May 14, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
51:19
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
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President of the United States of America, representative of the media. | |
| We will see the signing of the agreement of buying aircraft from Boeing. | ||
| His Excellency Badr bin Abdul Amir will sign from the Qatari side, and Kelly Ortberg will be signing on behalf of Boeing. | ||
| And the United States of America. | ||
| Boeing purchase agreement signed on behalf of the state of Qatar by His Excellency Badr Mohammed Amir, CEO of Qatar Airways Company, and behalf of the United States, Kelly Ortberg, President and CEO of the Boeing Company. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Signed on behalf of the State of Qatar by His Excellency Sheikh Saud bin Abdurrahman bin Hassan Althani, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of State for Defense Affairs. | ||
| And on behalf of the United States of America by the Honorable Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense of the United States of America. | ||
| Firstly, a letter, a statement of intent on defense cooperation between the state of Qatar and the United States of America. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
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Secondly, a letter of offer and acceptance for MQ-9B aircrafts. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| And a letter of offer and acceptance, F.S. Lids. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| It is my honor to announce the signing of a Joint Declaration of Cooperation Between the State of Qatar and the United States of America. | ||
| Signed on behalf of the State of Qatar by His Highness Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, Amir of the State of Qatar, and the Honorable Donald J. Trump, President of the United States of America. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| The signing ceremony has now come to an end. | ||
| And now, a joint statement from His Highness the Emir and the President. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you very much. | |
| We had a couple of hours of great meeting with the President. | ||
| And we discussed many issues, our great bilateral relationship and also the situation in the region. | ||
| Of course, I think after signing these documents, we are going to another level of relationship between Qatar and the United States. | ||
| So I just wanted to thank you, Mr. President, again for this historic visit. | ||
| Thank you very much, sir. | ||
| Well, thank you very much. | ||
| And this has been a very interesting couple of hours. | ||
| We discussed... | ||
|
unidentified
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The world. | |
| We discussed Russia and Ukraine, where you've been a tremendous help in so many different ways. | ||
| We certainly discussed Iran, where it's been really an interesting situation. | ||
| I have a feeling it's going to work out. | ||
| I think it's going to work. | ||
| It's got to work out. | ||
| One way or the other, we know it's going to work out. | ||
|
unidentified
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But you were of great help. | |
| And other things, but in particular, the trade is the Kelly's telling me from Boeing, it's the largest order of jets in the history of Boeing. | ||
| That's pretty good. | ||
| And that's 140. | ||
| Was that a 140 or 160? | ||
| Yeah, but it's actually 200, including the 40, so it's over $200 billion. | ||
| But 160 in terms of the jets, that's fantastic. | ||
| So that's a record, Kelly. | ||
| And congratulations to Boeing. | ||
| Get those planes out there. | ||
| Get them out there. | ||
| But I just want to thank you. | ||
| We've been friends for a long time, long before politics. | ||
| Well, for you it was politics. | ||
| For me it wasn't, right? | ||
| But we've been friends for a long time, and this is an outstanding man. | ||
| He's a great man, and we're going to help each other. | ||
| The United States is in a very strong position militarily. | ||
| We have the best equipment anywhere in the world. | ||
| You're buying a lot of that equipment, actually, and I think we're going to see some of it in action tomorrow at the, we won't call it an airfare, but it's going to be sort of an airfare. | ||
| We're going to be shown a display that's going to be incredible. | ||
| They have the latest and the greatest of our planes and just about everything else, so I think it's going to be a lot of fun and very interesting, but I just want to thank you for the friendship, for the longtime friendship, and again, long before any of this stuff. | ||
| We just liked each other. | ||
| That's not a bad thing. | ||
| That's a good thing. | ||
| But we always had a very special relationship. | ||
| And we came from Saudi Arabia, where we have another great man over there that's a friend of yours. | ||
| And you two guys get along so well and like each other. | ||
| You sort of remind me a little bit of each other, if you want to know the truth. | ||
| Both tall, handsome guys that happen to be very smart. | ||
| But he's also a very special guy, and it's good to see all the relationships forming in the Middle East. | ||
| Because the Middle East is really being talked about all over the world. | ||
| And we're having a lot to do with it. | ||
| We're helping a lot. | ||
| But they're doing a tremendous job. | ||
| So I just want to thank everybody very much for being here. | ||
| I want to thank the media. | ||
| The media has been very fair, actually. | ||
| And it's a great honor to be with you. | ||
| You take a look at this room. | ||
| This room is the real deal. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's called white marble. | |
| It's very hard to buy. | ||
| Believe me, I know very well. | ||
| Because you try to buy it, you can't buy it. | ||
| And you just take a look at what you have here. | ||
| It's been incredible what you've been able to build as a nation. | ||
| And we're with you all the way, and you know that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| The ceremony has now come to you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| Right there you see President Trump. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| Yeah, went to Qatar. | ||
| A little different than the first time we went there back in 17. I'll explain that. | ||
| Here's what I would like to do is that we're going to do a cold. | ||
| We got our cold open. | ||
| Let's just blow the break. | ||
| Let's do the full cold open to the show. | ||
| We're going to bring it in because we got the ceremony. | ||
| President Trump arrived. | ||
| He just signed all the deals. | ||
| Now we're going to go back in time, show you about his arrival, what happened, some of the big news yesterday. | ||
| Let's go ahead and let it rip. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| The transformations have been unbelievably remarkable. | ||
| Before our eyes, a new generation of leaders is transcending the ancient conflicts of tired divisions of the past and forging a future where the Middle East is defined by commerce, not chaos, where it exports technology, not terrorism, and where people of different nations, religions, and creeds are building cities together, not bombing each other. | ||
| Out of existence. | ||
| We don't want that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| And it's crucial for the wider world to note this great transformation has not come from Western interventionalists or... | ||
| Flying people in beautiful planes giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs. | ||
| No, the gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation-builders, neocons, or liberal non-profits like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop. | ||
| Cabal, Baghdad, so many other cities instead. | ||
| The birth of a modern Middle East has been brought by the people of the region themselves, the people that are right here, the people that have lived here all their lives, developing your own sovereign countries, pursuing your own unique visions and charting your own destinies in your own way. | ||
| It's really incredible what you've done. | ||
| In the end, the so-called nation-builders wrecked far more nations than they built and the interventionalists. | ||
| We're intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves. | ||
| They told you how to do it, but they had no idea how to do it themselves. | ||
| Peace, prosperity, and progress ultimately came not from a radical rejection of your heritage, but rather from embracing your national traditions and embracing that same heritage that you love so dearly. | ||
| President Trump is in Qatar this morning after wrapping up the first leg of his Middle East visit in Saudi Arabia. | ||
| While there, Trump sat down with Syria's new president and spoke about the decision to lift sanctions on that country's government. | ||
| It gives them a chance for greatness. | ||
| The sanctions were really crippling, very powerful. | ||
| And I spoke to Mohammed and I spoke to a friend. | ||
| From Turkey, who we just spoke to also by phone now. | ||
| But felt very strongly that this would give them a chance. | ||
| It's not going to be easy anyway, so it gives them a good, strong chance. | ||
| And it was my honor to do so. | ||
| So we will be dropping all of the sanctions on Syria, which I think really is going to be a good thing. | ||
| So, David Ignatius, obviously a lot of questions hanging over the new leadership in Syria. | ||
| The Wall Street Journal cautiously optimistic, though, saying they need to be given a chance. | ||
| I'm curious your thoughts. | ||
|
unidentified
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So, Joe, after the terrible Syrian civil war, the awful loss of life, to see a chance for Syria to come back together as a country under President Ahmad al-Shahra is, I think, a very positive trend. | |
| And lifting sanctions is a necessary part of that. | ||
| The big bet that President Trump and really the whole Arab world is making is that Ahmad al-Shar, the president who was formerly a member of an affiliate of al-Qaeda, really has changed that he's going to be a leader who will... | ||
| Put his terrorist background behind him and will be able to unify the country. | ||
| Interestingly, this is something that Israel was quite worried about, but it was pressed by Turkey, which has been the biggest backer of al-Shara, encouraged to help train his forces before he took power. | ||
| So it's a big move by President Trump. | ||
| We were all expecting that this trip to Saudi Arabia would be... | ||
| Pop and, you know, elaborate meetings. | ||
| And it's been that, but it's also had a lot of substance. | ||
| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
| Pray for our enemies. | ||
|
unidentified
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Because we're going medieval on these people. | |
| I got a free shot at all these networks lying about the people. | ||
| The people have had a belly full of it. | ||
| I know you don't like hearing that. | ||
| I know you try to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it. | ||
| It's going to happen. | ||
| And where do people like that go to share the big lie? | ||
|
unidentified
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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
|
War Room. | |
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Mann. | ||
| It's Wednesday, 14 May, Year of War, 2025. | ||
| Another historic day in the Middle East as President Trump reorganizes the Middle East the most since Sykes-Picot back in 1918. | ||
| We're very honored to have our guest in-house for the remainder of this hour. | ||
| He's been here the whole time, but of course we're covering live everything the president does. | ||
| Congressman Matt Gaetz, one of the greatest young men in his generation and sorely missed. | ||
| We'll get into that. | ||
| So first off, you were one of the early proponents in President Trump's inner circle. | ||
| I call it kind of the Gaetz-Tucker school of, hey, non-interventionism. | ||
| Walk me through why what's happened the last couple of days is so historic and so many of... | ||
| People that have been colleagues of ours, people we've been close to, and you're a huge defender of Israel, are like their heads are blowing up. | ||
| Tell me what has gone on here. | ||
| What has actually transpired the last couple of days? | ||
| You're seeing a total rapprochement in the Middle East. | ||
| This is a region of the world that 20 years ago was run by a bunch of guys in their 80s. | ||
| And I think you see the guys who now run this part of the world in their 30s, 40s, early 50s having a real taste for Western ways and Western markets and Western women. | ||
| And they are eager to embrace their relationship with the United States in a different way. | ||
| I have been a critic of Saudi Arabia. | ||
| I'm certainly a critic of Iran. | ||
| You've been a big critic of Qatar. | ||
| Well, at times, but I've also praised Cutter for... | ||
| Frankly, doing some of the diplomatic work that has to be done in places where we can't and don't talk to everybody because of the foolish mistakes of the neocons and neoliberals. | ||
| And that was the core of Trump's message on this trip. | ||
| That clip of his speech where he talked about the nation builders destroying more nations than they ever built, the interventionists not understanding the places in which they are intervening, and the fact that the true prosperity of the Middle East was built by the people who live there. | ||
| I've got it up on Getter, folks, if you want to go look at it, that that speech was the end of the neocons. | ||
| He basically said that speech of President Trump and the way he went through a logical argument of how we got here and where we're going forward with these folks basically ended what we consider the neocon experiment. | ||
| Do you agree with that? | ||
| Yeah, I think it certainly was the capstone. | ||
| Of that moment in history in the Middle East. | ||
| But I think it's also a message to other parts of the developing world. | ||
| What is our Africa strategy? | ||
| Like, no one could really distill that to me. | ||
|
unidentified
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Or Central America. | |
| Or in a lot of the global south, frankly. | ||
| In the developing economies in Asia, we seem to be trying to draw them into work with the United States to pull them away from China. | ||
| But I think that the doctrine is very applicable globally. | ||
| That success is not going... | ||
| It's going to be some function of an American democracy experiment or interventionist war. | ||
| Success is going to have to derive from the people in the region. | ||
| David Ignatius and Ed Luce, I talked to Ed Luce at the Financial Times earlier, they're like stunned at what's going on. | ||
| Ignatius from the Langley, Bugle, Washington Post, the spokesman for the CIA, they're gushing over Trump this morning on Morning Joe. | ||
| More engaged in the world than ever. | ||
| Why do you think that is? | ||
| Are we not playing the globalist game? | ||
| No, you're missing the signal here. | ||
| What is Qatar? | ||
| I mean, the fusion of Qatar and the CIA is... | ||
| It's something that has been broadly discussed, and I have to be a little careful here, but I mean, come on, Steve. | ||
| There's a reason Qatar exists to be the place where a lot of these bad hombres live, and it's because it's a place where you can keep an eye on them. | ||
| Where would you prefer, them in the Hindu Kush or in downtown Doha, where you can see everything? | ||
| Exactly, and you can, you know... | ||
| We went over there, and you were key to this in the thinking of the time. | ||
| We went over in 17, Riyadh, Jerusalem, and Rome. | ||
| And in Riyadh, as you remember, because you're one of the guys that were working on this behind the scenes, we had the Stop the Tariff Financing Memorandum of Understanding. | ||
| Qatar went out of their way saying, we're not signing this. | ||
| We had a big brouhaha over there. | ||
| And then 30 days afterwards, MBZ and MBS basically surrounded Qatar, and they almost went to war. | ||
| What's changed in that eight years? | ||
| I think that Where the president's getting a state visit, there's a state dinner tonight, he's signing deals with these guys, $200 billion of Boeing jets. | ||
| I think that it is the prowess that Cutter holds in... | ||
| The economic system right now that is undeniable and has to be reckoned with in some way on peaceful terms. | ||
| Is the economic system just spreading money around basically Europe, the United States and other places to kind of buy people off or to look the other way? | ||
| Is Mark Levin and these guys right that we're looking the other way, the guys that financed the Muslim Brotherhood just because it's convenient or easy for us to do that? | ||
| I mean, you asked me if I believed Qatar had funded the Muslim Brotherhood and my answer was not any more than we have. | ||
| I mean, you know, like, oh, what, what? | ||
| America's now going to... | ||
| Are you going to say funding the Muslim Brotherhood means you get disqualified from the global stage? | ||
|
unidentified
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Like paging Numa Abedin, paging Hillary Clinton. | |
| Matt Gaetz is breaking news here. | ||
| So you believe with President Trump, this is for our non-interventionists, this is the way you do this. | ||
| This is how you do it. | ||
| By the way, look at how we got out of this thing with the Houthis, okay? | ||
| All of the neocons wanted the Houthi deal to draw us into some big war with Iran, which is their fever dream. | ||
| And Trump brilliantly played a little fire on ice there and resolved that on the best possible terms for the United States. | ||
| And now he's able to take the victory lap and say, look, I'm not here to be the block captain of Baghdad. | ||
| You know, I'm not here to try to figure out how to send a bunch of Western urban planners into Kandahar. | ||
| I'm here to trade with you. | ||
| I'm here to sell you our weapons so that you are peaceful with us and interoperable with our ways and not the Chinese. | ||
| And I think that's kind of how Trump era colonialism in 2025 is going to work. | ||
| You want to sit there and wax poetic about, oh, they spread money around. | ||
| Donald Trump is the guy who just by executive order stalks the enforcement of the Forward Corrupt Practices Act, and he's totally right about it. | ||
| He is totally right about it. | ||
| So our policy is going to be a lot more permissive on that kind of stuff and a lot more realistic because, by the way, that's how the world works. | ||
| That is how the world works. | ||
| You're in San Diego now. | ||
| I'm in Florida, but I spent some time in San Diego. | ||
| You're a Florida man. | ||
| big announcement coming out of also, uh, your show and your, and your network or the hearings this morning. | ||
| I'll get to that in a second. | ||
| 32nd street, North Island carrier battle. | ||
| One of those carriers and a carrier battle group, uh, out of the third fleet, I think we should not put ourselves in a situation where we get drug into a war of someone else's choosing. | ||
| And I think when we jam up the Red Sea with a bunch of American Greyhull vessels, that risk is higher than I like it to be. | ||
| Talk to me about the show, the big network announcement. | ||
| Yeah, so look, I believe that we have to go and create the outposts for our communication strategy. | ||
| And you've built this out of your basement. | ||
| I mean, I helped you do it back during the impeachment days. | ||
| And when I showed up at One America News, we were on about 10 million homes. | ||
| We've added sling now. | ||
| We've added dish now. | ||
| And today the big announcement that we are going to be on Spectrum, which is one of the properties of Charter Communications. | ||
| It is the largest cable provider in the country. | ||
| It will be carrying One American News. | ||
| We have to create these lily pads at RAV and Newsmax, even at Fox, I hate to say, for our people to be able to go and fertilize this ecosystem that is now the most powerful thing in politics. | ||
| The great, kind of like CNN-type news all day long. | ||
| It was fantastic. | ||
| I mean, the packages were just amazing. | ||
| I mean, better than CNN. | ||
| They clearly wanted that shut down. | ||
| They shut the hearings down hard. | ||
| I mean, you guys were nowhere at one time. | ||
| Even getting back to the 10 million was a struggle. | ||
| How did the hearings and you guys pull this off? | ||
| Well, I got to say, Robert Herring is a man of a different generation, and he is as tough as it gets. | ||
| And he just bore down. | ||
| And at personal cost, he kept the lights on. | ||
| But now this is a thriving business. | ||
| With the ability to be on cable, we're going to be able to have a great future for One American News. | ||
| And you know why I think it's happening, Steve? | ||
| Because I think a lot of these... | ||
| But providers don't want to have a real, you know, tough eye from the FCC or the DOJ antitrust division if they are engaged in censorship. | ||
| And I think good corporate citizenship has been reflected by charter and we hope good corporate citizenship by others to allow diverse political viewpoints and to allow the marketplace of ideas to thrive. | ||
| And if we do that, then I think the country succeeds. | ||
| I think we resolve our differences through debate and discourse and not more on. | ||
| We're going to take a commercial break in a moment, but before I do it, because I want to get back to your efforts, particularly behind the scenes. | ||
| People, I don't think, totally realize how important you've been on the deportations, how important you've been on the whole strategy in Central America. | ||
| But tell me about the show. | ||
| Talk to us about the show. | ||
| How are you doing? | ||
| Tell me what you're trying to do, the podcast, all that. | ||
| Well, every night at 9 o 'clock Eastern on weeknights for an hour, we get together the top newsmakers. | ||
| We had Tulsi Gabbard on last week. | ||
| We had the vice president of El Salvador. | ||
| You have really taught me a lot about how global populism is connected. | ||
| We've had leaders from Europe, Latin America, all over the world to really break down this judicial coup that we are under. | ||
| You believe it? | ||
| Because we say we're hurtling towards, it's a convergence of crises, but we're hurtling towards one that's got to be resolved by the end of June. | ||
| We are in the middle of a slow-moving judicial coup right now, I believe. | ||
| And I believe that the fundamental test for members of the Trump administration is, are you willing to defy an unlawful court order? | ||
| That's going to happen. | ||
| By the way, before they leave tomorrow, and by the way, we're going to have wall-to-wall coverage on this. | ||
| They're going to argue the 14th Amendment, this huge birthright citizenship case tomorrow. | ||
| Before they leave in June, is this going to be rectified, particularly about his Article II powers as commander-in-chief and the writ of habeas? | ||
| Before June? | ||
| Well, before they leave in June. | ||
| No. | ||
| You don't think it'll be resolved by that? | ||
|
unidentified
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Listen. | |
| We'll be able to go to an entire summer. | ||
| The Supreme Court will not step in here. | ||
| I believe that the Supreme Court is very concerned about losing the veneer of legitimacy if President Trump has an appropriate, robust view of his Article 2 powers. | ||
| And I think that's why Roberts has been ruling the way he has, to try to at least keep some tension on the line. | ||
| I don't know that we get a resolution on that. | ||
| You don't think we get a resolution? | ||
| You think that lingers through the summer and into the fall? | ||
| I do. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| Matt Gaetz here. | ||
| Okay, we're going to take a short commercial break. | ||
| Congressman Matt Gaetz, one of the biggest drivers, not just in the MAGA movement, the Trump movement, but also on Capitol Hill, will ask all those questions. | ||
| He single-handedly led the effort at tremendous personal cost, showed his courage, his bravery, but also his brilliance in taking out, for the first and only time in the history of this republic, a sitting Speaker of the House. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
| Take your phone out. | ||
| The ultimate guide, it's totally free, on investing in gold and precious metals in the age of Trump. | ||
| Not the era of Trump, the age of Trump. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
| Matt Gaetz is in the house. | ||
|
unidentified
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next. | |
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Mann. | ||
| Okay, there's some absolutely amazing footage that was made by Congressman Gates when we went this historic trip and our former producer, Vish Burra. | ||
| Let me know as soon as we have it. | ||
| I want to show this. | ||
| It's breathtaking. | ||
| We're going to put up, you've got to see the whole thing. | ||
| It's, I don't know, 10 or so minutes long. | ||
| Since the Cutter thing, we don't have time to play. | ||
| I want to go back to your theory of the case. | ||
| This is very important. | ||
| When Matt Gates says something, it's important. | ||
| Walk me through the Constitution because we're having a convergence of trying to end the kinetic part of the Third World War, the deportations, the Constitution, and the refinancing. | ||
| Let me let it rip here. | ||
| We have been building this populist movement. | ||
| We've got populist energy in the Congress. | ||
| We've got our few populist senators, Vance, Hawley. | ||
| We had the guy from Indiana, Braun, Rick Scott. | ||
| You can get a populist president even. | ||
| And so the one place that the elitists have us cornered out is the judiciary. | ||
| Because if you're a populist great thinker, it is really hard to be a judge. | ||
| You know why? | ||
| The system to become a judge requires judicial nominating commissions, and you had to be the second recording vice president of the local bar association. | ||
| But you also go to Harvard and Yale. | ||
| Well, maybe because a Democrat senator and a Republican senator had to agree to allow you to proceed. | ||
| So it's this whole... | ||
| Mating dance with the establishment that you have to go through to become a federal judge that you don't have to go through even to be a congressman or a senator or a president. | ||
| It is it is more exquisite and more challenging and it draws you deeper into the establishment to take that position. | ||
| So if we did all of this. | ||
| Won the swing states, beat DeSantis, trudged through the snow in Iowa and New Hampshire. | ||
| If we did all of what we did to eke out these majorities in the Congress and to get Trump through assassination attempts and indictments so that some sniveling little you-know-what in like a Massachusetts courtroom can dictate to us the terms of U.S. foreign policy, then this has all been for naught. | ||
| And so it cannot stand. | ||
| You know who I think had... | ||
| The clarion moment of this, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who I used to work for back in 2005. | ||
| And when a reporter asked him if he was going to talk about the nature of his communications with Salvadorian President Nahid Bukele, he said, I'm not telling you and I'm not telling a judge. | ||
| You know why? | ||
| Because that is not the purview of the courts. | ||
| We're going to have to take this position, okay? | ||
| We're not getting out of this presidency without having to... | ||
| Thoroughly reject one of these unconstitutional nationwide injunctions. | ||
| And so the Bannon, if we were doing this like the old days, we would say, okay, if this is coming, what is the ground you want to fight on? | ||
| And I propose to this audience and to you and to my former colleagues in Congress that the best ground to fight on is deportations under the Alien Enemies Act. | ||
| Clearly, in the Article 2 purview of the president, the country is overwhelmingly on our side. | ||
| And so I went down to Sakat Prison. | ||
| I was the first American journalist inside the Trendy Iraq War. | ||
| But hang on, before we get there, this has been a project that you have worked on for years. | ||
| Walk me through to get to that prison, even to have our guys down there just to materialize. | ||
| Walk me through the logic you had to think this through. | ||
| I started to see what was happening in El Salvador, where this man turned a country from the murder capital of the world into the safest country in the Western Hemisphere. | ||
| And I started talking about it on your program. | ||
| I started talking about it in Congress. | ||
| He invited me down to his inauguration. | ||
| I met him there. | ||
| We became fast friends. | ||
| He's my age. | ||
| And I really became an advocate for the U.S.-El Salvador relationship. | ||
| And he said to a group of congressmen who were down meeting with him during the last term that if Trump won and if Trump needed a place to put... | ||
| Thugs and criminals that El Salvador had developed an expertise with this because in a country of six million people, they've rounded up 40,000 hardened gang members. | ||
| If you do that in a country of that size, you get security real quick. | ||
| And this guy has a 91% approval rating. | ||
| The state of exception that allowed those people to be rounded up, that has a 95% approval rating. | ||
| Even the prisoner I spoke to who admitted to kill... | ||
| What do you mean 50 people? | ||
| No, he said he killed 50 people. | ||
| That's how he ended. | ||
| We asked him how he ended up in Sakat. | ||
| He said homicide. | ||
| We asked how many people he killed. | ||
| He said about 50. And most of his time was in the United States and killings in the United States. | ||
| And he said, look, this new president got in and he meant business and we got what we deserved here in Sakat Prison. | ||
| And so, look, please. | ||
| We cannot be tolerant of this judicial coup. | ||
| We cannot have an administration and a Congress that sits back and allows the best selection of the Harvard Law Admissions Council to be able to run the country. | ||
| And those deportation flights should resume immediately to Sakat Prison. | ||
| And look, we're not going to be able to have... | ||
| If a judge comes in and puts it, they run into court and do a TRO, you just keep rolling. | ||
| Keep the planes flying. | ||
| This is U.S. foreign policy with enemy combatants, with the public on our side on President Trump's signature issue. | ||
| If we are not willing to do this in the face of some Woketopian in a black robe, then we did not deserve this victory. | ||
| Let's play it. | ||
| We've got some footage. | ||
| You've got so much great footage. | ||
| We're going to play it throughout the day. | ||
| I want to play a snippet here that was quite shocking when I saw it, and I've seen a lot of this stuff. | ||
| Let's go ahead and play it. | ||
| See his reaction to the Trende Aragua prison ward. | ||
|
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*Piano music* | |
| *Piano music* *Piano | ||
| music* Okay, Rebecca, what did we just see there? | ||
| And what were they shouting at you guys? | ||
| They want out. | ||
| They want to come back here. | ||
| And we can't let them. | ||
| These were people who were involved in criminal gang activities in the United States. | ||
| They have all the gang markings that have been screened for those affiliations. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| You don't get to come back. | ||
| You don't get to invade our country and then expect that when you're in a Salvadorian prison, we're going to come bail you out. | ||
| And I've got to say, the camera work of War Room alum Vish Burra was masterful. | ||
| Absolutely masterful. | ||
| All of the footage on our big special was filmed by one guy, Vish Burra, War Room trained, War Room hardened. | ||
| It's so scary when you see the whole thing, and then you go to the other side with the MS-13, who are the baddest of the bad hombres. | ||
| They're like sheep. | ||
| It's actually... | ||
| It's freaky about how this happened. | ||
| How did that happen? | ||
| They're just broken people? | ||
| I think a lot of them were on thousand-year sentences. | ||
| There was a moment when we were in the MS-13 ward on a different visit when Congressman Andy Biggs turned to the warden and said, did everyone here kill someone? | ||
| Because there are thousands. | ||
| And the warden looked back and said, oh no, everyone here killed more than one someone. | ||
| And so it's for people who are multiple killers. | ||
| And it is totally... | ||
| Zapped of the will to fight. | ||
| After they've been in that environment, no will to fight, and they're not a threat to anyone. | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| I also show my audience the promise that comes out of this on the other side, where people can start businesses and grow families and grow dreams. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| President Bukele's number one ask of us is please cut off the foreign aid, because the way we treat these parts of the world is by funding NGOs that then go after the governments that are making life better for people. | ||
| You're one to always go on smart offense. | ||
| With these judges, Mike, should we be cutting off $2 billion of the $10 billion the federal courts get? | ||
| Should you cut off $2 billion? | ||
| Should you start getting rid of judges? | ||
| Steve, you and I both know that if you cut the federal courthouse budget 95% Those dedicated Woketopians that want to issue these injunctions will set up a tent in the parking lot and issue them, okay? | ||
| So I think that the, look, the impeachments are justified, but that's not really a strategy. | ||
| That's more of a spasm. | ||
| And I think the... | ||
| Well, we'll cut their funding. | ||
| What have you seen Congress cut the funding to anything? | ||
| We can't even get the Congress to cut the funding to USAID. | ||
| We showcased that USAID was a grift to the world, and then they wouldn't even vote to cut that. | ||
| So they're not going to do that. | ||
| Or the doge codes. | ||
| They won't codify. | ||
| This requires fortitude and resilience. | ||
| This is not some legislative activity. | ||
| This is an activity where our country has to look within and say, Just as Marco Rubio did, we are not going to let these people conduct matters of policy of the United States of America. | ||
| And if they'd have just stuck to their lane, we probably would have had judicial review of birthright citizenship and all that. | ||
| But when it's like a federal judge saying that the Department of Health and Human Services has to put the... | ||
| Transsexual guidebook back on the website. | ||
| It is so far afield that the only acceptable response in this environment The only acceptable response from the administration is to ignore these orders. | ||
| I think complying with them is constitutional vandalism. | ||
| What do you recommend now to the administration? | ||
| You're saying when you see these orders that are so clearly unconstitutional about your Article II powers as chief executive, as commander-in-chief, and as chief magistrate and chief law enforcement officer, you're saying don't comply. | ||
| Steve, this is Trump's great superpower, revelation. | ||
| And I think he knows how to pick the fights to reveal the enemies in the right sequence. | ||
| But my humble advice to the administration is pick it on this one. | ||
| Pick it on the Alien Enemies Act deportation because through the resistance to the administration's actions on that, you will reveal so much to the country about the globalist invasion and the judicial coup that is allowing it. | ||
| Let's talk about weaponization. | ||
| Are you comfortable right now? | ||
| You know, Ed Martin got bounced out of a DC attorney. | ||
| He's now on the weaponization task force. | ||
| You got Judge Jeanine coming in. | ||
| Maine justice, they barely have a foothold over there. | ||
| As much as they're bringing in new people, of course, we blew out 100 in the Civil Rights Division. | ||
| Do you think we've got control enough of Maine justice that the anti-weaponization movement that you said had to happen? | ||
| Yeah, I can't judge it in that type of a binary fashion. | ||
| I think they're doing a great job over at justice. | ||
| Look at the directional progress of this, though. | ||
| The last time you and I were sitting, when we first sat at this table, we literally had an attorney general. | ||
| Working against us. | ||
| Trying to throw Trump. | ||
| Hoping that Trump had committed some sort of crime that they could throw him in prison for. | ||
| And not just that. | ||
| Both of you and I were going to prison. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| They had massive investigations. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| So, I mean, we've gone from the other side, like the person at the top wanting to throw us all in jail and like busting down the doors of MAGA grandmothers in Homer, Alaska. | ||
| And not just that. | ||
| When you were in the studio, we used to keep the door locked saying, hey, but, you know, they could kick down the door at any time. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| So we've gone from that. | ||
| To, like, maybe, you know, we might have a slightly different view on who someone for rungs down into the bowels of the DOJ are. | ||
| So that really means a lot of the work we did do to fill out the billets is resulting in better policy outcomes. | ||
| It is so rough over there. | ||
| And I got a little peek at it. | ||
| And I think that Pam Bondi is doing... | ||
| So rough in trying to get control of the building. | ||
| Well, I think that... | ||
| Most of the people who work there probably wake up every day trying to make General Bondi's job harder. | ||
| And that's really tough to deal with. | ||
| And I think when you look through that lens, what she's done on the deportations on the law enforcement front, that's who and what Pam Bondi is. | ||
| She is a nose to the grindstone law enforcement, you know, go see where the crimes are, get the perpetrators and hold them accountable. | ||
| We've got to go to a quick break. | ||
| If the president decides that they're so swamped over there, he needs a special prosecutor to go after that. | ||
| And Matt Gaetz is always the top of his list. | ||
| Does Matt Gaetz do that job? | ||
| I don't think we need special prosecutors now because we have the apparatus of the Justice Department, right? | ||
| So in an ideal world, it's the U.S. attorneys that we have that are doing that work. | ||
| Matt Gaetz is with us for another block. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
|
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back in a moment. | |
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Band. | ||
| Are we going to be forced to start suspending – President Trump suspending the writ of habeas corpus? | ||
| I side with Mike Davis on this. | ||
| I think there's so much ground that we have to gobble up before we get there. | ||
| I think that we have to set some deterrence on Article II powers. | ||
| I said before, I think if you look at how John Roberts has been ruling, he's trying to avoid this inevitable clash that is coming between – You can see he's trying to avoid it. | ||
| He is trying to avoid it. | ||
| But I think that it's unavoidable. | ||
| It's inexorably we're being drawn to this. | ||
| We're being drawn to this because of the nationwide injunctions. | ||
| And these tyrants in black robes in single jurisdictions have gotten a taste of that power. | ||
| And I'm telling you, it's like when you get a bull shark that gets the taste of human blood. | ||
| Like, it's on it now. | ||
| Because that's the only thing that's working for them right now. | ||
| Everything else is dead. | ||
| You're reviled in the city by the elites in the lobbyists and people that run it because you did something that's never been done in American history, single handedly pulled a team together, thought up a strategy and then executed to remove a sitting speaker of the House. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| It showed that the power systems here don't win every time. | ||
| And I don't know precisely when others in Congress will be called upon to summon that courage, to fight the beast, to fight the system in a similar way. | ||
| But I think it's a really important... | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| If you really marshal a sufficient amount of energy and you are tactical about it, you can beat power in this town. | ||
| And power has to know that occasionally to inform decision-making. | ||
| But it's sort of like taking out the trash at the house. | ||
| That's my responsibility in my marriage. | ||
| And just because I take out one piece of trash or take out the trash once, I can't really pat myself on the back. | ||
| You made originally with McCarthy. | ||
|
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If he had executed on that deal, he would have been triumphant. | |
| He'd still be Speaker of the House. | ||
| He would be one of the greatest speakers ever, correct? | ||
| You gave him the framework, a tough negotiation, but you laid out a framework. | ||
| If you execute, single subject bill, boom, and we wouldn't be in this mess today with the big, beautiful bill. | ||
| I think if any speaker took up that deal that we made with McCarthy and executed on it, they would be the most successful conservative speaker. | ||
| But the corrupt interests of this town have a gravitational pull to lawmake by continuing resolution or omnibus spending bill. | ||
| I don't know about you, Steve, but I'm embarrassed that here we are more than 100 days into Donald Trump's presidency and the finance structure we are operating under is the Joe Biden Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer, Mike Johnson. | ||
| September 30th, over $2 trillion deficit in President Trump's first kickoff year. | ||
| I had Keith Self on my show this last week, and he said if the fiscal hawks won every little battle, Medicaid, SNAP, whatever the battle, if we won every one of them, we go to $50 trillion in debt in the budget window in the next day. | ||
| In the 10 years. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, Chip Roy is saying in 10 years, we're going to add $20 trillion to the debt, which is not actually hard to fathom when you look at the numbers. | ||
| Trust President Trump's strategy, but it's... | ||
| But the House is... | ||
| Walk us through the Matt Gaetz trade. | ||
| They still all look for you, for guidance. | ||
| Let me be brutally frank, and I love these guys. | ||
| Without you there, there's not a leader that can galvanize both the thinking and, guys, here's how we're going to execute. | ||
| So talk to me about what would be the Gaetz plan here. | ||
| I am old-fashioned in my desire to have single-subject bills because I think that's the only way you create durability around these policy ideas. | ||
| You have to reveal the... | ||
| Negative arguments coming from the other side on our immigration plan, on our trade plan, on our tax plan. | ||
| And instead, when all of that just kind of becomes branded as Trump agenda good, you miss the chance to really vertically integrate the movement to those ideas that you are pushing. | ||
| The lawmakers aren't really pushing what they say. | ||
| Everybody was so excited about showing all this wasteful foreign aid and now you've got Republican lawmakers in the Senate voting to fully restore USAID and not just like a small handful of them. | ||
| And not codify even what Doge found, not to codify any of the Doge cuts. | ||
| If we keep doing that, my question is, does any of the rest of it matter? | ||
| I mean, if all we did to save the border, to create a peaceful world, to restore a sense of national pride, is it going to matter if we lose the dollar, if we go $50 trillion in debt, if interest rates spike, if austerity gobbles up the country? | ||
| What is the vested economic interest of the lobbyists and the donor class not get about that? | ||
| I think that much like the way the stock market has got everybody just thinking about their quarterly earnings and We choose a suboptimal path in the long term because there's a sugar high in the short term. | ||
|
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If we can pat ourselves on the back and say, look, we got something done. | |
| We got something done. | ||
| You guys all renamed some post offices. | ||
| Everybody got a little bridge they built or a pork barrel project you could take back to your districts. | ||
| You can run on it for the midterms. | ||
| And all it costs us is like the dollar and the country. | ||
| You and Ginger are clearly loving living in California, right? | ||
| Or at least we're on vacation and staying in California, right? | ||
| We do my show a good amount out of Washington, a good amount out of Florida, and a good amount out of California. | ||
| My wife is from California, and it's nice to dip her in the Pacific Ocean every once in a while. | ||
| The future of Matt Gaetz politically. | ||
| Governorship of Florida, governorship of California. | ||
| Come back and run for the Senate. | ||
| What are you going to do? | ||
| I'm not running for anything in California. | ||
| I'm not a Californian. | ||
| But I know this about... | ||
| The moment we're in. | ||
| There will come a line change. | ||
| Just like in a hockey game, you've got to get some folks who twist an ankle or have to move on to something else. | ||
| People who are in really prominent roles now will... | ||
| We'll have their life circumstances change, may need to live in a different place. | ||
| And there's a whole bastion of people who are ready, willing, and able upon a line change to do anything that we're asked. | ||
| Or like in any fourth turning, another crisis. | ||
| And we're now having a convergence of crisis. | ||
| So leadership like yours is needed more than ever. | ||
| Where do people get the show? | ||
| Where do they get social media? | ||
| One American News, 9 o 'clock Eastern, 6 Pacific. | ||
| And I'm on X at Matt Cates, where we keep the conversation pretty lively. | ||
| We're going to leave the first hour by the right stuff. | ||
| A classic book by Tom Wolfe, a magnificent movie by Phil Kaufman, and an Academy Award winning music by Bill Conti. | ||
| I can't think of a better song to go out than The Right Stuff. | ||
| Matt Gaetz has got it. | ||
| Sir, thank you so much for joining us here in The War Room. | ||
|
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Unbelievable. |
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