May 13, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
48:52
Participants
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unidentified
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*Tonk* *Tonk* *Tonk* So So | |
| So So So So So So So So So So So So So So So | ||
| So So So So So So So So So So So So So | ||
| long receiving line of frankly rich guys coming to get their 30 seconds with president trump and with the crown prince crown prince greeted president trump at the airport a short time ago an honor he did not offer president biden in 2022 when he arrived the president's limousine the beast was escorted to the | ||
| royal court by arabian horses the saudis know how to put on a show they know how to welcome president trump remember in that visit in 2017 when they projected his face onto the side of the ritz carlton I was on that trip traveling with the presidential pool. | ||
| The images of the president and the king were draped on every building as the motorcade went down the highway. | ||
| On his hotel, the Ritz-Carlton, they put up his face, as you say, in digital imagery. | ||
| The same hotel, by the way, that Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince, usually later used to detain his political prisoners. | ||
| That was the trip of the orb where the president and the king and the head of Egypt all stood with it. | ||
| Yes, they created that Saudis figured out early the trick for President Trump is to flatter him, to treat him like royalty, which is what he wanted. | ||
| And we saw that on that trip. | ||
| We are seeing it again now. | ||
| Yes, the White House has said, look, this is about business. | ||
| We're trying to get deals, the trillion-dollar mark, although that seems... | ||
| Unlikely, but of course there are geopolitics that are going to creep in here. | ||
| The situation in Gaza, the Gulf states will push him to come up with some sort of plan there for the Palestinians. | ||
| The Iran deal as well, they're going to want some sort of solution there. | ||
| But right now, as we're seeing the president a short time ago with the crown prince, he's strengthening ties to the region, and it's really about economic and business development rather than strategy, Mika. | ||
| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
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unidentified
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Pray for our enemies, because we're going medieval on these people. | |
| You're just not going to get a free shot at all these networks lying about the people. | ||
| The people have had a belly full of it. | ||
| I know you don't like hearing that. | ||
| I know you try to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it. | ||
| It's going to happen. | ||
| And where do people like that go to share the big lie? | ||
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unidentified
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MAGA Media. | |
| I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience. | ||
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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. | ||
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unidentified
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War Room. | |
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| you you It's Tuesday, 13 May, Year of Our Lord, 2025. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| We're going to get into the geopolitics, talk about the pageantry, the businessmen, what the purpose of this, the great Jim Rickards. | ||
| As only he can explain to you, he's up on deck. | ||
| He's going to join us momentarily. | ||
| We've got Dave Bratt to walk through, because this afternoon, the huge markups and three big committees, particularly about Medicaid and about taxes, are going to take place. | ||
|
unidentified
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We're going to prep you for all of that. | |
| But I want to start. | ||
| We're very lucky to have Andy Biggs for a few minutes here. | ||
| Before he gets on other activities up on the hill. | ||
| So Congressman Biggs, here's the thing. | ||
| We're trying to break this whole thing down, the big, beautiful bill, both the cost side and the tax side. | ||
| But let's go to cost first, because you've clarified something to me I think is quite important, and I believe the audience understand this. | ||
| Senator Johnson's got an amazing piece in the Wall Street Journal, and we're trying to get Johnson on in Hawley, Hawley's piece about Medicaid. | ||
| But Johnson talks about, as we talk about on the show, the discretionary budget. | ||
| You've got to get here. | ||
| You can't get a debt ceiling increase and then blow through it. | ||
| And I keep saying, hey, we've got to get off talking about the 10 years. | ||
| But the 10-year does have a logic to it in that the guys talking about 10 years are talking about some of the mandatory cuts. | ||
| Walk me through right now your assessment because the big, beautiful bill... | ||
| It seems to me, it's kind of slapped together. | ||
| It's very hard to get your hands around. | ||
| I don't see a lot of cuts coming out of here. | ||
| I see a $2 trillion minimum deficit this fiscal year that ends on September 30th. | ||
| And back of an envelope, we're at $2, $2.5 for next fiscal year. | ||
| So the $4 trillion lift we get on the debt ceiling, I think we blow through before the 26th midterm. | ||
| Congressman Biggs, you've been the biggest deficit hawk in Congress. | ||
| Your thoughts, sir? | ||
| Yeah, you're exactly right, Steve. | ||
| So when you take the big beautiful bill is focusing on what we call mandatory spending, and that's a whole tranche of things that we can touch. | ||
| We can't really get into discretionary spending too much on that. | ||
| But you cannot touch Social Security. | ||
| Everybody says, oh, we're getting Social Security. | ||
| No, you can't touch Social Security. | ||
| And this is all by rule, by the way, Steve. | ||
| This isn't... | ||
| This is rule. | ||
| And so you have this mandatory side, and then you have the discretionary side. | ||
| And Ron, I love Ron, and I'm working with Ron. | ||
| We meet fairly regularly, talk about these things. | ||
| He's right. | ||
| And I've been advocating to get back to the pre-2019 levels. | ||
| Get back to the pre-2019 levels. | ||
| On the discretionary side, you actually take a substantial chunk and you bend the spending curve down. | ||
| On the other hand, you're talking about people that they don't want to cut The Green New Deal stuff. | ||
| So we're going to get only about 85% of Green New Deal cut. | ||
| That's on the mandatory side. | ||
| You're going to get these folks from these California, New York, Illinois, New Jersey, these high property tax states. | ||
| They want the rest of America to subsidize their high property tax as a deduction. | ||
| So they said now they're not going to vote for this because they didn't get a big enough deduction. | ||
| But that's a $250 billion hit. | ||
| Over 10 years. | ||
| What's the big nut? | ||
| The big nut here, Steve, is that we'll be cutting less than 10% of our annual structural deficit of, as you say, $2.25 trillion. | ||
| You'll be cutting somewhere in the neighborhood of about $140 billion. | ||
| So your deficit will continue to grow and exist. | ||
| And the other part is, in 10 years from now, you'll be sitting at $60 trillion in national debt. | ||
| Unless you do more than what's been proposed. | ||
| And at that $60 trillion... | ||
| That doesn't include any kind of wildfires, catastrophes, hurricanes, flooding that'll need supplementals. | ||
| It doesn't include any military action or wars that get in there. | ||
| It doesn't include spikes in interest rates. | ||
| And it also, a lot of people aren't talking about this, it also makes assumptions on the growth rate of the GDP. | ||
| So while we want to get this done, and we want it to be nice and big and beautiful, And there's some great things in this bill, and there's some nods in the right direction, and you still end up in a very untenable situation 10 years. | ||
| Look, I love Hawley and Johnson. | ||
| They're great guys, but Hawley's the lone populace, and Johnson's like a former business guy, talks like an entrepreneur. | ||
| We love him. | ||
| But they're not exactly, and they would admit, they don't have a lot of stroke in the Senate. | ||
| You, and you're leaving here shortly to go run for governor of Arizona, and you're like the leader of the deficit hawks. | ||
| This is like the last hurrah for Andy Biggs. | ||
| When are we going to start feeling that there's some organized effort here of smart people that understand this deficit? | ||
| Because, correct me if I'm wrong. | ||
| The whole purpose, and this is Besson's plan, which he sold in the campaign. | ||
| He sold to make himself Secretary of Treasury. | ||
| It's Trump's plan. | ||
| It's brilliant. | ||
| Take the percentage deficit from 6.5% or 7%, which is not sustainable. | ||
| Take it down fairly rapidly to 3.5%, which we don't love, but he says you're never going to get to balance, but we can live with that. | ||
| I can finance that. | ||
| This program... | ||
| Let's talk about the growth rates. | ||
| I don't see us even making a dent in that. | ||
| I still think we're back up north of 5%, 6% of percentage when you talk about real spending, not the gimmicks that are in there. | ||
| You talk about that. | ||
| So this doesn't execute on the president's principal plan to get the country's finances in order. | ||
| Andy Biggs, your thoughts? | ||
| Yeah, I think that's right. | ||
| I think President Trump... | ||
| It's really emphasized the tax plan. | ||
| So you got the tax plan, but some of that needs to be paid for, right? | ||
| I mean, how do you pay for it? | ||
| Because some of it is a straight up... | ||
| And by the way, I love the tax plan. | ||
| But some of it just... | ||
| You're not actually... | ||
| You've got to have some money to pay for it somehow. | ||
| And you should be using trade-offs in other areas. | ||
| I mean, so last week, my understanding is last week we were going to vote on some bills that would codify the doge cuts, but we ended up not voting on them. | ||
| Now, why is that, Steve? | ||
| It's because we have people in this body that won't do it. | ||
| So when we start talking about Medicaid, Medicaid is really important because you have two basic fundamental groups. | ||
| You have the original Medicaid, which is the... | ||
| Take care of the disabled, the elderly, pregnant women and children, indigent children, right? | ||
| Then you had the Obamacare side of it, which was the expansion population, which is the able-bodied adults. | ||
| And then you have the matching rates that are very different. | ||
| You don't have work requirements. | ||
| This bill has very modest work requirements, 20 hours a week. | ||
| Come on, Steve. | ||
| I mean, that's just crazy to get all your medical care if you're an able-bodied adult. | ||
| There are some states that are reimbursing at Medicaid rates that are multiple times Medicare reimbursement rates. | ||
| Why are those different? | ||
| Well, the number one growing area is the Medicaid, and that is our biggest growing program and our biggest growing financial danger that we have. | ||
| So you've got a whole host of things. | ||
| Why are Republicans now who, when I first ran nine years ago, we were running on the notion of eliminating Obamacare, and now we're basically embracing Obamacare because of Medicaid. | ||
| Can you hang through the break? | ||
| I think we have you for a few more minutes after a break. | ||
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unidentified
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Okay. | |
| I got Andy Biggs, Jim Rickards. | ||
| Going to explain what's happening in the Gulf right now. | ||
| A lot going on. | ||
| Not just pageantry. | ||
| Also, President Trump's going to address these business leaders. | ||
| And they're all over there kowtowing to it. | ||
| Larry Fink, Schwartzman, the whole pack. | ||
| Katzmatidis. | ||
| It's quite a collection. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Bratz here. | ||
| With charts. | ||
| Bratz got charts. | ||
| I would say to Andy Biggs, I think it's because we don't have great jobs, and that's why there's a lot of MAGAs on Medicaid, but I agree. | ||
| An able-bodied semen, I'll be putting in, I don't know, 40, 60 hours? | ||
| If it's a month, they ought to just rack it up. | ||
| You can't get it. | ||
| If you're able-bodied, you've got to show that you've got work required minimum. | ||
| Anyway, we'll get to all of this. | ||
|
unidentified
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The big, beautiful bill. | |
| Got to have cuts. | ||
| We're going to ask Andy Biggs why the doge cuts have not been codified. | ||
| First of all, I want to know what the numbers are. | ||
| Number two, why didn't people step up and cut a fight? | ||
| In the War Room. | ||
| Short break. | ||
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unidentified
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I got American, baby. | |
| In America's heart. | ||
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Mann. | ||
| Andy Biggs is with us. | ||
| Jim Rickards is with us. | ||
| Dave Brett with us. | ||
| Congressman Biggs, first off, when you go about pre-2019 or get to the pre-pandemic budget, With the revenues we got coming in, we could sort this thing out. | ||
| We would be back in something. | ||
| We'd go level set and make this, you know, get our arms around. | ||
| What is the problem with going back to the pre-pandemic numbers, sir? | ||
| All these constituencies that happen every time that the federal government spends money, they're fighting it. | ||
| And many of my colleagues get very nervous about that. | ||
| I'm not touching the traditional Medicaid population or even no benefits in Medicaid whatsoever because we're including inflation that's happened. | ||
| I mean, you've got to acknowledge that. | ||
| But that doesn't mean that you can't take down, say, some other areas within... | ||
| The spending spree, because if you take that down, that wipes out about $1.5 trillion just like that. | ||
| And then you have the additional things that are being proposed. | ||
| You have massive amounts of fraud and waste and duplication in every program. | ||
| Okay, hang on. | ||
| Full stop. | ||
| I want to go back to Doge, because this is my big problem with Elon when they came in, because it was like a magic wand. | ||
| We're going to find a trade, and we're going to find this. | ||
| Of the codification on the DOGE cuts, because I'm sitting there going, Medicaid and the Defense Department? | ||
| Come on, man. | ||
| That's fraud central. | ||
| Let's go back. | ||
| You say they were going to codify the DOGE cuts, and I don't want the programmatic cuts, but fraud, waste, and abuse. | ||
| Not USAID, not Department of Education. | ||
| We understand that, right? | ||
| That's coming programmatically. | ||
| But when you talk about waste, fraud, and abuse, the trillion dollars that you're supposed to find. | ||
| How much have you seen actually, because I keep asking and I don't get a firm number from anybody. | ||
| So when you say codification of doge cuts last week, what were you trying to codify? | ||
| USAID and the programmatic stuff out of education or actually like fraud from Medicaid? | ||
| It was going to be largely... | ||
| What you described as programmatic. | ||
| We're talking USAID, other programs that are duplicative, wasteful. | ||
| Full stop, full stop, full stop, full stop. | ||
| I got that. | ||
| I'm glad they sent the kids over and they were like a hammer. | ||
| But, you know, Eli Crane and MTG and Andy Biggs, you know, 23, in the frickin' middle of the summer at 2 o 'clock in the morning, you guys are up there on the House floor arguing and trying to get these cuts. | ||
| This has all been identified. | ||
| I'm glad Eli came in as an auxiliary force to do it. | ||
| But that's something we knew about and something's got to be done and must be done. | ||
| But that's programmatic. | ||
| Why? | ||
| This is my question. | ||
| Why have we not found actual fraud? | ||
| Not a trillion dollars, a couple hundred billion dollars. | ||
| Where is that? | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| If they have found it, they haven't given me the receipts, okay? | ||
| I'm where you are. | ||
| It's like, okay, I keep hearing these numbers. | ||
| Where are the receipts? | ||
| I've got to prove it because If it's fraud, it isn't just about, Steve, cutting that wasteful spending out. | ||
| It's about prosecuting people. | ||
| So if you have people that have fraudulently sent in social security numbers, by the way, I can just tell you that... | ||
| Under previous programs, under Obama, for instance, you could go to these child tax credits and you could actually find literally where hundreds and hundreds and thousands of illegal aliens were getting those benefits using loopholes in our law. | ||
| But they were fraudulent and there were accountants that actually, and this is what I mean when you get to the fraud, they were actually prosecuted. | ||
| For filing those false claims. | ||
| And that's when I say show me the receipts because then I'll know how much is there. | ||
| I want to know who we're prosecuting or who we're investigating, at least who we're investigating. | ||
| And if we have that, then I can get a number. | ||
| But right now I have no number. | ||
| Okay, by the way, on the codification, I'd like to do that in the appropriations process anyway, but I'll talk to you about that later. | ||
| I want to go to two things. | ||
| Number one, Medicaid. | ||
| We talked about expansion. | ||
| Here's the problem. | ||
| We've shipped all the great jobs over, so you get MAGA. | ||
| I mean, in Arizona, I think there's a ton of MAGA that are kind of working class. | ||
| That the way they make it meet is they're using Medicaid to have babies and to meet medical. | ||
| Because Medicaid's not just an urban legend anymore. | ||
| It's actually out there. | ||
| Isn't that the Medicaid expansion? | ||
| Isn't Josh Hawley right that we're going to have to deal with this? | ||
| And Biggs, you're the biggest deficit hawk I know. | ||
| So people will listen to you about your solution. | ||
| Yeah, so here's the deal. | ||
| If you're working eligible, the expansion population, there's 100,000 people in the expansion population in Arizona. | ||
| 100,000. | ||
| There's more than 2 million people in Arizona. | ||
| Now, Steve, we have a population of 7 million in Arizona. | ||
| There's more than 2 million people that are on what's called Medicaid. | ||
| We call it access in Arizona, whether it's expansion or the traditional. | ||
| We spend, from all sources, more than $20 billion a year. | ||
| And that means for every man, woman, and child in Arizona, we allocate essentially $3,000. | ||
| You are helping pay $3,000 for the $2 million plus on Medicaid in Arizona. | ||
| That's an interesting thing for me. | ||
| And the other thing is, there's... | ||
| If folks were on the expansion population and they're capable of working, they're also capable of getting on the ACA's silver plan, the lowest plan. | ||
| And so they're not going to be without care. | ||
| The question is, how are you going to fund that care? | ||
| How are you going to pay for that care? | ||
| Well, the state can't do it. | ||
| You're going to be governor. | ||
| This is my point. | ||
| You're going to be governor. | ||
| Governor Biggs, what do you think? | ||
| Isn't this kind of the thing, hey, we want to dump it back to the states? | ||
| But the reality is, and these are, and I'm saying worker requirements should be tough. | ||
| There should be not one illegal alien on this. | ||
| I heard there's still that problem. | ||
| But how do you do it? | ||
| How do you do it and make sure working class people got a shot here? | ||
| Well, you have to, you have to. | ||
| Do a number of things, not the least of which is refine the medical care. | ||
| Now, when we start talking about fraud in Medicaid, I'm going to tell you that we have found providers that are defrauding the federal government in order to get higher reimbursements. | ||
| That's real. | ||
| And so you're going to have to do that in Arizona. | ||
| So you're going to have to basically do a doge on that in Arizona and actually prosecute. | ||
| You're going to actually get reimbursements and those types of things. | ||
| I want to see the doge at the federal level. | ||
| Anyway, we'll get to the last thing because I know you've got to punch. | ||
| On the tax bill, look, I'm all for the upper bracket. | ||
| Somebody's got to pay this and not have carried interest is a slap in the face to working class people. | ||
| It's outrageous. | ||
| But the business cuts are not permanent. | ||
| They're just going to be with us for a couple of years. | ||
| Isn't it important to get, if we're going to do the, you know, the advance write-offs of capital expenditures, of R&D, which we want, particularly help entrepreneurs, don't we want to make those permanent? | ||
| They're just kind of thrown in there, and as soon as Trump's gone, they're gone, sir. | ||
| Yeah, you do want to make that, I mean, because an entrepreneur will adjust to the field of play. | ||
| They always do. | ||
| But what you want to do is give them predictability. | ||
| If you don't give them predictability, they get skittish and they withhold capital investment. | ||
| And that's really what you're trying to do because capital investment creates jobs. | ||
| They expand the employment. | ||
| They expand the economy. | ||
| And so these are good. | ||
| These are good provisions there. | ||
| They just need to be lengthened out. | ||
| But the problem is, Steve, somebody's got to pay for them. | ||
| So the other thing is when we start making the reductions like we're doing for middle-class folks in multiple areas and senior citizens and all that, there won't be capital investment because of that. | ||
| So you have to just say that's foregone investment. | ||
| That's not coming in. | ||
| But you're going to have to deal with that. | ||
| What's going to have to take place, Steve, is we're going to have to acknowledge that Arizona needs to open up its natural resources because it's got incredible minerals, including critical minerals. | ||
| And if we can open those up, we can survive on the extraction fees that you see from places like Texas or North Dakota where they had the... | ||
| Those fees for exploration and taking out oil and gas. | ||
| We can do the same in Arizona. | ||
| So, Congressman Biggs, people are looking at you this next couple of weeks. | ||
| It's going to be the grinder we're going to go through. | ||
| So, what's your social media? | ||
| Where do people go? | ||
| We look forward to having you back. | ||
| Go to az... | ||
| Rep Andy Biggs AC. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Rep Andy Biggs AC. | ||
|
unidentified
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Gotcha. | |
| I never go there myself, Steve. | ||
| So that's it, man. | ||
| We need tons of people to go there because you're absolutely essential to this. | ||
| So we appreciate you, sir. | ||
| Thanks, Steve. | ||
| Take care, man. | ||
| Congressman Andy Biggs. | ||
| Congressman Biggs, capital investment leads to jobs. | ||
| President Trump is over there and it's national security. | ||
| Normally you always go over there. | ||
| We started the first trip as all national security, right? | ||
| Now this is all about capital investment leads to jobs. | ||
| The biggest players in the world are there with the Emiratis, the Saudis. | ||
| It's quite a group. | ||
| Jim Rickards, who's a specialist, understands this neighborhood perfectly, is going to join us here in a moment. | ||
| We're going to take a short commercial break now. | ||
| You need, since all the forecasts, except for the boardroom, have been wrong by all the mainstream media and the business press. | ||
| Remember, the sky's not falling. | ||
| Remember in mid-April, it's the worst stock market in April in the history since 1929, 1932. | ||
| Wrong. | ||
| And we'll talk about that. | ||
| By the way, we're going to get our reshoring guy on. | ||
| If not this morning, and we can't do it this afternoon, and I'm going to have Eli Crane and Burkett. | ||
| Both. | ||
| Birchit in the 6 o 'clock hour to talk about what's going on. | ||
| Capital investment leads to jobs. | ||
| That's why President Donald John Trump is getting the royal treatment in Saudi Arabia today, in Riyadh. | ||
| Jim Rickards is going to join us. | ||
| Birchgold.com. | ||
| End of the dollar empire. | ||
| The Rio reset July 6th. | ||
| This is the road to Rio every day to talk about what the BRICS nations. | ||
| Remember, she... | ||
| And she and Putin were like two high school kids, two 16-year-olds, on their first date last week in Moscow. | ||
| Guess who she's having as a guest today in Beijing? | ||
| If you said Lula Brazil, you would be right. | ||
| Bricks that, Bannon. | ||
| Okay, short break. | ||
| Jim Rickards on the other side. | ||
|
unidentified
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Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | |
| Okay, Jim, by the way, we may cut to President Trump as soon as he starts speaking at this conference, if it's streamed, or we go live. | ||
| Jim Rickards joins us. | ||
| Jim, I got a lot of questions after Biggs' discussion here, but I want to go back to capital investment leads to jobs. | ||
| Why is the President of the United States being feted like a royalty, even more so than it looks like a traditional president in the Middle East right now, in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, sir? | ||
| Well, it's a two-way relationship, Steve. | ||
| Of course, the Fed and MSNBC wants to say they're sucking up to him, whatever. | ||
| It's just a sign of respect. | ||
| I would leave it at that. | ||
| But it's a two-way relationship. | ||
| It's a good time to remember... | ||
| The petrodollar accord, which is still in place. | ||
| It was put in place in 1974, but it's still active today. | ||
| And I was actually part of the team that put that together. | ||
| We had a carrot and a stick approach. | ||
| So the carrot was Bill Simon, who was Secretary of the Treasury, Jerry Parsky. | ||
| And they went to the Saudis and they said, look, everybody in the world needs oil. | ||
| So if you price oil in dollars, everybody needs dollars because they've got to buy the oil. | ||
| And that basically underpins the role of the dollars, the Global Reserve Council. | ||
| There's more to it, but that's the key thing. | ||
| And by the way, sorry, when you get your dollars for the oil, deposit them in U.S. banks. | ||
| There was a tax council of the Citibank, actually. | ||
| And the banks will lend it to South America and they'll buy our stuff. | ||
| We'll get the whole economy out of the ditch, which it was in 1974. | ||
| So that was the carrot. | ||
| But there was a stick. | ||
| And I worked with Helmut Sonnenfeld, who was the deputy national security advisor in the White House under Henry Kissinger. | ||
| And the stick was, if you don't do it, we're going to invade Saudi Arabia. | ||
| Not the whole place. | ||
| It's mostly sand. | ||
| But the eastern provinces take over the oil production. | ||
| We will produce as much as we want. | ||
| We will price it wherever we want. | ||
| We'll hold the money and trust for the Saudi people. | ||
| But basically, we're going to run the oil market combined with U.S. oil production. | ||
| Slow down. | ||
| Slow down. | ||
| Full stop. | ||
| Full stop. | ||
| By the way, I'm going to have Ed Luce on. | ||
| Later in the week about the new book, Zbig, about Dr. Brzezinski as the National Security Advisor. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| It's like Shakespearean. | ||
| For half of it, between Kissinger and Brzezinski. | ||
| But hit me, we threatened to do, when was this? | ||
| We threatened to do what, brother? | ||
| This was 1974. | ||
| So the carrot was, price it in dollars, everybody needs oil, therefore everybody needs dollars. | ||
| And we'll give you a security umbrella as well. | ||
| That was the carrot, that was the approach, that's what happened. | ||
|
unidentified
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But hold it, we had just screwed these guys. | |
| Hadn't we just gone off the gold standard? | ||
| And the Arab oil embargo, all is because of this, because they realize, hey, they're going to start paying us in, wait for it, fiat currency, sir? | ||
| Well, you're right, Steve, that was 1971, but that was exactly the point, which is, hey, if you're Saudis, why not just pump oil, dump the dollars and buy gold and put the gold in the vault? | ||
| How do you get the dollars in circulation? | ||
| It's not just about the quantity of dollars, it's about the circulation of dollars, and that was the key. | ||
| Everybody in the world was going to need dollars. | ||
| You couldn't buy oil and gold. | ||
| Now, that was a possibility, by the way. | ||
| The Saudis could have said, hey, give us gold and we'll sell you the oil. | ||
| They didn't. | ||
| They said, we'll sell you the oil for dollars. | ||
| And that was the petrodollar accord. | ||
| By weight of gold, the dollar dropped 95% from 1971 to 1980. | ||
| Gold went from $35 an ounce to $800 an ounce. | ||
| So if you use gold as your yardstick, it was a 95% devaluation of the dollar. | ||
| And the moral of the story is have some gold. | ||
| But you also need oil and you also need dollars. | ||
| So we took the plan, basically, the invasion plan, and we leaked it to the Chicago Tribune, and the Saudis read both sides of the equation. | ||
| They said, okay, we'll do the Petrodollar Accord. | ||
| But my point is, it's still in place. | ||
| Now, we may be getting close to Petrodollar 2.0, and obviously, Scott Best. | ||
| But hang on, slow down. | ||
| I want to make sure Steve Bannon understands this. | ||
| You say it's in place. | ||
| But the Saudis cut an output deal with the Chinese to take the currency risk and figure it out. | ||
| The Persians did it with the Chinese, not the petrodollar. | ||
| The Saudis, correct me wrong, done a 40-year deal with them, not the petrodollar. | ||
| I think the UAE, our good buddies there, did one with Modi in India, our good buddy there. | ||
| Also not, I mean, away from the petrodollar. | ||
| Am I wrong there? | ||
| Haven't you always started seeing the cracks in the system? | ||
| Well, you're right, but they are cracks. | ||
| But that's the point. | ||
| That's why it's time for Petrodollar Accord 2.0. | ||
| Let's get back to where we were. | ||
| And that's one of the reasons the president is in Saudi Arabia meeting with MBS. | ||
| So, yeah, but you're right, Steve, but the amount of Chinese yuan that the Saudis took for oil is minuscule relative to the overall market. | ||
| And they don't want the yuan. | ||
| What are you going to do with the yuan? | ||
| I mean, you know, buy some Chinese manufactured goods. | ||
| They don't even need that many. | ||
| But this is the Saudis. | ||
| And the Emirates way of signaling the United States, hey, you know, you better get back to being our friend. | ||
| You better get back to giving us a security umbrella. | ||
| And you better get back to, you know, maintaining the value of the dollar. | ||
| And then we'll, you know, as I say, that's why I call it Petrodollar 2.0. | ||
| It was never a treaty, by the way. | ||
| It was a memo, which, at least at the time, was classified. | ||
| I don't think that's ever been revealed. | ||
| But you don't need a treaty. | ||
| You just need a firm handshake, and they can trust Trump. | ||
| But that's one of the reasons he's there. | ||
| And the idea that, oh, this is just a business trip or whatever. | ||
| Well, yeah, but it's all dollar-based. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| So the Saudis will still sell oil to the Chinese, but they'll tell the Chinese, you have to pay in dollars. | ||
| The pressure on the Chinese, because how do they get dollars? | ||
| They sell stuff to the United States. | ||
| What are the tariffs? | ||
| Well, they were 150% two days ago. | ||
| Maybe they're 30% for the next 90 days. | ||
| But this is a very complex game, and the Russians are involved. | ||
| But the U.S., by strengthening the relationship with Saudi Arabia, going to petrodollar 2.0, puts the pressure on China to basically reduce their tariffs and meet some of Trump's requirements. | ||
| Otherwise, they don't have a source of dollars. | ||
| The geopolitics here. | ||
| There's actual discussions behind the scenes in Turkey, I think in Istanbul on Thursday, that supposedly is Zelensky potential Putin meeting. | ||
| Trump's kind of dropped it. | ||
| I know people are actually thinking this through, that Trump may actually go by, which would be historic. | ||
| Walk me through the geopolitics. | ||
| We've got the Larry Finks. | ||
| We've got the investments, and we'll come back to that in a second. | ||
| But the geopolitics, they had the pomp and circumstance of meeting the president. | ||
| You had the beast surrounded by the cavalry of the rural Saudi army. | ||
| I also want to tell Mr. Hollins of Mr. Hollins Opus, I think there's a job opening this afternoon for a band leader in Saudi Arabia, probably looking for somebody from an American high school to go over and teach the guys. | ||
| Let's take another crack at that national anthem. | ||
| Good effort. | ||
| Know it's hot. | ||
| The instruments are hot, but got to do better. | ||
| What's the geopolitics of this, Rickards? | ||
| Well, basically, the meeting—you said supposedly a meeting. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's the right adjective. | ||
| Zelensky threw down this dare, well, I'll go to Istanbul, and Putin shows up. | ||
| Putin's not going to show up. | ||
| Now, if Putin shows up, Trump may go. | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| But Putin's not going to show up, because Putin—because what Zelensky wants is an unconditional ceasefire. | ||
| A party, show me a case in the history of the world where the side that's winning the war, winning the war, which Russia is, agrees to an unconditional ceasefire. | ||
| Putin has made his terms clear. | ||
| Putin laid down terms before the special military operation in 2022. | ||
| He laid them down again, same terms at a speech to the Russian foreign ministry last summer, summer 2024. | ||
| And he'll repeat them whenever you like. | ||
| Denazification, demilitarization, no NATO. | ||
| Russia takes the four provinces east of the Napa River, basically, plus Crimea. | ||
| And that's it. | ||
| That's basically the deal. | ||
| Trump could have that deal tomorrow. | ||
| Maybe Putin will throw in a couple of sweeteners just to save face. | ||
| But why should Putin agree to anything less? | ||
| And what strikes me is that the West, the collective West, so basically NATO and the United States, are very good at talking to each other. | ||
| The other day, was it Starmer and Macron and Mertz, the chancellor of Germany, met with Zelensky? | ||
| So what? | ||
| We're talking to each other. | ||
| Who's talking to Putin? | ||
| Who's talking to Lavrov? | ||
| Now, I know Wyckoff has been out there. | ||
| He's met with Putin. | ||
| That's very constructive. | ||
| But they cook up all these plans. | ||
| They leak them to the Financial Times and the New York Times. | ||
| They create a narrative. | ||
| It amounts to nothing because no one's addressing Putin's points. | ||
| But here's the importance of it. | ||
| If we could end the war... | ||
| Pretty much on Putin's terms. | ||
| Because he won the war. | ||
| That's the point. | ||
| You win the wars, you get to keep stuff. | ||
| But if we could get that behind us, then Russia is instrumental in helping with Iran. | ||
| And no one wants a war in Iran except, you know, Lindsey Graham and a few other warmongers. | ||
| But we could do a deal. | ||
| We had Frank Gaffney on yesterday making the case for unilateral Israeli, which I love Frank, but the audience wasn't buying it. | ||
| It didn't make a lot of sense. | ||
| But that group that's meeting today. | ||
| Because this is the world's, you got Larry Fink, you got Schwartzman, you got every big, you know, swinging whatever from New York down there. | ||
| You got everybody from the Gulf Emirates. | ||
| They're talking about trillion dollars coming here, investments, which, look, as you know, I don't love these sovereign wealth funds putting money into the United States. | ||
| These companies are bad enough, but the foreign capital. | ||
| But President Trump's focus on a trillion dollars. | ||
| That group... | ||
| And the Emiratis and the Saudis hate the Persians, but I don't see any group over there that has any interest even in thinking about or talking about the Israelis going to take a bombing run on the sites that are working on the nuclear program. | ||
| Do you, Jim Rickards? | ||
| I don't think that group expects that. | ||
| I agree with that. | ||
| Now, if you ask me, will the Israelis do it? | ||
| When the Iranians get to the point where they have not just a nuclear device, you can blow something up. | ||
| That's a big deal, by the way. | ||
| But it's not just a nuclear device. | ||
| You have to weaponize it. | ||
| You've got to get it on a warhead. | ||
| The missiles have to work, etc. | ||
| But when the Iranians get close to that point, the Israelis will attack Iran because it's existential. | ||
| You know, they have no strategic depth. | ||
| You could basically wipe out all the Israelis and affect most of the Jews in the world if that happens. | ||
| So they're not going to let it happen. | ||
| So the question is, how do you avoid that? | ||
| Well, you avoid it by getting the Iranians to agree to verifiably hold off on any further development of Iranian enrichment. | ||
| How do you do that? | ||
| You get the Russians involved. | ||
| But that's where this whole thing falls down over Zelensky, who is, you know, people say, why does Putin kill Zelensky? | ||
| Why would you? | ||
| If you're in a war and you're... | ||
| Your enemy is being run by an idiot. | ||
| Why would you kill him? | ||
| You want the idiot to be in charge. | ||
| And Trump is kind of maybe at the end of his rope with this whole thing. | ||
| But you have to basically settle the war on Russia's terms. | ||
| That's not a cave-in. | ||
| It doesn't make Trump a puppet. | ||
| None of that's true. | ||
| Read the history of Venice, 900 years of treaties, basically. | ||
| Hang on. | ||
| Stop. | ||
| Hang on for a second. | ||
| Hang on for a second because they're going to be blowing us up on social media. | ||
| Rickard is just another running dog for Putin. | ||
| And this is all the Tucker Carlson, Kurt Mill, Steve Bannon, you know, love Russia crowd. | ||
| Make your justification. | ||
| Why is that the President of the United States just kowtowing to the Russian demands, sir? | ||
| Two reasons. | ||
| Number one, Russia is winning the war. | ||
| They're going to win the war. | ||
| It's not over, but they've decisively won the war. | ||
| Ukrainian armed forces are in full retreat. | ||
| They've been decimated. | ||
| Look, the Bradley fighting vehicles, the Leopard tanks, the Challenger tanks, the Abrams tanks, they've all been left burning on the battlefield. | ||
| Why don't you hear about the F-16s flying around? | ||
| Because they get shot down by the S-400 Russian anti-missiles. | ||
| Was one a Reschnik? | ||
| Did you not get the message? | ||
| The Arashnik missile has made tactical nuclear Russia not only won the war, they're going to stop at the Nibir River, but there's nothing stopping them from going to the English Channel, basically, because NATO has shown that their weapons don't work. | ||
| It's not even a question of how many weapons you give them. | ||
| They don't work. | ||
| They're obsolete. | ||
| We're selling them stuff from scrap. | ||
| Also, we said this from day one when Zelensky was trying to get us on a security guarantee. | ||
| I kept hammering. | ||
| I go on British TV and say, yo, you guys combined. | ||
| Are not going to be able to put up 25,000 or 30,000 combat troops. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| Because they're talking 100,000, 50,000. | ||
| They finally passed the hat around. | ||
| They come up with the security force at most 25,000, which is a joke. | ||
| NATO is not real. | ||
| It's totally performative. | ||
| And when you talk about those three guys in the train and what they were doing with the little bag of, who knows? | ||
| That's another whole separate issue. | ||
| But Rickards, I'm going to hold you. | ||
| Can you stick around for one more block? | ||
| I've also got the great Dave Brat with us. | ||
| Brat's up in the bullpen. | ||
| He's got charts today. | ||
| Brat does, as he usually does. | ||
| John Solomon's on. | ||
| Tulsi Gabbard is giving an exclusive comment statement to John Solomon over just the news that is going to start setting things right about the domestic surveillance of United States citizens who they consider extremists. | ||
| Yes, that would be MAGA. | ||
| So we got that all coming. | ||
| President Trump, if we get this business I think it's not a lunch now. | ||
| I guess it's a dinner. | ||
| Only Ricketts should remember that Ritz-Carlton is where MBS put all the Saudi sheiks that have been shaking down people and not giving a little something for the effort back to the royal family. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
| Back in a moment. | ||
|
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Here's your host, Stephen K. Band. | |
| Okay, take your phone out. | ||
| Birch Gold. | ||
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| Let's change that. | ||
| The age of Trump. | ||
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| Talk to Philip Patrick and the team. | ||
| Also, we're going to need you at the Ramparts. | ||
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Not... | |
| Today, because we've got to figure this out, there's going to be a markup of ways and means on the tax side. | ||
| There's going to be a markup over at Energy and Commerce, I think, on Medicaid. | ||
| We're all over this, but we're trying to figure this thing out. | ||
| So make sure that you're smart and weaponized when you get up on the ramparts. | ||
| But what we don't need is you occupied by having a hard money lender, like either own your house or have a big old second mortgage loan because somebody got into your title. | ||
| HomeTitleLock.com, triple lock, $1 million protection. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| 24-7? | ||
| They're watching it. | ||
| If anything happens at like 2 o 'clock in the morning, boom, you get an alert. | ||
| If all else fails, $1 million restoration program. | ||
| You got Natalie and Dominguez and the team over there. | ||
| HomeTitleLock.com promo code. | ||
| Wait for it. | ||
| Steve. | ||
| Pretty simple. | ||
| Check it out today. | ||
| Just go check it out. | ||
| All we ask you is just go check it out. | ||
| Talk to Natalie and Dominguez. | ||
| See if it makes sense for you. | ||
| You cannot be occupied. | ||
| That happens. | ||
| Your life changes, folks, because 90% of your net worth is tied up in that title. | ||
| For your real asset called your home. | ||
| Jim Rickards. | ||
| Brother, thoughts? | ||
| There's so much going on. | ||
| Not a better time to have a guy like you around. | ||
| What are your thoughts of what's happening? | ||
| Yeah, you mentioned Tulsi Gavish. | ||
| She did something a few days ago that was momentous. | ||
| She declassified a document that was designed to identify and deal with domestic terrorism. | ||
| By the way, this document was created under the Biden administration. | ||
| I want to make that clear. | ||
| She declassified it. | ||
| By the way, I live in New Hampshire and I became a Tulsi fan. | ||
| And when she ran in 2020 for president, you get to meet all the candidates up in New Hampshire. | ||
| It's all retail. | ||
| She went surfing. | ||
| In New Hampshire on New Year's Day, the water temperature was like 50 degrees in a dry suit. | ||
| So I said, that's bad. | ||
| So I'm a big fan of Tulsi, and I did meet her and spend some time with her. | ||
| So she declassifies this document. | ||
| And I have a lot of experience with classified documents. | ||
| They use like a black magic marker to cross out some of this stuff. | ||
| But I could read right through it and just kind of see what it was. | ||
| It was classified secret. | ||
| It wasn't top secret, but it was secret. | ||
| No foreign, which means no foreigners don't share this intelligence for foreign intelligence services such as... | ||
| It was the Five Eyes. | ||
| So what was it? | ||
| It was a blueprint for dealing with domestic terrorism. | ||
| And I'm like, OK, that's important. | ||
| I'll read that. | ||
| Who are they? | ||
| Well, MS-13, I know they're from El Salvador, but they're here. | ||
| Trendy, Aragua, I know they're from Venezuela, but they're here. | ||
| ISIS, you know, Biden opened the border, let everybody in. | ||
| So these are all top. | ||
| Organized domestic terrorists, not to mention Antifa and BLM. | ||
| So as I'm reading through it, it doesn't mention any of them, not one. | ||
| Who do they target? | ||
| You've got to get to page 20 in the fine print. | ||
| The military, enlisted military. | ||
| It didn't say convicted of or court-martialed or whatever. | ||
| Just enlisted military, government contractors. | ||
| That's probably 20 million people. | ||
| It talks about the need to enforce social cohesion. | ||
| Those are the exact words. | ||
| What is social cohesion? | ||
| Which means if you're MAGA, You're not socially cohesive in the eyes of Merrick Garland or Joe Biden. | ||
| And it talks about gun control. | ||
| You know, the Supreme Court's been pretty clear on Second Amendment. | ||
| So I'm like, OK, this is a document to basically mobilize, take an all-over-government approach, mobilize the FBI and the intelligence community and other resources to identify anyone who disagrees. | ||
| With the Biden administration, and if you just happen to be in the military, moms protesting at school board meetings, parts of the Catholic Church. | ||
| I've been to Mass all over the world, 20 different languages, but if you happen to go to a Latin Mass, which is popular, somehow that marks you down. | ||
| So this was despicable. | ||
| That's the best word for it. | ||
| But I applaud Tulsi for declassifying it, making it available, and I think we're going to see more like that. | ||
| Jim, because Solomon's going to come on. | ||
| He broke and then they gave special access to him on this. | ||
| He's going to walk us all through this. | ||
| This is my point. | ||
| Where's the investigation on this thing? | ||
| I mean, this has got to be, we've got to get, you know, they're going to have this big book coming out by Jake Tapper and I think Tomlinson over at Axios now. | ||
| He was at Politico. | ||
| Thompson, the two guys that... | ||
| That wrote this big expose, massive expose on Biden. | ||
| Today they dropped it. | ||
| You know, Biden, they were thinking about putting Biden in a wheelchair for the second term. | ||
| You saw him at the Vatican for the posting. | ||
| I mean, he looks like he's 100 years old. | ||
| Why is there not, this should be such a public massive outcry and such a huge investigation. | ||
| Where is it, Rickards? | ||
| Well, I mean, it's a good question. | ||
| You have a familiarity with the intelligence community, Steve. | ||
| The one thing they drill into you is we're not law enforcement. | ||
| We're intelligence, you know. | ||
| So, OK, well, who is law enforcement? | ||
| Well, it's the FBI, Department of Justice, Pam Bonney now, and Kash Patel. | ||
| Now, they've got a pretty full plate. | ||
| I take the point. | ||
| But, yeah, somebody was behind it. | ||
| And when you have a 25-page single space... | ||
| Hang on, hang on, hang on. | ||
| Jim, they got a hell of a full plate. | ||
| I'm not talking... | ||
| But shouldn't this be a priority? | ||
|
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Look... | |
| It's hard. | ||
| You've got to go pretty deep in the woods to hit your tripwire to get you to say, hey, this is outrageous given your 40 years or 50 years experience in this. | ||
| And you've said it's one of the most outrageous, if not the most outrageous thing you've seen on domestic spying on American citizens. | ||
| Isn't this a priority to make sure this can never happen again and hold accountable those that did it? | ||
| Yes, this was a blueprint for mobilizing the intelligence community and the FBI, which is part of the intelligence community, and law enforcement to basically attack a large segment, maybe more than half of the American population. | ||
| Again, you've got to be a bit of a geek. | ||
| You've got to read all 25 pages. | ||
| But it's there. | ||
| So, you know, they use jargon. | ||
| They obscure it. | ||
| They have statutory references. | ||
| But, yeah, let's have a congressional hearing. | ||
| Let's find out who wrote it. | ||
| If it's declassified, then the person who wrote it doesn't have any particular protection. | ||
| Who put that? | ||
| We sort of know it wasn't Biden. | ||
| I mean, Biden was president. | ||
| He's responsible. | ||
| But he was, you know, I don't know why everyone said, gee, we knew by 2024 that he wasn't all there. | ||
| I mean, what was the... | ||
| It's the Praetorian Guard that put him in. | ||
| That's where Jim. | ||
| Where do people go to get to the strategic intelligence and the free offer of the book Money GPT? | ||
| Where do they go today? | ||
| Yeah, thank you, Steve. | ||
| We have our own landing pages. | ||
| RickardsWarRoom.com. | ||
| That's RickardsWarRoom.com. | ||
| You go there, you'll find we've got recordings. | ||
| We can subscribe to our flagship newsletter, Strategic Intelligence. | ||
| A lot of the issues that you and I discuss on War Room, we cover in great depth in our Strategic Intelligence publications. | ||
| So RickardsWarRoom.com. | ||
| This is something read by chairman and CEOs all over the world. | ||
| It's like the Financial Times. | ||
| You want to read with decision makers who are reading? | ||
| Get Strategic Intelligence. | ||
| Jim? | ||
| I'm going to publicly now bug you to come back on later in the week because there's so much going on. | ||
| President Trump's historic four-day trip to the Middle East and maybe even topped off with a trip to Turkey. | ||
| Sit down with Putin, never know. | ||
| Jim Rickards, social media, where do they go to get you on social media, sir? | ||
| On X, at Real Jim Rickards, at Real Jim Rickards. | ||
| Love you, brother. | ||
| Thanks for taking time today. | ||
| Historic day in the Trump second term. | ||
| We got Dave Brat. | ||
| John Solomon is going to be here. | ||
| Folks, this thing that Tulsi did and unleashed or put out for the people to see, it's got to be a priority. | ||
| We cannot have a constitutional republic if you have the Praetorian Guard, the deep state that can do this. | ||
| Short commercial break, take you out with the right stuff. |
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