March 4, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
51:36
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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unidentified
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President Trump hitting Canada and Mexico with 25% tariffs on imports to the United States and doubling tariffs on Chinese goods to 20%. | |
| President Trump saying the three countries had failed to do enough to stop the flow of the drug fentanyl into the United States. | ||
| Retaliation coming immediately from China, mostly on agricultural products. | ||
| Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that his country would respond immediately with 25% tariffs on about $20 billion worth of U.S. imports and more than $80 billion of additional dollars worth of imported goods in just about three weeks if the new U.S. tariffs were still in place. | ||
| Mexico's economy ministry said that President Claudia Sheinbaum was expected to announce Mexico's response during a news conference this morning. | ||
| Who is this for? | ||
| Tell me who is the swing state voter in Pennsylvania or Nevada or North Carolina whose issue in this election was, I don't think Vladimir Putin is getting enough of what he wants. | ||
| Tell me who is the median voter in some bellwether county in Arizona who thinks, you know what? | ||
| Russian cyberattacks have gotten so bogged down and difficult, it's getting so it's really difficult to just ransomware a hospital in Arizona these days. | ||
| Isn't there anything we can do to help with that? | ||
| Is there a single voter in the United States who thinks that Canada is the bad guy in the world and Russia is the good guy in the world? | ||
| And so let's threaten Canada and learn Russian. | ||
| Is there anyone? | ||
| Who is this for? | ||
|
unidentified
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And what did they do to get all of this? | |
| What has Russia given up to get this list of things that they have received in the first six weeks that Donald Trump has been back in the White House? | ||
| He's the dealmaker, right? | ||
| What's the other side of the deal? | ||
| This weekend, the foreign policy chief of the European Union said, quote, the free world needs a new leader. | ||
| The rest of the free world is trying. | ||
| This weekend, the prime minister of Great Britain and the president of France announced that they would form a new coalition of the willing to support Ukraine. | ||
| And they hoped they might get support from the United States for that effort. | ||
| The United States, our government, has changed sides in the world. | ||
| And it seems pretty clear they will not be doing that. | ||
| Our government now sides with Russia and against America's allies. | ||
| And we spent years trying to figure out why the Republican Party and its new leader would be inclined in that direction. | ||
| It now sort of doesn't matter. | ||
| What matters is the new reality is that he controls the government and that's the way that he has changed the U.S. government's orientation in the world. | ||
| And it really is hard to imagine what else Putin might want that Trump hasn't already given him in just these six weeks. | ||
|
unidentified
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David, Warren Buffett calls these tariffs an act of war. | |
| Like Donald Trump, I said it the other day, has sort of done the unthinkable. | ||
| The guy that was willing to deregulate the hell out of anything, wants to lower taxes as much as possible for corporates and be pro-business, has somehow killed animal spirits. | ||
| What are we in for here? | ||
| Because corporates I've talked to are like grinding to a halt because they don't know what these tariffs are going to do to them. | ||
| Well, that's just it. | ||
| I'll pick up on something that Greg said a moment ago, and that is... | ||
| Who knows if the president's satisfied or when he will be? | ||
| And I sat down with Chrystia Freeland, who's making a run to lead the Liberal Party in Canada, and I said, look, Chrystia, this is a dumb question, but what do you have to do? | ||
| What does Canada have to do to satisfy Donald Trump? | ||
| And she said, it's not a dumb question. | ||
| I think that's been kind of the animating feature of this entire debate, is he talks about fentanyl, he talks about immigration, but there's no clear parameters for what these two countries, these two very close allies of the United States, need to do. | ||
| You ask what's going to happen next. | ||
| I mean, we have been on this very rough journey since Inauguration Day. | ||
| Would those tariffs be put in place? | ||
| Right after the inauguration, they weren't. | ||
| There was a research study commission that was floated that these would be postponed once and then again. | ||
| We're still seeing floated the notion that there could be more tariffs on specific products and retaliatory tariffs. | ||
| We know this is a thing he loves, but the uncertainty that Greg's talking about permeates all of this. | ||
| And to your point... | ||
| ...does nothing positive to the animal spirits, to businesses, to consumers who are just frankly wondering how this is all going to play out. | ||
| ...overnight imposing tariffs on America's closest allies. | ||
| The strategy from the White House seems to be to shed as many friends as possible as fast as possible. | ||
| And the long-term question is, does that leave America safer, stronger and greater, or does it leave it weaker? | ||
| I mean, you just look, the risk at the moment is you push the Europeans closer to China, you push the Canadians closer to China, you push the South Koreans closer to a nuclear weapon. | ||
| I mean, it's hard to see how this strategy plays out well for the United States in the long run. | ||
| It's hard to see how it plays out well in the short run as well. | ||
| I mean, I think what the Trump people would say is that If you caught them in private moments, is that friendship and economic deals between the US and Russia, between Trump and Putin, will unleash all kinds of animal spirits and energy deals. | ||
| And, of course, the deal for Ukrainian minerals, which presumably, in one form or another, Zelenskyy will be corralled into accepting. | ||
| That's going to be boom time for American businesses. | ||
| His view of the world is about deals. | ||
| It's also about an affinity with Putin. | ||
| I'm not overlooking that, but it's chiefly his. | ||
| If you want to summarize Trump's view of economics, it's about having lots of deals and punishing those who are in surplus with the United States. | ||
| There are no friends in that world. | ||
| There's just deals that Trump has skin in the game in. | ||
| And so that's how they would justify this as a success because there is no sort of ethical, philosophical or strategic. | ||
| Yeah, I think sometimes, Kate, we get a little too complicated in our questions. | ||
| So I think the easiest way we can kind of just ask this is, do Americans like the way that Trump's handling his job compared to how they felt about Joe Biden? | ||
| So this is the net approval rating. | ||
| You look at Joe Biden back in 2024. He was 22 points underwater. | ||
| Holy cow. | ||
| You look at Donald Trump. | ||
| It's just a different planet entirely. | ||
| I mean, the gulf between these two is wider than the Gulf of America or Mexico, depending on which side of the aisle you stand on. | ||
| He's at plus two. | ||
| So look. | ||
| At this particular point, Americans are giving Donald Trump the benefit of the doubt. | ||
| He's doing considerably better than Joe Biden was doing on the handling of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. | ||
| And so on this simple question, I think Americans are saying... | ||
| Okay, Donald Trump's doing all right on this. | ||
| What about specifically on how they feel about bringing the war to an end? | ||
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| So, you know, look, questions on this can be quite complicated, but I think this kind of gets at sort of where the American trend line is. | ||
| Americans on the Russia-Ukraine war want a quicker end of the war, but Russia keeps its captured land. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| 50 percent. | ||
| 50 percent. | ||
| Bare majority. | ||
| Bare majority coming in here. | ||
| Support Ukraine's right to fight, even if it means a longer war. | ||
| That's at 48. This is very, very... | ||
| But the trend line on this question is so important because that want a quick end of the war, look at this. | ||
| You go back to August of 2022, it was at 31 percent. | ||
| Now we're at 50 percent. | ||
| I mean, that is a rocket ship upwards in terms of the Americans who want a quick end to the war, even if it means Russia keeps the captured Ukraine land. | ||
| Americans are moving closer and closer to wanting a compromise, even if it means that Ukraine doesn't really get what it set out to want, at least at the beginning of this war. | ||
| And Americans' views on Russia are shifting as well. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I mean, one of the reasons why we're seeing this is Americans who say Russia is an enemy. | ||
| You go back to 2023, it was 64 percent. | ||
| And that CBS News YouGov poll? | ||
| It was down to 34%. | ||
| Now, there is a chunk that believes that Russia is an unfriendly nation, but the percentage who believe that they're either an ally or friendly, that's up to 34% as well, basically equal to the percentage who say that they're an enemy. | ||
| So views on Russia have become, let's say, a little less isolated in terms of wanting Russia to be way out there on their own, thinking that they're an enemy. | ||
| At this particular point, they're starting to see Russia a little bit more friendly, and I think that's part of the reason why Americans want to see a compromise at this particular hour. | ||
| 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 line? | ||
|
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. Vance. | ||
| It's Tuesday 4th of March in the year of our Lord, 2025. | ||
| Today is the president addresses a joint session of Congress. | ||
| We normally call it a State of the Union, but traditionally, right after the weeks after a President's inaugurated, it is called a joint session, a speech to the joint session that will take place tonight. | ||
| We'll have wall-to-wall coverage on that on the most important days. | ||
| The reason is... | ||
| Economic warfare kicked in last night, the stroke of midnight, 12 Eastern Standard Time. | ||
| 25% tariffs on two of our three largest trading partners, that would be Mexico and Canada, and a 20% tariff on the Chinese Communist Party. | ||
| It's historic. | ||
| And the way to look at this, and also all these negotiations or phony negotiations in Europe... | ||
| This is geostrategic on one hand of what President Trump's doing with the rapprochement to Russia and geoeconomic on the other as he redoes the business model of the United States of America to make sure that people that want to have access to this market, and that means access to you, the underlying, underpinning civic society of this country has made this country free and made the most prosperous nation on earth, they have to pay a premium. | ||
| And the easiest way to avoid those tariffs is, guess what, or avoid that premium, is move your manufacturing here. | ||
| You cannot separate out yesterday's announcement by Taiwan Summit Conductor Manufacturing Company, the largest and most important of all the advanced chip design and chip manufacturers in the world, announcing a $100 billion investment in the state of Arizona to offshore They're manufacturing away from the Chinese Communist Party to the United States of America. | ||
| You couple that with Apple's $500 billion announcement a week or so ago announcing they were moving their manufacturing from China and even some from India to the United States. | ||
| They're following President Trump's game plan. | ||
| What President Trump is saying is that, hey, if you move your manufacturing here and create and invest... | ||
| Massive amount of capital equipment. | ||
| And I think yesterday, they said there's already been $1.7 trillion of investment commitments in the first 40 days. | ||
| Now, some of that is from Massasan and SoftBank and the Gulf Emirates and Qatar and Saudi. | ||
| And, you know, I'm not crazy about that money. | ||
| But close to a trillion dollars is from the Hondas and the Apples in the Taiwan semiconductor. | ||
| The greatest companies in the world are going to bring high-value-added, high-paying jobs, and also it looks like virtually all of those are going into red states or MAGA. The world wants to be associated with MAGA. The world feels comfortable and safe putting its money in states that are controlled by MAGA. And so this is why President Trump ratcheted up last night the economic war. | ||
| Now, there's other answerly... | ||
| Things that he wants to do with this, fentanyl, destroy the cartels, all that. | ||
| But hey, it's economic warfare. | ||
| And this is why he's shutting down the kinetic part of the Third World War in Ukraine. | ||
| He's shutting down the kinetic part of the Third World War in Israel. | ||
| He is shutting down the potential, the potential for a kinetic part of a Third World War. | ||
| In the Straits of Taiwan, the South China Sea, an invasion of Taiwan, as he extracts right now the manufacturing of the advanced chips that would destroy the American and world economy. | ||
| And simultaneously, he's going to economic war with the Chinese Communist Party, 20% tariffs. | ||
| And the Chinese Communist Party, unlike Mexico and unlike the EU and unlike Canada, they didn't say, well, you know, maybe there's a counter, we'll throw another tariff. | ||
| They said, hey, we understand exactly what this is. | ||
| It's economic warfare. | ||
| And what did the Chinese Communist Party say? | ||
| We will fight you to the bitter end. | ||
| I like an enemy that's straightforward enough, up in your grill. | ||
| Okay, we're going to walk through the tariffs. | ||
| We're going to walk through how the tariffs and the economic warfare tie to what's going on in Ukraine. | ||
| President Trump called their bluff last night. | ||
| No more arms, no more money for Ukraine. | ||
| Hey, Europe, you talk a big game. | ||
| You talk $800 billion here, all this. | ||
| You haven't put up any money. | ||
| You've sent no troops. | ||
| You talk a big game. | ||
| Put up or shut up. | ||
| Because peace is going to come to Ukraine, and Donald John Trump is going to ensure that. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
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| How to invest in gold in the era of Trump. | ||
| The ultimate guide. | ||
| Get it, read it, pass it on. | ||
| Also, the end of the dollar empire. | ||
| The sixth free installment. | ||
| Modern monetary theory. | ||
| The idea that broke the world. | ||
| Birchgold.com slash Bannon. | ||
| Back in a moment. | ||
|
unidentified
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Here's your host, Stephen K. Mann. | |
| So throughout the day, we're going to be with you all day today. | ||
| We have two hours, obviously, live in the morning, our morning war room, then the afternoon, 5 to 7. Natalie's going to be at the White House this afternoon. | ||
| Brian Glenn's at the White House right now. | ||
| We're also going to be anchoring the Real America's Voice coverage with all of the personnel. | ||
| A real America's voice. | ||
| Brian Glenn, Natalie, we got John Solomon, Amanda Head, Grant will be with us, the team at Studio 8H, hopefully Grant Posos will be pregame coverage, then after the State of the Union, or the joint address to Congress, whatever your feeling is. | ||
| We'll do postgame analysis, all that. | ||
| We're trying to get some people live in the field at watch parties, so you're going to want to keep it here. | ||
| At Real America's Voice all day. | ||
| Let's go to, we have Brian Glenn. | ||
| Brian, let's go to, I've got Eric Tietzel at CRA. I'm going to get to him in a second. | ||
| He's going to explain everything to you. | ||
| Spencer Morrison wrote this amazing new book called Reshoring. | ||
| He'll be with us. | ||
| Brian, today is kind of game day, and President Trump timed this perfectly, and the White House staff want to give a hat tip to Susie Wiles, the entire team over there. | ||
| Not just comms, but kind of organizing everything. | ||
| You kick off the economic war at midnight. | ||
| Then you roll throughout the day. | ||
| You tell NATO to put up or shut up. | ||
| And then you roll in to address not just the nation, but the world. | ||
| How's it over there today, Brian? | ||
| Get us up to date. | ||
| Yeah, good morning, Steve. | ||
| Good morning, War Room. | ||
| It's kind of quiet here at the White House right now, as there's nothing officially on President Trump's schedule other than him departing the White House to the Capitol with the First Lady Melania Trump at around 8.30. | ||
| But you teed it up perfectly. | ||
| I mean, you want to talk about the news cycle, an economic war going on right now. | ||
| And Alina Habba just did a quick gaggle in the break, and she mentioned, hey, you know, this is what it's all about. | ||
| First, build your product in America, and you avoid the tariffs. | ||
| That's what President Trump campaigned on. | ||
| That's what the MAGA movement was all about. | ||
| So, yes, there might be some temporary pains for the consumer lives, but, Steve, you and I both know this is what we've been pushing for for a long time, and it's the reality of this world. | ||
| And as far as Ukraine and NATO, hey, he said go. | ||
| If you guys think you can handle it, go for it. | ||
| And I think that's a bold move he said last night as well. | ||
| You have to do it. | ||
| You have to call their bluff and say you guys are big talkers. | ||
| Let's be brutally frank. | ||
| NATO and the EU, the party of Davos and Brussels got us into this war. | ||
| They kept pushing and pushing and pushing. | ||
| When I was back in the Pentagon in the early 80s, The mere conception that NATO would be as far as in the Ukraine would have been looked at as madness, as pure madness. | ||
| You know why? | ||
| Because it is pure madness. | ||
| They're the ones that push it. | ||
| The European elites push it. | ||
| They put up really no money. | ||
| The United States put up $350 billion according to President Trump. | ||
| We've got the forces that they want our security. | ||
| This was the punk Zelensky the other day was in the Oval. | ||
| Forcing the entire time because that meeting at the Hay Adams with the senators, he thought he had cards to try to get the security guarantee. | ||
| And President Trump says, quote, you have no cards. | ||
| He's calling out NATO. And you cannot look. | ||
| Look, $700 billion. | ||
| Let me repeat that. | ||
| $700 billion. | ||
| Of state-of-the-art, advanced, high-value-added manufacturing by the premier companies in the world have been announced in the last three or four weeks. | ||
| That has to be tied to the tariffs. | ||
| It's working. | ||
| Not only is it working, it's working on a level. | ||
| The entire investment of foreign companies in Obama, excuse me, in the Biden regime, I think was, you know, one and a half trillion dollars. | ||
| President Trump has surpassed that already. | ||
| In his first 40 days, it's extraordinary. | ||
| And I'm just counting the real ones as the companies, but they're all top of the line. | ||
| It's Apple. | ||
| It's Taiwan Semiconductor. | ||
| It's Honda. | ||
| These are the best companies in the world, Brian Glenn. | ||
| It's working. | ||
| Right now, I will tell you, it's quiet on the outside, but behind the scenes, Susie Wiles and the team, Peter Navarro, I've already talked to a bunch of them, they're beavering away on this. | ||
| To make this an incredible day for President Trump culminated in an incredible speech, not just to the nation, but to the world, sir. | ||
| Yeah, and wait till we hear pharmaceuticals move in their production to the U.S. That is a national security aspect as well. | ||
| That will be huge. | ||
| I saw a report last night that we have provided, in this war, 3.45 million rounds of ammunition. | ||
| The EU combined was just over a million. | ||
| So not only have we depleted a lot of the ammunition we have here, we've sent it over there, but we've done our fair share, as Joe Biden loves to say. | ||
| But it's a bold move. | ||
| But, you know, he is the master of the deal. | ||
| Fair share. | ||
| It should be some far... | ||
| Fair share. | ||
| We've paid our fair share. | ||
| Fair share, dude. | ||
| Bro, bro, what are you... | ||
| The head... | ||
| Hang on. | ||
| The head of the Indopac command... | ||
| Which is all the Indian Ocean, all the Western Pacific, it's East Asia. | ||
| He said a year ago, unless we dial this down, he said the Europeans are putting in nothing as far as small arms and weapons go, and we're putting everything, we're not going to be able to defend Taiwan. | ||
| He went on a congressional record. | ||
| Also, Tucker Carlson. | ||
| Tucker makes the point that all the arms we sent over there, and the Financial Times in London had this story that Harnwell and I went through. | ||
| A couple of years ago. | ||
| It's all being taken by the oligarchs. | ||
| You know, 30 to 50 percent of it is being taken by the oligarchs and resold to criminal gangs, radical jihadists, criminal gangs in Europe and the rest of the world. | ||
| They're taking our thing that the United States is giving them and they're taking it and monetizing it for themselves. | ||
| These are the most corrupt people on earth. | ||
| And they've finally gotten called out by President Trump. | ||
| Brother Brian Glenn. | ||
| Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And as far as what we can expect tonight, Steve, on the House floor, even though this is not an official State of the Union, but it's like one, the shenanigans will start probably from the very beginning. | ||
| As we will see House Democrats show their defiance with President Trump and talk about threats of democracy. | ||
| And, of course, Republicans will stand up and support the agenda. | ||
| But, Steve, you and I need to get on a side note, and this is a whole other episode, but this CR, it bothers me. | ||
| What's going on on the Hill right now is disturbing. | ||
| It's a whole other... | ||
| I know that. | ||
| But we need Republican Party to do the right thing. | ||
| And let's just see what that speech says tonight. | ||
| Let's just see if we can change some attitudes there on the Hill. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on. | |
| It's got to include... | ||
| Let me give you some bad news, brother. | ||
| I don't know if you saw it, but Bloomberg came out late last night, early this morning, with Doja's first report from the Pentagon. | ||
| It's $80 million. | ||
| Doge has got to step up here. | ||
| The whole CR is going to hinge on Doge and what they call these anomalies. | ||
| You cannot pass the CR unless you have the Doge spending cuts in there. | ||
| And now the issue gets to be, in the last 12 hours, is there any there there? | ||
| Doge, I think, has to step up to the plate right now. | ||
| Elon Musk has got to walk through, and we have to understand exactly, exactly, exactly. | ||
| What these cuts are that have to be in the CR. CR is going to be very tough to pass. | ||
| It's just going to be very tough to pass. | ||
| It's going to be very tough. | ||
| I think now I'm hearing word it may be a 30-day to get their house in order on appropriations. | ||
| But Brian, we'll talk about that in more detail maybe this afternoon at 5 o'clock. | ||
| How do people get you during the day? | ||
| There will be a lot of activity in the White House. | ||
| 8.30, 8.30. | ||
| They leave at 8.30 to the Capitol. | ||
| The speeches start approximately about 9 o'clock. | ||
| Yeah, but 9 o'clock. | ||
| You can follow me at BrianGlennTV across the board, at BrianOnTrueSocial, and I'll get with you later and give you a full rundown of how the BBC interview went last night and what they did not air and what they chose to air. | ||
| Typical. | ||
| Very typical. | ||
| Well, hopefully we'll get it and we'll air the whole thing ourselves. | ||
| Brian Glenn now become a major media star. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Who's getting the most clicks? | ||
| Natalie Winters or Brian Glenn? | ||
| I knew that Rav and War Room would get a couple of White House correspondents and they would cause trouble immediately, right? | ||
| They would become controversial. | ||
| Brian Glenn. | ||
| Oh, we just lost the feed on Brian Glenn. | ||
| Brian Glenn at the White House. | ||
| So tonight, coverage live here for the first two hours this morning, as usual. | ||
| Back at 5 to 7 live. | ||
| Now we'll be back over to the White House. | ||
| And then we will recommence. | ||
| From 8 o'clock until 11, we'll have some pregame coverage, have the entire Real America's Voice team. | ||
| Then the president will leave, actually leave with the first lady to the Capitol around 8.30. | ||
| We'll cover all that. | ||
| The speech, approximately 9 o'clock, should take at least an hour. | ||
| I believe he's going to talk about disruption, other topics like that. | ||
| Let's go to Eric Tietzel. | ||
| Eric from CRA. Eric, I know you guys cover both, and of course, Russ Vogt is in the middle of the CRA. He's in the middle of the tariffs. | ||
| Let's talk about Ukraine, sir. | ||
| Your thoughts about where we stand in all this? | ||
| Good morning, Steve, and good morning to the posse and Team Natalie, for what it's worth, here on my end. | ||
| No offense to Brian, of course. | ||
|
unidentified
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I gotta stick with my Claremont fellow posse. | |
| Exactly. | ||
| What do you got for us? | ||
| Yeah, I like the way you talk about this as economic warfare. | ||
| You're exactly right. | ||
| Of course, we know that war is just politics by another means, right? | ||
| What the president is engaged in is statesmanship. | ||
| It's statecraft. | ||
| He is putting America first in every aspect of policy, whether that's trade or war or the economy. | ||
| For the first time in my entire life, we have a president who is willing to do things on behalf of the American people that have not been done before. | ||
| And it's breaking out right into the open just in the last couple of days. | ||
| It truly is historic. | ||
| Let's talk about that. | ||
| When you say that this is a whole new, what I call, geoeconomics. | ||
| This is not a tariff on a tomato in Mexico. | ||
| No. | ||
| It's not a tariff on a part under the hood. | ||
| I tell you what, let's take a break and we'll come back. | ||
| Eric Tiesel for Center for Renewing America. | ||
| We have Spencer Morrison, the great author of the book. | ||
| By the way, it's Studio 6B. They're going to join us. | ||
| There's actually a live, I think they're having a live watch party. | ||
| We're going to have people there. | ||
| What we want to do, if you have a watch party... | ||
| Put it in the chat right now. | ||
| Let Grace and Mo see it. | ||
| We want to cover as much of that as possible. | ||
| As the MAGA movement and the nation and the world gather around their televisions tonight, no matter what time it is, in Europe or in Asia, to watch the President of the United States on the days of thunder and the years of lightning flooding the zone with MAGA and Donald John Trump. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
| Back in a moment. | ||
| ...is largely implicit or indirect or customary. | ||
| We actually have specified our commitment through things like the designation of Taiwan as the pacing scenario for the department. | ||
| So my view that the combination of the greater threat from China and the lack of preparedness on our part, I have a different assessment with respect, Senator, about Taiwan's efforts. | ||
| I think actually as a proportion of GDP, it's well below 3%. | ||
| I agree with President Trump that they should be more like 10% or at least something in that ballpark, really focused on their defense. | ||
| So we need to properly incentivize them. | ||
| So together, that means that my focus has been, again, with the shooting the flare metaphor I used earlier, Senator, to get Taiwan motivated to avoid precipitating a conflict that is not necessary with Beijing and giving us time and space to be able to try to rectify this problem because that is my goal, Senator. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Senator Blumenthal. | ||
| Senator Hirono. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| Welcome, Mr. Colby, to you and your family. | ||
| I ask the following two initial questions with relevance to... | ||
| We're going to listen for a few minutes. | ||
| This is the controversial hearing over Eldridge Colby to be one of the assistant undersecretaries of defense. | ||
| Very controversial. | ||
| Let's go back and watch. | ||
| I have not, Senator. | ||
|
unidentified
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Have you ever faced discipline or entered into a settlement relating to this kind of conduct? | |
| I have not, Senator. | ||
|
unidentified
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I think it's interesting that you would not say whether Russia invaded Ukraine and saying that this is a complicated kind of a situation right now. | |
| But I think I also heard you say that you would give the president your best advice regardless of what you think he might want to hear. | ||
| So I'm going to ask you a simple question relating to whether Russian military forces invaded Ukraine in February. | ||
| Well, Senator, you're describing a factual reality that is demonstrably true. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes, so that would mean that Russia invaded Ukraine. | |
| So that was a question that you would not answer. | ||
| I think that's pretty important because we care about what Xi Jinping thinks about what this president does and thinks. | ||
| And if Xi Jinping thinks that we have a president who does not separate fact from fiction, such as who invaded Ukraine, I would think that maybe President Xi has some... | ||
| Conclusions that he would draw may be having to do with, as our ranking member said, U.S. fecklessness. | ||
| And I also think that one of the reasons that our NATO allies are increasing their spending on military is that they do not think that they have a particularly stable partner in the U.S. and therefore they better look to their own interests because they can no longer rely. | ||
| On the U.S. I think that is a very bad situation for the United States to be in, especially as we identify China as a pacing threat and also whatever Russia is thinking along these lines, clearly they think that they now have a friend in the president. | ||
| I don't think that helps us vis-a-vis our strength regarding Russia, regarding China. | ||
| In fact, I think that we are placing ourselves in a very weakened position with regard to how we are viewed by our adversaries, that would be China as well as Russia, and our allies alike. | ||
| Not a good situation to be in. | ||
| We need a president who can separate fact from fiction. | ||
| Let me move on. | ||
| Since the administration has identified China as a pacing threat and the importance of Indo-PACOM, To face that threat, would you agree with that? | ||
| Yes, I think the department has identified China as the patient. | ||
|
unidentified
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But Indo-PACOM provided Congress with an $11 billion unfunded priorities list. | |
| And this says to me that there is a misalignment of our funding decisions and strategy. | ||
| If we consider Indopaycom to be a priority, and yet you have Indopaycom putting forward an $11 billion unfunded priorities, what would you do to decrease the unfunded priorities and align our strategy and the importance of Indopaycom with the resources that it gets? | ||
| And would you agree that maybe? | ||
| We should provide Indopaycom with more direct input into the department's budgeting and resourcing priorities. | ||
| Well, Senator, what I'd like to say is, if I may, is I think this is exactly the kind of baseline reality that I think so much of my strategic argumentation proceeds from. | ||
| A lot of what I'm saying is that many of us in the public debate and so forth are acting as if... | ||
| You know, we can do everything, but the reality is that there's an $11 billion unfunded priority list from Indopaycom, and realistically, I bet the real deficit is even higher, given that that's just what came out. | ||
| So, Senator, if confirmed, I would make it an absolute priority, given the priority that China must get across administrations. | ||
| I think this is now a matter of strategic consensus. | ||
| To try to not only drive that down, but to reform the department and reprioritize it, to actually go through and carry out the strategic shift that's been talked about in some ways since probably Bob Work was Deputy Secretary of Defense at the end of the Obama administration. | ||
| So would you agree that Indo-PACOM... Senator, I don't have enough information to say specifically organizationally where I would fall on that, but certainly that perspective needs to get, I would say, an elevated... | ||
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unidentified
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I hope so, because an $11 billion unfunded priority, that is the largest unfunded priority list of any of our combatant commands. | |
| Thank you, Mr. Chairman. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Let me observe, Mr. Colby, that I have been somewhat critical of the COCOMs that have not come forward with realistic. | ||
| In the middle of this... | ||
| Okay, you have the beginning of the Third World War. | ||
| The kinetic part. | ||
| This is more dangerous, as I keep saying, as the time between 1939 and 1941. That would be the invasion of Poland by the Wehrmacht. | ||
| And in June 1941, the invasion of Russia by the Wehrmacht. | ||
| That time, the invasion of Poland, later the fall of France, later the Battle of Britain, the air war over Britain, what we call the Blitz. | ||
| Different operations in both Norway and in North Africa. | ||
| All of those combined until the Wehrmacht unleashed on the Russians in June of 1941. Those two allies at the time turned on each other. | ||
| The killing was, I don't know, a tenth what has been in Ukraine and in Israel. | ||
| We are in the Third World War, and now you see the economic part. | ||
| In fact, the Chinese Communist Party has been at war with us since at least May of 2019 when they declared a people's war. | ||
| She declared a people's war. | ||
| They fight called unrestricted warfare. | ||
| A big part of this is economic warfare. | ||
| This controversy, and what you're seeing right there, and I think Bridge did a great job. | ||
| The book, his name is Elbridge Colby. | ||
| That last name, he's the grandson of William Colby. | ||
| A hero in World War II with the OSS, but one of the more controversial directors of the Central Intelligence Agency. | ||
| And so Bridge Colby comes from kind of that Ivy League, you know, the folks that have been kind of running the country. | ||
| I know him. | ||
| I'm a big admirer of this book. | ||
| And Bridge falls in an unfortunate category. | ||
| This is a very controversial position that President Trump has elevated him to. | ||
| He has to be Senate confirmed. | ||
| Michael Anton over at the State Department and Bridge Colby run what are called the policy sectors. | ||
| Michael Anton actually sits in the seat of George F. Kennan. | ||
| Who wrote the long memorandum, it was called the X Memorandum, I think in the late 1940s, that basically laid out the containment strategy against the Soviet Union, who we realized quickly after funding them in World War II that the Russian people might be our allies, but that the Bolsheviks and the Soviets were certainly not our allies. | ||
| So Michael Anton has that position. | ||
| People know Michael very well. | ||
| He was in the National Security Council with us in the first term and wrote the famous memorandum on Flight 93 in the 2016 campaign. | ||
| Bridge Colby is going to take the equivalent job in the Pentagon. | ||
| And the reason this becomes so controversial... | ||
| And one of the reasons I did that long interview with Kurt Mills is that Tucker Carlson has come out and been a big supporter of Bridge Colby. | ||
| Bridge Colby's theory of the case is the following. | ||
| That he thinks we ought to wrap up this situation in Ukraine and that we shouldn't be in a war, we shouldn't be supporting a war on the Eurasian landmass. | ||
| He also has said consistently, as we have, we have to pivot away from CENTCOM. We have to pivot away from the Middle East. | ||
| The Middle East is an interesting theater. | ||
| But it's not the existential theater. | ||
| It's like in World War II. The decision was made by the FDR that although... | ||
| The Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor, and that's what got us into the shooting part of World War II in December of 1941. In fact, we never declared war on Germany. | ||
| Germany actually declared war on us, I think, three or four days later, because they had a secret treaty with the Japanese, that the priority would be Germany first, hold ground in the Pacific, and then later... | ||
| Drive to Tokyo. | ||
| Bridge Colby just said, he says, hey, look, I don't think CENTCOM is as important as it is. | ||
| I just don't think CENTCOM is the center of gravity of our strategy has to be to defeat, or in his case, contain. | ||
| The Chinese Communist Party. | ||
| My colleagues and my brethren over at the Committee on the Present Danger, and people like Captain Fennell and Bill Gertz, the great Bill Gertz, and Frank Gaffney, all the people over there, they think British Kobe's way too weak on the Chinese side. | ||
| They say, look, he's for containment. | ||
| He's for Kissinger's detente. | ||
| He's not that strong on Taiwan. | ||
| He's not like we are that want to take down the Chinese Communist Party. | ||
| But the biggest hit he gets, and some of this comes from that he's not a defender of Israel. | ||
| And this has made him a very controversial figure. | ||
| I think Bridge Colby, if you look at the other possibilities, I think Bridge Colby is going to do a fine job. | ||
| And like I said, I don't support Bridge Colby in all these policies. | ||
| I'm much more aggressive. | ||
| When it comes to the Chinese Communist Party, but Bridges' book, A Strategy of Denial, kind of is what a great power struggle is where you basically have command by negation. | ||
| And his command is to stop them from becoming a hegemon in East Asia. | ||
| Brother Tetzel, with Ukraine, Bridges Colby, where do you stand? | ||
| Where do you stand with Bridges Colby? | ||
| Because this is controversial. | ||
| I think one of the controversies is that Tucker... | ||
| Who's thought this through, and I appreciate Tucker's opinion on this a lot. | ||
| I think Tucker's one of the brightest guys out there. | ||
| Tucker, and kind of the Kurt Mill school. | ||
| I love Kurt. | ||
| I've known Kurt. | ||
| For years and years and years, kind of the American conservative, the paleo-conservatives, right? | ||
| They think that we way overemphasize the Middle East and we have to get much smarter. | ||
| They really are more of an America first. | ||
| Would love the Panama Canal to Greenland strategy, the hemispheric defense that President Trump is picking up. | ||
| But where do you come down on Bridge Colby? | ||
| And folks, we'll be dipping in and out of this throughout the day. | ||
| In fact... | ||
| Grace, if we can put that up on one of our other channels on Rumble, I think it'd be great because this is one of the more controversial selections that President Trump has had. | ||
| Yeah, Bridge Colby is a special guy and just the right guy for this job, in my view. | ||
| I think it's a testament to him that, as you say, he was raised really in the swamp, in the regime, and he's qualified in all of the ways that a typical person for a role like this would be qualified. | ||
| Yet he somehow managed to get through with his brain still screwed on correctly, not having been infected by the same ideology that has led the world for the last generation or more. | ||
| He's an independent thinker. | ||
| He has done much to stand up and certify a next generation of foreign policy thinkers outside the blob who are putting America first. | ||
| And it's perfectly reasonable to disagree with some of the specifics around the edges of what he thinks and to argue about those things. | ||
| That's good. | ||
| That's healthy in the America First movement. | ||
| But at the end of the day, Bridge Colby is the kind of person who's going to carry forward the president's agenda alongside a guy like Mike Anton. | ||
| And I'll say this, if nothing else, if he can sit there and listen to Mazie Hirono talk for five minutes, he'll be just fine with G. She did have a good point. | ||
| Now, she's from Hawaii, and Pearl Harbor is in her. | ||
| She did have a good point. | ||
| Indopac Command has a... | ||
| And this gets back to the CR. This gets back to Doge being over at the Pentagon. | ||
| This gets back to hemispheric defense. | ||
| I'm a huge believer right now that what Pete ought to do is we got to take a... | ||
| We just passed a 900 The point of the CR, | ||
| the point of this fight over Ukraine, the point of calling the bluff of the Europeans is that this cost, the strategy of the United States, Right? | ||
| To be kind of a hegemon and be everywhere. | ||
| And fighting everywhere. | ||
| Supporting all these fights. | ||
| It's ridiculous strategically. | ||
| And it's even more ridiculous economically. | ||
| President Trump, that Panama to Greenland is more of a naval strategy. | ||
| And I think Bridge and Michael Anton are two of the smartest guys I know. | ||
| And I think that's how it fits in. | ||
| I also address this Israel 365 in Dallas. | ||
| And I want to thank Rabbi Walecki and others for having me. | ||
| There was a great audience. | ||
| Kind of a MAGA. And what I said is that, hey, what we have to do, and I think Bridge is a big proponent of this. | ||
| I think Tucker's a proponent of this. | ||
| I'm a proponent of this. | ||
| We have to make sure in everything that's going on in the Middle East right now. | ||
| That the United States of America and Israel does not get sucked into a land campaign against the Persians or even an air campaign against the Persians. | ||
| There's other ways to deal with this situation. | ||
| And I keep saying, hey, as bad as the Persians are, you just crushed Hezbollah in Lebanon. | ||
| Now you've got Turkey that took down Syria. | ||
| The threat is, to me, Qatar's money and Turkey's, you know... | ||
| Re-establishing the Ottoman Empire and the Caliphate, that's a problem. | ||
| And we've got to be very focused, but we cannot get into another land war. | ||
| And there's a lot of people itching to go shoot it out with the Persians. | ||
| And as a young man was on a destroyer off the coast there, I will tell you, that place is like the surface of the moon. | ||
| It is so vast and so big, and we don't want any part of it. | ||
| Your thoughts, Brother Tietzel? | ||
| There's a time and a place for war, a just war, but I think what people are waking up to is the extent to which America's entire approach to economic growth has been dependent on war. | ||
| We do have an industrial policy, and it's war. | ||
| That's why we've been at war for half of my life, if not more. | ||
| The president is putting a stop to that, and rightly so. | ||
| There's this theory of economics that people may be familiar with. | ||
| It's called the broken windows theory. | ||
| And it's basically the argument that you make a bunch of windows and then have somebody break them, and that creates economic development because you've got to make new windows, right? | ||
| But of course it's fallacious because they're not counting the cost of the broken glass. | ||
| And what we've seen over the last generation is a broken bodies. | ||
| Theory of economics. | ||
| It's fine if Ukrainians are dying. | ||
| It's fine if Russians are dying. | ||
| It's fine if Afghans are dying or somebody has to die because don't you understand that we're giving subgrants to weapons manufacturers in every congressional district in America? | ||
| That cannot be the way that we grow as a country. | ||
| And that's why you're exactly right, to prove that all of this is tied together. | ||
| Tariffs. | ||
| Ukraine, Russia, Israel, Gaza. | ||
| The president is taking a whole-of-economy, whole-of-nation approach to say we're not going to be that anymore. | ||
| We're going to revitalize areas of America with real industry apart from the military-industrial complex. | ||
| You know, Tucker Carlson, Kurt Mills, Steve Bannon, Eric Tietzel, other people in our movement, we're not doves. | ||
| We're far from it. | ||
| We're just not neocons. | ||
| We don't want to be everywhere. | ||
| And as a naval officer, as a young man, we went from the Western Pacific in one deployment all the way to the North Arabian Sea in the Persian Gulf. | ||
| So I got a tour. | ||
| My other members of the family, the same thing. | ||
| And it's a vast world. | ||
| We can't be everywhere. | ||
| And we can't be fighting everywhere. | ||
| Because it's ridiculous. | ||
| It's just ridiculous. | ||
| And you're 100% correct. | ||
| Hang on for a second. | ||
| I want to get to the economic warfare part of this, Eric. | ||
| If you can hang on a second. | ||
| I want to bring in Spencer. | ||
| The book is reshoring. | ||
| It's absolutely brilliant. | ||
| The timing of this is exquisite, sir. | ||
| You launched the book on the day that we start the economic war against the Chinese Communist Party and also give a love tap to both... | ||
| What is President Trump's theory of the case here, sir? | ||
| Wall Street's going crazy. | ||
| The business press is, oh, this is terrible. | ||
| It's the end of it. | ||
| I think your theory is very close to President Trump. | ||
| You think the exact opposite, do you not? | ||
| President Trump has been saying this ever since he was a young man. | ||
| I remember an interview he did, I think it was on Oprah, and he was talking all about how America is losing its industrial might and its industrial capacity. | ||
| And tariffs are the prime tool to reshore our factories and to bring those good middle-class jobs back to America. | ||
| And tariffs have two main policy components, okay? | ||
| There's an economic side of the coin. | ||
| The other side of the coin is power. | ||
| It's national defense. | ||
| Money is power, right? | ||
| So what tariffs are going to do, and President Trump, his latest executive order, as of yesterday, he says, look, we're going to slap another 10% tariffs on China. | ||
| The reason for that, you know, the purported reason is he says, look, they're bringing all this fentanyl into the country. | ||
| They need to be punished. | ||
| But when taken into consideration with all of the other policy objectives and things that the president is doing, you can see that it's part of a much broader agenda to strengthen America. | ||
| And the backbone of this country, the backbone of this country since the late 1800s has always been our industry. | ||
| How do we beat the Germans in World War II? How do we beat the Japanese? | ||
| We beat them because we were able to build so much more military products than them. | ||
| Not only that, we were ahead of the curve in terms of technology, right? | ||
| So we had a wonderful confluence of economic production and technological growth. | ||
| Unfortunately, since 1974, all of that has been bleeding out of this country. | ||
| We've been sending our factories to China. | ||
| We've been sending our technology industry over to Europe and to India. | ||
| And we're losing the edge. | ||
| Right now, America is buying the future that we used to build. | ||
| And case in point is this trade deficit, right? | ||
| America spends almost a trillion dollars every year buying foreign products, stuff that we should be making in this country, and that's displaced over 7 billion jobs. | ||
| Hang on. | ||
| The Wall Street guys, particularly Gary Cohn and I, fought this, Navar and I versus Gary Cohn and Mnuchin, every day in the first term. | ||
| Every day. | ||
| And they would say, and they were both Goldman Sachs guys, and they would look me in the eye and say, trade deficits don't matter. | ||
| That is a ridiculous way. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, they're completely wrong. | |
| Trade deficits matter because of the way the books are actually balanced. | ||
| So when we spend a trillion dollars abroad on foreign goods, the Chinese aren't giving us all of that for free. | ||
| We have to pay for it somehow. | ||
| And there's only two ways we can pay for it, Steve. | ||
| We either pay for it by selling assets or we pay for it by selling debt. | ||
| Now, what does it look like on the asset side? | ||
| Because we have to balance the books, right? | ||
| Assets are real estate. | ||
| Assets are ownership of America's companies. | ||
| So a really good example, last year, foreign buyers bought up $62 billion worth of American real estate. | ||
| Everything from ranch land in Iowa to real estate in Manhattan and San Francisco. | ||
| And this is putting huge pressure on our real estate markets. | ||
| I mean, we talk about all of these people, young people, who are unable to afford to grow up in the communities where they were raised. | ||
| They can't buy houses in the cities they grew up in. | ||
| The big part of the reason for that is all of these foreigners are buying up all of that land with money that we give them for goods. | ||
| Look at ownership of America's corporations. | ||
| When China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, about 7% of our corporations were owned by foreign entities. | ||
| Today, it's up to 17%. | ||
| We're giving them money to buy our land. | ||
| And to buy our corporations. | ||
| Not only that, they're buying up our debt. | ||
| They're basically, when we send money abroad, that money has to be spent in America. | ||
| So we're giving them money to fund the federal government's debt. | ||
| And so essentially what we're doing is we're borrowing money from these countries and paying them interest for the privilege of purchasing their goods, the goods that we should be building in this country. | ||
| So Wall Street's got it totally backwards. | ||
| They're essentially covering their own tracks. | ||
| It doesn't matter that the books are balanced. | ||
| It also matters how they're balanced. | ||
| What about – I'll tell you what. | ||
| You hold on. | ||
| We're going to go to the top of the hour. | ||
| Eric Tietzel, we've got to bounce. | ||
| What's your social media? | ||
| Where do people get you at CRA? You know, you're the stand-in. | ||
| You've replaced Russ Vote, the Grace Russ Vote. | ||
| People still want to get all the information and know what you guys are up to. | ||
| Where do they go? | ||
| Yeah, no one will ever replace Russ, but we're doing our best. | ||
| You can find me at Eric Tietzel and at Center for Renewing America to follow all the great work that the team's doing over here. | ||
| Thank you, Steve. | ||
| Great to talk to you. | ||
| Thank you, brother. | ||
| We're going to take a short commercial break. | ||
| 11 o'clock hour, we've got Tom Fenton also going to go to Rome to get some perspective on what President Trump's doing, the economic warfare side in Ukraine. | ||
| We have Ben Harnwell teed up. | ||
| We also have Spencer Morrison, this amazing new book, Reshoring, that puts to lie everything you've been told about terrorists. | ||
| President Trump understands this. | ||
| This is economic warfare. | ||
| Flat out. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| He's going to win this one. | ||
| Just like he took down ISIS. Just like he's going to take down the cartels. | ||
| He's going to stop the chemical warfare attack. | ||
| The second opium war driven by the Chinese Communist Party. | ||
| And a lot more. | ||
| From the EU to Canada to Mexico. | ||
| All of it. | ||
| President Trump, winner takes all. | ||
| Short break. | ||
| We're going to leave you going out with the right stuff. |
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