Hawaii, whatever, unless and until they do that, we risk letting This whole second Trump administration getaway, I fear. | ||
| So as we've been looking at this in the legal front, particularly in federal courts, it's very, very important. | ||
| We have said that they should go for X because the front line, these radical left-wing judges, and you said they're beyond activists. | ||
| This is a judicial insurrection. | ||
| Take your number two pencil out because Josh Hammer just gave you the overall construct, a judicial insurrection by these front line federal judges. | ||
| We've always said expedite appellate review and then get on the emergency docket immediately. | ||
| Because the appellate review, particularly if it's in Washington, D.C., you're going to lose. | ||
| A lot of these appellate courts are just as bad as the frontline judges. | ||
| Get on the emergency docket. | ||
| For the personnel issue dealing with this special counsel, the Supreme Court passed. | ||
| And that's why I was starting to get concerned of Mike Davis and your guys' theory that the Supreme Court is going to be the arbiter of this. | ||
| And in that arbitration that they're going to come down on the side of the Constitution and the unitary theory of the executive, which is obviously the intellectual construct that the Trump administration is doing. | ||
| Why have they gotten involved in the slush funds or the money side of it? | ||
| Why have they avoided taking any action, at least today to my understanding, on the personnel side? | ||
| Good question. | ||
| I don't have a great answer to that, unfortunately. | ||
| So the Hampton-Dellinger litigation. | ||
| So Hampton-Dellinger, the head of the Office of Special Counsel, Trump tries to fire him on February 7th. | ||
| The district court. | ||
| Issues another one of these TROs, these temporary restraining orders, essentially purporting to mandate that he keep his job on February 12th. | ||
| It had a two-week expiration date. | ||
| The judge extended that TRO yesterday because I guess nothing matters anymore, frankly. | ||
| But in those two-week interim period… Both the D.C. Circuit and the United States Supreme Court refused to alter the TRO. So they did have that opportunity. | ||
| Now, it's worth noting that the D.C. Circuit ruling, when they heard it in that procedural posture, it was over a vociferous dissent from Judge Greg Katzis, who was an excellent Trump nominee on the D.C. Circuit the first time around. | ||
| It'll probably be a SCOTUS shortlister this time around as well. | ||
| When it reached the U.S. Supreme Court this past weekend, There were two dissenting votes. | ||
| Justice Gorsuch wrote what I thought was a compelling dissent where he basically said that this entire notion of this remedy, what I was talking about, the notion that a district court can issue a so-called temporary restraining order and commanding you in this case that you have to rehire Hampton-Dellinger is nuts. | ||
| It's absolutely nuts. | ||
| So SCOTUS should have stepped in and made a substantive ruling just this past weekend. | ||
| But I do think that their hand is going to be forced here sooner rather than later there. | ||
| The good news, and I agree with my I do think that the votes are absolutely there on the current Supreme Court to finally uphold unitary executive theory, as the left-wing media likes to call it, otherwise known as just basic common sense, right? | ||
| I mean, Article 2 of the Constitution says the executive power. | ||
| Yeah, just basically the basic Constitution, right? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| I mean, Article 2 says the executive power shall be vested in a president of the United States. | ||
| It's not vested in the vice president. | ||
| It's not vested in the secretary of state. | ||
| It's not vested in the dog catcher, the White House coffee boy, whatever. | ||
| No, it's vested in one person and one person only there. | ||
| And specifically when it comes to Hampton Dellinger, by the way, there's a very similar parallel track litigation going on right now involving a woman by the name of Gwynne Wilcox. | ||
| Gwynne Wilcox is a Democrat nominee to the NLRB, the National Labor Relations Board. | ||
| She was fired. | ||
| Very similar thing here. | ||
| So whether we're talking about the Office of the Special Counsel, which is where Hampton Dellinger purports to work, or whether we're talking about the National Labor Relations Board, where Gwyn Wilcox purports to work, we're talking about these so-called independent agencies, which is an entire creature of FDR-era New Deal jurisprudence. | ||
| It's all fabricated. | ||
| It's all made up. | ||
| And specifically, there's a 1935 SCOTUS precedent called Humphrey's Executor, which was the first time that the Supreme Court upheld the legitimacy of this there. | ||
| But I'm pretty confident, Steve. | ||
| I'm typically pessimistic about all things judicial branch related. | ||
| I'm actually optimistic about this one. | ||
| I really do think that there are five votes on the current court when that case is finally heard to directly overturn Humphrey's executor. | ||
| I get a little weary, a little wary about this court when it comes to kind of the so-called culture war issues, when it comes to sovereignty, when it comes to race, things like that there. | ||
| When it comes to bread and butter, structural constitutionalism, separation of powers, federalism, that's when the John Roberts court is at its... | ||
| Can I hold you through the break? | ||
| You bet. | ||
| Because I want to ask you – I want to go back. | ||
| President Trump signed an executive order the other day specifically about these independent agencies. | ||
| So we come back. | ||
| The two things, the reauthorizations because none of these – all the – even the cabinet, EPA, FBI, all of them are socially reauthorized I think every five or ten years. | ||
| The military makes sure that they're never out of authorization. | ||
| They do a National Defense Authorization Act every year. | ||
| It's the reauthorizations of these. | ||
| Also, the independent – I mean why did the president feel he had to go out and actually put an executive order out to basically say the independent agencies actually report to me? | ||
| Hang on. | ||
| I want to get the – I want to get the answer after the break because the left, if you watch TV every night, they're saying we're hurtling towards a constitutional crisis. | ||
| I kind of agree with Josh. | ||
| I think it's pretty straightforward, right? | ||
| We're going to have to slug this out at the Supreme Court, but I agree with Josh Hammer. | ||
| It's pretty straightforward. | ||
| It's common sense and I think a direct reading of the Constitution. | ||
| Birchgold.com, end of the dollar empire. | ||
| EJ is going to be here about new labor numbers that are out. | ||
| Talking about the economy, people say it may be softening. | ||
| We're going to find out the factors that are converging about the global economy in the economy of the United States of America and where precious metals fits in as a hedge in times of turbulence and turbulence we're going to have. | ||
| Speaker Johnson on Caitlin Collins last night kind of gave it up a little bit about the CR. Birchgold.com slash Bannon. | ||
| Go check it out today. | ||
| You know, Josh Hammer, who I would say is kind of a steady Eddie, he's not a fire breather, calls this a judicial insurrection. | ||
| Josh, haven't we had the problem of both the legislature and the executive just for years, have not done when these laws are laid out? | ||
| For instance, the reauthorization of these cabinet positions in different programs, and then you've got the whole thing of your point since the Roosevelt... | ||
| These independent agencies or the alphabet agencies, the ones that really drove, at least initially, the growth of the administrative state. | ||
| People just didn't do their job and sit on them. | ||
| And now this, you know, we have a financial and economic crisis, a geopolitical crisis, you know, the beginning of the kinetic part of Third World War. | ||
| Trump is really dumped on Trump. | ||
| It's essentially a constitutional, I don't want to call it a crisis, but an issue that things just haven't been run by what the rules are set up. | ||
| And under the jurisdiction of the Constitution, sir? | ||
| Trump is trying to recalibrate the separation of powers, best on what I can tell, Steve, towards what they actually are. | ||
| I mean, for the past century, we have had the engorgements of the so-called fourth branch, the administrative state. | ||
| We also have had the engorgements of judicial power. | ||
| I mean, we have this whole modern-day myth. | ||
| of what the lawyers call judicial supremacy, which is the notion, kind of what we were talking about earlier, that the courts are the sole exclusive and final arbiter of all things constitutional law. | ||
| That's not how it actually works. | ||
| It actually was not until an obscure 1958 case called Cooper v. | ||
| Aron that the Supreme Court first declared that they are the final binding arbiter, the interpreter of the Constitution. | ||
| Abraham Lincoln famously rejected that. | ||
| In fact, he actually directly He literally issued passports to free blacks in the Western territories in direct defiance of the Dred Scott ruling from a few years prior because he viewed it as wholly illegitimate. | ||
| So the executive absolutely does have not just the right but the duty and the obligation to interpret and enforce the Constitution as it pertains to his own prerogatives. | ||
| And again, he is the executive. | ||
| He is the only person in whom the executive power of Article 2 actually resides. | ||
| Not in any cabinet heads. | ||
| God forbid. | ||
| Stupid independent agencies which are not constitutional in the first instance because, again, if you're outside of the hierarchy of Article 2, you're illegitimate there. | ||
| So I think that Donald Trump is in many ways— Trying to make what I like to call departmentalism great again. | ||
| Departmentalism is kind of the Abraham Lincoln stance. | ||
| The stance that all three branches get to interpret the Constitution for their own spheres. | ||
| The judiciary doesn't strictly bind the POTUS. And then the president doesn't strictly bind the judiciary and so forth there. | ||
| That's the actual Constitution. | ||
| That is how it actually works in practice. | ||
| So after so much time here of an engorged administrative state, of a Congress that does basically nothing whatsoever and just continues to give ever greater power to the unelected bureaucrats in the deep state. | ||
| The Supreme Court that for the better part of 60, 70 years now has declared itself to be the supreme branch even though Hamilton famously told us in Federalist 78 that they were supposed to be the least dangerous branch. | ||
| So the fact that they are supreme would have been anathema certainly to the views of the founders there. | ||
| Again, on all of these various fronts, Steve, I view what Trump is doing as quite the opposite of a constitutional crisis. | ||
| It's actually really a constitutional, I would say, rejuvenation actually. | ||
| Josh, where can people get you? | ||
| Steve, I'm on X, Josh underscore Hammer. | ||
| Instagram is Josh B. Hammer, and I host two shows as well, The Josh Hammer Show and America on Trial with Josh Hammer. | ||
| Josh, thank you for coming on this morning. | ||
| We will push the show out and all your content. | ||
| Thank you, sir. | ||
| You bet. | ||
| Thanks so much, Steve. | ||
| We have told you that this, using the courts, is where their natural default position is, and they are... | ||
| And I love the phrase judicial insurrection because that's essentially what they've done here. | ||
| We're going to get – I want to go to the Caitlin Collins, but what I want to do in a second is to make sure that everybody understands they're going to come looking for – and they've got to come looking for tax revenue, whether it's CR or not. | ||
| If you got a letter from the IRS, if the IRS has informed you that there's some issues – With your filings and or audit or whatever, make sure you go to taxnetworkusa.com slash Bannon. | ||
| You can get a free consultation or call the following number, 800-958-1000. | ||
| That's 800-958-1000. | ||
| Get a free consultation or go online, put in promo code Bannon. | ||
| When you call, say promo code Bannon also. | ||
| You have to deal with a letter from the IRS. You just have to. | ||
| So if you get a missive from them, you can take two options. | ||
| Call yourself or get a free consultation to see if they can help you. | ||
| The one thing you can't do is just let it sit there. | ||
| The fees, the penalties, the interest continues to accumulate and will not go away. | ||
| It just may get harder and harder and harder. | ||
| Let's go ahead and play the cold open. | ||
| We have EJ and Tony for us with a lot going on today. | ||
| Let's go ahead and play this. | ||
| You just talked about how important the work that Elon Musk is doing is. | ||
| If you pass a continuing resolution, won't that just refund all the programs that he says he's cutting that are full of waste, fraud, and abuse? | ||
| No, look, that's why I say you add anomalies to a CR. You can increase some spending, you can decrease some spending, you can add language that says, for example, the dramatic changes that have been made to USAID would be reflected in the ongoing spending. | ||
| It would be a clean CR, mostly, I think, but with some of those changes to adapt to the new realities here. | ||
| And the new reality is... | ||
| Less government, more efficiency, a better return for the taxpayers. | ||
| And I think that's something everybody should welcome. | ||
| There is a long list of data points here, so be patient. | ||
| GDP, second look at fourth quarter. | ||
| 2.3, our last look, and it remains at 2.3. | ||
| To put it in context, 2.3 was actually the weakest since the first quarter of 24, when it was 1.6. | ||
| If we look at... | ||
| Personal consumption, well, it actually remained the same. | ||
| Many were looking for it to deteriorate a bit. | ||
| 4.2%, very solid reading. | ||
| The best since the first quarter of 23. The pricing indice is leapfrogging. | ||
| It is jumping. | ||
| Price index moves from 2.2 to 4.2. | ||
| I mean, I have to look at that twice. | ||
| That almost seems like I read it wrong across the wire, but it is 4.2. | ||
| That would be the hottest. | ||
| We're going back all the way to the third quarter of 22 when it was 4.5%. | ||
| Now, if we look at the PCE on a core basis, now this is a quarter over quarter metric. | ||
| It jumped two tens from 2.5 to 2.7. | ||
| That would be the warmest since 2.8 in the second quarter of last year. | ||
| So yields, of course, are going to most likely... | ||
| Rick Santelli right there walking through the numbers. | ||
| Let me get EJ in here. | ||
| EJ... Break this all down, including the jobs number. | ||
| I take it in the fourth quarter, it looks like the indication for future inflation coming in a little hot, sir? | ||
| Oh, very hot, Steve. | ||
| As we just heard from Rick Santelli there, the number essentially doubled from what we previously thought it was. | ||
| In other words, inflation was way worse at the end of the Biden administration than they previously told us. | ||
| Shock of shocks, right? | ||
| This is the same old game that we saw over and over again throughout the four years of Biden, where we had initial data and it was always revised worse. | ||
| So that meant inflation getting revised up, jobs numbers getting revised down. | ||
| But another really troubling thing that we see in this GDP report is the fact that investment, specifically fixed private investment, was down even more than previously estimated in the fourth quarter. | ||
| In other words... | ||
| At the end of the Biden administration, this key driver of future economic growth was going down and going down faster than they initially told us. | ||
| So, again, Trump is essentially being handed an economy much worse than we thought it was, at least going by the official data. | ||
| And so it's going to be even more of a Herculean effort to try to turn this thing around. | ||
| In terms of those jobs numbers that you mentioned, We continue to see additional data coming in that shows us, once again, the jobs that we thought were there never really were there. | ||
| And so we anticipate many more downward revisions as we go further and further into the future. | ||
| Shockingly, the last of those big downward revisions from the Biden years, we won't even get until the start. | ||
| In other words, January of 2026, that's when we can finally close the book with the last downward revision for Biden. | ||
| But the initial data we have today that points to what those future revisions will look like is pretty gloomy. | ||
| It's pretty bad. | ||
| So again, we can expect those big downward revisions to continue. | ||
| In terms of job numbers right now, one of the interesting things we're seeing... | ||
| With the initial filings for unemployment insurance, that comes in on a weekly basis, is that we're seeing a huge spike in Washington, D.C., and the greater D.C. area. | ||
| In other words, all of the firings, all of the efficiency cuts that are being made, whether it's by Doge or other government agencies, whatever the case may be, Those numbers are actually large enough to show up in the macro-level data. | ||
| I think this is a huge win for the American people, the fact that the D.C. bureaucrats are losing their jobs. | ||
| And look, it's not that we hate people, right? | ||
| It's not that we want to see anybody suffer. | ||
| But it's simply the fact that the work these people were doing was counterproductive. | ||
| The work these people were doing was costing the American people dearly. | ||
|
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And so it's a good thing to see that work go away. | |
| Hang on a second. | ||
| What do you mean by that? | ||
| What do you mean the work was counterproductive? | ||
| Be specific about that. | ||
| Great, great question, Steve. | ||
| When we look at, for example, the work being done by regulators, they are adding significant costs. | ||
| In just the Biden years, for example, regulators managed to add the equivalent cost of $10,000 per American family. | ||
| I mean, that's absolutely devastating. | ||
| That's a huge part of where today's cost of living crisis has come from. | ||
| It's the regulatory burden inflicted on the American people by these by these bureaucrats. | ||
| Conversely, during the first Trump administration, and we hope they're going to repeat that success now in the second administration. | ||
| But during the first administration, they cut about twenty five hundred dollars in terms of regulatory costs for the average American family. | ||
| So that was that was a huge boon to the American people. | ||
| And it was all taken away and then some by the Biden era regulators. | ||
| But on top of that, you know, you know, it's not just regulators. | ||
| It's the people who are allocating our tax dollars to all of these crazy ventures overseas. | ||
| All the folks that have gotten axed from USAID, for example, they were certainly not doing the Lord's work, to put it gently, right? | ||
| They were taking our money and spending it in oftentimes counterproductive ways, not only wasting it on things we never should have been spending that money on. | ||
| But very oftentimes they were sending money to groups that did not have America's best interest at heart, that in fact were working against America's best interest. | ||
| This is how, for example, we had money landing in the hands of the Taliban and other terrorist groups. | ||
| How did we get in a situation where... | ||
| And I want to go very specifically back. | ||
| It used to be it was bad enough it was jobs that they put a number out and they go back and revise it the next quarter or two quarters later. | ||
| And we understand the job situation is much worse than you were the one that went through and actually broke down. | ||
| The jobs and say, hey, look, they're not delineating here for the public to put forward that all these jobs are being generated for foreigners or illegal aliens, that American-born citizens, native-born citizens, regardless of your race, ethnicity, religion, are not getting these jobs, right? | ||
| Now we're to the situation of revising other aspects, investments, the one that jumps off the page. | ||
| And I hope the Trump team this afternoon is dealing with this right now. | ||
| And this makes sense why they're hammering Trump on the price of eggs. | ||
| Their inflation forecast 2.2% to 4.2%. | ||
| Let's do it after the break. | ||
| I need to hold you because here's the point. | ||
| I couldn't figure out why Labor Department is having such misses all the time. | ||
| Is there something matter with the algorithm they're using? | ||
| Is there something matter with how they're doing these surveys? | ||
| But to miss inflation by You know, almost a double. | ||
| I can see, oh, we thought it was 2.2 and it's really 2.6 or it's 2.2 and it's 2.7 or 2.8. | ||
| They go from 2.2 to 4.2. | ||
| It just, it doesn't feel that that was not done on purpose. | ||
| That number's not suppressed on purpose. | ||
| And this is one of the reasons President Trump is starting off in some inflation and inflation looks like it's going to get hot. | ||
| And of course, that's exacerbated. | ||
| It's tied to, in the quarter, E.J. and Tony. | ||
| Dr. Antony, that we had the biggest record ever in deficits for the first quarter of the fiscal year. | ||
| And I might add, I think December is the biggest number and record on trade deficit. | ||
| It's all coming together, and it ain't good. | ||
| And they've kind of suppressed the math here. | ||
| Short break. | ||
| EJ on the other side. | ||
|
unidentified
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Here's your host, Stephen K. Mann. | |
| We're going to try to tie it all together in the next hour with Jim Rickards. | ||
| He's going to join us. | ||
| Go to RickardsWarRoom.com. | ||
| If you like capital markets and geopolitics, all the national security aspect of it, go to RickardsWarRoom.com. | ||
| Put in Ben and you get a discount. | ||
| Strategic Intelligence is the newsletter throughout the world that Jim is known for. | ||
| You're going to be reading what the top CEOs, chairman, hedge fund guys, not just in the United States, but throughout the world, read. | ||
| So if you want to be inside baseball, that's the way you get it. | ||
| Strategicintelligence, RickardsWarRoom.com. | ||
| You get a free book also about artificial intelligence and capital markets. | ||
| That will maybe keep you up at night. | ||
| Just read it. | ||
| Very powerful from Rickards. | ||
| E.J. and Tony, back to my question. | ||
| How do they... | ||
| First off, how do they have such a big miss on inflation? | ||
| And then I want to ask you, what does this portend for the economy that President Trump is dealing with, sir? | ||
| Well, Steve, unfortunately, we're not able to get the price of every single thing throughout the entire economy in a timely manner and then also compare that with what people are actually buying. | ||
| So these GDP reports, they don't just measure the price of everything that people are selling, but it's also all weighted. | ||
| It's a weighted average according to what people are buying. | ||
| So as people buy more of one thing and less of another, it's going to change how much one price counts versus another. | ||
| So again, it's very difficult. | ||
| There's a lot of surveys involved. | ||
| And so you do typically have some revisions, occasionally even large revisions. | ||
| But what stands out over the last several years is what we were talking about earlier, how consistently the inflation numbers have had to have been revised worse. | ||
| And so that points to something wrong in the data itself, which does periodically happen and does need to be corrected. | ||
| You know, whether it's the method methodologies, maybe it's how the data is being collected, the models that are being used. | ||
| Again, whatever the case may be, clearly something is wrong and something needs to be corrected. | ||
| And, you know, the Bureau of Economic Analysis falls under the Department of Commerce. | ||
| So I think this is definitely something the new Commerce Secretary needs to take a look at, just like the new Labor Secretary needs to be taking a look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is in that department, obviously, because the BLS is the ones that put together the Consumer Price Index, for example, and there are clearly problems because the BLS is the ones that put together the Consumer Price Index, for example, and Again, something is wrong with the numbers here when you so consistently get such large revisions and they're all in the same direction. | ||
| What does this mean for where we stand? | ||
| I'm going to play the Caitlin Collins. | ||
| And E.J., do you have a hard out at 11 or can I keep you for a few minutes into the next block? | ||
| No, no, I'd be happy to stay longer. | ||
| Okay, so I'm going to deal with the Caitlin Collins in a second, but let's go back. | ||
| In the context that now you have the reconciliation, and the reconciliation people just understand that's really dealing with the extension of the tax cuts. | ||
| It's a whole lot of smoke and mirrors and that, but we'll deal with that. | ||
| But the CR, as we preach the gospel of the CR, that it's got to be addressed to fund the government for the rest of the year. | ||
| In your mind, as an economist, Where do we really stand with what President Trump inherited as you see the economic battlefield in front of us? | ||
| It feels like less a battlefield than a minefield, frankly, what President Trump has inherited. | ||
| I mean, it is difficult, Steve, to, I think, to get across to people just how bad the economy is because what the economy actually looks like today and what people's lived experiences is just simply not matching up with what the data say. | ||
| There's just too many problems, again, with the data. | ||
| Going back to what we were just talking about, right? | ||
| There are things wrong with the data themselves. | ||
| It's why President Trump won such a great victory in November, right? | ||
| Where you had him winning the popular vote, every swing state, a huge electoral majority. | ||
| It's because the media was not successful in telling people, don't believe your lying eyes and don't believe your empty wallets. | ||
| Everything's fine. | ||
| So we are staring down the barrel of more inflation, courtesy of the Fed's interest rate cuts last year and relatively loose monetary policy. | ||
| Let's not forget. | ||
| If we look at the monthly inflation reports, the annual inflation rate that comes in every month, that has gotten worse each month since the Fed started cutting interest rates. | ||
| So clearly we have more inflation coming down the pike that the president will have to deal with. | ||
| We have all of the messes internationally that the president is already dealing with, especially in places like the Ukraine. | ||
| We have a banking crisis, which still really hasn't gone away. | ||
| The Fed just... | ||
| Papered over it with things like emergency lending programs, but that is still very real. | ||
| We have a commercial real estate sector that is in absolute turmoil. | ||
| The housing market is a disaster. | ||
| We just got pending home sales numbers this morning that were down to a record low. | ||
| Pending home sales today are about 30% below where they were in 2001. Not 2021, 2001. So here we are essentially a quarter century later, and the housing market If the housing market is 30 percent less activity today than it did back then, that's a disaster, even before you factor in things like population growth, for example. | ||
| So again, what this president has been handed is an absolute dumpster fire, frankly, of an economy. | ||
| Things are terrible. | ||
| The deficit is exploding. | ||
| It's the worst start ever to a fiscal year in terms of that deficit. | ||
| Started in October, ran through January. | ||
| The worst four-month start ever to a fiscal year. | ||
| And at the same time, you have a Treasury Secretary in Scott Besson, who is a master of sovereign debt markets, and he's going to need, I think, I mean, | ||
| Steve, if you give me an hour, I could fill it, I'm sure, Add on top, the only one you missed, we had a record trade deficit in the month of December. | ||
| And they're saying, oh, that's people trying to get ahead of President Trump's tariffs. | ||
| No, that's absolutely incorrect. | ||
| It's that we're purchasing too many manufactured goods from overseas. | ||
| Full stop. | ||
| I'm going to keep E.J. and Tony. | ||
| We're going to talk about this CR. We're also going to talk about Peter Navarro's been on CNBC talking about the terrorists. | ||
| President Trump reiterated this morning. | ||
| On the 4th, in the evening, he'll go up to address the nation from the nation's capital. | ||
| Early in the day, he will, as he says, hit Mexico and Canada, two of our largest trading partners. | ||
| With 25% across-the-board tariffs and, oh, by the way, a 10% tariff on the Chinese Communist Party. | ||
| Everything coming from China. | ||
| Geo-strategically, geo-economically, there are decades in which nothing happens and there are weeks in which decades happen. | ||
| Ladies and gentlemen, you're living through one of those weeks. | ||
| The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom to the White House right afternoons. | ||
| Zelensky's there tomorrow. | ||
| President Trump doing it all. |
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