All Episodes
Previous Next
Plain Text
Feb. 6, 2025 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
49:58
20250206_steve-bannon-on-trump-2028-elon-musk-feud-jail
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|

Time Text
Tectonic Shift to Populist Nationalism 00:06:44
Make sure you understand the faith, the nuances of the faith, and understand how you can internalize the faith.
Don't come up and start lecturing people about the way things are going to be.
If you're going to do that, we're going to rip your face off.
It's been a really a tectonic plate shift to more populist nationalism.
This is why now you're seeing what we call the days of thunder.
These guys have now become what I call techno-feudalists.
In that regard, they're quite evil.
If he is evil, should he be at the right hand of the president of the United States?
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Piers, you're just wrong about Ukraine.
Unfortunately, I've been what?
I'm not.
Piers, you're 1,000% wrong on Ukraine.
A fight of two Slavic entities.
We just don't have a dog in that fight.
You were quoted as saying, maybe we go again in 2028.
Did you mean that?
Was it just a massive troll?
When Donald Trump reached the White House for the first time, Steve Bannon was credited with not only helping to put him there, but also setting the agenda for his presidency with this speech.
This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.
Well, Bannon served for seven months as the White House chief strategist, but as we know, the relationship soured.
Trump said of his former Svengali, when he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.
But Bannon never gave up on President Trump.
His war room podcast has been instrumental in reshaping the Republican agenda ahead of Trump 2.0.
So how does the original MAGA mastermind view the opening weeks of the new administration?
Well, Steve Bannon, host of the War Room, makes his uncensored debut.
I finally lured you on, Steve.
Piers, I've been wanting to come on for a long time.
I just wanted to wait for the best day, and I think this is the best time.
You know what?
It actually is the best time because it's been a fascinating eight years, really.
And you've been, you know, involved very heavily, very inside on the periphery, now back in a very influential way.
First of all, your reaction to the scale of Trump's win, were you surprised or did you feel that was coming for quite a while?
You know, Piers, when I did the morning show with you years ago in London, I think when President Trump was making his trip, you said, because, you know, our audience may not know this or seeing you tonight as we put this up, is that, you know, Piers has had a long relationship with President Trump.
You said on the air, you said, hey, I asked, I talked to Trump after the win, and I said, tell me what Bannon did.
And he says, he sent me to the right places.
And I think you saw that in more, in that right places, what it meant was that we had this theory of the case in 16 that we could pierce the blue wall, that we could go to Pennsylvania, go to Michigan, go to Wisconsin.
You know, every morning on Morning Joe, they were mocking me because they said I didn't know what I was doing.
And that's what President Trump meant, that we talked about going up there and piercing that.
And he won that.
He won that again this time.
And I think the difference is that you saw a coming together, right, of now African-American working class, 39% of African-American men voted for President Trump.
Hispanic families, the most Hispanic county in our country down at South Texas, in hard-bitten South Texas on the border is called Stark County.
97% Hispanic.
We lost it to Hillary Clinton in 16 by 60, 60 points.
We won it in 2024 by 16.
So it's been a really a tectonic plate shift to more populist nationalism.
And that's why you have, and this is why now you're seeing what we call the days of thunder.
This has been years in the making, Piers.
Ever since President Trump left, there was a hard group of people around him that got together and kind of put together the grassroots political organization, but there were also public intellectuals who came to work in different think tanks.
It's under the rubric of Project 2025.
But what you're seeing is the culmination of all that, the political and really the public policy coming together and kind of hammer blows every day as we flood the zone to basically take down the established order here in the United States.
You've been incredibly close with Donald Trump.
You've also been frozen out by Donald Trump and you're back in with Donald Trump.
People are curious about the state of your relationship now.
How would you categorize it?
Well, I think it's great.
When we say frozen out, President Trump and I did have some disagreements, but it's a little bit been mischaracterized by 17.
If you look at it, I've always had President Trump's back and really populist nationalism.
President Trump, when he left, when the 2020 election was stolen and he was forced out of the White House, they just had a core group of people that had his back.
And War Room, remember, he was the Murdoch banned him.
Rupert Murdoch sent out a memo in late January of 2021, I believe it was, says we're going to make Trump a non-person about what happened at the Capitol.
He was not live on Fox for 18 months because they're afraid he was talking about things.
So War Room, our show, the War Room posse, that kind of hardcore of the MAGA base.
You know, we started to go to work in the precinct strategy and rebuilding the political operation from the grassroots up.
And, you know, we've been totally aligned.
We've always been aligned ever since our first met him.
But he's a populist nationalist and you're seeing those policies today in what we call the days of thunder.
How often do you talk to him?
I talk to him frequently enough, but I think what I tell people is if you watch the war room, we're on for four hours a day, two in the morning, two in the afternoon.
You'll see that coming in the policies.
In fact, I could give you a very specific example about these tariffs that have come up.
And I know a big point of conversation, we said, look, part of this is an emergency about fentanyl on the border.
And he's using an emergency measure that's never been used before for tariffs, a measure about security emergencies.
But that this is really a geoeconomic and a geostrategic reshifting of the actual, the underlying business plan or business model of the United States and our national security model.
And this is much more truly what I call the golden door or, you know, charging a premium to get into the market of the United States.
And he came out, I think, on Sunday and basically tweeted out this thing that was on the show.
So I know the people around him show him a lot of clips.
He and I think, I think, exactly alike on matters of national security and economics, although he has President Trump has to balance much more than we have to in the war.
We're about as hard right as you can possibly get in the United States.
And President Trump has to balance a lot, particularly with the new money that's coming in from what I call the oligarchs.
The IRS is the largest collection agency in the world and it's just stepped up enforcement for 2025.
Balancing Oligarchs and the Base 00:11:14
If you owe back taxes or if you've unfilled returns, do not wait for the IRS to come after you.
Getting ahead of this is the smart move.
But never, never contact the IRS on your own.
Turn it over to the experts at Tax Network USA.
Why?
Because not all tax resolution companies are equal.
Tax Network USA has a preferred direct line to the IRS.
That means they know which agents to deal with and which ones to avoid.
Tax Network USA has proven strategies that are designed to settle your tax problems in your favor, whether you owe $10,000 or $10 million.
Their attorneys and negotiators have resolved a rebillion dollars in tax debt.
You can talk to one of their strategists about your case for free.
So put your IRS troubles behind you once and for all.
Call 1-800-958-1000 or visit tnusa.com forward slash peers.
That's P-I-E-R-S.
And that's tnusa.com slash peers.
Now on with the show.
Yeah, I mean, Elon Musk, he's the new first buddy, as people are calling him, and he's part of the broligarchy.
You've been pretty scathing of Mr. Musk.
I think you said he's a truly evil guy, a very bad guy.
I made it my personal thing to take this guy down before because he put money and I was prepared to tolerate it.
I'm not prepared to tolerate it anymore.
I will have Elon Musk run out of here by inauguration day.
He won't have full access to the White House.
He'll be like any other person.
Well, he's not been kicked out yet from the circle.
Do you still believe what you said?
He doesn't have full access to the White House.
They're across the street.
That's true, yeah.
But I want to give some depth this for the audience because a couple of things.
Number one, you know, the enemy, my enemy is my friend.
Elon, I have been Elon's biggest promoter, even more than even President Trump, on three big elements I think will directly relate to your audience.
Number one, he backed our play early on, just before I went to prison.
This campaign came down to two decisions, which you would appreciate, Piers.
One was what we called the MAGA base plus.
It was MAGA plus low-information, low-propensity voters that have to be dug out in a very expensive kind of ground game, plus what I call the Maha movement, the Make America Healthy Again, kind of the Bobby Kennedy, these moms, suburban moms of moms for liberty, American moms, that crowd.
Versus, as you know, Trump always has around him, people want him to moderate.
People want him to be nicer.
People want to condor.
And that was people that wanted to go after the mythical suburban mom for Trump to tone it down.
Elon came in and with his engineering mind, he backed our play.
In fact, he wrote $250 million worth of checks, which for, I know England, there's not a lot of money in elections.
In the United States, there is, but nothing like this.
When you talk about billionaires like the Edelsons putting in $100, $200 million, that's over a four-year cycle.
This was $250 million put at the point of attack on the grassroots to basically get these low-propensity voters, get people out.
He backed our play.
Then when he went around President Trump, every time you see him jumping around the stage, he's talking about canvassing, get out the vote, registering voters, that kind of core stuff of grassroots that allows you to win.
So number one, he deserves a big, you know, hat tip.
And I've said all along, what he did in the campaign, he's going to get a seat at the table, just not at the head of the table.
And that table shouldn't be in the cabinet room.
Number two was Doge.
I'm kind of the author of the Deconstruction Administrative State, as you remember back to that CPAC speech years ago.
He actually brought an element that can help energize the system, that engineering brain plus money research.
So Doge is quite important to what we want to accomplish in taking the deep state and the administrative state down.
Number three, I said, look, I've been kind of the pioneer of trying to knit together this populist nationalist movement throughout Europe.
And, you know, Nigel says, hey, if it hadn't been for Breitbart, London, and Bennon, we'd never gotten Brexit done.
And we've backed Tommy Robinson and all these guys for years and years and years.
Elon comes with the two tactical nuclear weapons of modern politics.
Unlimited money, a guy that can write a quarter of a billion dollar check and not affect his lifestyle, and the tactical weapon of a massive social media platform that he can promote who he wants to promote and crush who he wants to crush.
And I've said, there's no centrist government in all of the continent that can withstand this guy getting it back of it and having a full play.
So on those three, I'm fully supported.
Now, I'm totally against kind of his concept of brolegart.
He's a globalist.
He's a techno-feudalist.
We've got to cure him of those things.
And once we do, we'll be fine.
But you're not painting a picture of Mr. Evil.
Well, he's in many regards.
Some of the things that the Brolegarchs, particularly when you talk about the Brolegarchs, they don't believe really in this, if you look at the spectrum of kind of the debates we have, whether it's progressive left or the right, you're on a spectrum of kind of sovereignty.
And some people may be more globalists, some people or nationalists.
In the United States, we've allowed an apartheid state to be formed in Silicon Valley.
And the progressive Democrats are the ones that did this.
They made a pact years ago when the same time they made a pact with Wall Street to bail out our financial institutions after 2008 on the back of American taxpayers.
They also made a pact with Silicon Valley to really let them become a group of oligarchs and not to have to, they didn't break up the companies.
They didn't set the Justice Department on them.
They let them create an apartheid state.
They didn't do anything on pricing.
These guys have now become what I call techno-feudalist, not really on the spectrum when you have a debate in a democracy or in a constitutional republic.
In that regard, they're quite evil.
In addition, he's the leader of what is called the transhumanist movement, this transhumanist movement, this kind of dark underpinnings of this tech, of this tech revolution.
And that is the convergence of these technologies, particularly artificial intelligence and CRISPR and this, really to enhance Homo sapiens.
And Elon with Neuralink, which will chip your brain, is at the forefront of that.
So in that regard, it's quite dark and it's quite evil.
And the populist nationalists of this country are kind of binding together to make sure with the Maha movement, with the Make America Healthy Again, to make sure that we stop it.
So, I mean, if he is evil in the way you're now characterizing, should he be at the right hand of the president of the United States?
And that's what many people are asking.
He's an unelected evil presence.
It's a, well, he's not a co-president.
Look, he has influence.
He doesn't have a lot of power over the weekend.
You know, he's trying to do $2 trillion in cuts or $1 trillion in cuts.
He's kind of here and there.
He did help take down USAID, which is one of the things we fought for.
It's kind of a cutout for the CIA and for MI6.
So it's one of the things we fought for.
So he does good work at the time.
But remember, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
I don't have to be in love with every person I'm fighting with in a trench, right?
As long as they fix bayonets, the top thing.
And we're going to have huge disagreements.
But right now, we have an apparatus we have to take down, the administrative state and the deep state, plus the lords of easy money on Wall Street.
We got a long fight and a tough fight ahead of us.
He has actually been helpful in certain areas.
And in those areas, President Trump appreciates that.
And also, President Trump is trying to balance in a major industrial power all elements of it.
So, you know, he's got his hardcore, fervent, grassroots, populist national, which our show plays to the grassroots leaders, this kind of cadre.
But President Trump's going to balance it.
And President Trump gets to choose, just like in the cabinet, he gets to choose Bobby Kennedy.
He gets to choose Tulsi Gabbard.
He gets to choose Cash Battelle.
And we back those plays.
He gets to choose who the first buddy is.
You mentioned two things which resonated with me here in the UK at the moment.
Brexit, which just had its anniversary five years since it actually got implemented.
Obviously, the vote was in 2016.
I mean, I voted to remain, but I wasn't massively evangelical about it.
I was prepared for Brexit to work.
And I said, look, I definitely think we should give it time.
But here we are, five years after it started.
And honestly, the ability of even the most fervent Brexiteers to paint a positive picture of what it's actually done to help us rather than actively harm us.
I just don't see anybody out there with a convincing story to tell.
You know, I spoke to a world leader last week, very influential, who just said it makes no sense when you're competing against the United States and China and countries of this magnitude.
It makes no sense for Little England to be out there on its own.
It should be part of a EU, albeit a reformed EU, battling with the big boys rather than, you know, in this little dinghy out on his own.
Number one, I would think, look, Theresa May, the elites in England, even leading to Boris Johnson, this fifth anniversary.
And always remember, Brexit was kind of the predicate to Trump's win.
As soon as we won in England and saw that, particularly the way the working class up in the Midlands, I guess, you know, saved the Brexit vote, the same people that kind of supported Trump.
But they feel very disillusioned now, Steve.
I mean, it's like 50% of the people.
57% of the British.
Hang on, 57% of the British public in a poll last week because of the fifth anniversary said they would now vote to go back into the EU.
They would vote to stay in it.
So there's a massive shift now in public opinion from a slight majority wanting to leave to an overwhelming majority now thinking it's been a mistake.
Because the Tory elites have never implemented and what they did implement was wrong.
First of all, Teresa May and this guy, when they came over, I told the team at the time, we would sit in a room for 30 days or however long it took to cut a one-on-one trade deal to make sure it was reciprocal and fair, that England was our mother country and we were prepared to do this.
They saw at the time Brexit as a problem to be overcome, not a solution to anything.
They fought it.
Then, when Boris Johnson won the huge majority, he had a concept of Singapore on the Thames.
This is exactly what England doesn't need.
This has kind of fallen into the, you have a small version of what we have between Cambridge and the city of London.
And I would argue, if you look at the economics outside the city of London, England is kind of a third world country because they've let manufacturing atrophy.
You guys could be a manufacturing powerhouse with the skill set you have and the workers you have.
You could be a manufacturing powerhouse.
Boris Johnson's thing of sitting on the Thames plays right into the lords of easy money mentality of the city of London, just like Wall Street and Cambridge University.
You've got another Silicon Valley up there.
Now, it could be very positive if you talk about bringing back advanced manufacturing, but all it's doing is the age of algorithms, exactly like our Silicon Valley does, which is looking for foreign workers, not using domestic workers, and having industries that don't employ a lot of people.
NATO's Dangerous Primrose Path 00:10:56
If you ever executed Brexit, like I think the initial Niger Farage vision was, you're going to be a robust country and you're going to have your sovereignty.
The British are going to make decisions for the British people.
You're not going to look to Brussels.
You're not going to look to Davos.
Good God, look what's happened in Ukraine.
Do you want these people making decisions over your life?
This is a very destructive.
Well, you and I don't agree about Ukraine, to put it mildly.
I know, I know.
Genuine question.
I don't want to get into the whole thing about Ukraine.
But Piers, you're just wrong about Ukraine, unfortunately.
I've been right.
What?
I'm not.
Piers, you're 1,000% wrong on Ukraine.
I'm going to tell you.
I'm going to ask you one question.
I'm fascinated by your answer.
And I respect you, Piers, but on this one, you're just dead right now.
So much you say is smart.
In this one, you're just dead wrong.
Let me just put a picture to you, which is this.
I remember Saddam Hussein invading Kuwait, right, in 91.
And Kuwait wasn't a member of NATO.
So America had no need to get involved if it didn't want to, but it did because it was in America's interest because of oil and whatever.
And America, over about a month-long period, did a brilliant operation along with other allies to remove Saddam Hussein.
Now, I'm at a loss to understand why that was universally supported by almost every American I've ever met in my life.
They all go, yeah, absolutely.
We kicked out Saddam.
It was great, including, I would say, 100% of conservatives and Republicans.
And it's been a bizarre shift in thinking.
And I'm just genuinely curious because you're one of the people, I think, who's been influential in this.
Why is it that so many conservatives now view a Russian dictator invading a sovereign democratic European country, which for better or worse, Ukraine now is illegally invading it and taking a third of the land so far as he had taken Crimea before?
Why is it that that doesn't instinctively bring out a rage in the American right as Saddam invading Kuwait did?
And why don't you want to kick him out?
I mean, it seems to me that there's almost a thing.
We were sold a bill of goods.
Kuwait wasn't about Kuwait.
It's about Saudi Arabia and defending the monarchy.
And we were sold a bill of goods on that.
Okay.
For what happened later at 9-11 was Saudi money.
What happened is people started to wake up.
Look, I spent eight years as a naval officer, four years under Destroyer, and a lot of that time in the North Arabian Sea and Persian Gulf because of the situation in Tehran at the time with the hosts.
My daughter is a West Point grad that served and fought with the 101st airborne in Iraq after she got a...
So we have some skin in the game.
Here's the point.
I mean, my brother was an army colonel who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, as was my brother-in-law.
So I have skin in the game too.
I didn't say you didn't.
I got that.
But here's the point.
Look at World War II and World War II.
Good Lord.
Montgomery, Patton, Eisenhower, those wars in Eurasia, that part of Eurasia is not in the vital national security interest of the United States.
A fight of two Slavic entities over the Russian-speaking Donbask and Crimea is we just don't have a dog in that fight, okay?
We can't be everywhere.
You do.
It's called democracy.
It's called safeguarding freedom and democracy wherever you see it attacked.
What are you talking about?
Piers, did you not live through the first half of the 21st century protecting democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan?
No, I posted.
Hang on.
Hang on, Steve.
Steve.
Hang on, hang on.
I literally led the campaign in the UK media against the Iraq war, even though it was a Labor government and the paper that I was the editor of was the Labour supporting paper.
I literally went to war with my own Labor government at the time because I felt strongly that it was waged on a completely false premise, which it was.
But there's no false premise of what's happening in Ukraine.
Hey, Mike Baker here, host of the President's Daily Brief podcast.
If you want straight talk on national security, foreign policy, and the biggest global stories going on of the day, this is the show for you.
We publish twice a day, Monday through Friday, once in the morning, again in the afternoon.
And on the weekend, we go longer with the PDB Situation Report with excellent guests, including national security insiders and foreign policy experts.
Check us out on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Also on our YouTube channel at President's Daily Brief.
False Brown is, oh, the False Brando is exporting democracy everywhere.
Yeah, I agree.
I agree.
Look, whatever the two Slavic entities slugging out, if the EU and NATO, because this is our point, NATO has become a protectorate of the United States, not an alliance.
You guys can't put up two combat divisions because the 2% you're supposed to go to GDP.
You know, Italy's at 1.5%.
Only the UK and Poland does this.
And quite frankly, it's going, it's going to be...
Oh, a lot more of them are now doing it because of Donald Trump.
He bullied them into doing it, and quite rightly.
And I was the tip of that spear.
I'd go into those meetings and say, guys, you got to put the 2% in the middle of the money.
You were right.
The English.
Well, here's the bottom line.
The bottom line is, as I said on the eve of this war, just like Professor Murshami said, the West, Davos, Brussels, NATO, the city of London and Washington, D.C. and New York City are going to lead the Ukrainian people down a primrose path to their destruction.
And the West will fight to the last Ukrainian dies.
And it becomes uncomfortable for the West as it's becoming uncomfortable now.
They'll cut bait and say, hey, Bob's your uncle.
And here we have, according to President Trump, and I'm giving his numbers he gives all the time, there's essentially a million dead or wounded Ukrainians.
There's 750,000 dead or wounded Russians.
Ukraine looks like Dresden in 1945.
And Piers, here's the tragedy, where it was about the Eastern-speaking Russian, the Russian-speaking Eastern brothers of Donbass and Crimea.
Now the Russian army, I don't know, as you said, controls a third of the country.
And as you remember, Piers, the Russian army has a tendency not to back up where they have tanks.
So now we're going to be in a horrible, you know, a horrible negotiation.
And Piers, yesterday to the Associated Press, Zelensky just told the Associated Press, hey, of the $200 billion the Americans sent, I only got $77 billion.
So I don't even know where the rest went.
And this is one thing we said at the beginning.
And they're going to come back and they're going to come back to you, England, and say, of the 200,000-man security force, England's got to put in 50,000 troops.
We want 50,000 or 100,000 from the Americans.
And NATO put the rest.
And that's just going to be a non-starter here.
This thing's going to be a good idea.
I'll tell you what.
Here's what I think.
I actually just literally interviewed President Zelensky today before I interviewed you.
I've always liked Zelensky in a way that a lot of the American conservatives seem to hate him.
I don't quite know why, what he's done wrong, other than defend his country.
But he said to me an interesting thing about nuclear weapons, right?
If Ukraine hadn't been persuaded to give up its nuclear capability, then Putin would never have invaded them.
And he said, look, if I'm not going to get NATO membership, which Putin would probably see as a red line for him, then I want to have the firepower that deters him from attacking us again if we do a settlement.
And he said, and that should include a nuclear weapon, right?
In other words, give us back the deterrent we had, which if we'd had it, would have stopped him invading.
I thought that was a perfectly reasonable point.
We made them, we made Ukraine, led by America, made Ukraine give up its nuclear defense.
And look what happened.
Piers, if you're telling me now that we should give guys have already shot off missiles into Russia itself, you're telling me the West should give Zelensky.
Why should Ukraine fire missiles into Russia, given the number of missiles Russia's fired into Ukraine?
Tell me.
Because those missiles, those missiles were not, at least the American missiles were given under the auspices they would never be fired into Russia in those depths, because then you could trigger a broader conflict.
Look, all this fear of the Russian army.
Why shouldn't Russia have the right to do it, but Ukraine?
When I came off sea duty, when I came off sea duty and was in the Pentagon, everything was about Russia.
When I was a naval officer, all we did was hunt Russian submarines.
I was on an anti-submarine destroyer protecting a carrier battle group.
It was all about getting the Russian fast attack submarines.
In the Pentagon, it was all about deep interdiction in the North German plane to make sure we could stop the Russians from rolling across Poland into Germany.
That doesn't exist anymore.
They could barely take Kharkiv.
They haven't gotten to Kiev in three years of fighting with almost a million casualties.
So this whole thing of the Russian army being so overwhelming is, to me, just doesn't seem to be a fact on the battlefield.
And if it is, the UK and NATO ought to take it seriously.
And they're not taking it seriously now because they don't build up their military and don't have any confidence.
Well, I agree with that.
I agree with that.
This thing in Greenland should be a signal that President Trump is looking at what I call a Mahanian strategy off of Alfred Lord Mahan, the same strategy the Royal Navy had for years.
We're looking to get choke points in Greenland all the way down to Panama.
And this weekend, the Panamanians threw the Chinese out.
No one belt, one road.
They're going to essentially turn the Panama Canal over to us.
President Trump's plan geostrategically, you can see is pretty clear.
It's hemispheric defense all the way from the Arctic Circle, which is the new great game of the 21st century, the Arctic Circle, all the way down to Latin America with Bolsonaro eventually and Millay taking care of a Latin America, throw the Chinese out.
We have hemispheric defense.
And, you know, tomorrow he's going to meet with BB, and I think they're going to talk about Iron Dome.
And President Trump said Iron Dome.
So when he leaves office, he's totally secured the homeland from the Arctic all the way down into Latin America.
And then we can pick and choose.
And one thing we're not going to choose is taking on a Russian army and a Slavic entity that Montgomery and Patton and Eisenhower would tell us we're crazy even think about.
The Eurasian landmass is not our deal.
Those are wars of the 20th century.
And we lost enough people in Iraq and Afghanistan and enough money that America doesn't want to do it anymore.
The working class people that serve don't want to pay for it and they don't want to do it.
And so now NATO has got a got a big decision.
What the peace deal in Ukraine is going to be central because if you guys are going to send security forces, it's going to be enormously expensive.
And I don't know how you balance your budget given that you've already had Liz Trust government turfed out by the bond market.
Really, Richie Sunak kind of turfed out.
One of the reasons labor is upside down is they can't get an economic model that works.
And these global bond markets have taken out more than howitzers, more governments than howitzers.
And it seems to me that in the United Kingdom, we want to get very focused on an economic model that works and kind of the benefit of UK citizens instead of worrying about wars going on over between these two Slavic entities.
Law and Order vs War Fatigue 00:07:46
We will agree to disagree, Mr. Bannon, but I hear you.
I respect your view.
And I respect your view, but I just think you're wrong on this one.
Agreed.
I feel the same way about you.
So we'll move.
We'll move on.
January the 6th.
Obviously, Trump's coming and he's pardoned all 1,500.
My personal view was that which I recommend is strongly, all of them.
Right.
So that's an interesting point because I agree with JD Vance on this, that anyone who committed acts of violence against police officers, they should not be pardoned or commuted.
But the others, very good argument.
A lot of them were given way too heavy sentences, particularly those who were completely peaceful.
It just seemed to me a bit odd that Trump is always so vocal supporting police officers generally and so determined to stop people attacking police officers.
Why would he send a signal that actually, if you do, you may get a pardon?
I don't think so.
Here's why.
Let's go back to JD.
You bring up a great point.
When JD went on Fox that day, and for your audience, it was a couple of Sundays ago.
It was before the Sunday, I think, the week before the inauguration.
And he gave the same argument you gave.
He says, look, we're looking at pardons for the nonviolent, but the guys of peace.
And brother, it blew up our show and the base and Don Jr.
And guys said, no way.
It's all of them, right?
And we're law and order folks, right?
Okay.
We're law and order folks, but it's all because this was a Fed surrection.
We got to investigate.
This thing's totally rigged.
And I don't even know when you talk about police hurt.
We got to get to the bottom of that because these cases were all totally rigged.
The firestorm that came from the MAGA base, who are law and order, got President Trump's attention.
A woman named Julie Kelly, they put him in touch with her.
She walked.
She's covered these cases for four years from the courtroom.
And he made a determination: hey, I think I'm going all the way.
I believe Pierre is what triggered the whole thing.
I think came late the morning of actual inauguration day when Biden, very cowardly, started giving these pardons, not for his family, but when he pardoned J6 and the staffs, that's when I think Trump, because the pardons didn't come late in the afternoon.
I think they had two choices.
And I think Trump was always leaning to all of them.
I think he said, screw it, all of them.
And you got to remember, I went to prison for four months in a federal prison, not a camp.
The people in jail.
And I went for a principal.
I said, this was not a legitimate committee.
And the president gets to choose on executive proof who he wants.
And if I got to go to prison and they send me to prison for a misdemeanor, the first time in the history of our federal prisons, I'll do it.
And so when I'm sitting there and I hear that Benny Thompson and Liz Cheney and all these big tongue, particularly Liz Cheney and Kinzinger, who had gone out of the way to campaign and get on stage with Kamala Harris and talk, when they're begging the White House to give them blanket preemptive pardons, which never happened in our history except for Nixon on one tiny, you know, technicality, when they're begging him and the staffs, the woman who perjured herself in my trial got a pardon.
I think that's when our side just says, screw it.
And President Trump, I think, did the right thing.
Are there some bad ombres in that group?
I think you could argue that, but it's not the point.
The point is in the MAGA base who's totally law and law and order.
So nobody thinks Trump's getting soft on law and order or soft on the police.
That's another mainstream media misdirection play.
What was prison like?
I mean, take me back to your first night in prison.
Many people who go through that say it's a pretty harrowing experience.
It's such a personal experience.
And I don't want to, that's why I've never really talked about it.
Look, I will say this, at 70 years old, a federal prison is a very dangerous place.
And here's why it's a dangerous place.
The prisons are very cramped.
This prison in Danbury was for 800 people and 1,200, I think there are 1,200 inmates because of the overcrowding.
And a lot of that's from the illegal alien bad ombres they got there.
But the central thing in this warehousing, and I was in a cell block in a cell, in fact, a January 6th guy was right across from me, is that nonviolent drug dealers, and these are young men, normally in their mid-20s, Hispanic and African-American, who are not caught selling drugs, are caught in federal law in conspiracy to sell drugs.
Peers, they're getting 10, 15, and 20-year sentences.
And Danbury is a very tiny place.
And if you and I had to sit there and think the next 20 years, I'm 25 years old, next 20 years of my life, I'm not leaving a very small compound.
It would break.
And what happens is the place is flooded with drugs.
This drug, particularly called K2.
And once these guys take K2, it's out of control.
The cops can't control it.
Nobody controls it.
And so what makes it so dangerous is these prisons are flooded with drugs.
And one of the reasons they're flooded with drugs is the mental kind of breakdown of people that have long been given these long prison sentences by these judges and really don't have any rehabilitation.
This is why President Trump's first step act, quite frankly, is brilliant.
I'll be working with Jared on prison reform a lot, but I will say this.
Federal prison in the United States of America is very, very difficult and very, very dangerous.
I mean, just without going too much into it, I respect the reasons why you prefer not to, but just on a human level, you're Steve Bannon.
You were the architect of this stunning victory in 2016 for Donald Trump.
And then suddenly you're finding yourself in a grim, overcrowded prison, you know, and you're there for months.
That kind of experience, it can make or break a man.
It seems to me, I don't know you very well, but it seems to me, in a way, it kind of made you maybe a stronger individual.
I mean, I don't put words in your mouth, but how would you categorize what the experience did to you?
I considered a duty to my country.
Just like I said, I served under destroyer in my 20s in the Pacific, in the North Arabian Sea and Persian Gulf, and I'm serving here in a prison as a political prisoner.
You know, Nancy Plosi, think about it, the people that put me there, Liz Cheney, Benny Thompson, and Jack Smith's team at the prosecutors, and Nancy Plosi, I came out.
I'm more empowered.
One of the reasons I'm more empowered, you have to be so immensely focused.
Look, at 70 years old, you're just not going to get that experience.
You have to be so amazingly focused.
Are you going to end up hurt?
Are you going to end up dead?
So you got to be focused every second of every day to have your mind just totally focused.
It empowered me.
And think about it.
Nancy Pelosi has been kicked to the curb of screwing up the 2024 election.
Liz Cheney, these people beg for pardons.
Jack Smith's gone and probably going to be prosecuted.
So I came out of this empowered.
And as you know, because you've known me, the show's tougher.
The show's better.
I'm more focused on what I do with Trump because I also realize you only got so much time in this life and you got to get on with it.
So for me, outside of the fact that I had to work 12 hours a day talking to my team about making sure the show was empowering the campaign, it was a very empowering experience, dangerous but empowering if you can get through there at 70 years old.
And all the people that put me in either got pardons or are going to be prosecuted who did like Jack Smith's team for this for the criminal behavior they had.
And Nancy Pelosi has essentially been kicked to the curb by the Democratic Party of having screwed up the 2024 election.
So it's ironic, but so is life.
Hey, I'm Caitlin Becker, the host of the New York Postcast, and I've got exactly what you need to start your weekdays.
Every morning, I'll bring you the stories that matter, plus the news people actually talk about.
The juicy details in the world's politics, business, pop culture, and everything in between.
It's what you want from the New York Post wrapped up in one snappy show.
Ask your smart speaker to play the NY Postcast podcast.
Listen and subscribe on Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What was the thing other than family and friends?
The Age of Trump Arrives 00:09:48
What was the thing you miss most when you were inside?
It's interesting.
The thing you miss most in prison, in federal prison, the whole thing is to break you psychologically.
One of the ways they, there are no chairs.
You have a little plastic chair in your cell, and you can take that in the TV room, but everywhere in the chapel, the little plastic chairs for grown men.
Now, think about it.
This for a guy that's 25 years old, gonna be there for 20 years.
You have a little plastic chair, whether you go to the chapel or anywhere.
And if you go, I taught in civics, you have a little tiny school dash like you would have when you were nine years old.
The whole system of prison is to break you so you never feel comfortable.
You sleep on a steel slab with a mattress that big.
You have no pillow, no blanket.
It is literally to break you that you're never comfortable.
You're always on edge.
There's this cell block.
There's just men all over top.
If I hadn't been on a Navy destroyer, if you're just some burglar schmendrick showing up at 70 years old, I think it'd be very, very tough.
I'd had training in this in military school and on a destroyer, and I can kind of grind through things.
But everything they do, and the biggest thing you sat there, it took me a month.
I said, How is why am I so uncomfortable all the time?
I said, Wow, you can't sit anywhere.
There's no place really to sit and be comfortable.
So they do all, they play all those kinds of games.
And look, I was in a low-security prison, which is controlled moves in a cell block in a cell.
You go up, if you go up the prisons to medium security, which I think I would only live for 72 hours.
I went to medium security or U.S. penitentiary.
Forget those are gladiator schools.
That's a whole different level.
So the prison, and this is why I'm so big on prison reform with Jared because I didn't actually see the genius of what he was doing.
Our prisons in the United States have to be radically, they have to be radically changed.
We are, and the other thing, sex offenders, this is the thing.
Half the prisons are sex offenders now, and there's no rehabilitation.
If you think people are in prison right now, sex offenders are getting rehabilitated, you are wrong.
There is no programs whatsoever.
These people are warehoused for 10 to 15 years, clearly have issues, big issues.
But outside of being a you know, a child molester or somebody on a thing, they've never had a parking ticket.
I mean, it's bizarre, and they're put in with convicts.
So it's a bizarre system.
It's a dangerous system.
You're not helping people.
And quite frankly, you're not helping the country.
So it's got to be, and President Trump is kind of the leader in prison for him.
This is one of the reasons, by the way, 39% of black men voted for President Trump, the highest portion ever.
And part of our coalition going forward are Hispanics and African Americans.
So just the short version is you missed a nice comfortable chair.
I just maybe.
I just missed because you're not comfortable.
But if you don't get over the fact that you're not going to be comfortable, you're going to crack pretty quickly.
So you just got to put it by you.
Just say, hey, I'm going to do it.
I've done lots of interviews with serial killers and psychopaths and stuff in American, you know, maximum security prisons.
The feeling I get when I leave those places is always just a surge of relief.
that I'm out of there because they're very foreboding places.
We've got to wrap things up soon, Steve, but I just wanted to ask you quickly.
There's a lot of fear on the Democrat side that Donald Trump may try and run for another term.
You were quoted as saying, since the Constitution doesn't actually say consecutive, maybe we go again in 2028.
Did you mean that?
Or was that just a massive troll?
Piers, you probably know him as well as any person in global media, right?
You know Trump and you know that you can see right now these days of thunder.
I mean, he's in the moment.
This is something he's thought about a lot in those years.
The line in winter, Trump was always thinking, always thinking.
He had like the Project 2025 people, these think tanks and others.
He's here and now.
And I just, and I do believe that the Constitution is a little, some lawyers I talk is a little open to that.
I think it'd be terrific if President Trump is a candidate in 2028.
And I would work for that.
Wow.
Now, that being said, the Democratic Party, and this is, you know, him.
So he's a blunt force instrument and he's delivered blunt force trauma on the political class in our country.
The Republican, you know, the Mitch McConnell Republicans, but particularly the Democrats, they have not regrouped.
Schumer's sitting there bleeding, oh, Bannon's flood the zone thing is not going to work.
We're going to focus.
Just this weekend, they picked a head of the DNC as just some average guy from Minnesota.
They're not charging any of their policies.
And here's the reason.
The worst thing, by the way, you've reminded me, the worst thing was the way every candidate on stage for that chairmanship were asked, do you think racism and misogyny played a part in Kamala Harris losing?
And they all put their hands up.
And I was like, you guys have learned absolutely nothing.
She did not lose because of her skin color or gender.
She lost because she was utterly useless.
End.
That's it.
I rest my case.
You just said it.
And that's...
No, but they still raised it.
So he's shattered them.
And it's only going to be more shattering because there's tons of work to do.
But I just think right now, if we can figure it out, why wouldn't we?
And it can't be, look, if we get to a place that it can't happen, it can't happen.
But you know him.
He's got a head of steam right now.
When he went to Notre Dame, I sat there and go, this guy was like Charlemagne walking in with a bunch of, you know, Macron and all these characters.
That's how he is right now.
Every day's days of thunder.
We're flooding the zone.
He's getting, you know, from the Panama Canal back to Mexico just caved within 24 hours on the tariffs.
It's all happening and it's happening at a vast scale with scale, depth, and urgency.
Tell me one thing Donald Trump could do that would lose your support, that you would just distance yourself completely.
I don't think there is.
We're going to disagree a lot.
First of all, I totally disagree.
They're going to try to, I think in his tax plan, it's the reput the tax plan.
Remember, I fought that back in that, in fact, I fought that back in 17 when the Wall Street Journal went after me in June of that year when I said the taxes for the wealthy have to go up.
President Trump and I are going to disagree on taxes.
We're going to disagree on what's to do with the wealthy.
We're going to disagree with the brolegarks, disagree maybe with transhumanism.
There's a whole host of things we're not going to totally agree with.
But I don't have to agree with everything to have this guy support.
He is unique.
We've had General Washington, we had Abraham Lincoln, and we got Trump.
This is going to be referred to as the age of Trump.
We've never had anyone like this, given everything that he's had against him, given that, you know, when they turfed him out of here in January 20th of 2021, you remember this, Piers.
When he went back, the only reason McCarthy and his guys go down is make sure the line was still in the cage.
He had nothing, and he understood, this is why he had moral courage.
He understood, he made a conscious decision.
He made a conscious decision to come back and run again, understanding they were going to try to criminalize this.
I understand.
I agree.
And Jack Smith, for your audience, just Jack Smith's stuff alone, not the rest.
Just Jack Smith was 300 years in a federal prison.
The established order in our country wanted Trump to die in a federal prison.
You know the worst thing?
The moment, well, there were several moments when I knew he was going to get re-elected, but one was when I heard that they were literally going to drag him through a criminal court over an alleged one-night stand with a porn star 18 years ago.
And at that point, I was like, are you kidding?
In the history of the United States, the first president to ever get taken through a criminal trial is going to be over VAT.
I said, if that doesn't scream to everybody that this is literal lawfare, it's all it is.
It was pathetic political point scoring.
And from that moment on, actually, you saw Trump's poll numbers just go up and up and up and up.
I thought he was done, finished.
I thought it was all going to be DeSantis or whatever.
And Ron DeSantis too.
Here's the thing that's interesting.
Your old CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, you go back and look at the covers that time, they were wall to wall.
This was Trump was finished.
Trump was overnight.
I'm sitting there going, this is the greatest gift they ever gave us.
Yeah.
And that moment of when he survived the assassination attempt and he punched the air and said, fight, five, five.
I actually spoke to him a week later and I said, it's all over.
But he said, it was interesting.
He said, you know, it's four months to the election.
He said, anything can happen.
And it was the next day Joe Biden quit.
I was like, wow, he wasn't wrong.
The moral courage of coming back and doing that, understanding all the law for it was going to come, because he knew they were going to come bankruptcy and all the points are the physical courage, which not many people have, of getting off the stage to do fight, fight, fight in even in prison.
I could tell you the gangster and the gladiator merged.
This is when the young men came to him.
This is when young men who had the locality.
I totally agree.
They go, hey, I want that guy.
I agree.
And we haven't had that in this country.
That's what you're seeing here with Days of Thunder.
Well, you know, the difference is that Joe Biden physically couldn't have got back up.
I mean, right there was the stark reminder that the current commander-in-chief literally falls over quite regularly and can't get back up again.
And that was the most telling thing.
See, we're running out of time.
I just want to end with a quick fire Q ⁇ A because I've never had you on uncensored.
And there are some wonderfully wild rumors about you.
And you just want to, I want to give a quick answer to these, right?
Whether they're true or not.
Is it true you grew up in a Kennedy Democrat family?
Very true.
Yeah.
Junion Kennedy family.
Musical Taste and Cabinet Picks 00:03:28
Is it true you're an executive producer of 18 Hollywood movies from 1991 to 2016, including The Indian Runner written and directed by one of Trump's most ferocious critics, Sean Penn?
True.
How many millions, well, I know this is true, but how many millions did you get from investing in Seinfeld?
I didn't invest, but I kind of invested.
Instead of taking a cash fee, I took my fee in ownership of Seinfeld.
I don't want to say it, but it's been Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David are geniuses and the things was enormously profitable and incredible.
So you've made a ton of cash from Seinfeld.
I did very well in Seinfeld.
Not as well as those guys did.
Their well-deserved.
You know, birds or whatever Gene or?
Larry David's a genius, but Jerry Seinfeld was the business genius.
Larry David is the creative genius, extraordinary uh.
You once wrote a hip-hop musical set in the La riots.
I took Core Lanus, I took Core.
I've done Shakespeare films.
Titus Andronicus was a major motion picture.
Uh, I.
I was a company that owned uh, that did um uh, that did, uh.
A bunch of uh, including with British stars, did incredible films.
Richard Iii I did, my company did, and then I uh yeah, Richard The Third, that Great One was done.
Set in World War One between the Two Wars, was a company I own, was one of the producers and distributors of it uh, and that I always wanted to do.
Corey Lanus uh, and so I wrote with a writer uh, Corey Lanus uh, a set in the Between The Bloods And The Crypts in uh in, uh in La during the riots.
Wow yeah, that's a great idea actually.
Um finally, my favorite one of all, that Trump's use of the song Macho Man by the Village People was originally inspired by your love of the iconic gay band during your time in the NAVY.
Is that true?
That is, I am actually not a fan.
President Trump's got his own musical taste.
That comes from his, as you would know Piers, just so you know, our producer made that one up just to get your reaction.
The Studio 54 era.
No president, Trump's got eclectic taste.
Your producer got me.
No, i'm not a fan of that and not a fan although president, although Maga loves it.
Maga, it's the, I gotta say, the irony.
The irony of the guy they all call a bigot uh, actually leading America in a dance to you know, Young Man By Ymca or Macho, whatever it's called, is just hilarious.
Well, one thing, Scott Besson, who's a very close friend of mine we, he was a contributor on WAR ROOM for years, secretary of Treasury, easy senior, most openly gay man to ever have a cabinet position, a major cabinet position, as a close friend, and we pushed him so hard.
For me that doesn't matter it's, it's who you are and what you're already competent.
So we're very proud of pushing Scott Besson, who's the first openly gay, uh senior, uh cabinet member in the United States history.
So we're very proud of that.
But the village people i'm not a fan, but president Trump loves it and Maga loves it, so that's all that matters.
I, I. When he starts dancing, it's one of the most hilarious things to watch, and when he did it with the village people on stage, that was hysterical.
Uh Steve, we've run out of time.
Brilliant uh to have you on our sense, so don't leave us along next time.
I won't, Piers.
Thank you so much, brother.
Look forward to seeing you over here.
Great to see, and i'll forgive you being so wrong about you.
Crane holder for another day.
Take care.
Export Selection