Stephen K. Bannon and Chip Roy dissect the 2026 election, linking Trump's poll worker "army" to Jim Crow-era intimidation and Alabama's gerrymandering as "Jim Crow 2.0." They argue Supreme Court rulings enabled these voter suppression tactics while Chip Roy defends race-based maps against Democrats. The discussion shifts to inflation, which they attribute to geopolitical conflicts rather than domestic policy, with Bannon claiming Jerome Powell raised rates politically to aid Biden. Finally, they warn that premature rate cuts could trigger hyperinflation as oil prices remain volatile amid Middle East tensions and China's strategic petroleum reserve drawdowns. [Automatically generated summary]
Donald Trump is using debunked claims about quote unquote unfair elections as a pretext to send what he's now calling a large, quote, election integrity army to every state for the 2026 midterms.
Trump made that announcement in response to Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer's new effort to push back against potential election interference from Trump and Republicans.
Now, Trump didn't give specifics on who actually would be, you know, the so called army, but his comments.
Echo a strategy from Republican operatives to install trained recruits as poll workers to monitor the 2024 election.
First of all, based on what we have seen since January 20th of last year, he will leverage every single body carrying a badge and a gun to serve whatever purposes he thinks he can get away with.
We have had the attorney general, in spite of a direct federal law contravening his assertions, Say that he has no problem with ICE at polling places.
Again, Congress passed a law that was signed by a president which forbids armed federal agents from being at polling places.
And we have a really shameful history from the Jim Crow and Reconstruction eras as to why that is necessary.
Secondly, we know from his first failed coup attempt in 2020.
That he is willing to rile up a crowd like we saw on January 6th, who are willing to destroy federal property, assault police officers, and generally make a mockery of every single thing that this country is supposed to stand for.
And it's important to note he doesn't need to take over a polling place, he doesn't need to start another insurrection.
All he needs to do Is use leisure de main and lies to cast doubt on a few swing states and throw the country into chaos.
And we have seen, to get back to what we were talking about earlier, time and time again, that it is unfortunately easy for him, whether by his skill or other people's ability, to hoodwink those who want to support him.
I mean, this was the scene inside the Louisiana Statehouse last week as Republicans worked to jam through the new maps.
Protesters packing the halls demanding to be heard.
Frankly, some of the same in Alabama, where Republicans are trying to take away at least one of the two congressional districts in Alabama represented by a black lawmaker.
Protesters saying, we shall overcome outside the House chamber, some of them dragged away by security guards.
Same thing in Tennessee, where Republicans have passed new maps that break up majority black Memphis so Republicans can run the table for the whole state.
Protesters blew whistles and booed and shouted shame.
As Republican lawmakers walked in to cast their votes.
I should tell you, in Tennessee, a big slice of black residents in Memphis will now have their votes folded into a white county called Williamson County.
Williamson County literally still has a Confederate flag on their county seal.
But they'll have just the right size of a slice of black voters from Memphis to make sure they can never, with our other Memphis residents, elect a member of Congress of their choosing.
There's a reason why people are calling this Jim Crow 2.0.
This really is plainly an effort to drag us back to the post Reconstruction era after the Civil War, right?
The so called redemption of the old Confederacy, where the slave states reverted to giving black Americans zero say in their own democracy.
The Supreme Court has gotten it wrong generation after generation.
The rights we enjoy right now are not because of nine people on the Supreme Court.
It's because people fought for them.
And where the Supreme Court usually gets it wrong is when they're taking away rights, whether it's Korematsu with the internment of Japanese, whether it's Plessy versus Ferguson denying rights to African Americans, whether it's Dobbs, they got it wrong taking away rights for women to control what happens to their bodies.
And here we have again the Supreme Court taking away rights.
Equality, fair representation, and fair voting.
Doing in result, the exact same thing happened when Reconstruction fell in the 1870s.
And exactly what happened then is state legislators moved to take away rights and access and fairness and representation from black people.
The Supreme Court is effectively sending us back to an era where legislators in many of these states can effectively wipe black voter power off.
This is not about left or right.
So, the real question is, is not what the Supreme Court did, because they've done it in past generations.
It's what are we going to do as a result?
And they may have issued a decision.
It's time for us to again make history.
And we can.
Every American should see this as no longer about left or right, about right or wrong.
This race now we're having with all of these maps since the Rucho versus Common Cause decision, where the Supreme Court says, hey, yeah, partisan gerrymandering is anti-democratic, but we're not going to do anything about it.
Election has to be about those fundamental rights, not right or wrong, but will Americans have basic fundamental rights like the right to vote and the right to fair representation?
Because this race to the bottom we're on is wrong, and the desecration of the sacrifices and struggles of so many people from different races, Goodman, Cheney, Schwarner, dying in Mississippi for voting rights.
This has got to be about more than just a political election.
It's got to be about us.
Affirming our rights as past generations did when the Supreme Court tried to set us back.
Right now, the South is exhibit A for how far we still need to go as a country.
It is not surprising or shocking that the South is the one racing forward at lightning speed to strip black people of their voice, and they're doing so without hesitation or shame.
The Voting Rights Act was always what nudged us in the right direction, and that nudge was needed most.
GREATLY in the South, in the Deep South States, a former Confederacy that is not even blinking as they shamelessly strip away districts represented by honorable black public servants.
So, as we have done throughout our nation's history, the NAACP will continue to march forward in the wake of the animus and the hostility.
We will turn out in the streets and use our votes, our voices.
We will turn out in the courts, Constitution in hand, standing up.
For the rights outlined in the Reconstruction Amendments.
But most importantly, this election season, you will see turnout like you have never seen before.
It is at the ballot box where we will use our voice in the most determined fashion during this dark season.
Michael, as we know, DOJ trying to get everybody's voter rolls.
You have references to this army that they want to put out there.
And then on top of that, Michael, you now have the Washington Post drawing our attention to the fact you have a bunch of Republicans who denied the 2020.
Election results who could be governors next year.
Political figures who took leading roles in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election appear on track to win the Republican Party's nomination for governor in several of the country's biggest battleground states, including Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
What could possibly go wrong?
I remember being in Arizona and Nevada in 2022, Michael, when there were big Senate races.
And one of the big dividing lines between the Democratic and Republican candidate in those races were the Republican candidates were election deniers.
And yes, that may not have been the reason that voters went to the polls, but it was in the ether.
Part of the choice that they were making, and we're watching that choice play out again.
At the end of the day, a year from now, folks are going to be sitting back and listening to conversations like this and go, Why didn't anybody pay attention to what they said?
They were laying out the cornerstones of what was about to happen.
Donald Trump is going to steal this election.
I don't know why that's hard for folks to understand and to grasp.
He's put in place.
Early iterations of our being together, I was talking about in the last political cycle what Donald Trump was going to do in this political cycle because it was in his best interest to do so, Michael.
So it seems not just that it's in his best interests, and I slightly disagree with everybody.
I don't think this is in response to incentives, I don't think this is in response to any facts on the ground.
I'm going to be the simplistic, knuckle dragging ex FBI agent.
I think this is because they are bad people who don't care about their country.
In iota, as much as they care about themselves, and they are willing to burn down every institution we have built since the generation of the founders solely in the name of personal power.
And until everybody in America recognizes that, we're not going to stop it.
Rule of law is fundamentally under attack.
And I know a lot of people who have to win elections or who have appointed positions will disagree with me, but arguing right now about anything other than the rule of law.
Is like worrying about your window treatments when your house is burning down.
There are bigger problems.
If we don't save our institutions, if we don't save our democratic processes, issues like affordability, climate change, international relations, they're not going to matter at all.
A mouthpiece for the FBI, one of the most corrupt.
Institutions in this country, the deep state, really starting to get quite worried about the army we're putting together of grassroots people that, yes, will be guarding the ballot boxes this November.
Sorry if you don't like that, Michael Steele, Tim Miller, all you Nicole Wallace Republicans.
Think about that.
They ran the Republican Party.
That's what a joke the Republican Party is.
Chip Roy joins us now.
Chip, defense of the cost.
This is what I failed to get.
The Supreme Court 6 3 upheld the constitutional order.
This is clearly, these DEI districts are rabidly unconstitutional.
You're running for the Attorney General of Texas.
You're a constitutional expert.
You're one of the consciences in the House right now on the Constitution.
What doesn't the left get about we have to defend the constitutional order and that these districts are totally and completely unconstitutional?
Get that the Constitution is what controls because all they care about is power.
They say things like the rule of law, like in that last clip.
The fact of the matter is, the rule of law here would actually suggest that having race based gerrymandering is the problem.
In fact, Clarence Thomas said it better than any of the other justices, as usual, when he said Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act should have nothing to do with districting.
We've been living under that for 60 years, and we've been creating race based districts contrary to the Constitution of the United States.
And you'd heard the complaints about Tennessee that, oh my gosh, what's happening?
A white guy, an old white guy, Steve Cohen, Is the representative for that supposedly black center district out of Memphis?
They don't care about anything but power.
The fact is, if you go back 20 years ago, you will remember this.
Some of us, a very small group of us, were instrumental in stopping the Bush nomination of Harriet Myers.
Now, I wish her well.
She's a nice lady, but she was not prepared to be a Supreme Court justice.
It took some of us throwing down, freezing the Senate Judiciary Committee when I was a lawyer on the Judiciary Committee.
And then giving it time, and a few days later, Harriet was removed, and we got Sam Alito.
Now, imagine how things would be different over the last 20 years if we hadn't done that.
Leadership matters.
In the Voting Rights Act, I was filing minority views laying out the unconstitutionality of the Voting Rights Act 20 years ago.
We knew Section 5 was unconstitutional, which bore out in 2012 in the Supreme Court opinion, saying you can't use 50 year old data to make states have to go pre clear with the Department of Justice.
Now, finally, the court.
Has taken race based gerrymandering out of our maps.
Now Democrats are flipping out because we added four seats, five seats in Texas.
DeSantis added four in Florida.
Now we got one in Tennessee.
We're hopefully going to get a few more from other states.
Virginia's Supreme Court did the right thing and struck down that absurd map.
The rule of law is actually governing.
The people should be able to choose their representatives in a Republican form of government.
South Carolina elected Tim Scott.
They are worried about leftist Marxist power, not blacks being discriminated against.
You remember, we had just had the Chief Justice Roberts.
We had two openings.
It was kind of chaos.
And some of us just said, look, we spent our whole legal careers trying to fight for this moment to have a Supreme Court that will actually do the right thing.
And now you're going to roll the dice with someone who's unproven and that we believe wouldn't be that solid.
So we had to go freeze out the Judiciary Committee members.
We, as staffers, as lawyers, say, guys, stop.
Wait and go sit down, look at a record.
Do not pledge your vote.
Do not put it out publicly.
And we basically ran a secret campaign for about a week.
Actually, it became not so secret, so much so that the Bush team had to come down and have a meeting with just us as staffers trying to convince us.
And we just lit into him.
So, what Supreme Court case has she ever been a part of?
What would give us anything to believe that she would be a rock star like Scalia or Thomas?
And the answer was nothing.
So, at the end of the day, President Bush thankfully pulled her name because, again, I'm not trying to disparage her.
She's a really, really fantastic human being, but just did not have any business to be on the Supreme Court.
Sam Alito was the right choice.
We've gotten numerous great opinions because of Sam Alito, a great guy on law enforcement, a great guy on the Fourth Amendment and on our rights, a great guy on obviously getting the right opinion on Roe versus Wade.
And now this opinion on the ridiculousness of the Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, and it should not be race based.
And the court and the country is better off for having Sam Alito.
It's one of the things I'm most proud of.
Leadership matters when you have to set the stage and look down the table.
You know, yet, whether it was the speaker's fight, remember, three and a half years ago, Steve.
We wouldn't have gotten the big, beautiful bill.
We wouldn't have gotten a lot of the reforms.
We wouldn't be standing alongside President Trump the same way if we hadn't picked that fight three and a half years ago in the 20 in the Freedom Caucus, who led.
I'm still doing my day job in Congress, burning both ends of the candle.
The Deal Death, Face Death Act now would make sure that if you're a drug dealer pushing fentanyl and killing our kids, you can face the death penalty under federal law.
We need to be stronger.
We need to be much more forceful on these.
We need, by the way, to codify what the president is doing at the border, and we haven't done that yet.
There are a lot of things we need to do.
We need to get rid of the kill switch.
We need to stop the central bank digital currency.
We need to reform FISA to secure our rights.
Look, I'm doing everything I can in Congress to push Congress to the right to back up what the president ran on, defend the president of the United States, and get things done right.
But in Texas, we've got to have an attorney general who, no matter who's in the White House, will stand up and defend the greatest state and the greatest country in the history of the world.
If we lose Texas, we lose it all.
Look, my family came here in 1853.
The people who came here and built Texas, they built Texas for freedom.
They built Texas so that we could come here, live free, act out our faith in God, and carry out and live our lives according to the dictates of our conscience.
And now, Texas is often too often for sale, for sale to the highest bidder, for sale to big corporations coming in and putting data centers wherever they want without regard to water or without regard to electricity and what's happening on our grid.
Too often for sale to the highest bidder who wants to come in and use their powerful lobby interest in the Austin swamp, which is every bit as bad as the DC swamp.
The Austin swamp fears Chip Roy.
The leftists and the Marxists fear Chip Roy.
So much so that there's a California PAC running a million dollars of ads against me, not my opponent, because I delivered repeal of the Green New Scam subsidies alongside President Trump in the big, beautiful bill.
There's a lot of lies being told by my opponent who has unlimited funds and resources.
Those lies are because he has nothing else to run on.
Those lies are because he's not a real lawyer.
He's never been in court.
He's never stood up and prosecuted a criminal.
I've done all of those things.
And look, I know some of your audience and some people have disagreed with me along the line.
That's okay.
You know, I'm going to fight and stand up for you, that I'm going to fight and stand up for the Constitution.
You know what you're going to get someone who's fearlessly going to go into the Austin swamp and say Texas is not for sale.
Steve, if we lose Texas, where else do we get to go?
We cannot turn Texas over to open borders, to criminals, to Marxists, and importantly, to the Islamists who are attacking our state and building mosques.
I was standing up and saying this publicly long before anyone else was.
Two years ago, I took to the floor.
Charlie Kirk called me and said, Thank you.
I called him to thank him for his speech in Oxford.
And the last conversation I had with Charlie was that we don't get it.
And if we don't stop Islam, there is no Texas.
There is no America.
We've got to stop the March of Islam.
We've got to stop the Marxists.
We've got to stop the corporatists.
We've got to stand up for the hardworking middle class family getting screwed over by the powerful interests.
What do you think the defining issue, this issue about Mays Middleton's lack of experience as a lawyer in courts, managing lawyers?
Is it issues that define it?
Because, you know, these state AGs are so important.
Paxton has raised the profile of Texas and the Texas Attorney General to be one of the most important elective offices in the country because of Ken Paxton's leadership.
And this is why it's such a huge fight between the grassroots for Paxton and Cornyn right now, trying to replace a sitting U.S. Senator.
Because this is because of Ken's actions over the last, you know, longer than that, but definitely since January of 2021, when he really stood in the breach.
When no one else would.
What do you think is the defining issue that people really got to think about?
As now we, I guess early voting starts Monday.
And then I think the 26th is when actually we vote in Texas.
What, when people go to the polls on election day, what do you think the defining issues are?
He spent $300,000 backing an opponent to Ken Paxton in the last primary, literally, well over half a million dollars across multiple candidates trying to take down Ken Paxton.
The fact is, my opponent is a swamp creature.
The swamp creatures in Austin are rallying around him.
And the defining issue really is who do you trust to be your lawyer as a Texan?
Who do you trust to be your lawyer to fight the key issues the Islamification of Texas, the Marxists and the radicals putting criminals on our streets and trying to, you know, put DAs and judges in place that will endanger our people?
Somebody who will stand up to secure the border if we have, God forbid, a Democrat, a Biden, Majorca situation again, who will declare an invasion and stand up and fight.
And the last and important one, as I mentioned before, stand up to the corporations and the boardrooms coming in, buying up our local hospitals.
Putting data centers wherever they want without regard to Texans' interests, buying up our ranches and our meat processing facilities, buying up all of our great lands, farmlands, and selling them to the highest bidder, buying up housing stock.
I know that's something of interest to President Trump.
There's been a lot of attacks against me, Steve.
You and I haven't always agreed.
I understand.
But when you put yourself in the cauldron and you stand up and fight for what you believe in in the Constitution, then you're going to take some arrows.
But I'm the guy that you can trust to put in front of a freight train.
And that freight train are a bunch of Marxists and Islamists who want to take Texas away from us.
Who do you want there?
Mays Middleton, who inherited hundreds of millions of dollars and is spending it to buy the election so he can be governor?
Or a guy who wants to be the attorney general, who's been in court and has taken arrows to fight for this country and the state of Texas?
That's what I think the election is going to be about over the next two weeks.
Well, look, I think they just need to stand up directly behind what the Supreme Court laid out.
I don't think it's actually that vague.
It was a strong six to three opinion.
I think they need to create maps that reflect the values of the people of Texas.
Make sure, I mean, well, in my case, Texas, the people of their home state, and say, we're going to have maps here that reflect the people, and we're going to elect the best people.
If you're in South Carolina, you stand up on the rooftops and you say, whether you support him or not, Tim Scott is a black candidate who has won statewide in South Carolina.
You're telling me we have to go draw specific maps?
That doesn't make any sense.
Wesley Hunt has been talking about this.
Other black members of the Republican Conference, Byron Donalds has been good on this, talking about the fact that they ran as conservatives.
People who support the America First agenda, and that they don't need some special lines to represent the people.
And what we've been doing is destroying, destroying the greatness of Black American culture by allowing the radical left to co op it.
That's why President Trump is doing so well with Black Americans and with Hispanic Americans.
They're tired of the crap.
They want to live free.
They want to live secure.
They want to live according to their values.
They don't like the March of Islam either.
Speak to people where they are.
Like we're standing up for hardworking Americans, not the ruling class.
We're not standing up for what the radical leftists want.
We're trying to defend them.
If I'm Attorney General, I'm going straight to the people.
I'm standing behind the Supreme Court.
I'm talking about Clarence Thomas growing up in Savannah, in the poorest of poor areas.
I'm quoting his great book about what it took to grow up in that area and love this country and stand up and now be the greatest Supreme Court justice in the history of this country, a proud American who happens to be black.
Everybody, good morning, Congressman Barrymore, getting ready to fly back to D.C. You know, I was a member of Congress in Alabama that lost his seat because they drew districts based on race.
And the Livingston map was the map that got thrown out.
So last week, in light of what happened in Louisiana, our legislature went into a special session and adopted a map they had already drawn.
It was my understanding that that was the only map we had time to get together.
But with the Supreme Court lifting the injunction yesterday and talking to some people that I know, there might be an opportunity for time to go in and draw, have another special session and go in and draw a 7-0 map.
And if that's the case, I'd encourage Governor Ivey and the legislature to do that.
When they were in session last week, I was talking to some of my friends.
I'm like, if we can get to 7-0, let's get to 7-0.
But with the Supreme Court lifting the injunction as soon as they did, as quick as they did, on the hills of our legislature drawing those maps.
There might be enough time.
So I would encourage my guys, my friends in Montgomery, Kay Ivey, the governor, and the members if we can get a 7 0 map, let's do it.
Yeah, I think it was around like 10 p.m., 10 30 people last night.
I saw he put up a post that just said, you know, this is great news about the Supreme Court.
We'll get a 6 1 map, and maybe someday down the road, we'll get a 7 0.
And I just lost it.
I'm like, someday down the road is now.
That's today.
Not someday down the road, not 2028, not 2030, not 2032.
We want the 7 0 map right now.
And so then woke up this morning and he'd put up that video clarifying, which I'm glad because Barry Moore is, you know, a congressman, a pretty good MAGA congressman.
He has the endorsement of President Trump in this Senate race.
And so I was like, wait a minute.
You're the Trump Ador's candidate calling for a 6 1 map.
The Supreme Court has shut down these unconstitutional power grabs, and it is now time for Republican states to act.
President Trump has made his expectations unmistakable.
There is no more time for hesitation or half measures.
South Carolina must move with speed and determination to draw maps rooted in the Constitution, not on identity politics or left wing social engineering.
We have both the duty and the opportunity to maximize our conservative stronghold and ensure our people receive the representation they deserve, grounded in faith, freedom, family values, safe communities, and economic prosperity.
This fight is a straightforward, fair election versus Democrat manipulation.
It is the same battle President Trump has led from the beginning no more delays, no more excuses, no more indifference to activist courts.
We must finish this redistricting work now by any means necessary.
The integrity of our elections and the future of our state demands nothing less.
I look forward to continuing our work to getting this done, and I thank you for your time.
She showed up unexpectedly at the judiciary hearing this morning.
And she was one of the people I was on the phone with late last night.
She's been calling state senators, everyone in her state, saying, Get on board.
The president gave us a mandate.
Let's get this done.
It's good for the state.
Then she woke up early this morning, showed up at the House judiciary hearing and got in line to speak.
And I thought she gave a very articulate, smart, strong speech that laid out exactly what is at stake and why South Carolina should not delay and they need to move forward now.
And so I'm very proud of Pamela Evitt for that.
And right now, that judiciary hearing is still going on.
And then we'll move over to the Senate, who is kind of where we think there's some more problematic actors.
You've got all types of people making phone calls to these people.
The White House political office has been absolutely amazing.
You know, President Trump has been amazing.
He called the Speaker of the House, he called the Senate president there, which to me is frustrating.
I mean, President Trump is busy enough.
You shouldn't have to be cold calling state senators and state House members in South Carolina to say, do what everyone obviously knows and what your state wants you to do and your constituents.
However, he is because President Trump plays to win.
And that's why I felt incumbent upon myself and so many others to drop what I'm doing and help get this passed because this is a priority of the president's.
And anything we can do to help the president pass his agenda, count me in.
Yes, and there are two different votes that are taking place and debates that are happening today.
One has to do with the actual moving of the primary.
There were some discussions about moving in South Carolina.
You have the governor's race on the ballot, attorney general's race.
You've got also, you know, the congressional races.
So you have a mix of state.
You've got the Senate race, mix of statewide.
And so I think what they were going to move all of them to August if they proceeded with this.
Now I believe that the decision that is more likely is that they'll proceed in June.
With the statewide elections and others, and they will only move the primaries for the congressional races, and that would be moved to a date in mid August.
So that's one debate that the Senate is having right now.
The House is debating the actual merits of the map, and then both of them will have to come into conference, pass both, and you have to have two thirds vote.
So that's also why the bar is quite high.
And so in South Carolina, in the House, we we have that, I think, pretty firmly.
The state Senate, you need there's 34 Republican state senators.
We need 30 of them.
And we're pretty close.
But there's a few.
I will say that these holdouts, I lived in South Carolina for a long time.
I've done a lot of politics there.
You know, just sending really mean or nasty tweets or emails or calls is not the way to move these guys.
I would encourage you if you live in South Carolina, then you should call them when we put these numbers up or email them and detail why you want your representative to do this.
That is the type of outreach I believe that really will work with these last few holdouts.
In the next couple of days, to have the ability to have a special session, because doesn't the regular session of the South Carolina legislature end this Friday?
And so there's a signed die agreement that has to come in.
And this is why some people got mad at Governor McMaster.
I'm like, hey, McMaster is like the most MAGA governor.
Again, he was the first statewide elected official to endorse Donald Trump all the way back in 2015.
The governor has the ability to call a special session, he does not have the ability to set the agenda of that special session, which is why they are trying to put into the agenda of the sign to do redistricting and moving the primaries.
Because as soon as that passes, that's what they're doing now, then the governor can call a special session, and then that will already be put in as to what they have to address in the special session.
So, it's very technical.
It's a little bit confusing, but that's why you haven't seen McMaster out there and just yelling about this.
There's limits to the power that the governor has in South Carolina.
And so he is calling for them to get this done.
And then he will call that special session as long as they set the agenda that includes redistricting.
No, I mean, Louisiana, it's still, you know, Louisiana and Alabama are going back and forth on if they're going to go for a clean sweep of all Republican seats or leave one of each.
I'm doing everything I can to.
To encourage those folks there.
So, really, there's one, two, three, four, five.
There's six seats still on the table two in Alabama, two in Louisiana, and then one in South Carolina, one in Mississippi.
Mississippi is also tricky.
Now, there was a good ruling yesterday that allowed Mississippi to redistrict.
Their special session is on May 20th.
Their complicating factors, their primaries already happened in March.
So, you know, you just have to weigh that.
I think they should push forward.
I think this is unbelievably important.
There is nothing more important than our sacred vote.
And, but it's, I just don't have tons.
I think it's a 30% chance maybe Mississippi's able to do that.
Yeah, that's the difference between having a Speaker Hockeyn Jeffries or not.
And if there's a Speaker Hockeyn Jeffries, it's the difference of President Trump and his family.
And his allies being tied up in house oversight investigations for two years, a complete stalling and derailing of his agenda, passing it through the house.
It is a massive difference.
That's where I'm like, I don't understand just the passiveness of like, oh, we'll go get it next time.
No, the time again is now.
What the like, we need these seats right now.
We should fight for every single seat.
The national Republicans have no problem spending 10, 20, 30 million dollars on these house seats.
And here I am staring at this, being like, this cost you.
Nothing, and right now it just costs having the will, determination and you know uh, fight in you to get this done, and so that has been what the earlier challenge was.
That's why I think the WAR AND Posse, everyone we started to get so loud of this two weeks as soon as that ruling came out.
We were the first ones out, and that really really, really has mattered.
Or else I think a lot of states would have done what Georgia did, which was just take the easy you know easy road out and say I will deal with this next cycle.
Price index hitting the wires up six tenths is the headline number.
That's exactly what we were expecting.
It follows up nine tenths up to this point.
Still unrevised.
That up nine tenths was the warmest inflation on a month over month headline basis since June of 22.
Now the six tenths backtracks it a bit, brings us to Feb when it was up.
Three tenths.
If we strip out the all important food and energy, a little warmer than expected, up four tenths, double the rear view mirror, and that would equal where we were in Jan of 25 to find a hotter number here going to April of 23.
Now, if we look at a year over year perspective, 3.8%, a little warmer than expected, half a percent.
The bad news is that year over year, the number is 3.8.
They're expecting 3.7.
It's on an upward trajectory, Steve, as we expected, because energy prices are going higher and they continue to drag everything up with it food, everything goes with energy prices.
Not a horrible number, but let's put in perspective that the Fed targets 2% inflation, where they would like the economy to grow and still be inflated.
So you don't want no growth and no inflation.
You want good growth and some inflation.
It helps.
Prop up the growth side of the equation.
The bad news is wrong trajectory.
And I would say there's something interesting playing out here.
At 3.8% year over year, look, everyone can play this game of let's strip out food and energy, but that's insane.
Everyone eats every day and uses energy every day.
So you have to look at the main number, the headline number, CPI, 3.8.
The Fed will be in a bind, in a corner, so to speak.
Warsh cannot lower rates with rates rising and at 3.8%.
This makes it very difficult for Warsh, and his confirmation is pushing through the June availability.
Why do you believe, given your experience in the pits of trading, why it will be highly unlikely that Warsh will be able to have the flexibility to cut rates in June?
Number one, the Fed is supposed to be an independent agency, independent of politics, independent certainly of the White House.
What happened with Jerome Powell over the Biden years, the Bidenomics years, he failed to get in front of inflation.
He let rates hold during that big massive rise in inflation.
Trump gave Joe Biden 1.4% inflation by middle of his term, 2022 or so.
He had jacked it up to 9.3%.
So, and in that period, the Fed never raised rates to slow the economy down.
And we took him to the woodshed for that.
I believe Powell is playing politics.
He was trying to give Joe Biden some wind in the sails to try and maybe look towards a reelection.
He was a political Fed chairman.
If Warsh does the same thing, they will just destroy him.
He's not, if he wants a job more than 30 months, which is the extent of Trump's term, he should be an independent Fed governor and not a governor, but chairman.
He has the willpower, the power to move rates.
He needs to hold.
Here's the silver lining is that if it were still Jerome Powell, there's no question in my mind, Stephen K. Bannon, that we would be raising rates immediately because Powell is a politician, not necessarily a monetary policy person.
He'll be raising.
Now, should he or not?
Maybe in a true, really independent manner.
Yes, maybe he would raise a quarter a little bit just to ease the inflation.
The reality is, this isn't price inflation.
This isn't.
Things are costing more here in America.
This is a geopolitical inflation rise.
So maybe just a quarter, but certainly I don't see a rate, I don't see him dropping rates before, likely before the end of the year, or he risks hyperinflation.
That would just take Republicans out of the economy.
Well, so there's an interesting theory floating around, certainly the oil patch and others, that the reason why oil isn't $140 a barrel right now, and it could be given that we've already taken a billion barrels of oil off the world markets.
Granted, we're doing fine here, so to speak, within relative terms to the rest of the world.
But a lot of people are now floating this idea that the U.S., as you know, we've been talking about our massive exports in the U.S., we're shipping out about 14 million.
Barrels a day.
That's about four or five million barrels higher than normal.
And that may be some sort of concerted effort with shipping more barrels to the world market because we have them.
And China has somehow reduced their pull on global oil markets by about five million barrels a day.
And they're draining their own SPR.
So there are those that think that this meeting may be some sort of confirmation of what the global oil market is doing.
We're seeing the United States putting more oil on the market, China pulling less oil off the market.
It's kind of regulated.
Given this situation, this is the largest draw in global oil in the history of the world, ever, ever, at now a billion barrels.
And it hasn't slowed down.
The strait is still closed.
Three vessels made it through with oil yesterday in the last 24 hours.
Six total, three of them had oil.
That's not enough to kind of slow down this upward rise in prices.
Can the United States and China, maybe China, pull back on their pull and maybe we push a little bit out there to regulate prices until we get some sort of deal or ceasefire?
Trump's right.
Oil prices will drop like a rock when it's over.
However, he's not being quite, let's just say he's not, he's being overly optimistic to suggest that gas prices will come down.
Anytime soon, they won't.
We're kind of baked in the cake for a really, really crappy summer driving season with the price of oil and gasoline.
Probably $450 will be the low end of the price, even if things get all clear in the Middle East.