In this episode of The Steve K. Bannon War Room, the former White House Strategist and presidential strategist takes a look at the current state of play in the 2020 Democratic primary race and offers some thoughts on what might be a constructive tweak to the classic Trump rally 1.0.
00:04:31.000Like, they've got a great team over there.
00:04:34.000But at that point in 2016, Steve Bannon and Dave Bossie in particular came into Trump Tower in the Trump War Room in Manhattan.
00:04:49.000And what happened there is that, like, the problem you have with giant figures like Donald Trump is that people may tend to tell him what he wants to hear rather than what he needs to hear.
00:05:14.000And the genius of Bannon and Bossie, two of the most frank, straightforward, and smart guys I know in politics, is that they simply told Donald Trump what he needed to hear at that point in time.
00:05:34.000And Trump, and Trump being the genius that he is, saw the chessboard differently and went on to win that race with what was a very targeted and disciplined message that was aimed like a laser beam at where he needed to win the election,
00:06:00.680which was, in that election, simply three states, simply three states.
00:06:06.600It was Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
00:06:12.480And Hillary was riding so high at the time that she never saw that coming, and it was a beautiful thing.
00:06:26.180Now, fast forward to 2020, I'm in the White House, we're fighting a deadly pandemic.
00:06:40.240Anybody, in fact, world leaders around the world were under siege because the public didn't understand what was going on.
00:06:48.000They were afraid, and they were afraid, and they didn't think whoever was in power in Germany, France, the United States, Brazil, wherever, was doing the right job.
00:06:58.740So it was very hard to be an incumbent at that time.
00:07:01.320Yet, I'd be sitting in the Oval, and I'd see folks like Steve Mnuchin, Wilbur Ross come in,
00:07:16.340and I'd be sitting there talking about how we needed to continue to press on things like China,
00:07:25.060and continue to do things on that existential threat, and Mnuchin and Wilbur Ross would be telling the boss,
00:07:35.700hey, we're going to win, it's a landslide.
00:07:37.440Mnuchin would drive me crazy, go, it's going to be a landslide, da-da-da-da-da-da.
00:07:41.700Remember, this is like September 2020, and that was like ridiculous, stupid kind of advice,
00:07:52.320but it was what Mnuchin and Ross were doing because they thought that's what Donald Trump wanted to hear,
00:08:01.980and therefore they weren't serving him well.
00:08:05.100And you had the same problem with Trump's own campaign team.
00:08:10.120It was Bill Stepien, Justin Clark, and Jared Kushner.
00:08:16.660And the spin that they would have, because the polls indicated a tight race.
00:08:24.200It was always going to be a tight race.
00:20:23.800Now, 90 percent, roughly, of the electorate have made up their minds.
00:20:29.260So, Trump has done a beautiful job of securing the Republican base.
00:20:38.180The Democrats, it's a much more fragile base.
00:20:44.220This is part of the good news I'm going to share with you.
00:20:47.520Because several of the traditional Democratic components of that base are eminently grabbable.
00:20:59.920Latinos, for example, are coming over strong to Trump.
00:21:03.000Blacks, particularly men, are increasingly supportive of Trump because they understand how things like the border crisis and competition from China are stealing their jobs.
00:21:25.900The question is, how do you go about that and who are the so-called swing voters and how do you appeal to them?
00:21:35.900So, I think the best way to think about this race, Kamala Harris versus Donald Trump, is to go back in history and think about what races were similar.
00:21:50.160And I come up with three of them, I think, both the Nixon-McGovern and Nixon-Humphrey races, as well as the Goldwater-Johnson race.
00:22:10.300What those all have in common is kind of this Grand Canyon chasm between the Republican versus the Democrat candidate on big policy issues.
00:22:29.600You had Johnson running against Goldwater, okay, who was viewed as an extremist.
00:22:37.720He even admitted he was extremist in one of the, I think, dumbest political quotes that, you know, it's like, extremism in defense of liberty is not extremism or justified, whatever.
00:22:49.160Whatever he said there, it's like, it just set him up for the famous one TV ad that killed Goldwater, and that was the nuclear bomb one with a little girl running around and the world dance, okay?
00:23:02.020Pure, pure mainstream guy, Johnson, run against a radical Goldwater, done, over, boom.
00:23:17.980McGovern, Nixon, it was the same deal.
00:23:20.780You had McGovern out there on a radical ledge.
00:29:35.640All right, Peter K. Navarro in for Stephen K. Bannon.
00:29:38.920We've been exploring the chessboard state of play of the current race for president.
00:29:46.360The good news here is this race is eminently winnable.
00:29:52.920My thought process here is that what we're being told by the polling and yada yada is that it's insane to attack Kamala Harris personally
00:30:10.280when, in fact, the attacks on her actual policy statements will be much more devastating.
00:30:19.380And I've drawn the analogy in terms of what this race looks like to, say, the McGovern-Nixon race where Nixon was running against an extreme on the left
00:30:37.340or the right or the Lyndon Johnson goldwater race where Johnson was running against an extremist on the right, okay?
00:33:14.740And the current rally formula is simply not sufficiently focused on the very stark policy differences—policy differences—between him and Kamala Harris that will swing voters in key battleground states.
00:33:31.660Instead, when Trump attacks Harris personally rather than on policy, Harris's support among swing voters rises, particularly among women.
00:33:44.000And that's just a fact of life right now.
00:33:46.960Let's imagine, then, a Trump rally 2.0, 2.0, as my old boss takes the podium at his next rally.
00:33:55.680After a big welcome to the always-massive audience and his obligatory recognition of the local dignitaries and political candidates he's endorsed,
00:34:06.560the former president immediately begins entering into an interactive jumbotron policy dialogue with Kamala Harris.
00:34:18.240Trump's goal is to expose both the radical and often incompetent and inexperienced elements of Kamala Harris's policies.
00:34:31.740In this interactive experience, jumbotron experience, instead of telling his rally audience that Kamala supports an open border, defunding the police, defracking Pennsylvania,
00:34:47.780men competing in women's sports, or higher corporate taxes and all that stuff, here's the beauty of this.
00:34:55.180Trump just shows Harris expressing and revealing these stark differences in her own words on the jumbotrons and other video screens dispersed throughout the arena
00:35:08.000and beamed to the TV sets of audiences watching the rally live.
00:35:14.600Through such simulated interactions, once Kamala's words are played, Trump then offers his side of the policy equation
00:35:26.740and importantly, importantly, relates Kamala Harris's policy to one of the many current crises facing this country.
00:35:36.540And most importantly, Trump offers a set of concrete solutions.
00:35:42.020As Duke Ellington might say about this, it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing.
00:35:53.040As a second in synergistic Trump innovation, and to further boost the policy content of the rallies,
00:35:59.740Trump could also feature video clips from former, perhaps future, Trump advisors and cabinet officials offering details about the many specific policy actions
00:36:14.720President Trump plans to take to bring inflation under control, secure the border, bring peace to Ukraine and the Middle East, and so on.
00:37:08.960As still a third innovation in further synergy, Trump might also intersperse his remarks with video clips from American citizens actually harmed by the policies that have been implemented by the Harris-Biden White House.
00:37:26.580For example, at a rally in Pennsylvania, Trump might introduce a video clip montage from workers in the fracking patch who lost their jobs.
00:37:36.520And in classic Trump style, these workers might be brought on at the end of the speech, along with the policy advisors and the president in a kind of traveling roadshow bow like you see at the end of every Broadway production.
00:37:55.040Now, logistically, technologically, retooling Trump Rally 1.0 to incorporate these innovations would actually be a piece of cake.
00:38:07.560Jumbotron and video screens are abundant in every arena Trump will play at.
00:38:12.140Trump's speech writers, Vince Haley and Ross Worthington, can easily incorporate the appropriate cues and language to simulate the proposed interactions.
00:38:23.060And I'm going to prove this to you this week, there is a political cornucopia of video clips that expose both Kamala Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, for the woke, radical, incompetent, inexperienced, and very dangerous politicians that they are.
00:38:45.240It would be equally easy to schedule press conferences prior to rallies, and Trump has no shortage of policy advisors to call upon to join him at the press conferences and record video clips for the interactive rally speeches.
00:39:04.280With this technique, with Trump Rally 2.0, Trump can have equal fun with Harris's male running mate, Tim Walz.
00:39:16.700Hey, he's a much—you can beat the hell out of that guy and not worry about women voters running away.
00:39:23.080You can go out—that's just the Mars and Venus world we live in.
00:39:27.040And that dude, Tim Walz, in the second hour of the show, you don't miss this, because we've got a great guest coming on to talk about the history of Stolen Valor episodes, Tim Walz.
00:39:42.900Here, Trump can choose from any number of TV clips in which Tampon Tim supports feminine napkins in boys' bathrooms, Cuomo-style senior-killing lockdowns as governor of Minnesota during COVID,
00:39:56.920or engaging in, yes, Stolen Valor as Walz abandoned his fellow soldiers on their way to the Iraq War.
00:40:09.920It's really more of a courtesy and a strategy.
00:40:15.060It's a little pie in the sky knowing the boss, too, but I'm going out on a limb and a ledge here, and I'm going to give you this one, too, okay?
00:42:07.000I mean, hey, we're in a technology world.
00:42:09.000What I'm going to do later in the week, I'm going to show you kind of how some of this could work where you—I mean, like, it's the difference between show and tell.
00:42:24.320It's the first rule in any kind of communication.
00:42:27.760You're better off showing than telling, right?
00:42:30.800If I say Kamala Harris wants to defract Pennsylvania, that's one set of facts.
00:42:38.480If I show Kamala saying she wants to defract Pennsylvania, and then I show a fracking worker laid off and going into poverty, isn't that better?
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00:45:57.120The problem you face here is you've got these scumbags out there who somehow get a hold, go into your title, and they're able to switch it in their name, sell your house.
00:46:07.600And before you know it, you have a hard time getting it back.
00:46:33.460So let's set up what we're going to do in the second hour of this show and then just summarize where we've gone so far this morning.
00:46:45.840The top of the hour here, I'm going to have one of the great young generation surrogates in from the Trump campaign to talk about some of the issues.
00:47:03.220I think this is the kind of face and brain that we need more of.
00:47:10.740She's kind of like the Charlie Kirk crowd generation.
00:47:16.980And I think that one of the big demographics up for grabs are the younger generations who, as they have aged and realized that they don't have as good a chance of buying a house, a car, getting married, having a family and all that stuff.
00:47:36.600They're looking more and more towards Trump lands, Trump's America, and less and less towards kind of the Zuckerberg future of virtual reality and some kind of hovel with a chip in their head.
00:47:56.300So she'll be with us at 11, and then I'm really looking forward to the bottom of the hour.
00:48:04.940We've got one of Steve's favorite guests and authors on who does all the military history for us.
00:48:15.660And I want to have him kind of give us historical context on all this stolen valor issue with Kamala Harris's poor choice for vice president, Waltz.
00:48:34.440Because, I mean, look, that one just, when I saw that clip of him at some, I don't know, rotary lunch in Minnesota running for whatever he was, going out, talking about carrying guns and being this brave soldier and this, that, and the other thing.
00:49:00.020And I could see in his eyes lies, you know, it's that eagle song, you can't hide your lying eyes.
00:49:12.240They'd call him Teflon Tim, but I don't know.
00:49:17.760I mean, I've seen guys like that, there are a dime a dozen in politics.
00:49:22.240It's like, ah, you know, it's like, ah.
00:49:26.980And then you kind of look behind the curtain there, and it's senior citizens getting killed by his policies in lockdown.
00:49:40.480It's lying about Iraq and leaving his fellow soldiers to go get killed or maimed over there while he pursues his political ambitions.
00:49:56.000Or it's letting Minnesota burn, while Kamala was raising funds for the people who were burning it.
00:50:06.760So, anyway, at 11.30 Eastern time here, we're going to talk long and hard about the stolen valor issue.
00:50:18.160I hope we get to relate it, having had a pre-brief on this with the guests, whether we can relate it to the Swift Boat incident with John Kerry, which, pun intended, sunk his campaign.
00:50:39.580So let me just, in the last few minutes of this segment, what I'm trying to express to you is that political campaigns are about two things, strategy and messaging.
00:50:59.040And my read of this chessboard is that, first and foremost, the Trump campaign must focus on the swing voters.
00:51:13.400And those voters are not on any extremes.
00:51:18.560They're dead set in the middle and ideal targets for the policies that define Trump's America.
00:51:27.840What Kamala Harris is going to do, as long as she can do it, is avoid all of the policy issues because she has the cover of much of the media.
00:51:47.180ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, Washington Post, Axios, Bloomberg, Raw, stuff like that.
00:52:01.580So it's got to be our mission, and you're part of it, Posse.
00:52:05.600It's got to be our mission to get out there and explain not just the policy differences between Trump and Harris, but the consequences of the Harris-Biden policies with respect to runaway inflation, wars breaking out all over, murders and rapes from illegal aliens, all of that.
00:52:32.360All right, when we come back, Daniel Alvarez, direct from the Trump campaign, and we'll talk all things Trump campaign.
00:52:43.100Peter Cade Navarro, and for the Admiral, we'll be right back.