Aug. 13, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
53:49
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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Down. | |
| They're just anti-institutionalists. | ||
| You know, Alex Wagner Day, we're the ones that protect the institutions. | ||
| No, Alex, we're grabbing the institutions and taking power. | ||
| As the American people, the way our constitutional system works gave President Trump the authority to do. | ||
| So we're going to deconstruct the administrative state. | ||
| We're going to purge the deep state and the executive branch. | ||
| We're going to take over the Senate. | ||
| And we control the House already. | ||
| Oh, by the way, the judiciary, you're not going to get your judges through. | ||
| They're all going to be Trump judges. | ||
| I want you to, you're all in the fetal position, so I'm going to give you something really to suck your thumbs about. | ||
| We are in charge. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| The American people have spoken. | ||
| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
| Pray for our enemies because we're going medieval on these people. | ||
| Here's not got a free shot on 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're trying to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it. | ||
| It's going to happen. | ||
| And where do people like that go to share the big lie? | ||
| MAGA media. | ||
| I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience. | ||
| 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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Here's your host, Stephen K. Back. | |
| It's Wednesday, 13 August in the year of our Lord 2025. | ||
| President is going to leave momentarily and arrive at the Kennedy Center. | ||
| We're going to be covering all of it in this hour. | ||
| Our own Brian Glenn is there. | ||
| I want to go to Dr. John Lott, who's been a frequent guest here, one of the best folks about statistics around, but also gets, I think, understands crime. | ||
| A blockbuster book, if you've never had a chance to read it, more guns, less crime, monumental with all the analysis and analytics to back it up. | ||
| But one of the reasons the old West was such a polite society, right? | ||
| When you're carrying, when you got something on your hip. | ||
| John Lott, the president, the deployment of National Guard started yesterday. | ||
| You've also got the Park Police. | ||
| You're going to have every federal institution in the city focused on cleaning up the city and particularly cleaning up the crime. | ||
| People have talked about this and stumbled around on this for years, and now they're throwing out, oh, the crime statistics are down. | ||
| It's all nonsense. | ||
| The crime is out of control in Washington, D.C., and everybody knows it. | ||
| Everybody lives there, whether you're a progressive or whether you're a right-wing reactionary. | ||
| Your thoughts about how President Trump's doing with the deployment of the National Guard and others? | ||
| Because right now, we essentially are seizing the institutions of the capital city, sir. | ||
| Yeah, well, I hope this is a template for the rest of the country. | ||
| I mean, Democrats have been saying there's nothing you can do to go and fix the crime problem. | ||
| And just like with the border being fixed, I think that this is going to make a real difference. | ||
| Look, right now, D.C., or before Trump did this, D.C. only had about 400 or so patrol officers on duty at any point in time. | ||
| For a city of 721,000 people, as the police unions have said, they were being stretched extremely thin and weren't able to go and do their job, plus all the other restrictions that are put on them. | ||
| Just in the first night, Trump had an additional 850 officers that were able to be on duty there. | ||
| That's a huge percentage change. | ||
| So there's like three times as many people out there, law enforcement people, trying to deal with it. | ||
| And this isn't rocket science. | ||
| The basic notion is if you want to reduce crime, you have to make it riskier for criminals to commit crime. | ||
| That means more arrests, more prosecutions, more convictions, and longer prison sentences. | ||
| And Judge Denine Pirro is dealing with part of that with the prosecutions. | ||
| Under the Biden administration, the U.S. attorney there in 2022 refused to prosecute 67% of those who were arrested. | ||
| Even in 2023, he refused to prosecute 55% of those who were arrested. | ||
| You know, if you don't punish these guys, it's not going to deter them from committing crimes. | ||
| And I hope constituents around the country are going to say to their mayors and city councils: if they can go and reduce crime, as I think they'll be able to do in D.C. here, why can't we do these types of things in our own jurisdictions? | ||
| What has your frustration been? | ||
| Because you've been on this beat for a long time and you've written some brilliant analysis about it, both articles, interviews, books. | ||
| And it kind of defies common sense of why these types of methods have never been implemented. | ||
| You said go throughout the country. | ||
| Why has it not been done? | ||
| Why has it not been done to date? | ||
| I mean, even Democrats understand their constituents are sitting there going, hey, look, there's not enough cops around. | ||
| You particularly have these youth gangs. | ||
| You got real gangs and cartels in partnership with cartels for both human trafficking and drug trafficking. | ||
| These cities are essentially out of control. | ||
| And the people that are the biggest victims are the people of color that actually live in these cities and try to be honest citizens and go to work and raise their families. | ||
| They're the ones that these predators come after. | ||
| So what has been the pushback? | ||
| Why have the Democrats not done what President Trump is doing right now in a very dramatic way, sir? | ||
| Right. | ||
| No, I mean, you put your finger on it exactly. | ||
| Look, 90% of blacks are murdered by other blacks. | ||
| People tend to commit crimes against people who are like themselves in terms of race and socioeconomic status. | ||
| And so while you have a lot of these progressives who are saying, you know, blacks share the population, maybe 13%, so they should be no more than 13% of the people that are in prison. | ||
| Who's being harmed by that? | ||
| Rather than going and just looking at did somebody commit a crime irregardless of their race? | ||
| Because even while they may be caring about the criminals there, the people that they're hurting the most are the ones that Democrats claim that they care about, the poor and the minority. | ||
| But, you know, the one thing you'll say about the progressive is they're consistent in the sense that what you see is that, you know, they won't let law enforcement do its job and they won't let individuals go and protect themselves too. | ||
| The same people who put restrictions on law enforcement also are very strong gun control advocates and won't let the poor and others in those cities be able to go and defend themselves. | ||
| You know, in Washington, D.C., you only have about 1% of the adult population with a concealed carry permit. | ||
| And even then, there are all sorts of gun ban areas, which make it very difficult for people to actually go and carry for their own protection. | ||
| So you have things like the murder rate is out of control in 2023, the last year that we have data for from across the country, from the FBI, the final data. | ||
| D.C. ranked fifth of the 60 most populous cities in the country. | ||
| You know, they'll go and point out that things like carjackings fell in 2024, and they were down to 496 from the 990 the year before. | ||
| But the problem is, it's still five times higher than it was in 2017 and 2018. | ||
| So, you know, if you want to go and stop these types of crimes, you have to make it, the law enforcement's there, and you have to also try to make it so that individuals are going to be able to go and protect themselves. | ||
| But I hope Trump is going to be able to show, and I believe he will, that these are simple solutions, just like it was to fixing the border. | ||
| But Trump has done other things that have been helping. | ||
| I mean, one thing has been, and it's related to the previous guest that you had, when he's gone and closed the border and been deporting illegals. | ||
| One way, you know, he's not only deported a lot of criminals, but the other criminals that are there, one way to keep from being arrested and deported is to keep your head down and not commit much crime right now. | ||
| Because if they're not on police radars, because they're not committing crimes, they're less likely to be arrested and then deported. | ||
| And so I think one of the reasons why we've been having crime go down nationally right now is because of his immigration policies. | ||
| You've talked about this as a template, and we're a big advocate of that, and we believe that this is a template for particularly Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City. | ||
| And we understand what's happening politically in New York City. | ||
| Chicago, the mayor's already saying that we don't want you in Los Angeles. | ||
| They're trying to do everything to thwart law and order. | ||
| Walk me through. | ||
| How can this be a template to basically from Los Angeles? | ||
| Let's just deal with those big three, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. | ||
| How could this possibly be a template for actually getting crime out of these cities, sir? | ||
| Well, I mean, in New York, the leading Democrat nominee there, he wants to go and replace police officers with social welfare workers. | ||
| He wants to go and make it so that people aren't going to be able to be punished. | ||
| He wants to get, he's in the past advocating getting rid of jails and other types of things like that, saying that it doesn't deter them. | ||
| You know, people are going to be able to see whether those types of claims are right or wrong with this big increase in arrests and prosecutions and convictions that are going to be occurring. | ||
| My guess is it's going to be hard for them to go and deny the evidence. | ||
| I just want to, in closing, have this discussion about Judge Janine. | ||
| Now, we have a special situation in Washington, D.C. with the U.S. Attorney there, where you have New York and you have Chicago, you have Los Angeles, you have these Source-backed local prosecutors. | ||
| How can, for instance, the Southern District of New York, I mean, what do you have to do? | ||
| Because it's twofold. | ||
| Number one, you deploy more resources, maybe National Guard, you get more police officers on the street, a bigger show of force to thwart the criminals and make arrests, but then you've got to prosecute. | ||
| How do you do that in these other cities, John? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, I mean, D.C. is a little bit of a unique case in the sense that the U.S. attorney there handles prosecutions involving adults. | ||
| She's asked for changing the rules to allow her to be able to go after juveniles because the prosecutors in D.C., the local ones, go and handle those cases. | ||
| And they have not been particularly tough on those cases. | ||
| Even when they've gotten prosecutions and convictions, they've often asked for those individuals not to have any real formal punishment that's there. | ||
| And that's one reason why the juvenile crime in D.C. has really been the most serious problem and out of control. | ||
| But, you know, you have people like Alvin Bragg in Manhattan. | ||
| He has refused to go and prosecute firearms violations. | ||
| And I'll just give you one example of the impact that this has on measuring crime rates. | ||
| The FBI collects data on aggravated assaults, not on simple assaults. | ||
| What often makes a difference between whether something's aggravated or simple is whether or not a weapon is used. | ||
| And he's refused to go and prosecute people who have charges, firearms violations that are there. | ||
| And so now what that's done is that's made it so that the police in many areas are not recording whether a firearm was used there because they don't want the prosecutors yelling at them later because the prosecutors, Alvin Bragg's office, doesn't want to take responsibility for reducing the charges on these individuals. | ||
| So they go and they try to put pressure on the police not to record it in their initial police reports that are there. | ||
| And that's one reason why it may look like crime is falling more when you look at the FBI data in a place like New York than it actually is. | ||
| So there's kind of political benefits for them kind of playing with these numbers. | ||
| And of course, D.C.'s had its own problems and the police unions there accusing them of kind of hiding the crime data that's there. | ||
| But, you know, it's at least you can say they're consistent. | ||
| They just don't think punishment matters for whether or not people commit crime or not. | ||
| You kind of wonder whether these individuals have ever had children. | ||
| You know, anybody who's had kids know that you have to go and give them kind of clear guidelines of what they can do or not and make sure that they know that there'll be punishment. | ||
| But, you know, as an economist, it seems pretty obvious to me. | ||
| You know, if the price of apples go up, people buy fewer apples. | ||
| If you want to have less crime, you make it costlier and riskier for criminals to commit crime. | ||
| John, social media and website, we got to bounce about 30 seconds. | ||
| Where do people go to get all your writings and your books? | ||
| Well, thanks. | ||
| Our website's crime research.org, crimeresearch.org. | ||
| And my ex-account is my name, John R. Lott Jr. | ||
| But thank you very much for being there. | ||
| Dr. John Lott, always amazing. | ||
| Thank you for your analysis and observations. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
| We're going to the Kennedy Center with the President of the United States next. | ||
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| Okay. | ||
| As we thought, there might be a slight delay with the president actually getting there. | ||
| And the reason is they did the, I think they did the, they had a call, it might have been even a Zoom call with the EU folks and the NATO, some of the NATO nations today about the situation in Ukraine and this coming summit in Alaska with Putin. | ||
| Remember, Zelensky is not going to be there, and the EU is not going to be there. | ||
| NATO's not going to be there, except as President Trump is the leading nation in NATO, the United States of America. | ||
| Also reporting, I've got it up on Getter, and this is one of the reasons Getter is totally free. | ||
| And one of the reasons I keep saying, hey, we try to get as much of our content up there as possible. | ||
| We don't have a paywall or anything like that, but I put it up on Getter. | ||
| Of course, Grace and Mo do a fantastic job on their Twitter feeds and also reposting on occasion some of my great thoughts or analysis. | ||
| There's an article out there. | ||
| The Russians, you know, and they're going to use as much battlefield leverage as possible, the major assault in Ukraine, I think with 110,000 combat troops, that they've breached one of the front lines as Putin tries to get as much territory as possible, I think, to get into this, which will be the framework at least for a negotiation. | ||
| If you watch mainstream media, I mean, they're bringing out guys like John Bolton. | ||
| I mean, who cares? | ||
| The guy's such a hater and also totally irrelevant and has gotten everything wrong in his entire life about this situation, about national security. | ||
| You know, they're just badmouthing President Trump. | ||
| And the White House, I think, has very specific ideas of what they want to do. | ||
| This is the first of a kickoff meeting. | ||
| Remember, it's an enormously complicated topic, this raw prochement, with the first step certainly being how do we bring the Ukraine war to an end? | ||
| As you know, having been viewers of the show for years, we've been opposed to this war from the beginning. | ||
| And we told you exactly what was going to happen is Dr. Mershheimer at the University of Chicago said they're going to fight. | ||
| The West is going to fight until they've run out of Ukrainians. | ||
| Now they're taking people 60 years old. | ||
| And now they're not drafting them, but if you're 60 years old or older and want to volunteer, the Ukrainian, the high command will put you right in the front, in the front trenches. | ||
| And those trenches are pretty brutal. | ||
| The valor and the courage of the Ukrainian fighting forces cannot be denied. | ||
| And Ukraine are very knowledgeable, very cunning. | ||
| They've really turned this into a large aspect into a drone war, and they're really doing some big-time damage in that regard. | ||
| This is why I say, you know, when I was in the service back in the Pentagon after sea duty back in 1981, the Red Army was a very different animal at that time. | ||
| And the fears that we had of coming across Poland and through the Faulda Gap in the North German plain and actually attacking into Germany is the reason that President Reagan at the time and Margaret Thatcher worked so hard to forward deploy tactical nuclear weapons, the Pershing missiles and others to make sure that we could basically get equivalents on the battlefield back in those days because why? | ||
| Wait for it. | ||
| NATO nations were not putting any money into their military. | ||
| It was all going to be the American Army. | ||
| I think it was still the third army that was in Germany at the time. | ||
| And of course, American troops with British troops would be called in to defend it. | ||
| So today, the president's coming over to Kennedy Center to announce the recipients of the Kennedy Awards. | ||
| Those recipients, I think, will be honored in, I think it's after Thanksgiving in December, but announcement day. | ||
| You can tell President Trump is taking, there's a great shot right there. | ||
| President Trump will be at the Kennedy Center. | ||
| Like I said, he had this call this morning to prepare and get the, since there's going to be no Europeans and no Zelensky at this meeting, to get their two cents in, as President Trump puts it all together for thinking this through. | ||
| We talk about seizing the institutions. | ||
| President Trump also put out that they're going to get the Smithsonian's house in order. | ||
| That I will tell you, as someone that is from the general area in Richmond, Virginia, as a kid, had came up to the museums with the family, wanted to be a great Sunday to go do it. | ||
| And also coming back and actually working in the Pentagon in the early 80s and making sure you could avail yourself to the museums and everything that Smithsonian had. | ||
| The radical interpretation of American history and the woke nature of the Smithsonian has called for President Trump to review the situation. | ||
| I think there's 11, 12, 13 different museums set up around the Smithsonian Institution Institute. | ||
| And so they're going to take a look at all of it. | ||
| And we were going to have trying to get Dr. Roger Kimball or Roger Kimball in over the next couple of days to go through all that as we seize the institutions. | ||
| We told you this was going to happen and President Trump is doing it now. | ||
| Miles Grimmard joins us. | ||
| Miles, I asked you to join us today in August for Field of Greens because I wanted to make sure that people, you know, we've had Coach Tupperville here all the time. | ||
| Caroline Wren is a proud alumni of Auburn University. | ||
| You guys have been working on this study with Auburn University. | ||
| It's pretty dramatic, the results. | ||
| Can you walk us through what you guys have been working on and the results of this clinical analysis you've done with the great Auburn University, sir? | ||
| Yeah, it's extremely exciting. | ||
| I know we've been on here before kind of hinting at it for a while, but there's so many fruit and vegetable products on the market, but they're just common products and they're not backed by science. | ||
| I know you know Dr. Kim. | ||
| He medically selected each fruit and vegetable that is in the Field of Greens for their specific benefits, whether it's for your heart health, liver health, metabolism. | ||
| Really, he selected them all for specific reasons. | ||
| And we've in the past come up with our doctor promise, but we wanted to really put it to the test. | ||
| So we partnered with Auburn to do a full study of the health benefits of Field of Greens. | ||
| And the results were amazing. | ||
| So the participants, they changed nothing. | ||
| They had the same diet. | ||
| They were eating fast food. | ||
| They didn't change their exercise routines. | ||
| They were still drinking. | ||
| The only difference that they really had was adding Field of Greens every day. | ||
| And the results kind of put out what we knew that Field of Greens would do, which is it does lower your biological age. | ||
| Your biological age is different from your natural age. | ||
| It's just how long you've been on this planet. | ||
| Your biological age is your cells age and your vital organs age. | ||
| And many people are eight to 16 times or 16 years older than their actual age. | ||
| Now, the Field of Greens in this study proved that it actually lowers your biological age with The participants. | ||
| So, all you have to do is take Field of Greens, and Auburn showed that you are actually lowering your biological age, which is pretty crazy. | ||
| I want to make sure, I want to go back to the study. | ||
| The participants didn't change any of their habits. | ||
| They still ate the same fast food, the ultra-processed food. | ||
| They still had the same exercise regimen or not. | ||
| They just did exactly what they did as normal, average, everyday Americans, right? | ||
| The only thing they changed was taking Field of Greens. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
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unidentified
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And which is go ahead. | |
| No, you go ahead. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| Oh, and so when the studies came back, we were able to prove that it actually reduced or lowered the biological ages of the participants. | ||
| Literally, their cells were younger just by taking Field of Greens. | ||
| Now, why is that? | ||
| Why is that different than because your competitors carpet bomb cable television? | ||
| And you can tell the way they do it because cable TV, not Real America's Voice or the streaming services, but cable TV draws an older audience. | ||
| I mean, Fox and CNN and MSMEC, these audiences are in their late 60s, early 70s on average, right? | ||
| And they're carpet bombing this. | ||
| Why would Field of Greens, why would you even do a study like this? | ||
| And what is it about Field of Greens that's so different that you could actually lower the biological age of someone? | ||
| And why would you take the risk of doing this in this study? | ||
| It was risky, but you know, Dr. Kim, and he always, you know, his science, if he says it's going to do something, it does something. | ||
| So we did take a big risk working with Auburn University. | ||
| And we didn't just, you know, test this with older people. | ||
| We tested this with all ages of people. | ||
| And so we wanted to prove that Field of Greens and the way Mike made it, which is using real foods, not extracts, and not just cheap common produce. | ||
| But like I said, Mike chose everything in the Field of Greens to help a specific vital organ. | ||
| And so when it's this just proves that it is helping the vital organs, it is helping your cells age. | ||
| And it's doing exactly what we say it does. | ||
| That the other, actually, there's no other fruit and vegetable product on the market that can claim what we can now. | ||
| Thanks to this study. | ||
| Now talk to me about, you have a thing called, is it the way protein? | ||
| Walk me through this. | ||
| You just launched a new product on the site. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| Yeah, it's called the Brickhouse Way. | ||
| We named it that because along with the Field of Greens, we were a nutrition company that hasn't had a protein yet. | ||
| Because unless we can find a way to make something better or completely different than our competition, we're not going to launch it. | ||
| So we finally, you know, Mike and his team launched a, we were able to launch a protein that's completely different. | ||
| It's lactose-free, so it's really easily digestible for many people. | ||
| And we don't have to deal with the cows or the steroids they're on. | ||
| What happens is it's a fermentation process and it's using the same science as beer and yogurt to create a same, you know, it's the same DNA sequence as a typical whey, but it's without the lactose. | ||
| And so it's delicious, it's easily mixable, and it's great for you. | ||
| It's easy on the stomach. | ||
| Where people go, you got a discount also. | ||
| You guys ought to be. | ||
| The study's huge. | ||
| The new product's huge. | ||
| Where do people go for all this, sir? | ||
| Fieldofgreens.com. | ||
| Use the code Bannon for 20% off. | ||
| And please check out the study on the website. | ||
| Don't take my word for it. | ||
| Auburn put their own name on it to prove that Field of Greens is the best fruit and vegetable product there is. | ||
| Humongous. | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
| Lowers your biological age because it lowers the age of your cells. | ||
| Miles Grimmard, you guys are knocking out of the park. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Appreciate you coming on. | ||
| Thank you so much for having me. | ||
| FieldoGreens.com. | ||
| Grayson Moe, if we can take that study, I want everybody to take a look at it, a hard look at it. | ||
| This is why we said they were different from the beginning, a couple of years ago when we first partnered up with them. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
| We're going back to the Kennedy Center next in the War Room. | ||
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We're going back to the Kennedy Center. | |
| Strong message from Europe as President Trump prepares to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin Friday in Alaska. | ||
| As concerns grow over Friday's summit in Alaska, Ukraine's president Zelensky and European leaders held a call with Trump this morning, urging him to resist Putin's demands in any potential ceasefire agreement. | ||
| And only moments ago, Zelensky made his message very clear. | ||
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Let's wait for the results. | |
| In any case, the key issues which you obviously were asking as to our principles, as to our territorial integrity in the end, will be decided on the level of leaders. | ||
| Without Ukraine, it's impossible to achieve. | ||
| And by the way, everyone supports that. | ||
| Okay, bottom line is: hey, we're paying for it, dude. | ||
| President's going to do what he's going to do. | ||
| And we've paid for this for too long. | ||
| There are too many people dead. | ||
| And American people have faith in President Trump. | ||
| One of the reasons is President Trump's seizing the institutions, the cultural institutions, law enforcement. | ||
| There's a tweet out that the presence of National Guard and other law enforcement is even going to increase throughout the day and tonight in Washington, D.C., even more than we saw last night. | ||
| That was kind of an opening salvo. | ||
| He's going to flood the zone. | ||
| You ever heard that term before? | ||
| He's going to flood the zone with law enforcement. | ||
| Let's go, Brian Glenn. | ||
| Brian, I believe the president may be. | ||
| Oh, there he is right there. | ||
| Is that the president? | ||
| Let's go ahead and cut to it. | ||
| President of the United States at Kennedy Center. | ||
| Kennedy Center. | ||
| Donald J. Trump. | ||
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Thank you. | |
| Thank you very much. | ||
| This is a very exciting project. | ||
| We're going to do something that will go rapidly, relatively inexpensively, and we'll make it better than it ever was, frankly. | ||
| It'll be something that people are going to be very proud of. | ||
| Along with in the bigger picture, a place called Washington, D.C. That is the bigger winner. | ||
| We'll talk about that in a little while. | ||
| But let's talk about right now the Kennedy Senate. | ||
| I'm delighted to be here as we officially announce the incredibly talented artists who will be celebrated later this year at the 2025 Kennedy Center honors. | ||
| It's going to be a big evening. | ||
| I've been asked to host. | ||
| I said, I'm the President of the United States. | ||
| Are you fools asking me to do that? | ||
| Sir, you'll get much higher ratings. | ||
| I said, I don't care. | ||
| I'm President of the United States. | ||
| I won't do it. | ||
| They said, please. | ||
| And then Susie Wells said to me, sir, rock at our house. | ||
| I said, okay, Susie, I'll do it. | ||
| That's the power she's got. | ||
| But I just, so I have agreed to host. | ||
| Do you believe what I have to do? | ||
| And I didn't want to do it. | ||
| Okay, they're going to say he insisted. | ||
| I did not insist. | ||
| But I think it will be quite successful, actually. | ||
| It's been a long time. | ||
| I used to host the Apprentice finales, and we did rather well with that. | ||
| So I think we're going to do very well because we have some great honorees, some really great ones. | ||
| Since 1978, the Kennedy Center honors have been among the most prestigious awards in the performing arts. | ||
| I wanted one. | ||
| I was never able to get one. | ||
| This year? | ||
| It's true, actually. | ||
| I would have taken it if they would have called me. | ||
| I waited and waited and waited, and I said, to hell with it, I'll become chairman. | ||
| I'll give myself an honor. | ||
| Maybe I'm going to honor, next year we'll honor Trump, okay? | ||
| This year, the board has selected a truly exceptional class of honorees. | ||
| I mean, really exceptional. | ||
| First is country music star, actor and producer George Strait. | ||
| Great. | ||
| Over an extraordinary four-decade career, George has sold more than 120 million records worldwide, amassed 60 number one hits, wow, And produced 33 platinum-certified albums more than any other living American. | ||
| That is amazing. | ||
| He's believed by millions of people to just be as good as you can get. | ||
| And he's beloved by hundreds of millions of people all over the world. | ||
| He's really something, and they call him the king of country, and we know him very well. | ||
| George Straight. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Cheers. | ||
| Oh, it looks nice. | ||
| He's a good-looking guy. | ||
| I hope he still looks like that. | ||
| Second is actor, singer, philanthropist, and star of the Broadway stage, one of my favorite talents. | ||
| I think he's one of the greatest talents I've ever actually seen. | ||
| I've always said, and just so we don't get in trouble, I'll say among, but among the greatest artists in the world are the Broadway London actors back and forth. | ||
| That's all they want to do, they want to do Broadway and they want to do London. | ||
| They want to do eight shows a week, including matinee on Wednesday. | ||
| And if you said make a movie, they can't even think about it. | ||
| If you say go on television, they don't want to do it. | ||
| All they want to do is be on the stage, the live stage, and it's amazing. | ||
| But I've always said that the most talented people, and this man may be the most of all, Michael Crawford is being honored. | ||
| Michael was born in England in 1942. | ||
| He made his Broadway debut in 1967. | ||
| I was there. | ||
| I shouldn't say that, but I was there. | ||
| It seems like a long time ago. | ||
| And he became an international sensation in the 1980s for his original portrayal of the phantom of the opera, one of the greatest ever, ever, ever, ever. | ||
| You don't see him like that very often. | ||
| Winning him the Esteemed Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical. | ||
| He's won so many awards. | ||
| Michael is truly a generational talent, had a voice that was unbelievable. | ||
| It was unbelievable. | ||
| There's never, I don't know, it's Luciano Pavarati had a very different voice. | ||
| The power was incredible, magnificent. | ||
| Michael had a different kind of a voice. | ||
| These are just unbelievable talents. | ||
| But Michael is very special and one of the greatest roles in the history of Broadway. | ||
| And nobody did it like him. | ||
| Michael Crawford. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Great guy. | ||
| Next, we look forward to honoring three-time Oscar nominee Golden Globe Award winner, an action movie icon, and a friend of mine. | ||
| He's a very unique man. | ||
| He's somebody that doesn't do these things. | ||
| I said, I wonder if he'll accept, because some people don't really want to be honored. | ||
| They don't care. | ||
| But he was very honored to be honored, I will tell you. | ||
| He's a very special guy. | ||
| A real talent, never been given the credit for the talent. | ||
| There was nobody else who could have done the roles that he did, like he did. | ||
| I'm not even close, and they've tried, and they didn't work out too well. | ||
| His name is Sylvester Stallone. | ||
| So it's very few, almost, if any, people that could have taken a name and made it so incredible, like Rocky, Rambo, Creed, and others. | ||
| But think of it, Rocky Rambo. | ||
| If you did one, you're good. | ||
| You do two. | ||
| And I'll never forget, I was a young guy, and I went to see a thing called Rambo, and it had just come out. | ||
| I didn't know anything about it. | ||
| But I was in a movie theater, like we used to go to movie theaters a lot. | ||
| And I said, this movie is phenomenal. | ||
| What the heck? | ||
| And that turned out to be a monster. | ||
| Rocky is Rocky. | ||
| I mean, the way that happened, you know, Sly had no money, nothing, and he went around, and everybody wants to do a boxing Movie. | ||
| It's the most, you know, probably more than any other type of character, boxing, boxing, always boxing. | ||
| It's so great. | ||
| And there's rarely been anything like this one. | ||
| John Voigt did a great one, as you know. | ||
| Champ, great. | ||
| I think that was right there, too. | ||
| John Voigt's a phenomenal person, phenomenal actor. | ||
| But Sly came in and he had no money. | ||
| He wrote a script along with thousands of other people writing scripts on a boxer. | ||
| And for some reason, a studio picked up this and liked it. | ||
| And Sly had he's in an old car that he came in from Brooklyn or someplace in New York, but I think Brooklyn. | ||
| It barely made it to California. | ||
| He was sleeping in the car. | ||
| I mean, he had nothing. | ||
| And he wanted control over who the actor was going to be because he said it can't be successful if you're going to pick a movie actor with a bad build. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| A nice face, but a bad body. | ||
| And he said, I can't have these guys because he's a tough cookie and he knew exactly what it took. | ||
| He knew what a boxer's body was. | ||
| So they brought him one, and I won't tell you who it was, but it was a big name. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But the chest wasn't exactly what you need. | |
| One shot and your heart would pop out. | ||
| That wasn't too good. | ||
| Then he did another one. | ||
| He was fat, sloppy, but had a good face. | ||
|
unidentified
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Then he did another one and another one and another one. | |
| And he turned it down. | ||
| He wouldn't take $1 million. | ||
| He wouldn't do it. | ||
| And it turned out that when they saw him, they said, you know, you'd be actually pretty good for this role. | ||
| And he had never done this before, anything like it. | ||
| But think of it, he turned down a million dollars. | ||
| He had nothing. | ||
| He refused to let somebody else play. | ||
| He didn't want to play it. | ||
| He wasn't original. | ||
| He did it as a writer. | ||
| But he ended up playing it because he couldn't find anybody else that fit the role. | ||
| And who knew what would have happened? | ||
| He's become a legend of the silver screen, a true legend. | ||
| And he's a great guy. | ||
| He's a little bit tough, a little bit different, I will tell you. | ||
| He's a little tough guy. | ||
| But he's a phenomenal person with a phenomenal wife and family. | ||
| Incredible wife, incredible family. | ||
| His films are grossing more than $7.5 billion, which is either a record or very close to it. | ||
| I can't imagine anybody doing more. | ||
| If you add up Rambo and Rocky and these others, I can't imagine anybody doing much more. | ||
| $7.5 billion worldwide over the course of six decades. | ||
| And Sly is a pillar of the really American pop culture and a Hollywood superstar, like few others, and one of the biggest names on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. | ||
| In fact, the only one that's a bigger name on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, they say, is a guy named Donald Trump. | ||
| I'm on the Hollywood Walk of Fame too, if you can believe that one. | ||
| But he's amazing. | ||
| He's really amazing. | ||
| And he's actually a great actor. | ||
| Fourth will be together celebrating one of the most revered singers of the American disco era, Gloria Gaynor. | ||
| Best known for her chart-topping 1978 hit, I Will Survive. | ||
| Gloria won the 1980 Grammy for Best Disco Recording, and her song was inducted into the National Recording Registry in 2016. | ||
| Four decades later, Gloria won a second Grammy in 2020 for her gospel album, Testimony, which is incredible. | ||
| Truly a historic achievement, not only in terms of the years that have gone by, to be great that long, but to have the two top two top of anything in that span of time and with that kind of period between is pretty amazing. | ||
| But I will say that I Will Survive is an unbelievable song. | ||
| I've heard it, you know, like everyone else here, thousands of times. | ||
| And it's one of those few that get better every time you hear it. | ||
| And nobody can sing it like her. | ||
| And that's an honor. | ||
| So, Gloria Ganner, thank you. | ||
| And finally, we'll be honoring one of the greatest rock bands of all time, KISS. | ||
| So, KISS was formed in 1973 in New York City by founding band members and incredible people, by the way. | ||
| Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons, Ace Fraley, and Peter Chris. | ||
| KISS became a global phenomenon, sold more than 100 million records worldwide, and produced 30 gold albums and lots of other things they produced. | ||
| They made a fortune. | ||
| And they're great people, and they deserve it, and they work hard, and they're still working hard. | ||
| And it's an honor to present Chris KISS. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Got it? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And they're going to do something very special. | ||
| KISS is going to be here on a little bit before the show. | ||
| I think they're going to do something very special. | ||
| We're going to have a good time. | ||
| The 48th Kennedy Center honorees are outstanding people, a standing group, incredible. | ||
| We can't wait to celebrate the Kennedy Center honors. | ||
| It'll be in December. | ||
| It'll be on CBS. | ||
| In a few short months since I became chairman of the board, the Kennedy Center, we have completely reversed the decline of this cherished national institution. | ||
| It was being run down. | ||
| Money wasn't being spent properly. | ||
| They were building things they shouldn't have built that nobody wanted instead of taking care of the great gem that it is. | ||
| You look at the marble, look at the quality of the marble and the things that with a little fix-up and a little work, we can make it unbelievable, these columns. | ||
| When you see them the next time, they'll be magnificent. | ||
| I mean, we have some great plans for this. | ||
| The bones are so good. | ||
| The bones of a building. | ||
| If you don't have the bones, you might as well forget it. | ||
| I'm working in another building, I think, called the White House. | ||
| We're fixing it up so beautifully. | ||
| It needed it. | ||
| It's been many, many years since it's been properly taken care of. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| One of the great places of the world. | ||
| Maybe, I mean, truly, to me, is there anything else even close? | ||
| But we're doing that and doing some other things. | ||
| And we're going to also fix up a place called Washington, D.C. We're going to make it so beautiful again. | ||
| We're going to be redoing the parks, redoing the grass. | ||
| You know, grass has a lifetime like people have a lifetime. | ||
| And the lifetime of this grass has long been gone when you look at the parks where the grass is old, tired, exhausted. | ||
| We're going to redo the grass with the finest grasses. | ||
| I know a lot about grass because I own a lot of golf courses. | ||
| And if you don't have good grass, you're not in business very long, Lindsey Graham. | ||
| By the way, you have very good poll numbers, Lindsay. | ||
| I just saw congratulations. | ||
| But a few short months ago, I became chairman of the Kennedy Center, and we completely reversed it. | ||
| We reversed what was happening. | ||
| We ended the woke political programming, and we're restoring the Kennedy Center as the premier venue for performing arts anywhere in the country, anywhere in the world. | ||
| This has the potential to be anywhere in the world. | ||
| We're going to make it something that people can't even believe. | ||
| We have some unbelievable plans. | ||
| And ultimately, it's about the talent you get, though. | ||
| You know, you can have a beautiful, you can have a beautiful building, you can have nice marble walls, you can have nicely done columns, as I was saying. | ||
| But if you don't have the talent on the stage, then we're going to get the best talent in the world. | ||
| To that end, the world-renowned musical Les Miz had a phenomenal five-week sold-out run the summer, beat projected revenues by 35%. | ||
| And we've raised over $10 million in private funds from a lot of generous donors, and we closed the $26 million budget shortfall that they had before we got here. | ||
| And with the help of Congress, we secured the critical funding necessary to rebuild the building. | ||
| We're going to get all brand new, highest-level seats, magnificent seats, and it's going to be all new. | ||
| We could have taken the existing ones and do a little pink job, little fabric, but it's not the same thing. | ||
| So we'll be taken out next season. | ||
| All of the seats will be taken out. | ||
| The room is being completely rebuilt. | ||
| And I just want to thank the Republicans and the Senate, headed by Lindsay in that case. | ||
| Lindsay was very much, she's a big fan of this building. | ||
| And they got a record $257 million that's going to go toward renovations that the building really needs. | ||
| And all of the exterior is going to be incredible. | ||
| It's going to be exciting. | ||
| So I thank you very much and thank all of your Republican senators. | ||
| I don't think we had too many Democrat votes, probably. | ||
| You never have. | ||
| We don't have Democrats voting even for crime. | ||
| But I shouldn't make this political because they made the Academy Awards political and they went down the tubes. | ||
| So they'll say Trump made it political. | ||
| But I think if we make it our kind of political, we'll go up, okay? | ||
| Let's see if I'm right about that. | ||
| But I want to thank the executive director for an incredible job. | ||
| He's done great. | ||
| He's been with me for just about the beginning, and everything he's touched has been good. | ||
| He was on high intelligence. | ||
| He worked in low intelligence and high intelligence. | ||
| He did better with the high intelligent people. | ||
| But he's been fantastic. | ||
| He's the executive director, Rick Rinnell, for his work. | ||
| Thank you very much, Rick. | ||
| Unbelievable job. | ||
| And as well as Lindsay and all the people that helped us in Congress, I want to thank, and the Senate has been incredible. | ||
| By the way, Leader Thun has been unbelievable. | ||
| And Speaker Mike Johnson, these are great people. | ||
| What we're doing with the Great Big Beautiful Bill is you're going to see a whole different country. | ||
| You're seeing it already. | ||
| We're coming in where trillions of dollars is coming in from tariffs from all over the world, from countries that took advantage of our country. | ||
| They thought we were children. | ||
| They took advantage of us for decades, and now the money is flowing to us. | ||
| And we have, we've become the hottest country anywhere in the world. | ||
| But the Kennedy Center board members, many of whom I knew and many of whom I put on the board, and it's as good a board as I've ever seen, and on the board also, and some people that are doing an incredible job. | ||
| One in particular is Attorney General Pam Bondi. | ||
| The job she's doing is incredible. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Long beyond the Kennedy Center. | ||
| The Kennedy Center is the easy part. | ||
| She's incredible, and you're going to see a big change in Washington crime stats very soon. | ||
| Not the stats that they gave, because they turned out to be a total fraud. | ||
| The real stats, the stats went through the roof. | ||
| You know, they had a man that was forced to put up stats like they were doing better. | ||
| They're not doing better. | ||
| Crime is the worst it's ever been, but it started as of about yesterday. | ||
| It started, you see a big change, and people are feeling safe already. | ||
| I've had so many calls. | ||
| Thank you, sir. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| They were afraid to walk out. | ||
| They're not afraid anymore. | ||
| And this will get, this will be like the border. | ||
| We started off with millions and millions of people coming in from all over the world, gang members and people from jails. | ||
| They were unloading their jails into our country. | ||
| All over the world they were coming. | ||
| Drug dealers. | ||
| They came from Africa. | ||
| They came from Asia. | ||
| They came from South America, Venezuela in particular. | ||
| They were coming in. | ||
| Trendi Aragua and the toughest people you've ever seen. | ||
| And by the millions, and for the last three months, we had zero, zero, and zero. | ||
| We had zero people come in for three months. | ||
| They respect our country again. | ||
| That's the other thing. | ||
| All over the world, our country is respected again. | ||
| So I also want to thank the Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles, who's fantastic. | ||
|
unidentified
|
She's done an incredible job. | |
| And Sergio Gore for the job he's done with personnel. | ||
| Thank you very much, Sergio. | ||
| Fantastic. | ||
| In the coming months, we'll fully renovate the dated and really the entire infrastructure of the building and make the Kennedy Center a crown jewel of American arts and culture once again. | ||
| I think we'll bring it to a higher level than it ever hit. | ||
| Actually, it hit a certain level, but we're going to bring it to a higher level than it ever hit. | ||
| We have the right location, and soon we will be a crime-free area. | ||
| This is going to be a crime-free area, by the way. | ||
| You'll be able to go out. | ||
| People tell me they can't run anymore, they're just afraid. | ||
| And they'll be running again. | ||
| We're going to have a crime-free, it's a big statement because you'll, if one thing happens all year, Pam, you better be good because they'll say Trump did not fulfill this. | ||
| One person gets a little injured by somebody, they'll say Trump did not fulfill his promise. | ||
| No, we're going to be essentially crime-free. | ||
| This is going to be a beacon, and it's going to also serve as an example of what can be done. | ||
| We have to get rid of this cashless bail nonsense. | ||
| If you look at New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, which is so badly run, Los Angeles, they can't get the houses. | ||
| They can't get the people their permits to build their houses. | ||
| They're trying to rebuild the houses from the ridiculous fire that should have never allowed to have taken place. | ||
| They should have had the water coming down from the Pacific Northwest, but they didn't do that. | ||
| But they can't get the permits for the people that want to build their houses. | ||
| But I want to thank Lee Zeldon because the federal government has gotten all of their permits, which are much more difficult permits, actually, and had them literally within 30 days after the fire. | ||
| Everybody had their permit. | ||
| But you don't have the city and state permits. | ||
| They've got to get going. | ||
| The governor and the mayor have to get going. | ||
| It will just be a matter of time that we're going to do something that's going to be incredible. | ||
| We're going to use the Kennedy Center as a big focus of it, and that's the 250th anniversary celebration that we're having. | ||
| So it's 250 years. | ||
| So we have the Olympics, we have the World Cup, and we have the 250th anniversary celebration, all in this administration. | ||
| And it's an honor that we were able to not be allowed to do what we were illegally and what we were supposed to do. | ||
| And that was we had a great election in 2020. | ||
| We won the election by a lot, but it was a rigged election. | ||
| And we had to wait four years, and we waited four years. | ||
| And it's interesting because I got the Olympics and I got the World Cup. | ||
| I can't claim that I got the 250th. | ||
| That one's a big one. | ||
| But I happen to be here. | ||
| But I got the Olympics, I got the World Cup. | ||
| And I said, the shame of it is that I'm not going to be president when it happens. | ||
| And lo and behold, look what happens. | ||
| We have some bad things took place, and now I'm going to be president for the Olympics. | ||
| I'll be president for the World Cup. | ||
| And the 250th is going to be maybe more exciting than both. | ||
| It's a great celebration of our country. | ||
| We're going to be using this building for a lot of the celebration having to do with 250 years. | ||
| But as I said earlier, I'm determined to make Washington, D.C. safe, clean, and beautiful again. | ||
| It's going to take place very rapidly. | ||
| Be prepared. | ||
| And a big part of that is going to include the Kennedy Center. | ||
| So thank you very much. | ||
| And I want to thank everybody for helping us. | ||
| This is mostly the group right here. | ||
| They're young, they're smart, they're ambitious, they want my job. | ||
| Someday, one of them will probably have it. | ||
| But we have a great group of people that are putting this together, and they're also helping us with Washington, D.C. We're going to make Washington beautiful. | ||
| We're going to redo roads. | ||
| We're going to redo the medians, the pavers, and the medians all throughout the city. | ||
| We're going to take all the graffiti off. | ||
| We're going to have to remove the tents and the people that are living in our parks. | ||
| We're going to be redoing the parks, the grasses, and all. | ||
| We're going to be going to Congress for a relatively small amount of money. | ||
| And Lindsay and the Republicans are going to be approving it. | ||
| I don't know about the Democrats. | ||
| They don't approve anything. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| It's like they just don't want to vote for anything. | ||
| They've got the yips. | ||
| You know, in golf, they say the yips. |
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