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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
| Pray for our enemies because we're going to medieval on these people. | ||
| Here's how I 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've tried to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it. | ||
| It's going to happen. | ||
| And where do people like that go to share the big lie? | ||
| MAGA Media. | ||
| I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience. | ||
| Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? | ||
| If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved. | ||
|
unidentified
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Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | |
| It's Saturday, 27 December in the year of our Lord 2025. | ||
| Okay, today, as you know, the Saturday show is my favorite show of the week, and this is our last Saturday show for this year. | ||
| I want to do something a little special, so I invited one of my favorite people, the great historian Larry Schweiker, to join us. | ||
| And we're going to spend the next couple hours going through not just American history, but also how it applies to today. | ||
| I want to start off, though, because I haven't had the opportunity to do this yet. | ||
| I want to play the speech I gave at Amfest, which some people think was a little controversial. | ||
| I don't happen to think it's that controversial, but I want to break it down for you. | ||
| I'm going to ask Larry to do this with me. | ||
| So let's go ahead and go right back to last Friday at Amfest. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It was about 8 o'clock in the evening East Coast time, I think 5 or 6 o'clock there when I gave a 15 or 16 minute speech. | ||
| We're going to play its entirety. | ||
| Then I'm going to break it down when we come back. | ||
| Let's go ahead and play it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| We are at war. | ||
| You know how we know this? | ||
| You just heard Hawkins up here a few minutes ago, right? | ||
| What did she say at the very moment Charlie Kirk was assassinated at the University of Montana? | ||
| They laughed in her face, right? | ||
| Laughed in her face. | ||
|
unidentified
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And some guy goes, oh, we're at war. | |
| Charlie Kirk knew we're at war. | ||
| Every time I've spoken at any event of turning point, I always start with that because Charlie Kirk knew one thing. | ||
| He knew we were at war, and he knew we were going to be victorious if we didn't quit. | ||
| What do I mean by that? | ||
| Let's go back. | ||
| Do you understand? | ||
| For the last 10 years, there have been eight national elections. | ||
| Either primaries, off-year elections where Congress is voted on for the whole nation, or presidential elections. | ||
| We have won seven of those eight. | ||
| This is why they hated this is why they hated Charlie Kirk. | ||
| It wasn't Charlie Kirk's philosophy or even his debates. | ||
| Charlie Kirk was a tough, tough person that built a machine that you guys are dedicated to that delivered victories. | ||
| Let's be specific. | ||
| Go back to 2015. | ||
| President Trump, 15-16, wins the primary against all odds. | ||
| Then in 16, he wins a come-from-behind, you know, once-in-a-lifetime victory against Hillary Clinton. | ||
| We lost the 18 midterms because people were leaning on their rakes, leaning on their rakes, and we lost, I don't know, 35 or 40 house seats. | ||
| And Nancy Pelosi told us exactly what she was going to do. | ||
| She impeached Trump and almost brought it all down. | ||
| President Trump came back, won the primary, right, very easily. | ||
| Nobody really ran against him. | ||
| I don't think anybody ran against him. | ||
| 2020, we won the 2020 election. | ||
| Is there any dispute on that? | ||
| If you don't believe that, you don't believe a foundational element of the MAGA movement. | ||
| We won 2020. | ||
| And to show you how we won it, we picked up 14 House seats that night, 14 House seats. | ||
| Then President Trump went into the wilderness. | ||
| This is when Charlie Kirk really, I think, stepped up the most. | ||
| President Trump was sent to Mar-a-Lago. | ||
| They never thought he was coming back. | ||
| The Republican Party never thought he was coming back. | ||
| And what happened? | ||
| President Trump grinded it out. | ||
| In fact, he told us on this stage last year, right here, the first time he told anybody, when Charlie had him come out here and speak, what did he say? | ||
| He said, I had to run again because I could not let them steal an election because they're stealing the country. | ||
| And we see what Biden did. | ||
| Then we win the midterms in 22. | ||
| We picked up about 11 seats, eight net, and took the House of Representatives. | ||
| There were supposed to be more, but we got control of the House. | ||
| And then, and really the greatest come from behind ever, President Trump, turning point put him on their shoulders. | ||
| we won the greatest election in the history of the country. | ||
| In 10 years, in 10 years, a decade, you've been beaten once when we leaned on our shovels. | ||
| Charlie Kirk understood one thing. | ||
| We are at war. | ||
| It's a political war. | ||
| It's a cold civil war. | ||
| We don't want it to turn hot. | ||
| We don't need it to turn hot if we accomplish what we're supposed to accomplish. | ||
| And we have won seven of eight national elections. | ||
| The American people are with us as long as we get things done, as long as we accomplish the punchlist that Rob Snyder talked about when he walked down this stage. | ||
| That's what's incumbent upon us, and that's what the Republican establishment today, because you can already see what they're doing and trying to block President Trump. | ||
| You see this in Indianapolis. | ||
| You see this in the redistricting. | ||
| The Republican establishment think that President Trump's just a passing storm and that he's just going to fade away. | ||
| And what they're going to try to do is co-opt co-op turning point because Charlie has built it into a massive political operation that cannot be beat. | ||
| And the left knows that. | ||
| It's one of the reasons, yes, I realize we haven't gone to trial yet. | ||
| We don't know all the information. | ||
| It looks like, you know, at least the information we have out, it may be this guy, maybe not an organization back of it. | ||
| We don't know that yet because the evidence hasn't been put out. | ||
|
unidentified
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But Charlie Kirk is dead. | |
| Think about that. | ||
| The individual that's probably, I think, at his age, the greatest individual this country's produced politically, culturally, since the revolution. | ||
| Remember, all the revolution with 30? | ||
|
unidentified
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Charlie Kirk's, hell, he's 31 years old. | |
| He's been doing this since he was 18, 17 or 18. | ||
| But Charlie Kirk was a man of action. | ||
| And here's, I want to make sure that we get something straight tonight. | ||
| We have a partner's discussion. | ||
| And I want to say up front: if I hurt some feelings here, you can come and talk to me afterwards. | ||
| This whole thing that's going on the last couple days, some of the comments tonight, this is not about this specific incident. | ||
| It's not about freedom of speech or platforming or deplatforming. | ||
| They're all talking about that, and that's, you know, people are saying hurtful things to each other. | ||
| Tucker said the quiet part out loud. | ||
| This is a proxy on 28. | ||
| Now, I think it's way too early to be thinking about 28, but he's right about one thing: this is a proxy on an issue that's not freedom of speech and not are you going to get platformed or deplatformed. | ||
| This is about a situation that Charlie Kirk was probably one of the most, if not the most important person in doing and accomplishing. | ||
| And that is this concept of what I would call greater Israel and Israel first. | ||
| You can't get a better defender of Israel than Charlie Kirk. | ||
| You can't get a better defender of Israel than Steve Bannon. | ||
| At Breitbart, Adamit couldn't have a two-state solution. | ||
| In the White House, I'm the one that pushed initially hard to move the embassy to Jerusalem. | ||
|
unidentified
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At War Room, ask all the war room people here. | |
| Ask all the posse. | ||
| We always talk about it, and we're one state, not a two-state. | ||
| But that's about Israel. | ||
| It's not about greater Israel. | ||
| And it's not about Israel first. | ||
| Charlie Kirk had some foundational beliefs. | ||
| Those foundational beliefs are: number one, he's a populist nationalist. | ||
| America makes its own decisions for America. | ||
| And as a populist, the American people are the people that make those decisions. | ||
| Now, Benji Shapiro sat up here last night and he was all, you know, I'm going to, you know, it's all about the truth. | ||
| Ben, I've known you a long time, brother. | ||
| You can't handle the truth. | ||
| Let's face it, Ben Shapiro is the farthest thing from MAGA. | ||
| Let's be blunt. | ||
| He is a hardcore never Trumper. | ||
| He's a hardcore never Trumper. | ||
| In the spring of 2016, he tried to upend Breitbart. | ||
| He walked off the job, made a big deal about some incident in Mar-a-Lago with Corey Lewandowski. | ||
| He tried to turn it to Ted Cruz from Donald Trump because he hated Donald Trump. | ||
| In the general election, he barely supported Donald Trump. | ||
| The first sign of when President Trump gets sent back to Mar-a-Lago, the very first individual that jumped on the Ron DeSantis train, the Israel first train, was Ben Shapiro. | ||
| And those are the darkest days we had. | ||
| In 21 and 22, you guys were there. | ||
| He's consistently been against Trump. | ||
| And now that President Trump doesn't back the Greater Israel Project. | ||
| What is Greater Israel? | ||
| It's not about Israel itself. | ||
| It's about an expansionist Israel, an imperial Israel that Netanyahu and that crowd have thought up. | ||
| And the Israel first crowd is Ben Shapiro, Tel Aviv Mark Levin, and many others that want to put that ahead of America's interests. | ||
| Charlie Kirk fought that. | ||
| You know where Charlie Kirk fought it in the White House? | ||
| I know because I was there. | ||
| When I went back, Charlie Kirk was working with Sergio Gore, certain people around the vice president, to make sure that we didn't get sucked into a land war, a decapitation of the Iranian elites that would lead to a massive civil war that American troops would get sucked into, because that was Netanyahu's plan from the beginning. | ||
| And we know that. | ||
| The Times of Israel has published that there was no urgency to go after the nuclear weapons. | ||
| We know the fact they couldn't finish what they started. | ||
| We know for a fact, we know for a fact that they needed American Aegis, Fed missiles, patriots to defend themselves. | ||
| On day 10 of the war, they were losing, and they didn't have the offensive capability. | ||
| And I don't mean the B-2s coming in and taking out the caves. | ||
| They relied upon our 1970s technology of cruise missiles fired from submarines in the North Arabian Sea to take out the above ground. | ||
| We had to bring that war to conclusion. | ||
| And President Trump and his brilliants said, we'll do that, and we'll call it the 12-day war, and it's over. | ||
| Now, for the Israel First Crowd, they are the ones that are destroying Israel. | ||
| Today in Miami, who's negotiating with Witkoff? | ||
| It's the Turks, it's Qatar, it's the Egyptians. | ||
| Because Qatar is going to underwrite Gaza, and 2 million Palestinians are going to stay there. | ||
| And the Turks are providing on Egyptian soil called Gaza, or on Israel soil called Gaza, is going to provide the military control mechanism over UAE troops, Saudi troops, and Egyptian troops. | ||
| That's a two-state solution that has been provided because of the efforts of the Israel First Crowd. | ||
| And Charlie Kirk had one simple thing that he thought about. | ||
| Who controls America and who makes decisions for the United States of America? | ||
| And Charlie Kirk worked overtime because behind the scenes, he was a player, not just helping Sergio get all types of great people in there and vet those people, but actually talking about policy. | ||
| And part of that policy was no more foreign wars. | ||
| Charlie, absolutely believe what I believe. | ||
| The Middle East is a sideshow in Israel's a sideshow to a sideshow. | ||
| Now, voices out there that support Israel, like Laura Loomer and Rabbi Walicki and others, are coming forward and saying, look, maybe Bannon and these guys are right. | ||
| We don't want to take any more American money. | ||
| We don't have any more American control. | ||
| We want to go out and do what we want to do when we, the Israelis, feel they have to do it. | ||
| I support that 100%. | ||
| Israel needs its sovereignty. | ||
| Israel needs to be independent. | ||
| If Israel wants to take on Syria, go for it. | ||
| If Israel wants to go into Lebanon, go for it. | ||
| but not drag the United States of America into another endless war. | ||
| Ask Megyn Kelly when she comes over here. | ||
| Look, Breitbart, Shapiro called Breitbart Trump Pravda. | ||
| When he left, he called it Trump Pravda. | ||
| And he was kind of right. | ||
| We had to be. | ||
| There was no other news site that was supporting President Trump. | ||
| When poor Megan Kelly came out in that first debate and made what looks like now some innocuous questions, right, about Trump's Facebook page or his Twitter feed about Rosie O'Donnell and others, have Jack Bosovic ask her how it turned out. | ||
| We unleashed the dogs. | ||
| We were maniacs why President Trump had no backing, had no backing at Fox, had no backing in the National Review. | ||
| And in 16, that would have driven him out of the race. | ||
| So we had to be there. | ||
| But Ben Shapiro is like a cancer, and that cancer spreads. | ||
| It's a cancer and it metastasizes. | ||
| He tried to take over Breitbart, and I ran him out of there. | ||
| He tried to take over David Horowicz, who was his mentor. | ||
| Don't ask me. | ||
| Ask the guys associated with David Horowitz, what he did there. | ||
| He tried to take that over. | ||
| And mark my word, he will make a move on turning point because he's always been envious of Charlie Kirk. | ||
| This is not about speech. | ||
| It's not about deplatforming. | ||
| This is about power politics. | ||
| And what Charlie Kirk believed in to the core of his being, that America makes decisions for America, and Americans make decisions for America. | ||
| That was Charlie Kirk. | ||
| Why the hell? | ||
| Why the hell do you think they assassinate him? | ||
| Why do they put the poison all over this place? | ||
| Why they mock and ridicule? | ||
| James Carville said yesterday that Rob Reiner has done 100 times more than Charlie Kirk. | ||
| They hate Charlie Kirk because Charlie Kirk brought victories. | ||
| And with victory after victory after victory, that's when we can re-Christianize this country. | ||
| What was Charlie Kirk's lesson? | ||
| That we are a Christian nation that got off the rails. | ||
| We have to re-Christianize this country. | ||
| You are in the shadows of a giant, not just an American patriot and an American hero. | ||
| Charlie Kirk is a Christian martyr, and Charlie Kirk is a Christian saint. | ||
| That is your legacy that you take up. | ||
| The day I went into prison, the day I went into prison, we passed the show to Charlie Kirk as we did oftentimes in the three and a half years that Charlie Posobic and I had that block at Real America's Voice. | ||
| And what Charlie said, I said to Charlie, next man up. | ||
| Charlie said, I got it. | ||
| Next man up. | ||
| Are you next man up? | ||
| Are you going to fill the shoes of Charlie Kirk? | ||
| Do you have the stones to do it? | ||
| Do you have the guts to do it? | ||
| Ask yourself that because I tell you what, that's what's going to you in this room right here are going to decide whether we win in 26. | ||
| And if we don't win in 26, they're going to bring holy hell down on us. | ||
| We have to win. | ||
| Charlie Kirk knew that, and you know that. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Next man up. | ||
| Okay, welcome back. | ||
| And I want to thank our production team in Denver and my own production team here because we're doing the first part of the show a little differently. | ||
| We don't take that break up in the middle of the show. | ||
| We're going to kind of float this one. | ||
| Why did I think that was important? | ||
| Number one, a lot of this conversation and debate had gotten around the First Amendment and around platform, who's going to be platform, who's not going to be platform, who's talking to, who's putting these people on shows, et cetera. | ||
| Not that I don't think that's important. | ||
| I just don't think it's signal. | ||
| I think it's noise. | ||
| The important things, I believe, are the underlying policies that are driving the movement may be a part of people aren't coalescing around. | ||
| And I want to be very specific. | ||
| I talked about this earlier in the week on, I think it was the Tuesday, I don't think it was Christmas Eve, but the Tuesday show. | ||
| I had Rabbi Willicki in in the morning, which he talked about, you know, the situation in Syria and Rabbi Willicki and Laura Loomer, who I name-checked right there, talk about Israel's sovereignty and our independence. | ||
| Well, let's say subsequent to that, it came out in the papers that Ron Dermer, who I worked very closely with in the first Trump administration, particularly Ron was, I think he was ambassador. from Israel to the United States at the time and just a brilliant guy, also somebody who worked with us very closely on moving the embassy to Jerusalem. | ||
| He is now, it's now been announced that he's working on a strategic plan underneath Prime Minister Netanyahu, and that plan is to wait for it, draw down all American assistance, starting the MOU we have as a kind of ally, or we're not really an ally, but this kind of partnership outlined this memorandum of understanding runs out in 2028. | ||
| And there had been talk before is that, oh, they're going to do one that's going to be $100 billion and it's going to last for 50 years. | ||
| And the neocons are all upset that these populists are talking about Israel and not defense of Israel. | ||
| This is not about the defense of Israel, as I said in that speech. | ||
| This is about the Greater Israel project and people that are Israel first. | ||
| It's two totally different things. | ||
| And now you see NetYahoo's government's responding to that. | ||
| What they're doing is saying, hey, at the end of the MOU this time, instead of extending for 50 years with a, I don't know, $2 trillion deal or whatever they were talking about a couple of weeks ago, we're actually going to draw down, we want to do a memorandum of understanding that actually draws down to no American assistance. | ||
| So that as Rabbi Willicki talked about, that they can have freedom of movement in places like Syria or even Iran. | ||
| As I said before, an independent and sovereign Israel, if they want to take on Turkey and Syria, if they want to go after the Persians, as long as they're not drawing us into it, and if we're not giving them five benef a year, and that's the minimum we give them, there's all types of other support system. | ||
| But if we don't, and they're sovereign and independent, make their own decisions as they should, because they shouldn't be a protectorate of the United States. | ||
| They don't need to be a protector of the United States. | ||
| Obviously, since the interest of both countries are going to go in different directions, what do I mean by that? | ||
| Well, look, the policy right now of the U.S. government is very much that it's a two-state solution, something I fought against ever since I kind of got involved in politics. | ||
| You have a two-state solution. | ||
| Because of the overreach of the overreach, I think, of the Israel First Crowd and this Greater Israel project, which is to expand Israel out into Lebanon, into Syria, into Iraq, all the way to Iran, into Egypt and the Sinai. | ||
| And it's just not feasible, and it can't be done. | ||
| It certainly can't be done with American support because that would draw us into one conflict after the other. | ||
| Netanyahu understands this. | ||
| Now, I don't want to take credit for it. | ||
| I don't want to take credit for it. | ||
| I want to take full credit for it. | ||
| But I've been hammering this one for a while. | ||
| And people have gone out of their way, particularly the Israel First Crowd, has gone out of their way to kind of change what the conversation is really about. | ||
| This is what it's about. | ||
| And now that you have Ron Dermer, who I think is one of the smartest strategic thinkers in Israel, and now that you have Ron Dermer under the guidance of Netanyahu actually coming forward and going to put forward a proposal to say we want Israel to be independent and sovereign, I think that's a step in the right direction. | ||
| I want to bring in Larry. | ||
| Larry, Really got interested in Trump as a as kind of not just a person, but a force of history. | ||
| Was it in 2014 or 2015? | ||
| Because I remember when I was at Breitbart and then when I took over the campaign in August of 2016, you already had a pretty definitive outlook on the MAGA movement. | ||
| Give me your thoughts. | ||
| When did you really start looking at Trump as someone that you thought would actually have an impact and was speaking totally differently than the traditional Republicans that you had covered so closely? | ||
| In 2015, sometime early in 2015, I met Ted Cruz and talked to him a lot. | ||
| And at that time, I thought, and this is going to be the guy. | ||
| But after I had conversations with him, I go, no, there's something missing there. | ||
| And it was about that time that I was on vacation in Arizona and I noticed that Trump was on TV and they had to move his speech from the Arizona Biltmore Hotel, which is good, but it doesn't have a big auditorium, to the Arizona Convention Center in downtown Phoenix, which seats 10,000. | ||
| I thought, there's something to this. | ||
| You don't do this every day. | ||
| This guy must have something. | ||
| He must be saying something that people are responding to. | ||
| Now, you know as well as I do that in 206, 2006, President Bush had attempted with this gang of eight an illegal immigration reform that was going to be a basic form of amnesty. | ||
| And people revolted. | ||
| At the time, Rush Limbaugh engaged in the only request he ever made for people to call into D.C. on an issue. | ||
| And they shut that down. | ||
| But no one between that time and the end of Obama's term was talking at all about illegal immigration except Donald Trump. | ||
| And I thought, this guy gets it. | ||
| Now, if he has any other policies that are along with that one, he's going to be a force. | ||
| And by the end of 2015, I was telling everybody who would listen he was going to win the Republican nomination. | ||
| I won some famous bets that people welched on, but nevertheless, I predicted that. | ||
| And then you know, in 2016, I started to follow the voter registration patterns in about seven or eight key swing states, and they were all pointing toward a narrow Trump victory. | ||
| And so I said in my book, How Trump Won, which came out after the election, but it was written before the election, that Trump was going to win. | ||
| And I said with between 300 and 320 electoral votes, and the final was 304. | ||
| What was it about? | ||
| Because here, this is why I started off with the speech about you're going through, you go through different times in American political history where the issues, just things change, right? | ||
| The country or underlying forces. | ||
| What was it about? | ||
| Because you, and correct me if I'm wrong, you come at things very much as a classic limited government, maximum liberty, maybe not a libertarian, but small government, lower taxes, lower involvement in your life. | ||
| Conservative, which Israel was, you know, one of the central parts of the foreign policy of the Republican Party. | ||
| But you came at things in a pretty standard, pretty classical way that Ted Cruz was really in that vertical for that 15-16 primary. | ||
| Ted Cruz was the guy for that vertical, right? | ||
| He was the guy that was running as that guy, correct? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The thing is, and I've written a biography of Reagan. | ||
| Reagan, I don't think, foresaw what was going to happen with the open borders eventually with NAFTA, with that kind of stuff. | ||
| I think he really believed in the 1980s that total free trade, regardless of what our trade opponents were doing to us, that it would still carry the day. | ||
| It's the old Milton Friedman argument that free trade will win no matter what. | ||
| Well, that may be true if you can sustain yourself over a few hundred years. | ||
| But as was becoming clear by the end of the Reagan administration, there was a hollowing out of American business going overseas. | ||
| And again, Trump in mid-2015 started to talk about that in ways nobody else was. | ||
| And I said, well, yeah, I'm a free trader, but we don't have free trade with China and with much of Europe because even though they may or may not have tariffs, some did, some didn't, nevertheless, they were restricting trade on their shelves. | ||
| You couldn't just put a bag of blazed potato chips on shelf someplace. | ||
| So I began to see Trump as a transitional figure away from the classical Republican party of a strong foreign policy, a very interventionist foreign policy, and won a Republican party that didn't pay any attention at all to the lower middle class or the blue-collar, truly middle-middle class, that they were really more of an upper-middle class party. | ||
| And I saw Trump hitting all of these buttons. | ||
| And I said, well, you know, if the thesis doesn't fit the evidence, you better change your thesis. | ||
| And so I started to see Trump's value, which Lennon would never do, by the way. | ||
| I started to see Trump's value. | ||
| And I began to predict well before the election that he not only would win, but he would win fairly easily. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Hey, Larry, hang on for one second. | ||
| I want to get more into this because I want to talk about your books. | ||
| One out now about the 21st century coming out. | ||
| And it's a good way, I think, to have people collect their thoughts and think about things towards the end of the year as we get ready for what will be a quite intense year for MAGA, 2026. | ||
| Short commercial break, Larry Sweikert, the historian, co-author of the Patriots History of the United States, a blockbuster bestseller. | ||
| Capital markets are turbulent. | ||
| Find out now. | ||
| Take your phone out and text Bannon B-A-N-N-O-N at 989898. | ||
| Get the ultimate guide for investing in gold and precious metals in the age of Trump. | ||
| Short point. | ||
|
unidentified
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Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | |
| Welcome back. | ||
| In 2015, Chris Cruz was going to be that guy for the classical limited government conservatives. | ||
| And I was running Breitbart at the time, so I knew it took a lot of incoming from those as Ben Shapiro accuses me of turning Breitbart into Trump Pravda. | ||
| When did you know back in 2015? | ||
| When did you know that, hey, Trump really is? | ||
| I know it was about the Phoenix thing, which I think was the first big rally head. | ||
| I think it was right after he announced in June, late June of before the first debate that Fox had, late June of 2015. | ||
| But what did your friends, you're incredibly well known. | ||
| I've done a ton of stuff with you before where you teach at all these groups that try to bring in youth, right? | ||
| I guess you and Peter Schweitzer used to always teach you were very involved in the classical conservative side of Republican politics. | ||
| What kind of blowback did you get from people that respect you? | ||
| And plus, you're a huge name because you had done the blockbuster that I think Glenn Beck had talked about and sent it to number one. | ||
| I believe it's the most published history book in the history of the country, the Patriots history of the United States. | ||
| You were kind of a conservative celebrity. | ||
| When he became an apostate, how were you treated? | ||
| Yeah, I lost some friends, or there's a number of people I can't discuss politics with on the right. | ||
| A number of people, especially a lot of those at NRO that I used to correspond with, to me, just simply went nuts. | ||
| They went to the next step. | ||
| That's the National Review that I did a four-hour, in fact, just playing over the holidays. | ||
| I did a four-hour and one-hour segments interview with Sam Tennenhaus, the wrote the biography of Buckley. | ||
| People love. | ||
| But Buckley's National Review is not the National Review today. | ||
| In fact, in the spring and March of 16, they put up the Never Trump or Against Trump, which had all the names on the front of people that were prominent conservatives that were going to oppose Trump under any circumstances. | ||
| So national reviews to the traditional people. | ||
| A lot of people, I'm sure, on that cover were guys saying, hey, Larry, you're one of us. | ||
| What are you doing here with a populist nationalist? | ||
| You know, I had the privilege of introducing William F. Buckley at a speech in Santa Barbara, and me and the female president of the Young Republicans there. | ||
| And Buckley came on stage and he said, well, Mr. Sweigart proves that the term young intellectual conservative is not an oxymoron. | ||
| And people, of course, are flipping through their dictionaries to figure out what he meant. | ||
| But yeah, there were a number of people who I thought surely they would just look at the evidence. | ||
| And it wasn't whether or not you agreed with Trump's policies, which I did, but I was trying to convince them: look, all you have to do is look at the polling, look at the voter registration, and you'll see he's going to be the candidate. | ||
| I said this over and over in 2015. | ||
| And even when Trump took the lead there, I think it was in June or so, and never gave it up except for one two or three week period to Ben Carson in October. | ||
| He never lost the lead in the entire Republican primary the rest of that time. | ||
| And it was usually a very big lead. | ||
| And they refused to believe that he was going to be the nominee. | ||
| I said, no, easily he's going to be the nominee. | ||
| And I believed at that time most Republicans could have beaten Hillary Clinton. | ||
| But I came to change my mind and I came to understand that politics had changed a great deal from Ronald Reagan's day to Donald Trump's day. | ||
| You know, I make a point to my students that Abraham Lincoln, with his high, screechy voice and his long-winded speeches, would never have made it on radio because his voice wouldn't have been a voice for radio. | ||
| But Franklin Roosevelt had a perfect voice for radio, but he never would have made it in the age of television in the 60s or 70s because there was still a bias against handicapped people. | ||
| So Ronald Reagan was perfect for television in the 70s and 80s because he was so photogenic. | ||
| He memorized the lines easily, didn't have to use a teleprompter, really. | ||
| But I don't think Reagan would make it today because our politics have become much harder-edged, you know, elbow swinging, if you will. | ||
| It's the difference between, I don't know, the Boston Celtics of Bill Russell and the Detroit Pistons of Bill Lambert. | ||
| It's just a totally different political world that Trump was particularly attuned to navigating because he didn't mince words. | ||
| He didn't speak Washington ease. | ||
| He's told you exactly what he thinks, which I think has become an amazing strategic strength of his over time. | ||
| You know, I used to reach out to you because this is what impressed me so much. | ||
| You were a historian and a famous historian, but you had this knowledge of the country going through a change. | ||
| What are the historical forces? | ||
| Because so many people I knew at the time, the Dave Bosses, really people, close friends who were starting to become Trump people, really their ideal was Ronald Reagan. | ||
| And Trump's a lot of things, but he's not Ronald Reagan. | ||
| What were the forces at work that from the end of the kind of Reagan era in 88, not even taking the Bush, you know, Reagan's third term? | ||
| What were the forces that drove it that a guy, a populist nationalist with a celebrity with zero political experience? | ||
| And not just political experience, but at the time, he wasn't, you know, he wasn't on the Council of Foreign Relations. | ||
| He hadn't had any military experience. | ||
| He didn't really go out of his way to be try to be a public intellectual. | ||
| He was truly an entrepreneur and a business guy. | ||
| But what were the underlying forces that you said made it harder edge and made the issues different than the 15, because the Republican Party have spent billions of dollars getting each one of the candidates ready in the 15 and 16 primary. | ||
| You know, you had the libertarians with Rand Paul. | ||
| You had kind of the broader 10 people with Ben Carson. | ||
| You had the corporate people with some of the corporate candidates. | ||
| You had the Bush, you know, the Bush regime. | ||
|
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You had Marco Rubio that had kind of been pictured perfectly. | |
| Yeah, but Bobby Jindo, you had all of these. | ||
| And then Trump, what had changed in the country, the underlying historical forces? | ||
| Well, the obvious change was NAFTA and the hollowing out of American industry. | ||
| Nobody like Mitt Romney could possibly run on reindustrializing America. | ||
| They just, their heart wasn't in it. | ||
| They didn't believe it could happen. | ||
| You know, Obama said all those jobs are never coming back again. | ||
| What's he going to do? | ||
| Wave a magic wand? | ||
| Well, actually, you change a few policies and you do have a magic wand. | ||
| Trump was speaking to all of those people that had been let down both by Bush and by Obama. | ||
| And when you go through books that have traced the 2016 election, they're very clear on the number of people who voted for Obama twice and then who turned around and voted for Trump, particularly in the key swing counties of Ohio and Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania. | ||
| So there was the economic factor, but also there was a cultural factor at work. | ||
| Our society has moved now very, very fast. | ||
| The whole society is moving fast. | ||
| Our communication networks are much faster with cell phones. | ||
| And that put a premium on personality and on celebrity status, whereby you didn't have to spend five years building up a political name that people would recognize. | ||
| Trump walked into politics, even though he'd never been in politics before, as a well-known figure because he was on television so much. | ||
| And so that was a major change. | ||
| And then lastly, this idea of speaking very clearly about issues without going into, on the other hand, you know, Ronald Reagan had that great saying that he wanted to meet a one-armed economist, so he would never say, but on the other hand, and Trump would do that. | ||
| And he was coarse, and he was often profane in various ways, and he would say things that many people wouldn't say. | ||
| And that was precisely the point. | ||
| What he did say was the very stuff that average people say all the time. | ||
| And so let me segue to what just happened here over the last three months. | ||
| Over the last three months, we have seen the media, or as I like to call it, the hoax news media, consumed by the Kennedy Center renaming, by a tweet or a truth post that Trump made about Rob Reiner, and then before that about the ballroom. | ||
| Now, relatively speaking, these are utterly irrelevant things in the lives of most Americans, yet that's what not only X and Twitter and all these places were spending all their time on, talking about how horrible it was what Trump was doing. | ||
| But in the meanwhile, Trump was just getting rid of 2.5 million illegal aliens. | ||
| He basically reorganized all of Latin America except for Colombia, Venezuela, and Argentina into a kind of MAGA version of Latin America. | ||
| And he negotiated about four or five ceasefires around the world. | ||
| And my point has been that Trump now is moving at light speed and he's moving way too fast for Congress. | ||
| Congress is almost irrelevant. | ||
| They got done one bill last year, one bill. | ||
| Now, by nature, the American House and Senate going all the way back were meant to be slow. | ||
| They didn't want a lot of quick change. | ||
| So the Congress as it is now constituted is totally out of step with what Trump is doing and how fast he's moving. | ||
| And I believe, I can't prove it, but I believe that that is what is responsible for 30 House Republicans saying they'll step down and 22 House Democrats saying they'll step down. | ||
| And just yesterday, Cynthia Loomis, the senator of Wyoming, said she's not going to run, even though she was only elected in 2020 because of, and I quote, exhaustion. | ||
| And she said, I feel like a sprinter in a marathon. | ||
| That's Trump. | ||
| Is it from the historical point of view? | ||
| One thing President Trump ran against, really, as a populist nationalist, was this mindset, this, you know, Gore Vidal called it the Uniparty, I think, first back in the 60s or 70s. | ||
| But that the official Washington, D.C. has a perspective that they look at things through. | ||
| And they're Atlanticist, they're globalist, and they really are not, and they're elitist. | ||
| They're not really interested in the common working man. | ||
| You can tell this by the policies. | ||
| And they're not really interested in what the common man or woman, working class or middle class, actually think. | ||
| Why did no one pick, why was it Trump that kind of picked that up? | ||
| You know, that's a tough one. | ||
| He's always had these views. | ||
| You go back and listen to his testimony before Congress, to what he would say to Oprah Winfrey, read his books. | ||
| He's always had these views that were in many ways more aligned with the middle class and lower middle class than they ever were with the elites. | ||
| He's just sort of a blue-collar guy that happened to grow up a millionaire, which isn't unusual in American history. | ||
| We have a lot of those guys who, like Theodore Roosevelt, for a long time, was very much attuned to working class people and kind of the middle classes. | ||
| What it was that Trump saw, I think, has in fact changed over the last six or seven years. | ||
| I think when he came in, he still believed that there was a class of professional politicians that could be reasoned with, that they really did love America, and that if he just gave them the right programs, showed them how it would benefit Americans, that he would get support and his programs would sail right through. | ||
| And I think what he learned in his first term was that most of these people, not all, but most of them, are in fact there to make sure nothing ever changes. | ||
| Their goal is to keep the gravy train flowing, especially as you get like military kickbacks or whatever. | ||
| And I'm a strong defense guy, but let's not play games. | ||
|
unidentified
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A lot of these people have made it. | |
| Larry, hang on. | ||
|
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Larry, hang on. | |
| Hang on one second. | ||
|
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We're going to take a short commercial break. | |
| America's populist historian and conservative. | ||
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| Larry, that was, you know, you come across this very scholarly, you know, historian with all these kind of bestsellers, but that's a pretty radical statement you made to end that to end that segment. | ||
| You said, hey, Trump came in and he was kind of idealistic in the way that he had a bunch of politicians there, even guys in his own party, you know, the Mitchman Council Paul Ryan. | ||
| All he had to do is put forward the case of why his policies make sense and everything would be nirvana. | ||
| He didn't realize that the system is actually kind of ossified, that they're working against the interests of the American people. | ||
| And you basically implied or said, knowingly working against the interests of the American people to basically feather their own beds, increase their power, and make more money. | ||
| Do you honestly, is that your current beliefs? | ||
| And if so, given when I read your books on history, I don't come away with that you've had individual bad actors, but you didn't have systemic problems. | ||
| When did that occur to you? | ||
| It's been occurring. | ||
| You know, Eisenhower warned about the military-industrial complex for a lot of reasons. | ||
| This was one of them, that there would be feedback loops set up in which people in Congress would approve weapons systems because their portfolios had various weapons contractors in them, North, you know, general dynamics, whatever it is. | ||
| I hate to use the term corrupt, but I would say I think a majority, not all, but a majority of the actors in the House and in the Senate are in fact tied into one lobby or another in such a way so that rationally they say, well, we shouldn't allow this to happen. | ||
| That will be bad for America. | ||
| But in fact, if you look at it, they're kind of looking at what they've been used to their entire lives. | ||
| Let me go to 1995. | ||
| I see that as a pivotal moment in the minimizing and what I think will be the ultimate loss of almost all power in the House and in the Senate. | ||
| In 1995, Newt Gingrich and the class of 94, the freshman class that had all these great names in it, went up against Clinton and had a government shutdown. | ||
| And after a few months of bad media, Newt caved. | ||
| And he never had the same kind of power after that at all. | ||
| Well, what has happened since then is that Congress increasingly has been unable to force a showdown over a budget. | ||
| And either you're going to shut down the government until somebody agrees to have a budget, or you're going to have to impeach whoever is in there. | ||
| And that's not going to work because you can never convict them. | ||
| So when you get up to Obama, he spent his entire term really on Obamacare. | ||
| That was pretty much it. | ||
| When you get to Trump and his first term after the Democrats took the House, they did nothing except impeach Trump. | ||
| So you could even say today, I hate to bring this up. | ||
| I know people are going to screech, but, and I'm very optimistic about 2026, very optimistic. | ||
| But let's just say the Democrats took both the House and the Senate in 2026. | ||
| What would be the real practical outcome? | ||
| How many laws would they pass that Trump would sign? | ||
| Zero. | ||
| How many impeachments would they get through? | ||
| Because you're not going to get 67 votes in the Senate. | ||
| Zero. | ||
| So for all intents and purposes, unless Mike Johnson puts on some jets here, there wouldn't be a whole lot of difference between a Democrat Congress in 2027 and what we have now. | ||
| And that's partly. | ||
| But the investigative power and the ability to send subpoenas and slow everything down be harmful. | ||
|
unidentified
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Larry, hang on. | |
| We're going to discuss this for the whole second hour. | ||
| And I want to put your writings, because the amazing thing about you that I find is not only you're one of our best historians, that you really got Trump early and you're quite practical and pragmatic when it comes to actually understanding the basic mechanics of national politics. | ||
| Larry Sweikert's our guest. | ||
| I guess he's my co-host, not even a guest for this morning. | ||
| Our last Saturday show of the year. | ||
| An extraordinary individual, great writer. | ||
| He's got a couple of new books come out. | ||
|
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We're going to talk about all that. | |
| The right stuff is going to take us out. | ||
| Take your phone, text Bannon, B-A-N-N-O-N, 989898, the ultimate guide. | ||
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