Steve Bannon was on NPR recently (I know, right?) and it’s not getting nearly enough attention.
That’s probably because none of us watch NPR, but that’s why you have me….to catch stuff like that and post it here where people will actually see it.
You’re welcome!
It really was a fascinating interview and fascinating insight into the mind of Steve Bannon and what he thinks comes next.
Spoiler alert: I think he’s 100% right.
Basically, Bannon says we’re on a collision course not just for a Constitutional Crisis by Summer but a convergence of many different crises all hitting at once.
Think about it….
Rogue district court judges with unconstitutional nationwide injuctions.
A potentially compromised Supreme Court that won’t fix things.
Budge crisis.
Tax cuts crisis.
Tariffs.
It’s all converging and something has to give soon.
So I think Bannon is 100% right here, but especially the way he lays it out is so brilliant.
Watch here or scroll down for the full transcript that I’ve posted down below:
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Steve Inskeep:
Just before President Trump concluded his first 100 days in office, we visited Stephen K. Bannon. He’s a longtime Trump adviser and supporter who backed Trump’s first campaign in 2016 and briefly served with him in the White House.
We found Bannon in the War Room, which is the name of the cluttered podcast studio where he produces a daily video stream supporting his own brand of populist politics. We talked about Trump’s first 100 days in office. We talked about tax rates for the wealthy.
Bannon says he supports the working class. And we also talked about a constitutional crisis that Bannon says he foresees. Let’s watch.
Steve Bannon:
You have to look at this as a revolution. Because it is a revolution. It’s a revolution about America’s role in the world, our position geopolitically, the global commercial relationships, plus the administrative state and how the country’s governed.
And if you look at that—the various verticals we look at—he’s just so much farther down the path than I think anyone would have thought. And so much more aggressive than I think anybody would ever have thought.
Steve Inskeep:
A lot of attention, but help me understand how much has really changed. I’ve heard you talk about government spending. DOGE has gotten a lot of attention. Elon Musk has a lot of attention. Analysts have said the actual savings are not that great. It might end up costing the government something.
Steve Bannon:
Well, first off, I do think in DOGE—because remember, you had these verticals like ending the kinetic part of the Third World War, sealing the border and starting mass deportation. The middle—yeah, the existential threat—is the government spending and how we finance it, etc.
The other part is taking on the administrative state. I think—and I’ve had tremendous disagreements with Elon Musk—I do believe you had to have a trauma-inducing force like DOGE to kind of rattle the administrative state and let folks know, “Hey, this is going to be very serious. There’s actually going to be a search for waste, fraud, and abuse.”
But in addition, programmatically, we’re going to come back and take apart the administrative state brick by brick. In that regard, it’s kind of shock troops. I think they really served a purpose.
Now, to the degree that they find an actual trillion dollars—which I was always skeptical about—in waste and fraud, I was highly suspect of. But there will be something.
I’ve actually called for an audit of that. Two things I’ve called for: Let’s make sure we know specifically what they actually found, and let’s get that codified, right? So we don’t then have to—maybe we have to cut less programming.
Number two: There also has to be a certification that no data or data sets of American citizens have gone anywhere except to the Trump administration and/or the U.S. government.
Steve Inskeep:
You have doubts.
Steve Bannon:
Trust but verify. Trust but verify, meaning you don’t assume that something has gone wrong, but you don’t know if something has gone wrong.
Number one, I don’t—when you talk about waste and fraud—remember, it was this show that kept harping on, “He’s got to cross the Potomac and go to the Pentagon.”
And look, I don’t go after the Pentagon because I’m a dove. I’m a hawk. Naval officer for many years, after sea duty served in the Pentagon. Daughter went to West Point. She deployed with the 101st to Iraq. So we have skin in the game.
But when you talk about waste and fraud, if you’re not to the Pentagon kind of first, you’re not serious. Eventually they went to the Pentagon, but so far it’s crickets.
Steve Inskeep:
You want to cut defense spending?
Steve Bannon:
It’s not that I want to cut defense spending. I want to balance defense spending to what the national security needs of the country are—and our allies.
But I think President Trump’s laid out—first off, the model we have is not sustainable. The model is essentially: the global capital markets are a casino. It’s not about long-term investing.
A couple of companies in the tech business are at the top, and that drives the metrics. Our beloved military has essentially become rent-a-cops for the casino.
That’s not appropriate. It’s one of the reasons we’ve had problems with recruiting in the past. A lot of people just don’t understand the task and purpose of the military, what we’re trying to accomplish.
I think President Trump—in trying to get to this hemispheric defense, right? From Greenland to the Panama Canal and the central Pacific, the three island chain—you look at America strategically that way.
That we’re off the Eurasian landmass finally, after these bloody wars of the 20th century. That it’s time now not to come home but to focus on our defense—and have expeditionary forces if they want to go.
The American people, including progressives, should be outraged. At this very minute, we have two carrier battle groups in the Red Sea protecting the Suez Canal to be open—
So that Europe, the same Europe that the EU is cutting a deal with China that says they may not decouple as our deals are saying you kind of have to, right?
They’re saying, “We’re not going to decouple.” We’re defending Europe’s trade routes. Where the Royal Navy has a destroyer, the Italian Navy has a corvette, and the French Navy has a frigate.
And we have two carrier battle groups. So it’s just disproportionate what the United States has been forced to do for kind of global security.
It’s time for other people to pick that up. One of the best ways to do that—and President Trump’s done a tremendous job—is focusing on hemispheric defense.
Now, the Pentagon is to me—look, we have a $900 billion NDA, National Defense Authorization. In the reconciliation, they’re talking about $150 billion of new stuff, new weapons systems.
In a perfect world, maybe that’s attainable. Maybe you can do that. We’re not in a perfect world.
What have you thought about as the president imposed tariffs on China, raised the tariffs on China dramatically, then backed off on key products and then talked about making a deal with China—even though there’s been negotiations. Why do you think he changed so much?
Steve Bannon:
Well, number one, I think we started a process with the nations of East Asia. You have Japan, you have South Korea, you have Taiwan, Philippines, Vietnam, and now India—all in discussions around a basic architecture, right? That would lead, I believe, to decoupling of the Chinese Communist Party in these new trade relationships.
The Chinese Communist Party—because they’ve been preparing this for 20 or 30 years—we went up the escalatory ladder very quickly to 125% and then 145%, okay? You went up that escalatory ladder very quickly.
I think the nations—particularly East Asia, which are central in getting this done—have come down our side. That kind of stacked up for Besson to get these deals done, or at least to get the architecture of it done.
Steve Inskeep:
Not the actual finished deals?
Steve Bannon:
No, but you do have—I think this week they’re talking about maybe two or three memorandums of understanding on the architecture of it. And then of course you’ll work for a while to work out the complexity of the small print.
President Trump went in full force. He’s got his own negotiating style. I think he’s been quite smart about how to do this. And he obviously wants to make sure that the store shelves are not totally empty.
Steve Inskeep:
As of yesterday, we have a full embargo on Chinese goods?
Steve Bannon:
For consumer electronics, iPhones, anything that we can—some of that’s starting to come through as we alleviate somewhat.
Steve Inskeep:
Weak by changing all the time?
Steve Bannon:
I don’t think he looks weak. I think he looks like a very smart deal guy trying to move the chess pieces.
My philosophy is: the Chinese only understand one thing—that’s smashmouth. Because since the World Trade Organization—look, they were a backward, developing agricultural society when the Bush regime bailed them out after Tiananmen Square.
Let’s take the series—World Trade Organization, Most Favored Nation—they totally gamed the system around us. President Obama negotiated that really terrific cyber pact in 2015. They never lived up to anything they agreed to.
Hong Kong in ’19—they totally walked away from a deal to keep Hong Kong independent and turned it into essentially a slave camp.
Also, Trump negotiated for two years the Lighthizer deal—remember, for two years Lighthizer and Navarro negotiated a deal with Liu He, Trump’s trade negotiator. Two years to negotiate a deal that would couple the two economies into a global economy—to take away what we call the seven deadly sins.
State-owned industries, their ability to export deflation—all of that. No, they just tore the deal up.
Then later, the Skinny Deal—they didn’t meet any of the standards of the Skinny Deal that was signed in January 2020. So they’re not essentially trustworthy.
President Trump, I think, believes with Besson—as Besson says—they can take this less than we can. That they’re going to get them to the place that they want, which will be appropriate tariffs and also give incentives to American manufacturing to bring manufacturing back.
Now, is it a perfect process? No. But in any complicated—what he’s trying to do—and this is what amazes me—in 100 days, in 100 days, he’s essentially saying, “I’m going to change the world’s commercial interactions with each other.”
Right? In integration points. It shouldn’t be lost on you that now one of the nations that we said on the reciprocal tariffs—even though a little of it sounded outrageous, when you looked at the non-tariff barriers, the currency manipulation, the counterfeiting—
There were not a lot of people sitting there going, “No, no, we don’t do that. That’s a lie from the Americans.” All of them came and I think were in agreement that there are some problems, and those problems have to be worked out.
Steve Inskeep:
I want to ask about how some of these things fit together. You referred to the administrative state. You’re talking about various parts of the government that do various things, including regulating Americans.
But some of the agencies that have been targeted do things in the world that relate to the competition with China. I was in Beijing recently and sitting with a guy, and he brings up to me that he was actually sad that Voice of America was shut down, because he practiced his English listening to Voice of America.
I was talking with another guy who said, “I was looking into the Uyghurs, and Radio Free Asia had reporting on the Uyghurs that was absolutely not available inside China.”
If you’re concerned about China, was some of this an own goal for the United States?
Steve Bannon:
No, I don’t think so, and here’s why. I’m glad you brought up the Mandarin language and the Chinese. That was replete with Chinese agents and had to be broomed anyway.
I think you’re going to see a major investigation into Voice of America—the Mandarin language thing. They’re the ones that cut Miles Guo off. First time ever in a live interview—in April of 2017—he’s giving an interview where he’s talking about the financial corruption.
This is a dissident—a Chinese billionaire. I didn’t even know him at the time. I just was following his YouTube videos because they were so kind of outrageous—what he was saying about the Chinese leadership.
He was giving a live interview on Mandarin language Voice of America—and it was pulled. They actually came to my office in the White House and said they just pulled some dissident interview live.
Steve Bannon:
So the answer is to shut it all down. I think what President Trump is going to do—and Kari Lake and others, Brent Bozell—is take the whole thing down to its statutory deck plates and then rebuild it.
It had become a totally politicized wing of the progressive left, and it had to go. I mean, the criticisms it made of President Trump were outrageous. Just outrageous. So it had to go.
Steve Inskeep:
Going into this project, we were asking how has the first 100 days changed the world?
Steve Bannon:
And I think you focused on the effort to put a new trade regime on the world—and geopolitically, remember. Well, America coming—look, right now you have the post-war liberal rules-based order.
And if you go around the Eurasian landmass, it is a replica of the Second World War, okay? The 20th century is our wars to control the Eurasian landmass—kind of Mackinder 101, right? The great heartland.
And what you see in the post-war era is to have a containment policy—from NATO and Western Europe to the Gulf Emirates and Israel, to the South China Sea and the Straits of Taiwan, up to Japan and Korea.
Okay, those four kind of nodes. You have commercial relationships codified by trade deals. We have capital markets, some cultural interaction. But it’s the American security guarantee.
It’s one of the reasons we have a trillion-dollar defense budget. It’s one of the reasons we have two carrier battle groups in the Red Sea keeping the Suez Canal open for the European elites. That has to stop.
What we’re saying—what President Trump I think is saying by this hemispheric defense—is that from Greenland to the Panama Canal, we will take care of it. The Russian Navy, the Russian army, is kind of NATO’s problem, Europe’s problem.
And we’re there to help. But you’re not going to see a massive amount of resources. This is why I think a rapprochement with our ally in World War II—Russia and the Russian people—is so important.
I think President Trump’s working on that. You totally change not just geopolitics. You totally change—and you couple that with a Russian rapprochement that gets them out of the CCP’s camp—
You have a complete ability to cut the defense budget, I don’t know, $300–$400 billion. Wouldn’t everybody want that?
Steve Inskeep:
I think the president hasn’t been clear about what he would want to replace the liberal international order—the rules-based international order, whatever you want to call it—or even if he does want to replace it.
There is a camp that believes that he wants to transform geopolitics. There is a camp that believes that he just wants to spruce things up and make them work better. Do you feel you understand what is supposed to come after?
Steve Bannon:
What is supposed to come after—I think it’s back to the Treaty of Westphalia. You have strong independent nations, right? With the United States looking to itself first and its citizens first.
With the understanding that if America’s strong, healthy, and prosperous, the world can be at peace. And now you’re seeing a shift.
That’s why people are throwing their toys out of the pram—all the Atlanticists, right? And I don’t want to say the Atlanticists are racist, but to me, having been in the Pacific Fleet and spent so much time in Asia—
Coming to Washington, D.C., it actually stunned me how provincial this town is. And how provincial D.C., New York, and Boston—that corridor—is about just thinking about a small portion of northwest Europe.
It’s like the entire world revolves around the United States and northwest Europe. It’s a massive, massive globe.
Steve Inskeep:
And is there a risk in dismantling an existing world order?
Steve Bannon:
Trump recognizes that. Is there a risk, though, to pulling down a system that did make the United States the dominant power of the world for 80 years—and kept the United States the richest and most powerful country in the history of the world for 80 years?
Steve Bannon:
When you say that, let’s talk about that. Is that true? It made the elites and oligarchs in the United States the—you’re talking about who benefited.
The United States as a whole—the GDP is pretty big. But the GDP—what is GDP? It’s just a set of numbers.
How’s it rolled down to working class? Working class and middle class people are in the worst shape they’ve ever been.
You have nine million people working two jobs right now. You have $1.7 trillion of college debt—we don’t know how it’s going to get paid off.
There’s $1.4 trillion of credit card debt—10% that is defaulting all the time because people are trying to use that to make a living.
The concentration of wealth—the top 19 families in the country just made a trillion dollars here, I think, since the beginning of the year.
The concentration of wealth for the people that ran the system—for people that ran the post-war liberal rules-based order, and go to the Atlantic Council and hang out in Paris or go to the defense contractors thing and the arms merchants in Munich—
It turned out great for them. But for the basic Americans on whose shoulders it rests, they got screwed. And they’ve been screwed.
And now they’re looking at a country that is flooded with illegal aliens at the lower level. And they’ve got every visa program in the world to take every high-tech job.
They’ve got—any kid in this country under 35 years old is nothing more right now economically than a Russian serf. They’re not going to own anything.
We’re trying to break up the apartheid state in Silicon Valley, and at the same time trying to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States.
That’s populism. And that’s economic.
Steve Inskeep:
So much to follow up on. You are favoring taxing the wealthy. The president has recently signaled some openness to a slightly higher tax rate, I believe in at least one interview.
He’s also started to take that back and say, “I have to make sure I don’t pay a political price,” which means he’s running again.
Steve Bannon:
That was a win-win for me. Because when he said—first off, they had given the wrong information on Bush. Because Bush principally raised the taxes on the wealthy, yeah, right?
This is a massive tax cut. Massive tax cut for the working class and middle class. It extends his original tax cuts.
Plus: no tax on tips. No tax on overtime. No tax on Social Security.
Steve Bannon:
It has to be paid for.
Steve Inskeep:
The thing I took from that interview—when he talks about, “Hey, I heard it could hurt me politically… it could hurt in a re-election”—
Steve Bannon:
Trump 2028. That’s when the merch—
Steve Inskeep:
Does that bother you, that that’s unconstitutional?
Steve Bannon:
What’s unconstitutional?
Steve Inskeep:
Running for a third term.
Steve Bannon:
Steve, as I told you, I’m sure we’re working on some things that are well within the Constitution, and it’ll be very—I think people will agree, it’ll be very smart work.
Steve Inskeep:
Give an example of—
Steve Bannon:
I don’t want to—I don’t want to whet your appetite. Let’s get through the 100 days.
Steve Inskeep:
You already whetted my appetite.
Steve Bannon:
Let’s get through—no, because it’s exploding liberals’ heads, progressives’ heads—that Trump’s going to be with them forever.
We are—listen, in 2015 or 2014, when I came out and said, “Hey, we’re going to throw all in for Trump,” the odds were very long. He polled at zero.
I’ve seen a lot longer odds than Trump ‘28. And at the appropriate time—after we get through his repositioning of America and the world, and changing the post-war international rules-based order so that it focuses on American citizens and our country—
Then at that time, probably closer to the ’22 mid or ’26 midterms, I’ll roll it out.
Steve Inskeep:
We’ve opened so many parentheses—let’s close a couple of them. You talked about tax cuts and tax increases for the wealthy.
Steve Bannon:
Yes, and looking after the working—can’t work any other way.
Steve Inskeep:
Why would an administration filled with billionaires from the top on down—and including the world’s richest man—do anything for the working class, really? Wouldn’t they look after their own interests?
Steve Bannon:
I didn’t say we’re not going to have a little resistance to this. Look, President Trump’s coalition, right, does have these banners that kind of came in, particularly after we won in November.
But the coalition is expanding—African-American men, Hispanics. Right now, we have the chance to increase this in the midterms.
One way we do it is being straight with the American people. What makes sense.
I don’t want to raise taxes on the wealthy. I’m not some guy that says “tax the rich.” I’m saying right now the math simply doesn’t work.
Steve Inskeep:
Let’s close the parenthesis on the Constitution, which we brought up. Clearly, you’re in favor of mass deportations. And the president has made some high-profile moves in that direction—and has run up against judicial resistance, including from people appointed by the president.
Steve Bannon:
A judicial insurrection. A judicial insurrection. You’ve got a judge—
Steve Inskeep:
Okay, wait, wait, wait. You have a unanimous Supreme Court saying all nine of us agree there should be some kind of due process. It might not be a full trial, but somebody should be brought before a judge before they’re thrown out of the country.
You have a U.S. citizen who was two years old, taken out of the country. And a Trump-appointed judge said the other day there was no meaningful process.
Does it bother you at all, as an American citizen, that due process is not being followed in some cases?
Steve Bannon:
It bothers me that a court—we never had—there’s nowhere in the Constitution talks about judicial supremacy.
Nowhere in the Constitution talks about judicial supremacy.
What you’re seeing is a court trying to step between President Trump and his—
Steve Inskeep:
Isn’t it just a court checking it against the law?
Steve Bannon:
They’re stepping in the middle. Stepping in the middle of President Trump and his—his unitary theory of the executive or Article II—his role as commander-in-chief.
This happened before in our country. It’s happened a couple times. A guy named Abraham Lincoln.
Chief Justice Taney tried to get in the middle of Abraham Lincoln and what President Lincoln did to the city council of Baltimore and the mayor of Baltimore, when they refused to let Union troops pass through Baltimore to the relief of Washington, D.C., in those very early days of the Civil War—
When it was all in the balance and Washington could have been very, very easily captured by rebel forces from the South. They blocked it.
And Taney—what did President Lincoln do? President Lincoln threw the city council and the mayor in jail with no indictment.
And Taney went to him and said, “Hey, under habeas corpus, you either indict them tomorrow or they’re free.”
And you know, the apocryphal story is he sent John Hay over with a message to say, “Tell Taney if you force this, the president’s going to throw you in jail.”
So he ran as a warlord. And look how many times—look how many times President Lincoln in a war had to resort to emergency powers to do this.
I think we’ve had seven emergency powers now—or eight—enacted by the president. He’s fully within his rights as commander-in-chief.
And yes, we are coming to—not just a constitutional crisis—we’re coming to a convergence of crises that are going to start hitting us this summer. One of these is the constitutional.
Steve Inskeep:
I’m glad you brought this up, because in this very book of mine that I brought, I write about one of the instances with Chief Justice Taney.
And it’s interesting—Lincoln did suspend the right of habeas corpus. In the case of a Maryland man, had been burned—
Taney said Congress could do that. Lincoln said, “I think the president can do that.”
In the end, a few months later, when Congress returned, Congress voted to approve what he had done.
Steve Bannon:
In the end, he got back within the constitutional system.
Steve Inskeep:
Seward and Lincoln were so concerned that what they had done in that interim time—as you remember—was outside the Constitution.
Because these were the smartest lawyers in the country, right? Seward and Lincoln would sit there and talk about the implicit powers of the Constitution, the implied powers of the Constitution for the chief executive.
It’s brought up brilliantly in Spielberg’s movie Lincoln. I think there’s a lot of discussion of that.
Steve Bannon:
But you’re right. Lincoln did it. That was all paper—that they papered over what they had to do after the fact to cover themselves.
But in the moment, what President Lincoln did—exactly what President Trump’s done.
You’ve had a judge here—Boasberg—try to step in the middle of a commander-in-chief making decisions about aircraft in the air.
You can’t have—right now, the hill the Democrats are dying on is about a human trafficker. Right? A human trafficker that is down in a prison—has been sent down to a prison.
They’re trying to say due pro—if every one of these criminal terrorists have due process, it’s 200 years before they get out. It’s not going to happen. It’s just not going to happen.
The American people back Trump on this. And they have to go. And they’re going to go.
Steve Inskeep:
And the argument against due process is just that it’s inconvenient?
Steve Bannon:
It would take too much time—
Steve Inskeep:
It’s not about the inconvenience?
Steve Bannon:
Thing is one—but it’s just—you don’t need it. It’s not necessary. It’s time of war. And they’re going. They’re going to leave.
Steve Inskeep:
We could raise questions about the Constitution. You do agree with me now, given your knowledge of Taney and Lincoln—
Steve Bannon:
I agree with you that Lincoln took a disputed interpretation of the Constitution and then got right with it a few months later.
Steve Inskeep:
Papered it over—
Steve Bannon:
But he and Seward sat there forever—by the way, as you know, two smart guys—and figured out step by step how they had to do it.
Steve Inskeep:
Well, let’s talk about—I mean, we could talk about it all day.
Steve Bannon:
Great day for me. I’ve had Steve Inskeep agree with me on a historical issue!
Steve Inskeep:
I’m sure we’d agree on lots of things if we had a long discussion.
Steve Inskeep:
Let me ask you about another thing, though, having to do with the Constitution and tariffs.
This is another instance where the president says, “There’s an emergency, I’m going to raise taxes tomorrow. I’m going to lower taxes the next.”
Okay, if you want to call them tariffs, I’m going to raise them, I’m going to lower them. You call them taxes. They are taxes—paid by Americans, according to economists.
In any event, whatever we call them, Americans seem to pay them when the imports are brought in.
The president repeatedly raised and lowered—
Steve Bannon:
They didn’t pay them! We put the tariffs on Chinese in ’18 and prices in China didn’t raise at all.
Steve Inskeep:
Well, we can talk about that separately. But in any case, the president has asserted the right to massively affect the economy—and then change it again today, and hours later, and hours later—without consulting Congress, because he says it’s an emergency.
It’s gone so far that some Republicans in Congress are trying to reclaim their power.
Does it concern you at all that a president could claim the power to completely transform the economy all by himself—just on his say-so?
Steve Bannon:
Well, it’s not just on his say-so. He did execute emergency powers to do this, given the emergency that’s there—both on fentanyl and on national security.
Steve Inskeep:
But the emergency is—he says there’s an emergency. That’s all.
Steve Bannon:
No—he gave backup documentation, too, on the fentanyl issue. And also the deficits alone.
The trade deficit is $25 trillion, brother. That’s not an emergency?
You can’t—the country can’t—we have $37 trillion in debt, a $2 trillion—this year it’s going to be $2.5 trillion. $2.5 trillion deficits—got to be financed every year—added on.
Then we have a $25 trillion trade deficit. And that’s not a bookkeeping thing, that the Wall Street guys say. That’s resources that went from us to other countries. $18 trillion to China.
Steve Inskeep:
Granting everything you say, would it be possible to work it through Congress—just to pass a bill? Do the constitutional thing?
Steve Bannon:
He’s called for emergency measures because if Congress had been doing its job on trade and tariffs over the last—let me just guess—I don’t know—since they allowed China to come in as a World Trade Organization member, they would have some backup from people saying, “Yeah, you know, we should get Congress in here, because they’ve done such a great job.”
What has Congress done? Congress sold us out.
Because the bags of money that came from China through Wall Street to buy everybody off in the ’90s—in the Clintons’ time—to give China most favored nation and World Trade Organization status and let them borrow at the World Bank as a developing nation—
Remember, in this budget alone, there’s hundreds of billions of dollars of your listeners’ money—taxpayer money, middle-class taxpayers—that are going for tax subsidies to back up manufacturing of solar panels and wind generators—
And all that manufacturing in China that are sold here for the Green New Deal. The scams that we use to support China as a country—
Including, as I said, using our capital markets and our pension funds to finance their entire industry, but particularly their military and their military technology—is outrageous.
So no. Since the House and Senate have rolled over to the globalists for 30 or 40 years, pardon me if I don’t take their concerns when somebody steps up and says—
“Hey, look, I’m going to put America—and I’m going to put American citizens—first.”
Steve Inskeep:
You’re no more confident in this Republican Congress than in past ones?
Steve Bannon:
Good God, no. I mean, look at—look at Johnson as Speaker. No.
The last one, we were very proud that we turfed out. This show was the leader in turfing out McCarthy.
Why? Because of the horrible debt deal he did with Biden—gave no cap on the debt ceiling and allowed him to spend as much money as he did—which was like $6 trillion to the debt.
Johnson, I think, may actually be worse. Because I think he’s tapped along the president.
Steve Inskeep:
Last question: What is one thing you want to see in the next 100 days?
Steve Bannon:
Just more of the double. Double down. More of the same.
I do want to see—there’s going to be a confrontation. I think the convergence of the financial issue of the big beautiful bill, particularly of spending cuts—
And the simultaneous constitutional crisis that we’re hurtling toward—is going to make this summer a summer like no other.
Steve Inskeep:
Steve Bannon, it’s a pleasure talking with you.
Steve Bannon:
Thank you, Steve. Always great having you here in the War Room.
Steve Inskeep:
All right. Thank you, sir.
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