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|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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Select few regarding its basic principles. | |
| It's where debates unfold, decisions are made, and the nation's course is charted. | ||
| Democracy in real time. | ||
| This is your government at work. | ||
| This is C-SPAN, giving you your democracy unfiltered. | ||
| Steve Bannon, who served in the first Trump administration, spoke about populism, trade policy, taxation, and Elon Musk during the Semaphore News 2025 World Economy Summit. | ||
| He was also critical of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. | ||
| This is about 20 minutes. | ||
| Please welcome Steve Bannon, chief strategist to the 45th President and founder and host of Bannon's War Room. | ||
| And Ben Smith, co-founder and editor-in-chief, Semaphore. | ||
| Well, thank you for joining all these globalists here at the World Economy Summit, Steve. | ||
| Honored to be here. | ||
| And I guess, you know, just to get straight to today's news, the markets are up like, I think Dow's up like a thousand points. | ||
| On the suggestion that Donald Trump is going to totally sell you out and everything you believe about decoupling from China in exchange for, you know, for keeping the trade flows going. | ||
| I mean, are the markets up too much? | ||
| Should people be selling if they believe that? | ||
|
unidentified
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It's irrelevant to me, the daily trading of the stock exchange. | |
| It's irrelevant. | ||
| The Chinese Communist Party has been at economic war with us for 20 years. | ||
| And if you look at what they've broken, they've gained the World Trade Organization most favored nation. | ||
| The cyber deal Obama cut with him in 2015. | ||
| They never lived up to. | ||
| The Hong Kong in 2019, they walked away. | ||
| President Trump worked for two years with Lighthizer, had that amazing deal, took all the seven original sins of the Chinese Communist Party economics away and integrated us into a total global economy. | ||
| And they walked away. | ||
| Lee Hu and the team walked away in 2019. | ||
| And so you've seen what's happened. | ||
| They're at war with us. | ||
| They've planned for this. | ||
| But so Donald yesterday says that he's going to be nice to them. | ||
| I mean, is there a turn here? | ||
| Because it really looks like he is walking back from this. | ||
| I don't think there's a climb down. | ||
| In fact, right when we walked in here, Caroline Levitt came in and said it's not going to be any unitary unilateral walkdown, right, to 50%. | ||
| Now, I will tell you about President Trump, he went up the escalatory ladder quickly, right, to 125 and 145. | ||
| But this is a long, tough process. | ||
| So I think people trading on this every day is just the computers or the algorithms or folks. | ||
| I think you have to see that he's bound and determined to, number one, treat this as a premium market, where if you don't bring your manufacturing back here, you're going to have to pay a premium to get to this market. | ||
| Like you buy a premium skybox at a sporting event or front row at a concert. | ||
| He sees a premium. | ||
| If you bring your manufacturing back, it's a different deal. | ||
| But this is a long, tough fight. | ||
| It's not going to be solved. | ||
| And the media is running around the market, stock market this. | ||
| It's very complicated, and we're dug in. | ||
| It's a battle between two systems. | ||
| If you think their system is going to win, you're kidding yourself. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| We're going to win this. | ||
| The American people are going to win it. | ||
| And Lao Beijing, the common man in China, is going to win it also. | ||
| The main thing I wanted to talk to you about here, actually, is taxes. | ||
| Because there's currently chatter in the Republican Party. | ||
| Trump floated this in a meeting that Congress could wind up raising taxes or maintaining higher taxes on the upper income brackets. | ||
| For this audience, for us, including perhaps a couple of people in here, In this tax bill, which is just absolute Republican kind of blasphemy. | ||
| And first of all, I'm curious, what would you like to see? | ||
| They could let the current bill expire and bring the top marginal rate back up to 39%. | ||
| There's been talk of a tax on millionaires. | ||
| There's been talk of a tax on $5 million or more in income. | ||
| And you get, I think, more credit than you deserve for having really pushed this very loudly into more credit than I deserve. | ||
| More credit than you get. | ||
| You deserve more credit than you get. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
|
unidentified
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The walls. | |
| There are many other places. | ||
| The true semaphore came out, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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I was going to say, I just got Ben Smith in the middle of the day. | |
| Other places where you get more credit than you deserve. | ||
| But this one. | ||
| But what do you, and I guess, first of all, what do you think they should do? | ||
| I think they should do what they're talking about doing, because the only thing that makes the math work, this is not about Newt Gingrich and Gerber Northcross and all these guys lighting their hair on fire about this is Bush in 92. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| Bush had a tax increase for everybody. | ||
| This is a massive tax cut for working class and middle class people. | ||
| Not only do you extend the tax cuts President Trump has, but no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on Social Security, that can lead us to other tax relief for the middle class and the working class. | ||
| You've got to remember, the entire global system rests on their shoulders. | ||
| They are the full faith and credit of the United States, not the Federal Reserve, not the SEC, not all you guys, not the hedge funds, not the government, the people of this country. | ||
| And they're beginning stiff in a system that works against them. | ||
| Remember, we've gutted out the United States from the high-paying manufacturing jobs, and yet the world system works with their security guarantee everywhere in the world, from NATO to the Middle East to the South China Sea up to Japan. | ||
| It's their kids. | ||
| So what should happen, and the only way the math works at our growth rates, and the IMF says today it's 1.8 instead of 2.5, is you extend the tax cuts for the working class and middle class. | ||
| You give them the additional tax cuts. | ||
| And the millionaires, I think President Trump's concept is the people making $1 million and above, so it's not the whole upper bracket. | ||
| They increased to 40%. | ||
| And I think the tax foundation's got up on Bloomberg right now. | ||
| That's about $400 billion over 10 years. | ||
| So it's $40 billion a year. | ||
| And I think that's just the first, and this is not President Trump's idea, but I think the carried interest has got to go away. | ||
| This whole phony thing about putting your stock in these foundations tax-free has to go away. | ||
| I actually think there should be taxes on financial transactions. | ||
| I think there's all types of populist economic policies. | ||
| And with Dick Durbin announcing he's not running again, I think you see that MAGA is going to be here for a while because I think he's basically telling you the Senate is not going to flip to the Democratic Party. | ||
| And there's a massive skepticism on the Hill that a Republican Party for generations was elected to cut taxes on every tax bracket, but a lot at the top. | ||
| That technical party was dead. | ||
| And when you talk to legislators, I mean, I think our Capitol Hill editor told me she would literally eat her hat on a Zoom call if they do this because they're so dug in. | ||
| What are you getting back? | ||
| Behind the scenes, people understand because the math doesn't work. | ||
| If you don't have massive cuts to spending, and I'm talking about discretionary spending, if you don't start the Pentagon and take a couple of hundred billion dollars off the trillion-dollar budget, if you then don't go to some of the discretionary social programs, like even a smart way to Medicaid, not to the entitlements. | ||
| But unless you do that, the math doesn't work. | ||
| Look, the first half of the year, we've already had a $1.3 trillion deficit. | ||
| I think this year for the full year is going to be $2.5 trillion. | ||
| The current system we have is not sustainable. | ||
| It's just not. | ||
| We're kidding ourselves. | ||
| You have to go to an alternative. | ||
| I think the alternative is budget cuts, and I think you incentivize the wealthy here to get their lobbyists to start getting focused on budget cuts, and it has to be tax increases on the wealthy. | ||
| And who on the hill do you think will fight for this? | ||
| Anyone? | ||
| I think we can get muster 25 or 30 people in the House, and I think a bunch of people in the Senate. | ||
| Behind closed doors, they're all saying it's logical. | ||
| Plus, if you see what's happening this week, if you take what we're doing to break up the oligarchs with the FTC suit against Facebook and what we're doing with the Justice Department on Google, if you add President Trump's tariffs and economic nationalism of bringing the jobs back, you add the tax cuts. | ||
| That is populism nationalism. | ||
| This is why our coalition grows every day. | ||
| This is so hollow of what Bernie Sanders and AOC talk about. | ||
| They run around on this, break the oligarchs up. | ||
| The Democratic Party created the oligarchy because all of those oligarchs were all progressive Democrats until 11 o'clock, 11 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on the 5th of November. | ||
| So they created it. | ||
| President Trump's coming up with a solution. | ||
| You've had everything that's happening. | ||
| You see what populism nationalism stands for. | ||
| You mentioned Newt Kingrich, who I think posted this slightly confusing thing that he had had some correspondence with Trump where he told Trump that if he raised taxes, it would be Bush 92. | ||
| And Trump said, you're right, Newt, I'm never going to do that. | ||
| What do you make of that? | ||
| I think he said, oh, that's interesting. | ||
| And maybe a thing. | ||
| He said, look, if that's the best Grover and Newt got to come with, they've lost their fastball, okay? | ||
| That's a totally different time. | ||
| We didn't have $37 trillion of debt. | ||
| We didn't have $2 to $2.5 trillion in deficits. | ||
| We're not adding a trillion dollars every 100 days. | ||
| Something's got to change and has to change fundamentally. | ||
| That's this whole tariff trade battle. | ||
| It's a fundamental reset of the geoeconomic strategy going with his reset of our geostrategic strategy of hemispheric defense. | ||
| What Trump is doing, forget World War II. | ||
| It's even more profound than that. | ||
| It's probably before the First World War. | ||
| You've had a massive change in both economic policy and a strategy coupled with a national security strategy. | ||
| And now you see the details of antitrust at the Justice Department and FTC and FCC. | ||
| You've seen economic and tax policy. | ||
| So when Newt says, Bush, Bush raised taxes on everybody, Trump is giving a massive tax cut to workers and middle class. | ||
| And that's why we won when everybody said we were going to get beaten last November. | ||
| Yeah, and we had Ferguson here earlier to talking about that. | ||
| So I guess on the other side of the ledger, in a way, on the cuts side, on the Tesla earnings call yesterday, Elon Musk said he's going to start to step away from his government work. | ||
| Have you won? | ||
| Click that butt. | ||
| It's not about personalities, right? | ||
| I do support Doge because you've got to deconstruct the administrative state. | ||
| If you want to get to deregulation, you have to deconstruct this choking administrative state that the Constitution, the founders, never thought of. | ||
| I think with Elon, what I do think we have to do, and we have to be very specific, before he leaves to go back to Tesla, although he's going to hang around part-time, we need to have an accounting. | ||
| He's questioned the integrity of the system, okay? | ||
| Like Treasury is $6.5 trillion, they can't find all this. | ||
| Social Security, IRS. | ||
| We need to have a very specific accounting of what he found as far as fraud goes and waste. | ||
| And I mean details. | ||
| Treasury's got to sign off that. | ||
| OMB's got to sign off. | ||
| And every department head, we need to know exactly what he found because he went from $2 trillion a year to $1 trillion a year to $150 billion next year with nothing this year. | ||
| None of this makes sense. | ||
| The cuts you've seen that have been announced are programmatic, whether it's USAID or DOE, that's a totally different thing. | ||
| So I think you have to do that. | ||
| And also, I think we have to have a letter of certification that not one data set or piece of data of the United States government or citizens of this country are held by anybody or any copies held except for the Trump administration and the U.S. government. | ||
| And that has to happen, I think, in the month of May. | ||
| It sounds like you don't trust him not to take data. | ||
|
unidentified
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Trust, but verify. | |
| And just more broadly, though, I mean, just to, it sounds like you're saying the Doge basically failed to find any cuts. | ||
| I think what they did in the UK. | ||
| As you say, cutting USAID, cutting some people's DOE isn't that. | ||
| They were a blunt force instrument, I think. | ||
| You've seen some layoffs, et cetera. | ||
| I think it's what the administrative state needs. | ||
| The administrative state is choking us down competitively, right? | ||
| This whole thing runs. | ||
| Read the book Abundance, not me saying this. | ||
| Klein says it. | ||
| The Democratic Party and the Administrative State became so focused on process and not on outcomes. | ||
| We can't continue like that. | ||
| So I think in that regard, he came in as a blunt force instrument against the administrative state, not so much the deep state. | ||
| Remember, our show, and we keep saying, you've got to go to the Pentagon. | ||
| You've got to go to the Pentagon. | ||
| You can't be serious. | ||
| If you're talking about waste, fraud, and abuse in our system, unless you're in the Pentagon finding out how it really operates. | ||
| And remember, they've been there 10 weeks and nothing. | ||
| Okay, nothing. | ||
| Some things happened in the Pentagon. | ||
| But not related to, well, the Chinese briefing, the war plan, but not related to, look, what they're trying to do is important for all of us. | ||
| We want to make sure we get the fraud out. | ||
| We want to make sure we get the abuse out. | ||
| We want to make sure the waste, but that's treat it like some magic wand. | ||
| It gets the hill off the hook. | ||
| The country, we don't have any easy choices anymore. | ||
| Remember when they talked about OMB where the money was and the meltdown? | ||
| Our choices narrow every day. | ||
| And here's why. | ||
| The global bond market gets a vote. | ||
| The bond market turfed out the trust government in the United Kingdom, right, by doing a Reagan-type tax cut and not giving the numbers of what it really meant. | ||
| We're not going to have those options anymore. | ||
| Not at 37 trillion when you're adding a trillion every hundred days and Scott Besson has to refinance, I don't know, $10 trillion of it. | ||
| You guys would know better. | ||
| We are narrowing our choices and our alternatives. | ||
| I don't care if it's Bernie Sanders and AOC or Donald Trump. | ||
| As a country, we have to come to a solution to this. | ||
| And what the Harvard and the colleges and the law firms show you, it's all federal money. | ||
| The reason Paul Weiss created was because of the federal money. | ||
| You're going to lose your security clearance. | ||
| You're not going to be able to work for jobs. | ||
| By the way, there's one line in there. | ||
| No client of yours is going to be eligible for federal funds. | ||
| The same thing with Harvard. | ||
| Harvard's all about federal money. | ||
| Everybody's got their snout in the trough. | ||
| And who pays for it? | ||
| The little guy. | ||
| That's why it's so frustrating. | ||
| And here's the thing. | ||
| The alternative the populist nationalists offer is an alternative that you can see the sunlit uplands. | ||
| Tons of change has to happen. | ||
| But the other alternative, I'm telling you, is this Luigi? | ||
| The look has treated like a hero. | ||
| He's treated like Robin Hood. | ||
| That should scare you to the marrow of your bones because that's the alternative. | ||
| If the system keeps going like it is, that alternative is your alternative. | ||
| We offer, the populist nationalists offer something you're not going to love, but you'll be able to live with. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| One other person I want to ask you about is Scott Besant, who you, you know, who I first, as a sometime war, Steve Bennon's war room listener, that's where I first discovered Besund. | ||
| And you've known him for a while. | ||
| You were a big supporter of his coming to the administration. | ||
| And I think he's emerged as the guy in the administration who, I know you don't care about the markets, but when he goes on TV, sometimes they don't go down. | ||
| You might care about the bond market a lot. | ||
| And I wonder he reportedly, just today reportedly had a huge, maybe physical blowout with Elon Musk in the West Wing. | ||
| What should people know about him? | ||
| First off, he's a safe pair of hands. | ||
| I've known Scott forever since I left the first term and met him over at Hong Kong at a conference. | ||
| Been very close. | ||
| He started coming on the show as a contributor a couple of years ago. | ||
| Our two guys are really Russ Vote and Scott Bessant and Peter Navarro, all were the contributors for our show because this is the type of thing. | ||
| Our show is for a blue-collar middle-class audience. | ||
| We talk a lot about capital markets. | ||
| We try to teach people how the system actually works. | ||
| That everything on cable TV, on MSNBC, and Fox is all pro-wrestling, right? | ||
| It's irrelevant. | ||
| So Bethro Wrestling. | ||
| There is currently, you know, there was some story that they're tricking Navarro to go across the street so Bessett and Lutnick can run to the West Wing. | ||
|
unidentified
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Besides having screaming that just with us, that's the type of stories that get a lot of claims. | |
| It seems to me that Besant has maybe do you think he is now the most important player on that economic team? | ||
| I mean, is he now basically the guy running the economy? | ||
| Well, not running the economy, but he's a safe pair of hands. | ||
| President Trump's a very sophisticated businessman, but Scott is a safe pair of hands that understands capital markets deeply. | ||
| He's done this for 30 years. | ||
| He has a very strong sense of what markets need to hear as far as information goes. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| Remember, the first fight, besides the H-1B visas and transhumanism, the first big fight we've had with Elon was over Elon pushed Howard Lutnick and Bannon in War Room pushed Scott Besson, and that got very nasty in Mar-a-Lago. | ||
| They leaked all kinds of stuff about Scott that was not true. | ||
| And at the time, I said, for what President Trump's trying to do on trade, on tariffs, on taxes, on national security, you're going to need a steady Eddie Iraq that the markets can sit there and go, that guy's telling me the truth. | ||
| I may not like it, but he's telling me the truth. | ||
| That's Scott Besson. | ||
| And I'll be blunt: if Howard Luttnick had been Secretary of the Treasury, it would have been an unmitigated disaster. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Unmitigated disaster. | ||
| And this is about people putting their own interests first, like Elon, versus putting the nation's interests first. | ||
| Well, thank you, Steve. | ||
| Appreciate it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| This afternoon, a discussion on the global economic situation with International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Urigeva and other international financial figures. | ||
| You can see it live at 3:15 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN, C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, or online at c-span.org. | ||
| Pope Francis is lying in state at St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican until his funeral early Saturday morning in St. Peter's Square. | ||
| President Trump and other world leaders are expected to attend. | ||
| The first pontiff from Latin America died Easter Monday at the age of 88. | ||
| Our live coverage begins Saturday morning at 4 a.m. Eastern on C-SPAN, on the C-SPAN Now app, and on our website, cspan.org. | ||
| Saturday, watch the White House Correspondents Association dinner, live on C-SPAN from the Washington Hilton Hotel. | ||
| First, join us online for exclusive red carpet arrivals at 6 p.m. Eastern, online on the C-SPAN Now app or at c-SPAN.org. | ||
| And then our live coverage of the White House Correspondents Association dinner begins at 8 p.m. Eastern. | ||
| Watch C-SPAN's live coverage of the White House Correspondents Association dinner. | ||
| Saturday, starting at 6 p.m. Eastern online, and then live on C-SPAN at 8 p.m. Eastern. | ||
| Sunday night on C-SPAN's Q&A, sports journalist Jane McManus, author of The Fast Track, discusses the rise in popularity of women's sports since the early 1970s and the challenges female athletes have faced since then. | ||
| including unequal pay and lack of media coverage. | ||
| You do have now are women who see themselves as athletes first, and they aren't looking to be pleasing to anyone else. | ||
| And I think that is where things have changed quite a bit. | ||
| They see, today's athletes see sports as their birthright, not just their brothers. |