In this special edition of War Room, host Stephen K.K. Williams is joined by Brian Kennedy and Michael Anton to discuss the weaponization of government by the Trump administration, and why it s time to go back to basics.
00:29:44.520Still live from California, Newport Beach at the Claremont Institute Lincoln Fellowship.
00:29:49.440We're joined by two of their brightest and leading voices, Michael Anton and Brian Kennedy.
00:29:55.080If you guys want to check out what Claremont's about, you can always go to Claremont.org.
00:29:58.080They also have their affiliated publication, The American Mind.
00:30:01.540And I was talking to a lot of Claremont people, and they were saying they would love to see more members of the War Room Posse in their fellowships.
00:30:08.440They have a sheriff's fellowship that they thought would be particularly well-suited for this audience.
00:30:13.220If you go to their website, you can check out, see how to apply.
00:30:15.840I've had the privilege of being taught by people like Michael Anton, John Eastman, Theo Wold, who we have on the show a ton, Brian Kennedy.
00:30:23.780It's truly amazing, so I encourage all of you guys to check it out with there.
00:30:32.560And like I said, The American Mind, maybe while you're at it, birchgold.com slash Bannon for the latest installment of the end of the dollar empire.
00:30:40.340But we're sort of halfway through the show, so I wanted to bifurcate and pivot more so to what a potential Trump administration would look like.
00:30:48.460And you know the show, Steve Bannon's kind of life crusade has been for deconstructing the administrative state.
00:30:54.660And I know you guys share that concern setting up, you know, recently sort of an administrative state project within Claremont run by Theo, who's on War Room a lot.
00:31:03.060But, Michael, you served in the National Security Council.
00:31:06.960I don't know how you made it out alive.
00:31:08.780You had a front row seat to probably one of the most corrupt little outcrops of the White House.
00:31:14.140But just walk us through where you think Trump stands in terms of, you know, the lessons that were learned from the first administration on the issue of personnel and subversion.
00:31:25.400Just going into it, what your analysis is.
00:31:29.900I've listened to the president talk about, you know, he's been, you know, look, let's just say Donald Trump is not a guy who likes to dwell on past mistakes.
00:31:38.820But so, therefore, when he does say, I got something wrong, it's very serious and you need to take it seriously.
00:31:46.720And he has said the personnel decisions, the operation, all of that in the first term was bad or had a lot of problems.
00:31:54.640And I've learned a number of lessons from that.
00:31:56.600I'm going to get it right the next time.
00:31:59.520He, because he's the president and he's at the top of the chain and it really every cabinet decision is down to him, he's going to focus on that.
00:32:05.620And I just hope that the people around him don't also lose sight of the staff.
00:32:12.420The reason why the National Security Council staff is important.
00:32:15.220First of all, it was created by law in 1947.
00:32:18.600You could, I suppose, scale it down and try to get rid of it.
00:32:21.560You can't entirely get rid of it because that without repealing the law.
00:32:25.160I still think that was that would be a mistake.
00:32:27.500I think the National Security Council staff, which was an obstructionist entity within the White House for much of his first term, could be reformed and become one of his greatest assets in a second time if it's approached the right way.
00:32:41.040First of all, it's the operation that handles foreign policy that's literally the physically closest to the president.
00:32:47.020It's part of the executive office of the president.
00:32:50.020It exists on the campus, the so-called 18 acres of the White House, you know, with its senior leadership in the West Wing and the rest of it in the executive office building across West Exec.
00:33:00.000You know, they're not often across the river in Arlington or Langley or in D.C. across town in Foggy Bottom.
00:33:32.800If you can get control of that, you can have a tremendous impact.
00:33:36.580I think it's in a way it's the lowest hanging fruit.
00:33:38.880Nobody on the NSC staff has to be confirmed by the Senate.
00:33:42.360Every single appointment is completely at the president's discretion.
00:33:45.900What has happened over decades and it's become accepted as normal that we need to kind of think through or think past is that the NSC staff ends up being dominated by about roughly 80 to 85 percent career professionals who are detailed in from their home agency for a year, two years.
00:34:03.900And then they go back with a little layer of leadership at the top that are appointed by the president.
00:34:08.880I think that number, that 85 percent number, needs to go way down, which will require some reforms that I've outlined in an article in the past and that I can explain if you want.
00:34:17.440But it's within the realm of possibility.
00:34:19.800And the president and his chief of staff and his vice president and really the senior people that are the most close to him need to think of the NSC not as – I think in the first term they started to – you know, they didn't know what it was or what to do with it.
00:34:32.320And then it – because they had all these basically obstructionist detailees in there who gave them a hard time, they started to – they didn't think about getting rid of it, but they just started to think about bypassing it.
00:34:41.620Let's just, you know, go around it, ignore it.
00:34:44.800They need to think about it as a potential asset, as potentially the president's greatest asset in the conduct of his foreign policy.
00:34:51.500As I think we all know – I mean, I know it from up close because I work for him on these questions – he likes to conduct diplomacy personally.
00:35:02.980And if he had a loyal, competent staff that is there for the right reason, that reports to him that either he hired or people he trusts hired that know what the agenda is and believe in it and want to serve him, the NSC staff could go from being either a liability or a big rock that you just try to get around into an actual engine that helps him conduct foreign policy.
00:35:24.540And that's what it needs to be in a second term.
00:35:27.540Well, I think with the advent of all the discussion of, you know, deconstructing the administrative state, the narrative that you hear, whether it's, you know, being vamped on MSNBC is, you know, oh, we're politicizing civil servants, right, to which you say they politicized themselves and they've been doing this for decades.
00:35:44.600I'm curious, Michael, from your perspective.
00:35:46.980I would say there's – that whole question is already politicized.
00:35:51.720When that accusation betrays a fundamental misunderstanding, right, you're politicizing the civil service as if it's possible to conduct politics apolitically, right?
00:36:02.920We have elections because people say – you know, remember Donald Trump in 2016, everybody thought he can't possibly win Republican primaries running against the Iraq war because, you know, everybody – well, he did because people wanted a different direction.
00:36:15.440And then you get in there and you find that the permanent government doesn't want a different direction, right?
00:36:19.400The politics means I elect you because I like what you're going to do, and I voted against that guy because I don't like what he's going to do.
00:36:27.540What these leftists who support the administrative state say is, oh, you elected somebody who doesn't like what the experts do?
00:36:34.280Well, we're just going to ignore that, and the experts are going to keep doing it.
00:36:37.500Politics should be politicized, right?
00:36:39.960Elections should change the direction of the government.
00:36:43.780Presidential appointments, who he chooses for jobs, should have an effect on policy.
00:36:47.780What they want is it for not to have an effect.
00:36:50.180They want the same people always running everything in the same way, and whoever gets elected and whoever gets appointed, maybe they get to sit in the fancy car and get the big office, but they shouldn't be able to do anything.
00:36:59.180And what I'm saying is that's a completely wrong way to look at it, and a second Trump term needs to attack this problem pretty directly.
00:37:05.900And from your perspective, when you see what is it, the 3,000 or 4,000 political appointees versus the 50,000 or so career appointees, in terms of actually reforming the system from within, do you think, and I'm aware they're not mutually exclusive,
00:37:21.760but do you think that focusing on quality appointments of those 4,000 people is of more or less significance than finding a way to rework that kind of existing steady state of 50,000 people, the Vindmans of the world?
00:37:37.580Like, where would you focus time and energy?
00:37:39.860Unfortunately, you've got to do both at the same time.
00:37:45.040I think that every single—so it's roughly 3,000 Schedule C full-time and another 1,000 on boards and commissions, which aren't as important, but they're less important than the 3,000, right?
00:37:54.760Perfection is going to be impossible, but the goal should be get somebody in every one of those 3,000 jobs who's good at it, committed to the agenda, knows what they're doing, is energetic, right?
00:38:06.220We want to be 100 percent. We're not going to get 100 percent, but it's got to be as close to that as possible, as fast as possible.
00:38:12.720Fill those jobs up with managers who know how the system works, how to move the levers, and who completely believe in what the president's doing and are enthusiastic about implementing it.
00:38:22.120At the same time, some of those people, the people who run, you know, the—let's say, deputy secretary is responsible for administration,
00:38:29.860people who run purely administrative parts of the government should be tasked with exactly the kind of reform agenda that you're saying.
00:38:38.820Like, you're—these people over here are going to manage, you know, the East Asia desk and keep an eye on what's going in the South China Sea, et cetera.
00:38:45.400Your specific job, Mr. Administrator or Madam Administrator, is reforming this terrible system that blocks reform and blocks change, blocks the implementation of the will of the people.
00:38:55.640And all—those efforts just—they have to be double-tracked. There's no picking. There's no prioritizing, right?
00:39:01.720The priority will be who's doing what, but you've got to have people in both camps doing both at the same time, or this will never work.
00:39:08.380And, Brian, from your perspective, again, I think you're more—you do more events with the War Room Posse than I do.
00:39:15.300I don't know how that got—we need to renegotiate our contracts, because I love meeting the War Room Posse.
00:39:20.640But in terms of making sure that that core group of 4,000 people are true, solid, you know, to their core MAGA types, you know, how do you think we thoroughly vet people and get people who are committed to Trump's agenda and aren't just going to end up being MSNBC contributors, you know, three months after they depart the administration?
00:39:41.660Yeah, no, I think that's important. First of all, I agree with everything Michael said.
00:39:48.320I would only add to it that we have to do that quickly, that, you know, a lot of folks say, well, you know, you just can't dismantle Washington overnight.
00:39:57.840And I would say it may not be overnight, but it's going to be very quickly. Do the painful things quickly.
00:40:03.300When it comes to the actual personnel, you know, I am more of the view, like William F. Buckley Jr., who said he'd rather be governed by the first 300 people in the Boston phone book than the faculty of Harvard University.
00:40:18.940I think the first administration of President Trump, there may have been too much of a focus, not by President Trump, but by those people doing the hiring, that you had to have certain credentials.
00:40:30.680And there was a tradeoff made between credentials and whether you actually believed in what President Trump did.
00:40:36.680In the second administration, we want competent people, but we shouldn't worry about whether they're coming from Harvard or Yale or Princeton.
00:40:43.260We should actually care if they're competent. Do they have real-world experience? Do they believe what President Trump believes?
00:40:50.400Which is not complicated. The America First agenda has been articulated by Michael, by President Trump most especially, and by many other people.
00:40:59.020It shouldn't be that hard to find those people. We just can't get hung up on whether they've worked previously for the State Department for 10 years, and so therefore we get to hire them again.
00:41:09.580This is part of the problem in Washington. It's not a government of the people, by the people, and for the people anymore.
00:41:17.440It's a government by experts who no longer love the country, who no longer believe in the country, and who no longer are willing to put the interests and the authority of what the president stands for and what he commands into actual policy implementation.
00:41:36.720They have, as Michael was suggesting, they have their view, and they're going to push their view, and they dare you to fire them.
00:41:45.000Well, I think in the second Trump administration, he's not going to be too hung up on firing people who are not willing to carry out an America First policy agenda.
00:41:54.460It is what the American people want, and it's what they need, and it's about the only thing that's going to stand between us and American collapse.
00:42:02.300And, Michael, just give me a minute real quick. When you were at the NSC, when you would look to your left and to your right, I mean, what percentage of people did you feel like were actually on your team, on our team?
00:42:14.220Well, some you absolutely knew. They were hired by the president. They were, you know, on the NSC terminology, they were direct hires.
00:42:24.680And you work with them for a few days, a few weeks, a few months, you figure out very quickly, these people are completely with you.
00:42:31.240I will be fair. Maybe some in the audience will think, you know, he's being a rhino here.
00:42:37.180There are a lot of people in the government who really are basically nonpartisan career civil servants who just want to do a job and who won't be subversive.
00:42:45.060I think those people can be found. I also think, though, that we didn't do much of a very good job of vetting them and trying to bring them over as detailees in the first administration.
00:42:54.740In fact, we were, you know, we would get blocked at the NSC.
00:42:58.460We would say, well, we've identified some people that we want from this department or that department.
00:43:01.800And we would allow the secretaries to say no to the White House and not send them.
00:43:05.780That's basically, you're allowing a cabinet secretary to say no to the president.
00:43:08.900I just don't think that should be allowed in the second term.
00:43:11.160The National Security Advisor says, I've identified Jane Smith as a Korea expert, and I want her over here.
00:43:16.620And we've vetted her, and we think she's good, even though she's not going to be a direct hire.
00:43:20.460Michael, we've got to jump to break. We've got one segment left.
00:43:25.160We're going to distill how we secure the 2024 election in eight minutes.
00:44:52.100Government gangsters are the group of individuals, career bureaucrats, who have been installed by what we call the deep state into every agency and department in the United States government.
00:45:03.420Had Donald Trump not won in 2016, he would not have exposed the flank of the deep state and their weapon of choice, the two-tier system of justice.
00:45:11.440From Russiagate to Hunter Biden's laptop to Joe Biden's classified documents case to January 6th to the 51 Intel letter and everything in between, we would never have learned that.
00:45:20.400These people are dangerous and vindictive, learning from their mistakes and perfecting ways to hide their corruption.
00:45:25.960It is finally time for a straightforward assessment of the state of our nation.
00:46:16.100I want to give you guys each like two minutes each just your sort of concluding thoughts on why the time to not rest, the time to get involved, engaged is now, and how they can do that.
00:46:27.600Definitely the time to rest is not now.
00:46:29.660I mean, you could just see the polling changes.
00:46:33.800I think Kamala is actually not in tune with the American people.
00:46:39.040But it's not – it should not be surprising that when a party that was demoralized about, you know, a half or non-sentient candidate, when they finally get out from under that rain cloud, they're going to be energized.
00:46:52.900They're going to be feeling confident.
00:46:54.760And, you know, and we're going to be on our back foot a little bit.
00:46:57.200But to beat that energy and that confidence, we've got to get back to – we've got to do something kind of contradictory.
00:47:02.940Get back to the really high spirits and the great feeling that we had in that period I talked about around the time of the convention and yet not let that great feeling and those high spirits make us rest.
00:47:13.800We've got to make it – do the opposite.
00:48:48.200There's really one main poll, and that's November 5th.
00:48:52.380And people have to be geared toward that day.
00:48:55.300I think you look at these rallies that the Democrats are having.
00:48:59.140You know, there's a lot of Democrats who are pretty deranged when it comes to President Trump.
00:49:03.480I don't know that they like Kamala Harris that much.
00:49:05.860But, you know, these are the same people who were for lockdowns and for wearing masks and for actually behaving in the kind of craziness we've seen over the past four years.
00:49:14.900So we ought not be surprised that there are a lot of crazy people on the left with a lot of pent-up interest in going to rallies.
00:49:22.380I still believe the American people are good and determined, and they want freedom.
00:49:28.320There's only one candidate today that represents that, and that's Donald Trump.
00:49:31.840And I say that just as a private citizen.
00:49:34.040If they rally to that cause, the cause of human freedom, America will be free.
00:49:39.340And if we don't do that, and if we sit on our, you know, rest on our laurels, we're not.
00:49:45.480And so now this is the most important time in my life for engaging in politics.
00:49:50.340So thank you, Natalie, and thank you for all you do as well.
00:49:53.460Well, thank you, and thank you for joining us.
00:49:55.300If people want to follow you, read the writings, where can they go to keep up to date?
00:50:20.740And War Room Posse, you guys know Next Man Up is the mantra here in the War Room.
00:50:24.760I hope you can see through just the brilliant leaders that we have at Claremont that we do have many men who are willing to step into the breach.
00:50:33.940They accept donations if you want to help support their work.
00:50:36.600Like I said, the programs that they're doing here are truly amazing, and I'm sitting in a room every day with dozens of other young people like myself who are equally committed to saving this country.
00:50:45.500So I hope you guys find a lot of hope and strength and solace in that, because you should, because every person in that room is as committed as I am, and I'm sure as you are, too.
00:50:53.620So you can also go to PatriotMobile.com slash Bannon, get 15% off, use a company that doesn't hate you for watching this show.
00:51:00.740And being pro-America, another company that certainly doesn't hate you, I think probably loves you for watching this show, is, of course, MyPillow.
00:51:07.360Mike Lindell, got about a minute and a half.
00:51:09.820I hear you have some breaking news and some promo codes.
00:51:12.480Well, everybody, yeah, we always have good breaking news, but you can check that at LindellPlan.com, everybody, if you want to know everything that's going around this country involving our election platforms.
00:52:49.900I want to warn you of a huge change that could be coming to our money and our bank accounts.
00:52:56.360First, think back to 9-11, shortly after the government pushed through the Patriot Act.
00:53:00.380This gave the government power to spy on innocent Americans by monitoring our phone and email and tracking our movement across the Internet.
00:53:08.400Now, Jim Rickards, editor of the independent financial newsletter Strategic Intelligence and New York Times bestselling author, is warning about a coming event that could elevate this governmental surveillance to a terrifying new level.
00:53:22.060In fact, some of the guests I've had on the war room believe that the government will soon expand their powers to track our every move.
00:53:29.980If we say the wrong things on social media, donate to the wrong causes, buy firearms, or even vote MAGA, the government may be able to shut us out of our bank accounts.
00:53:40.840I can't say for sure if this will happen, but it's an interesting and dire warning.
00:53:46.260Fortunately, Jim Rickards, an American patriot and friend of mine, has made it his mission to educate us on what he believes is coming and how to protect yourself from the possibility of programmable money.
00:53:58.880Watch Jim's warning video now, before it's censored like I've been in the past.