March 14, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
51:38
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| The cost you see to the constitutional order of a shutdown that isn't already being done now. | ||
| It's a dramatic cost. | ||
| Here's why, Chris. | ||
| Under a shutdown, it is the executive branch, in this case Trump, Musk. | ||
| Doge and Vogt, who's head of the OMB, who we all know are authoritarians, vicious, nasty, who would have sole control over what is funded and what isn't. | ||
| They get to determine what is a, quote, essential service. | ||
| And they will just cut to smithereens, far greater than in the CR bill, which is a lousy bill. | ||
| Far greater than that, what could be funded and what couldn't. | ||
| And there's no recourse. | ||
| You can't go to court. | ||
| This is a decision totally in the executive branch. | ||
| And so it would be devastating. | ||
| Why is it that Elon Musk and Donald Trump want a government shutdown so they can take control of the government and do their vicious, horrible things? | ||
| They could cut half the government. | ||
| They could tell employees you're not essential and never bring them back, permanently firing them. | ||
| It's a disaster. | ||
| And in a few weeks, if there was a shutdown, everyone would be complaining and howling, why did they eliminate SNAP? Why did they cut so much of Medicaid? | ||
| But they could do all that on their own. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| There is no check on them with a shutdown. | ||
| That's not to say this CR bill is a good bill. | ||
| It isn't. | ||
| It didn't have any safeguards in it. | ||
| But it would be much, much worse to have a shutdown. | ||
| And my job, Chris, as leader, is to see things a little bit ahead, down the road, and see how horrible this would be and alert people to it. | ||
| So, I want to sort of present two arguments on the other side. | ||
| One of them is that I was, it was quite... | ||
| And I hear you on this. | ||
| This is not an easy call. | ||
| I want to be clear. | ||
| I mean, I don't think it is. | ||
| But, you know, the AFG union, which is the largest union representing federal workers, they won a big victory today in federal court about those probationary employees who were fired. | ||
| What do you think of the job that Chuck Schumer is doing? | ||
| Would you ever challenge him, do you think? | ||
| I think that what we need right now is a united Senate Democratic caucus that can stand up for this country and not vote for cloture and not vote for this bill. | ||
| And I think that the strength that we have is in this moment. | ||
| Reconciliation and all of these, Republicans do not need Democratic votes for that. | ||
| They need it for this. | ||
| And so the strength of our leadership in this moment is going to demonstrate the strength of our caucus. | ||
| And I cannot urge enough how bad of an idea it is to empower and enable Donald Trump and Elon Musk in this moment. | ||
| It is dangerous and it is reckless. | ||
| Well, the only thing that gets their attention, the only thing that gets them to back down is meeting conflict with conflict. | ||
| If you meet conflict with essentially managed retreat or strategic non-engagement, then they roll all over you. | ||
| We are going to conflict with them on everything. | ||
| On the tax cuts for the billionaires. | ||
| They've become a plutocracy and oligarchy. | ||
| On Medicaid. | ||
| We have plans to conflict them with all of that. | ||
| If the shutdown occurred, we wouldn't be able to do that because they would fill up both the Senate... | ||
| And the discussion on whether we should cut this and not cut that, of things that they want to cut. | ||
| So to have the conflict on the best ground we have, summed up in a sentence, that they're making the middle class pay for tax cuts for billionaires, it's much, much better not to be in the middle of a shutdown, which should divert people from the number one issue we have against these bastards, sorry, these people, which is not only all these cuts, but they're ruining... | ||
| And one other thing on a shutdown. | ||
| On a shutdown, the courts could close or at least be totally, totally disabled. | ||
| And the courts are one of the best ways we've had to go after these guys. | ||
| Colleagues, House Republicans are already using the term Schumer shutdown, which has that nice alliterative style. | ||
| Are you not worried at all about Democrats taking the heat for the shutdown? | ||
| We know, and the American people are... | ||
| are not going to have the wool pulled over their eyes. | ||
| Everybody knows that Donald Trump is president, that Republicans have the Senate, and Republicans have the House. | ||
| They have the keys to the entire United States government. | ||
| And if Republicans wanted to avert a shutdown, they can. | ||
| They can. | ||
| If they need Democratic votes, then they can negotiate with Democrats to get those votes. | ||
| It is simple. | ||
| They have two options, to pass it with their votes or to pass it with Democratic votes. | ||
| And we also see the data bearing this out. | ||
| When you look at public polling from very reputable firms, we see that the American people understand that and they know that. | ||
| That the party in charge of government is the party that's in charge of keeping government open. | ||
| 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 them. | ||
| I know you don't like hearing that. | ||
| I know you've tried to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it. | ||
| It's going to happen. | ||
| 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
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Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? | |
| If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved. | ||
|
unidentified
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War Room. | |
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| Friday, 14th, March, Year of Our Lord, 2025. | ||
| It's going to be another crazy Friday. | ||
| President will be signing executive orders about 1 o'clock at the White House, around 1 o'clock. | ||
| Sometime this afternoon, the official surrender of the Democratic Party will take place in the Senate as they'll vote to continue on President Trump's government without a fight. | ||
| And then President Trump, Donald John Trump, the 47th President of the United States, by the way, who is Chief Executive Officer of the United States government. | ||
| He's Commander-in-Chief of the Uniformed Military Services, and he's also Chief Magistrate and Chief Law Enforcement Officer. | ||
| In that third role of Chief Magistrate and Chief Law Enforcement Officer, he will head to the Justice Department today for remarks. | ||
| Maybe a little Q&A. It's Pam Bonney. | ||
| I think Cash Patel will be there. | ||
| We've got so much going on. | ||
| And so the Democratic Party is in a total meltdown. | ||
| They've been trying to go on offense by going to these red districts to get this big plan of how to do it. | ||
| Also, they're engaging right-wingers in media more than ever. | ||
| The people that lost so badly for them are in meltdown about that. | ||
| And just in the middle of this, and they're getting... | ||
| Really, I think, pretty significant legal victories, at least with these radical lower court justices. | ||
| But in the middle of this, Schumer is surrendering today, and that has caused a complete and total meltdown. | ||
| The House, to a person except for Jared Golden up in Maine 2, which is really a Republican district in Maine 2, voted to shut the government down. | ||
| And Schumer, I think, is constructed to get eight Democratic votes over, say, Fetterman plus seven, or himself, he and Fetterman plus five or plus six to get to the eight. | ||
| A full surrender, and that's really put a chop block of any momentum the Democrats thought they had. | ||
| So we're going to get into all of this, the geopolitics of it, the capital markets, the economy. | ||
| Economic part of it. | ||
| Gold's over $3,000 this morning. | ||
| Stock market up a little bit at the open. | ||
| Let's go ahead and play. | ||
| We've got Besant's comments with Boyle. | ||
| We've got some swatting victims. | ||
| One of the things they're doing in the game, much nastier on threats. | ||
| Everyone I know is getting threats, death threats, other threats, swatting. | ||
| They're trying to suicide by cop. | ||
| We're going to get to all of that. | ||
| But I've got the great Mike Davis. | ||
| I have an open for Mike Davis. | ||
| Because right now of all the fights you see on the legislative side, they're surrendering. | ||
| They ain't surrendering in the courts. | ||
| And they're getting some traction because of radical justices. | ||
| These frontline federal judges are also playing the role of prosecuting the case against the government, against President Trump. | ||
| Let's go ahead and play and bring in Mike Davis. | ||
| All right, update. | ||
| As we reported at the top of the show, a federal judge in California today issued a blistering ruling from the bench in which he ordered the Trump administration to rehire thousands of people they had fired from the federal government. | ||
| USDA, Defense Department, Energy Department, Department of the Interior, the Treasury, and the VA. Well, I got two updates for you. | ||
| Because tonight, just as we were coming on the air, the plaintiffs in that case, the California federal case, the plaintiffs are the union representing government workers. | ||
| Plaintiffs went back to that same judge in California and essentially said, thank you for this ruling today, Your Honor. | ||
| Can you please make it so it applies to even more agencies? | ||
| They have now formally asked the judge to expand that order today to also order the reinstatement of fired employees at the Commerce Department, Education Department, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, the Justice Department, Department of Transportation, the EPA, NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the Small Business Administration. | ||
| Update one. | ||
| Here's update two. | ||
| Just minutes after those plaintiffs asked the California federal judge to expand his ruling and order even more agencies to rehire even more people, a second federal judge across the country in Maryland issued a ruling in an entirely separate case ordering the federal government also to rehire... | ||
| This federal judge in Maryland tonight has just ordered that thousands of fired probationary employees must now be reinstated at, ready for the list? | ||
| Department of Agriculture. | ||
| Department of Commerce, Department of Defense, Department of Education, Department of Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Department of the Interior, Department of Labor, Department of Transportation, the Treasury Department, VA, USAID, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the EPA, the FDIC, the General Services Administration, the Office of Personnel Management, the Small Business Administration, and the National Archives and Records Administration. | ||
| All of them. | ||
| And if it seems like there's overlap between the list in those two cases, you are correct. | ||
| As of tonight, just in today's news, we've got overlapping federal rulings ordering the immediate reinstatement of thousands of employees at multiple federal agencies. | ||
| I'll tell you, the Maryland judge writes in this new order that's just out tonight, quote, the law is clear. | ||
| That when dismissing an employee due to unsatisfactory performance, the employer must honestly be dissatisfied with the probationer's conduct or performance after giving him a fair trial on the job. | ||
| Again, two federal judges tonight with equally sweeping rulings, both in the same direction, both telling Trump, when you fired those people, you had no right. | ||
| Give them back their jobs. | ||
| Okay, Mike Davis joins us. | ||
| Mike, it's more than just, if you think of the obligations and duties of an executive, one is the hiring and firing people, you know, downsizing or increasing, also about where money goes. | ||
| At these first level, across the nation, like in San Francisco or in Maryland, they're also issuing injunctions for the entire country, and it's on everything President Trump's doing. | ||
| It's just not personnel. | ||
| Which they're really ramping up, but it is also restricting payments. | ||
| I mean, essentially doing what an executive does. | ||
| Can you give us a tour de horizon of where we stand now? | ||
| Because last night on the shows, they didn't want to talk about Chuck Schumer. | ||
| Chuck Schumer was the third or fourth story they got to. | ||
| The first story all night long was their wins in federal court, sir. | ||
| Again, the American people gave President Trump a broad electoral mandate to cut waste, fraud, and abuse to make our government work for us instead of us working for our government. | ||
| And President Trump is doing that. | ||
| That's the unthinkable in Washington. | ||
| He's actually doing what he promised American voters. | ||
| He would do. | ||
| And that includes getting rid of these federal employees who do not provide value. | ||
| These probationary employees who the Biden administration hired over the last year or two, the Trump administration made a determination on an individualized basis through these agency heads that these probationary employees are no longer useful. | ||
| So they got a pink slip and got... | ||
| Scent packing as they should have. | ||
| All these Biden hires, right? | ||
| And what they're doing is they have these plaintiffs, these unions and these left wing activists running to these left wing activist judges and they're getting illegal. | ||
| Unconstitutional orders from these activist judges. | ||
| These activist judges are trying to tell the President of the United States that he does not have power under Article II of the Constitution. | ||
| The executive power, the power of the chief executive officer as the commander-in-chief to hire and fire employees, including overseas foreign service officers, including... | ||
| Telling the president what he can do for military readiness and morale. | ||
| This is unacceptable what these activist judges are doing. | ||
| If these fired employees want to get redress, they go to the Merit Systems Protection Board and they can get monetary damages. | ||
| But for an activist judge, two activist judges now saying that the president of the United States has to rehire. | ||
| Fired executive branch workers against his will violates Article 2 of the Constitution. | ||
| It violates federal statute. | ||
| These judges don't have the power to do this. | ||
| Mike, hang on for one second. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'll hold you through the break. | |
| The Mike Davis, the Viceroy, joins us live to engage in the judicial insurrection against President Trump. | ||
|
unidentified
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In America's heart. | |
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Band. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| If you notice in that first, in the cold open, Mike Davis, the principal reason that Schumer gave for keeping the government open for his basic surrender today is because he feared we would shut down the courts. | ||
| And he says, this is the way we're winning right now. | ||
| Can you give your overall assessment? | ||
| Because this is where, and all their other failures, this is the one place they've gotten traction, sir. | ||
| It shows you how illegal and unconstitutional this strategy is. | ||
| The American people elected President Trump. | ||
| They gave him a comfortable majority in the United States Senate, and they gave him another Republican House. | ||
| The American people gave President Trump a broad electoral mandate. | ||
| And these Democrats know they're not going to win in the House, so long as the House sticks together. | ||
| They're not going to win in the Senate. | ||
| And so they have to run to their activist judges and the courts, their judicial saboteurs. | ||
| And remember this, a federal judge's job is a modest but crucial job. | ||
| They decide cases and controversies before them, with parties before them, with redressable claims. | ||
| The courts find facts, then they apply the law to those facts, then they order a remedy permitted by the law. | ||
| And that's it. | ||
| Judges... | ||
| They don't wear robes. | ||
| They don't wear capes. | ||
| They don't set national policy. | ||
| They don't, certainly don't set foreign policy. | ||
| They're not the HR department for another branch. | ||
| They can't tell the president who he can hire and fire. | ||
| Okay, but here's what I don't, here's what I'm confused about. | ||
| Corn fused. | ||
| The president's chief executive Why are we doing all these backflips that the probationary guys didn't live up to the probation? | ||
| Didn't he get into the argument about an individual? | ||
| Doesn't the chief executive have the ability to say, hey, we're going to downsize this country, government, and X amount of people. | ||
| We're going to start with the probationary because they don't even officially have jobs yet. | ||
| And if there's 80,000 probationary people, I heard there might be up to 150,000. | ||
| Guys, since we're going to be cutting other people later in a series of rifts, that the ones that don't have long-term jobs or haven't even qualified, they're still on probation. | ||
| No matter how you're doing, you can be a superstar. | ||
| We're just downsizing. | ||
| And in downsizing, we're not going through and making evaluations. | ||
| Here, correct me if I'm wrong, we're getting into a debate in the court in San Francisco. | ||
| About who performed, who didn't perform. | ||
| I mean, that's where the judge went crazy yesterday, because our response looked a little, you know, slapped together. | ||
| But doesn't he, as chief executive, he just had the right to say, hey, just like he has the right to say what you're going to argue on the impoundments, guess what? | ||
| I'm not going to spend the money, right? | ||
| That was a, the appropriations is a ceiling. | ||
| And, you know, I'm going to reprogram this, or I'm going to, I don't think it's, We need to save money. | ||
| Doge has identified this as waste, fraud, and abuse. | ||
| Yes, we put out a CR that Schumer agreed to, but we're not going to finance waste, fraud, and abuse, so I'm cutting that. | ||
| And by the way, I'm going to start with 150,000 probationary periods. | ||
| Why are we falling into a trap of trying to say, these people are good, these people are not good, this guy would come to the office, this guy wouldn't come to the office, sir? | ||
| Yeah, Congress certainly has the power to set up. | ||
| Officers of the United States by statute. | ||
| Congress certainly has the power of the purse, but the executive power under Article 2 of the Constitution belongs to the president and the president alone. | ||
| He's the chief executive officer. | ||
| He's the commander-in-chief. | ||
| He can hire people. | ||
| He can fire people. | ||
| And if you have statutes or regulations or court rulings that say that the president cannot fire executive branch Or he has to rehire them against his will. | ||
| Those statutes, those regulations, those lower court rulings are unconstitutional under Article 2 of the Constitution, period. | ||
| Full stop. | ||
| Correct me if I'm wrong. | ||
| Look, this is your line of country. | ||
| It's one of the reasons the Warren Posse reveres the Viceroy and why President Trump and others in the administration listen to your advice. | ||
| It seems to me, given some of these kind of arguments, both on the money and the personnel, and this is the way we deconstruct the administrative state, and seeing the ferocity of these radical neo-Marxist judges from D.C. to Maryland to San Francisco, | ||
| I mean across the country in these radical jurisdictions, that in knowing the Supreme Court, as at least I know him as a civilian, I don't see this getting rectified or sorted immediately. | ||
| In other words, I don't see this running up the chain of command and next week we have some clarity. | ||
| I think we're in a fight now. | ||
| Am I wrong in that? | ||
| Or are you and the legal geniuses saying, no, this is a strategy and we've got a path to get up there and essentially take these shackles off the office of the president and doing essentially a restructuring of the American government, sir? | ||
| I would advise, and I have advised, the president's legal team to continue to charge forward because the presidency is at stake. | ||
| Our country is at stake, right? | ||
| If President Trump would have lost this election, everyone knows we would have lost our country. | ||
| These Democrats are not liberals who love America. | ||
| Today's Democrats, too many of them, are Marxists who are trying to destroy America, and they have their... | ||
| Judicial saboteurs on the bench, these new Biden and Obama judges who are radical leftists, like Judge Ali in D.C., who is still a Canadian citizen, who's ordering the president to send $2 billion in foreign aid to who knows where. | ||
| Hamas terrorists, maybe? | ||
| Waste, fraud, and abuse? | ||
| Certainly. | ||
| And you have a judge who thinks he can do this. | ||
| And I would say this, these activist judges... | ||
| Are destroying their own legitimacy by sabotaging the presidency. | ||
| They are playing a very destructive game, the most destructive game imaginable. | ||
| And the Chief Justice needs to understand this. | ||
| He needs to step up. | ||
| He needs to stop this. | ||
| Because when the judiciary loses its legitimacy, the judiciary loses everything. | ||
| Look what Andrew Jackson did. | ||
| You cannot enforce your own orders. | ||
| You need to rely on your legitimacy to get the executive branch and Congress to go along with your orders. | ||
| Are you going to send your law clerks and secretaries? | ||
| To enforce your orders, they need to get these activist judges reined in. | ||
| These are activist radical judges. | ||
| They are acting illegally. | ||
| They are acting unconstitutionally. | ||
| And there is going to be a severe political revolt against the judiciary if the Chief Justice does not get these activist judges in line and in line fast. | ||
| Mike Davis, thank you very much. | ||
| I think we're trying to get, through your good offices, we're trying to get John Yu on today. | ||
| I appreciate your help on that. | ||
| Also, give a shout out, was it Gail Slater? | ||
| Many of the Neo-Brandeisians are now getting in place, and so really the antitrust and the take on big tech that you have pioneered for many, many years are coming in. | ||
| You want to give a shout out? | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| I know the Viceroy is highly partisan, but one area where Steve Bannon and the Viceroy are not partisan is on antitrust. | ||
| We are working with people like Andrew Ferguson, the FTC chair, Lena Kahn, a Democrat appointee at the FTC. Gail Slater is our friend. | ||
| Bannon's neighbor, who is the new antitrust chief at the Justice Department. | ||
| She's one of my best friends in Washington. | ||
| Mark Meador is going through the process now. | ||
| President Trump has assembled the antitrust dream team. | ||
| There is a bipartisan antitrust renaissance to hold these big tech monopolists and other... | ||
| We have free and fair markets. | ||
| That is good for small businesses. | ||
| That is good for consumers. | ||
| So congrats to our good friend, Gail Slater. | ||
| She just started. | ||
| Mike, Article 3, where do people go? | ||
| Article3project.org. | ||
| Article3project.org. | ||
| You can donate there. | ||
| You can follow us on social media. | ||
| The most important thing the posse does is take action. | ||
| Action, action, action. | ||
| Thank you, Steve. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you, brother. | ||
| Speaking of action, we're going to go to the White House to the sticks. | ||
| Caroline Lovett, live. | ||
| ...with us, who said that only because of President Trump are we here on the verge of brokering a peace deal. | ||
| Go ahead, Alayna. | ||
|
unidentified
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Did the President talk to President Trump last night on the phone? | |
| President... | ||
|
unidentified
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President Trump talked to President... | |
| Sorry. | ||
| President Trump talked to President Trump last night. | ||
| He did not, no. | ||
| Steve Whitcoff spoke to him yesterday in Moscow, as you know. | ||
|
unidentified
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Has the President spoken with the new incoming Canadian Prime Minister at all this week? | |
| I know earlier this week you said they hadn't yet spoken, but given everything that's going on between the United States and Canada, have they spoken? | ||
| To my knowledge, they have not spoken. | ||
| When they do, we can provide a readout of that call. | ||
| Yeah, I believe it's still ongoing or it wrapped when I came out here. | ||
| But, you know, the governor was here to talk about the pipeline that President Trump is very determined to get passed in the New England and New York area. | ||
| And so, you know, that's as far as I know about the conversation, but I can get an update on it. | ||
|
unidentified
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All the fire and probationary workers used the same language here just now that I was in the statement about fighting back against that ruling. | |
| Do you mean appealing or something else? | ||
|
unidentified
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And does the administration plan to comply with those orders in the meantime? | |
| Fighting back by appealing, fighting back by using the full weight of the White House Counsel's Office and our lawyers at the federal government who believe that this injunction is entirely unconstitutional, and it is for anybody who has a basic understanding of the law. | ||
| You cannot have a low-level district court judge filing an injunction to usurp the executive authority of the President of the United States. | ||
| That is completely absurd. | ||
| And as the executive of the executive branch, the President has the ability to fire... | ||
| Or higher. | ||
| And you have these lower-level judges who are trying to block this president's agenda. | ||
| It's very clear. | ||
| And as I just cited, I was... | ||
| Appalled by the statistic when I saw it this morning. | ||
| In one month, in February, there have been 15 injunctions of this administration in our agenda. | ||
| In three years under the Biden administration, there were 14 injunctions. | ||
| So it's very clear that there are judicial activists throughout our judicial branch who are trying to block this president's executive authority. | ||
| We are going to fight back. | ||
| And as anyone who saw President Trump and his legal team fighting back, they know how to do it. | ||
| But he was indicted nearly 200 times and he's in the Oval Office now because all of the indictments, all of these injunctions have always been unconstitutional and unfair. | ||
| They are led by partisan activists who are trying to usurp the will of this president and we're not going to stand for it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thanks. | |
| Okay. | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
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Gosh, I hate to say that word. | |
| Totally in sync with the White House and what the news of the day are, but you heard Caroline Levitt. | ||
| Look, this is big. | ||
| Chuck Schumer is going to essentially accede to and sign a surrender document today in the early afternoon. | ||
| The Democratic Party is completely and totally in meltdown over this. | ||
| Where they are getting some traction. | ||
| And I just want people now to, because my current thinking is the following, is that this is going to... | ||
| Grind through. | ||
| This is going to take a while. | ||
| You're going to see this fight go on. | ||
| And knowing the... | ||
| Because as Mike Davis tells you, it's the law, but it's also politics. | ||
| The higher up you go, the more the intense politics. | ||
| And now the radical nature of the judiciary, this is why the confirmation of these judges is so important. | ||
| This is why I remember on the night of the election, when we were sitting there starting to celebrate, we did say, hey folks, we've got to go to work. | ||
| The next day, after November 5th, why? | ||
| Elizabeth Warren put the clarion call out to Schumer and said, you hadn't done a good enough job. | ||
| We just lost the Senate. | ||
| We have, what, eight weeks before Trump's people are here, or actually less than that, to the new Senate, I think January 3rd. | ||
| And she said, we have to go approve all those judges. | ||
| And look how many judges they jammed through at the last second. | ||
| And what do you get? | ||
| You get the check-ins. | ||
|
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You get the Burrell House. | |
| You get the judge out in San Francisco, 80 years old. | ||
| I think he's been there 50 years, didn't he say, the other day? | ||
| 40-some years. | ||
| This fight in the courts is, and you can see the radical nature, you can also see the vitriol against President Trump and his administration. | ||
| I mean, they're coming and they couldn't be more vicious. | ||
| So that's what we had, Mike. | ||
| We're going to have John Yoo, the great John Yoo, is going to join us. | ||
| Hopefully at about 11 o'clock, John Yoo is one of the great legal thinkers on our side of the football. | ||
| He's written some incredible pieces at Fox, and he also wrote a piece at Civitas that laid this entire construct out. | ||
| We want to get him because ideas have consequences. | ||
| Also, Julie Kelly is going to join us tonight on what's happening today in the courts. | ||
| I will tell you on the two basic things, and this is both... | ||
| Doge's waste, fraud, and abuse, but it's also going to get into this whole programmatic cuts. | ||
| It's going to get into impoundment. | ||
| It's going to get into rescissions. | ||
| It's going to get into when we have to cut to the bone here because we can't afford paying for this anymore. | ||
| Not just intruding in your personal life and your professional life, but you just can't afford it. | ||
| It's not sustainable. | ||
| They're going to use the courts to try to fight this. | ||
| The legislative side essentially surrenders today. | ||
| The activist side, and they're going into red districts. | ||
| Bernie Sanders and Waltz, and Waltz is predicating his presidential campaign in 28 on this. | ||
| Bernie, I think, is feeling the juice. | ||
| He's drawn some big crowds. | ||
| You just have to face facts. | ||
| I don't think these Republicans should be canceling these town halls. | ||
| I think they ought to have security, and if people get out of control and start yelling and screaming, these paid Democratic activists, or even if they have Democratic people, you've got to tell people, hey, calm down. | ||
| I'll answer your question. | ||
| But it seems to me that MAGA's got to show up to these town halls. | ||
| You shouldn't back off them. | ||
| And make President Trump's case. | ||
| The case is very straightforward. | ||
| The case for waste, fraud, and abuse is very straightforward. | ||
| And it has to happen. | ||
| Caroline Leavitt was there. | ||
| You saw Scott Besant. | ||
| The Secretary of Treasury at the White House, he was in the background. | ||
| I would hope he would come to the sticks. | ||
| We can't get enough of Scott Besson. | ||
| Matt Boyle did an incredible job from the Salmon Chase room last night where they did the interview. | ||
| We've got the first clip up. | ||
| Let's go ahead and play that. | ||
| I'll jump in. | ||
| Is it ready to go? | ||
| Let's go ahead and play it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You gave a massive address recently in the New York Economic Club. | |
| In it, you laid out your plan to what you call reprivatize the American economy. | ||
| We saw there in the previous administration, pretty big reliance for economic growth on government spending. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You think that's not the answer. | |
| Walk us through, how do we reprivatize the economy? | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| Explain that for us. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So, one of the reasons I came out from behind my desk and asked President Trump if I could join the campaign, then... | ||
| When he asked me to be in the cabinet was because I was so alarmed by this high level of government spending. | ||
| We've never seen anything like this. | ||
| Highest level ever when we weren't in a war or in a recession. | ||
| So the Biden administration relied on this blowout spending. | ||
| Back to the mainstream media. | ||
| No one criticized it when they were doing it because it was for the great and the good. | ||
| It was for green programs. | ||
| It was for this. | ||
| It was for overseas engagement. | ||
| Now what we're trying to do is do a course correction where we bring down the government. | ||
| We deleverage the government and relever the private sector. | ||
| And we're going to do that by cutting spending, the lowering interest. | ||
| We'll get a natural lowering of interest rates. | ||
| And then on the other side, as we relever the private sector, we plan to deregulate the banking system, which was one of the things I talked about at the Economic Club of New York last week. | ||
| So as we unshackle the regulated banking system, they can... | ||
| They can lend to the private sector, and especially Main Street, which has been overlooked. | ||
| So small regional banks, small banks, community banks. | ||
| And so as the government comes down, the private sector will go up. | ||
| Government will shed excess labor, and there's plenty of it. | ||
| And then the private sector will pick it up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If you listen to the establishment media talk about this, they will say that the shift that we're talking about here from government dependency to a private sector for economic growth may cause a recession. | |
| You see that term out there all the time. | ||
| I would imagine you disagree. | ||
| Can you explain that for us? | ||
| Well, I disagree. | ||
| This does not have to cause a recession because, look, and again... | ||
| Back to your point on fact-based analysis, that for my 35 years from my investment career, I was able to not listen to the noise, adhere to the facts. | ||
| And I can tell you the facts are I've met with several large bank executives and payment processors this week. | ||
| The American consumer is in great shape. | ||
| They're spending. | ||
| I met with one of the five largest bank CEOs today. | ||
| He said that small, medium manufacturing in the Midwest, they've seen a tick up in loan volume. | ||
| So, you know, I disagree with this. | ||
| And where were all these people when the Biden administration was blowing out the deficit? | ||
| We could have come in. | ||
| It would have been easy to come in, keep up these horrendous spending levels, and maybe we could have kept it going for one year, two years, maybe even four years, and left the next president and his administration, the American people, with this problem. | ||
| Or it could just blow up at any time. | ||
| So we are laser-focused on getting this deficit under control and then growing the economy. | ||
| I'm so proud of these guys. | ||
| So Scott Besant there and then John Yoo when he comes on. | ||
| These structural massive problems with the government. | ||
| Right there, and I think we got a CNBC clip I may call for here in a moment of Scott Besant. | ||
| He said, hey, we could have continued on this massive deficit spending. | ||
| Now, what it would have done, it would have embedded inflation more into the system. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But... | |
| At some point in time, because we've kicked the can down the road, we haven't made the tough decisions. | ||
| You just keep going and going and going. | ||
| Trump could have done it. | ||
| Besson could have done it. | ||
| They're not going to do it. | ||
| President Trump's transformational. | ||
| This is why he's talking about hemispheric defense. | ||
| This is why he's engaged in stopping the kinetic part of the Third World War and the Eurasian landmass. | ||
| And just he put it at Truth Social a moment ago that said he's basically having conversations with Putin and making progress. | ||
| John Yoo is going to be in a moment saying, hey, this whole thing had gotten so far out of control with the Justice Department being so radicalized from the time of Richard Nixon. | ||
| And what President Trump's trying to do is end, you know, end these sins. | ||
| Of the cure, quote-unquote, for Watergate. | ||
| He's trying to stop the addiction to massive federal spending. | ||
| He's trying to stop the addiction to the war machine. | ||
| He's trying to detox. | ||
| Detox. | ||
| And somebody said, well, Scott, shouldn't I use that word? | ||
| I absolutely should have used that word. | ||
| Because if you tell the truth to the American people and you're authentic... | ||
| And they see that you're going to fight for their interests, and you explain to them, hey, folks, this is what we're trying to accomplish. | ||
| The American people will have your back. | ||
| That's why they had Trump's back in the election. | ||
| Remember, all the guys running around now, and they're going to, hey, you know, you've got Mike Allen. | ||
| They're all trying to come to talk to right-wing media because they understand we've outworked them, out-hustled them, and built these kind of networks out of nothing, out of zero. | ||
| No capital, just basically content. | ||
| President Trump is not here to do normal things. | ||
| That's why every day it's so amazing what he's doing on so many different levels. | ||
| Last night, a couple of things they put out yesterday. | ||
| Pete Hexas has put together a couple of military options for the Panama Canal, as you should. | ||
| President Trump already got Larry Fink and BlackRock. | ||
| I'm not huge fans of, but they're kind of guys who write a $25 billion check, and they wrote a $25 billion check to buy out Hutchinson Wampoa, the Chinese company, the Hong Kong company, that manages the docks and the stevedores, everything down the Panama Canal, the first step to taking it back. | ||
| Now it's in American hands, the operational part of it. | ||
| Not all of the parts of the canal are still under some parts of the Panamanian government, but that's all. | ||
| We're going to be quickly ceded to the United States. | ||
| And President Trump's looking at a couple, three military options. | ||
| He's looking at military options against the cartels. | ||
| We were going to have Tom Dance on this morning about Greenland. | ||
| There's a technical issue. | ||
| We'll get Tom tonight or tomorrow. | ||
| But, you know, he's thinking through this whole thing at Greenland. | ||
| Everything he's doing is massive. | ||
| They just leaked last night. | ||
| They're coming forward with the Aliens Act of 1798. To expedite getting rid of illegal aliens in the country. | ||
| The Aliens Act of 1798. They're going to dust that off and say, bang, we're doing this. | ||
| Today, President Trump's going to be sending more executive orders. | ||
| Everything is signaled with this. | ||
| They're not playing on the margins. | ||
| This is deep, and the fight's deep. | ||
| This is about the courts, and we're going to have you on. | ||
| And you see right there with Scott Besson. | ||
| Do we have the CNBC clip? | ||
| Let me play the CNBC. How long is it? | ||
| Just a couple minutes? | ||
| Let's go and play the CNBC clip. | ||
| This is consistent. | ||
| This is what I think is great coming out of Treasury and Scott Besson as a capital markets guy. | ||
| He's laying out. | ||
| We're cutting spending. | ||
| We're going to deconstruct this government. | ||
| We're going to get the size down. | ||
| We're also going to get the spending down at the Pentagon and other places. | ||
| They could have taken the easy road. | ||
| Right? | ||
| They're taking the narrow path. | ||
| Why are they taking the narrow path? | ||
| The country has to have it, or we're finished. | ||
| I kept saying that one in the middle about the finances. | ||
| If you just keep going, that's existential. | ||
| You're done. | ||
| You're toast. | ||
| They're not going to do it. | ||
| They're attacking this full on. | ||
| Let's go ahead and play it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, when you say that we're in a period of detox, you used that word on CNBC last week. | |
| Is that a euphemism for recession? | ||
| Not at all. | ||
| It doesn't have to be, because it'll depend on how quickly the baton gets handed off. | ||
| You know, our goal is to have a smooth transition. | ||
| But I tell you, Sarah, the easy thing for us to have done would have been to come in and just keep this massive spending level going. | ||
| And it's unsustainable, but could we have kept it going for a year, two years, maybe even four? | ||
| Maybe, but you're risking a financial calamity. | ||
| So, you know, we are trying to get this tax bill done. | ||
| We are controlling expenses. | ||
| And when we get the tax bill done, so if you can change the trajectory, up revenues, up economic growth, hold expenses flat or do the unthinkable and cut expenses, then that's a pretty good trajectory on growth. | ||
| And if we go back to the model in the 90s, that's exactly what happened. | ||
| We'd see interest rates come down. | ||
| We'd see the private sector take up the slack from the government. | ||
| Because right now we have excess employment in the government and that those people can be moved to the private sector. | ||
| Move them to the private sector, downsizing, cutting expenses. | ||
| And the courts are coming back saying you can't do that. | ||
| You can't do that. | ||
| You can't cut the federal government. | ||
| You can't cut the bureaucracy. | ||
| You can't do it. | ||
| They're fighting. | ||
| And this is going to go all the way up. | ||
| I think it's going to take a while. | ||
| I don't see this getting expedited really overall because they're going to keep coming. | ||
| I think you have to bundle it into one thing. | ||
| We'll ask John you this. | ||
| You have to bundle it and have an overall decision here because, you know, you're going to go one of these radical sectors like D.C. to lose to the appellate court and you have to go to the Supreme Court. | ||
| Or whatever side he loses is going to continue on. | ||
| So this is going to be, as Treasury and OMB are trying to do their jobs, you've got these unions and all these radicals, and you see them cheered on by MSNBC. What did Schumer say? | ||
| Don't miss the signal for the noise. | ||
| The final decision they made in keeping the government open, their fear is... | ||
| That if they shut the government down, President Trump could do something with the courts and slow it down. | ||
| And they admitted that's the only place they're getting victories right now. | ||
| This is going to get tougher and tougher. | ||
| Did I tell you also, behind the scenes, the polling, it's getting a little dicey. | ||
| One, I think it's just not being messaged 100% appropriately. | ||
| That's why I'm glad Besant's more engaged. | ||
| I hope Russ Vogt gets engaged. | ||
| I'm glad Caroline came out today. | ||
| I think the White House staff is doing a fantastic job here. | ||
| We want to see more. | ||
| I think you have more financial. | ||
| I would also make a recommendation, you know, maybe Howard ought to spend a little more time at Commerce, maybe a little less time in the TV studio. | ||
| A little bit of that goes a long way, if you know what I mean. | ||
| We've got to kind of get on point here. | ||
| Speaking of getting on point, Gold's through $3,000. | ||
| We've told you this for years. | ||
| It's pattern recognition. | ||
| We're here to give you access to information so that you understand it. | ||
| You have a mental map. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Somebody's just not telling you. | ||
| Understand why. | ||
| Understand why. | ||
| You do that, you'll change your life. | ||
| You will. | ||
| It's one of the reasons we're so proud and the team's so committed to the show. | ||
| We see how it's energized people. | ||
| Use your agency. | ||
| Take your phone out. | ||
| Text Bannon at 989898. Get the ultimate guide for purchasing gold in the era of Trump. | ||
| Even if you don't have the reason you don't want to purchase gold, learn about it. | ||
| Learn about it and talk to Philip Patrick and the team. | ||
| Short break. | ||
| Back in a moment. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Two things. | |
| I want to go to birchgold.com, end of the dollar empire. | ||
| Birchgold.com slash Bannon, End of the Dollar Empire, Modern Monetary Theory, the sixth free installment. | ||
| Also, RickardsWarRoom.com. | ||
| You get access to strategic intelligence. | ||
| And he offers up as a bonus a free book. | ||
| Was it Money in Chat, GBT? About currency, capital markets, and AI. There's a story on Business Insight. | ||
| I said this day was coming. | ||
| There's a new, one of the hottest Companies in programming. | ||
| Of coding. | ||
| Essentially said that the CEO, I'll have this this afternoon to talk about. | ||
| CEO made a statement. | ||
| He says he thinks all of his coding in his company, all of it, will be done by artificial intelligence. | ||
| They'll have some managers managing them. | ||
| All be done by artificial intelligence within this year. | ||
| Within this year. | ||
| So you go to RickardsWarRoom.com slash Bannon. | ||
| You go there and you not only get access to strategic intelligence, you also get the new book about money and artificial intelligence. | ||
| Rickards, the Chinese curse to live in interesting times. | ||
| Sir, we're doing it. | ||
| First, I want to pull back the camera and talk to you about the quote-unquote terrorist trade war, how that's affecting the market, impacting the market, and obviously... | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Well, I love the fact that every reporter in Washington or lobbyist or whatever is suddenly an expert on tariffs. | ||
| We haven't heard much about them for a long time, but now that's all you hear. | ||
| The fact is most mainstream economists don't understand tariffs. | ||
| There are a few who do, Michael Pettis and a few others, and I've spent a lot of time on the topic. | ||
| As we've said before, tariffs were how the United States grew. | ||
| From 1790, Alexander Hamilton, until 1962, when Kennedy signed the Trade Act of 1962, the U.S. always had tariffs. | ||
| John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley, Coolidge, Eisenhower, they all supported tariffs. | ||
| The income tax didn't even come in until 1913. How did we finance the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and all the growth, etc.? | ||
| So, tariffs make sense. | ||
| They basically say to the world, hey, you can sell whatever you want to Americans, no problem, but you have to build it here, you have to invest here, you have to hire Americans. | ||
| It creates high-paying jobs. | ||
| That, in turn, drives consumption of the good sort, and not with debt, but with the fact that people can afford things, and the economy grows. | ||
| Plus, you get an awful lot of revenue from it, and all these budget projections you hear about are not really taking into account the at least tens, perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars that we'll actually get from the tariffs. | ||
| So Trump has that right. | ||
| It's not some radical new idea. | ||
| It was an idea that was around for 150 years, but it was just... | ||
| Sort of abandoned during the age of globalization slightly before. | ||
| But the biggest canardcy or the biggest misunderstanding, the Democrats started this in the 2024 campaign, but it kind of caught on. | ||
| Unfortunately, they said tariffs are a sales tax on the American people. | ||
| You buy goods and if you put a 10 or 20 percent tariff on it, that's like a 20 percent sales tax. | ||
| Well, everyone hates sales tax. | ||
| I live in New Hampshire. | ||
| We don't have any, but most places do. | ||
| That's not true. | ||
| And here's what. | ||
| There are three parties, at least three, maybe more, but there are at least three parties to a tariff-related transaction. | ||
| There's the producer, the exporter. | ||
| It could be in China, Vietnam, or Malaysia. | ||
| There's the importer in the United States, which is a distributor or a wholesaler of some sort. | ||
| And then there's the consumer. | ||
| You might have more metal men, but those three parties. | ||
| So this idea that this gets laid off on the consumer is absolutely not true. | ||
| Kohl's and everyone else thought that they could raise prices to consumers. | ||
| They would do it anyway. | ||
| You don't need a tariff to raise prices. | ||
| They would just raise prices. | ||
| Why don't they? | ||
| Because they can't. | ||
| Because the consumer can't pay more. | ||
| Because the consumer's tapped out. | ||
| Credit lines are used up, etc. | ||
| There's a lot of what's called inelasticity, sorry, elasticity at that level. | ||
| People will substitute other goods, get hamburger instead of steak or whatever. | ||
| The only exception is gasoline because you absolutely need that. | ||
| So who actually pays the tariff? | ||
| Well, the importer writes the check, the importer who takes it off the container ship at the Port of L.A. Writes the check to the Treasury for the tariff. | ||
| But who bears the economic cost? | ||
| A lot of it gets pushed back to the producer. | ||
| The importer calls China, Vietnam, or Malaysia, as the case may be, and says, look, you've got to lower your prices. | ||
| Because lower prices with the tariff comes out about where we were. | ||
| But this is coming out of your profits and your margins. | ||
| Or the importer can bear part of it. | ||
| Again, same result. | ||
| Lower revenues, lower margins. | ||
| Or they can split it. | ||
| And that's just an economic decision. | ||
| But the point is, Either the producer or the importer or both bear the tariff. | ||
| The consumer does not because the consumers can't pay any more anyway. | ||
| So that whole sales tax idea is just a complete myth. | ||
| It's not true. | ||
| And that's why it's not inflationary. | ||
| Trump put a lot of tariffs on it in 2018. We didn't have inflation. | ||
| No significant amount of inflation. | ||
| Then go back to... | ||
| Hang on. | ||
| Hang on. | ||
| Hold it. | ||
| Full stop. | ||
| Hit rewind on that. | ||
| We've got to hammer this point every day. | ||
| President Trump put the highest tariffs we've ever had on the Chinese Communist Party in 18, and in 18 and 19, absolutely no price inflation at all on any of the Chinese goods. | ||
| Am I correct in that, Jim Rickards? | ||
| Am I correct in that, Jim Rickards? | ||
| It shows it's a lie, this canard they do every day, and nobody refutes it. | ||
| You got Spencer Morrison, you got Peter Navarro, you got Jim Rickards, you got three or four guys, and we ought to be out every day. | ||
| I've told Treasury and White House this, we have to have the first team out there tearing apart the lies that they're putting out about tariffs right now, sir. | ||
| There is no economic evidence that tariffs cause inflation. | ||
| In fact, the example we just gave, 2018, Trump piled on tariffs and there was no inflation. | ||
| The inflation took off in 2022 under Biden. | ||
| Hit 9.1% on an annualized basis. | ||
| Spending. | ||
| The Keynesian spending. | ||
| The Keynesian spending. | ||
| Jim, hang on for a second. | ||
| Rickards is going to be with me for most of the second hour. | ||
| Go to rickardswarroom.com. | ||
| You get access to strategic intelligence. | ||
| Also, you get a free book on capital markets, currency, and artificial intelligence. | ||
| Next segment, we're going to end here with the right stuff. | ||
| Rickard's got it. | ||
| President Trump's got it. | ||
| Our next guest at the top of the hour, John Yoo, one of the great brains on the legal side in the conservative movement is going to join us. | ||
| We're going to talk about, you heard Matt last night, the court in San Francisco, in Maryland, Mike Davis led it, these fights we have against these radical neo-Marxist judges. | ||
| John Yoo is going to say, we're here to end the sins of the post-Watergate era. | ||
| of what was done at the Justice Department and the Federal Bench. | ||
| Short commercial break. |
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