On today's show, Stephen K. Banno and Dave Brat discuss the debt ceiling crisis and how to deal with it. They also discuss the possibility of a debt ceiling increase and what it means for the future of the country.
00:03:17.000But right now, and this is key, at midnight on the 14th, three things will happen if we kick down, and they're talking about the raising the flag right now for a year long CR.
00:03:28.000Number one, it will be in President Trump's first year, you will have Joe Biden's budget and Joe Biden's numbers and Joe Biden's priorities.
00:03:37.000Number two, the Congressional Budget Office tells us, and War Room did its own math, it's at least a $2 trillion deficit this fiscal year.
00:03:47.000Number three, and here's the one that's as hard as those two are to embrace, the third one to me is the kill shot.
00:03:57.000All of the work of Doge, and here I'm not talking about their programmatic work of actually taking programs for it.
00:04:04.000We're talking about all this running around with audits and, you know, the $7 trillion in treasury, you don't know where it's going, and all this, everything, all the dust you see kicked up, all the waste, fraud, and abuse.
00:04:16.000You would actually technically be paying for that, all of it.
00:04:21.000None of it would come out, and you would pay for all of it.
00:04:23.000So all the Doge work to date would be for naught until next fiscal year, and people are already telling me, well, you know, in the appropriations process in July, you know, Doge is going to make presentations, going to be part of it.
00:04:37.000Number one, to get that $2 trillion down, which we have to do because it's not sustainable, the Congressional Budget Office came out, and they did a 10-year forecast.
00:04:46.000And we don't totally agree with everything you say, but directionally, it's correct.
00:04:50.000Debates about dynamic scoring and all these technical things can make it different.
00:04:54.000But what they say is you basically have 1.8% growth in over 10 years is $2 trillion a year, right, given the current tax structure.
00:05:09.000Interest is, you know, double what the Pentagon is at that time, time and a half.
00:05:14.000Neil Ferguson actually has a chart at his new theory of the case is that any nation has an interest payment higher in defense will collapse.
00:05:22.000It's different than the – this time it's different, which is about total debt to GDP.
00:05:26.000This is interest payments via defense.
00:05:29.000We're checking it out, but it sounds, unfortunately, quite logical.
00:05:36.000Number one, and tie it back to Rubio's opening statement in his Senate confirmation, the post-war international rules-based order is over.
00:05:44.000And that is basically spread out to the United States around the Eurasian landmass in NATO and Western Europe, around the Gulf Emirates in Israel and the Middle East, in the Malacca, in the South China Sea, down in Southeast Asia, and up with Korea and Japan.
00:06:29.000We're going to start by taking back the Panama Canal, cut off the Chinese, the People's Liberation Navy from teaming up with the Russians in the Caribbean.
00:06:36.000And we're going to go all the way to the Arctic, the new great game of the 21st century, like Afghanistan was in the 19th or Persia was in the 19th between the Russian Empire and the British.
00:06:53.000But Greenland to Greenland to the Panama Canal gives a forward deployment of American power, naval power.
00:07:02.000They block the Russian submarines, the fast attacks and boomers coming out of Murmansk and out of Archangel right there between Greenland and Iceland.
00:07:22.000This is why we need peace between these powers.
00:07:24.000Now, President Trump, when he looks at geostrategically the hemisphere, also you go to the three island chains in the Pacific in the vast desert that is the Pacific Ocean.
00:07:33.000And the United States is pretty well protected.
00:07:36.000You add an Iron Dome if it's even feasible and you have a hermetically sealed hemisphere.
00:07:42.000You get Bolsonaro down in Brazil and you get Millet out of that crypto mess in Argentina.
00:07:52.000Now, when you look at that, there's a problem.
00:07:54.000And that problem is the southern border of the United States of America.
00:07:57.000And that is a failed state just south of us in Mexico.
00:08:03.000The Mexican drug cartels are a kinetic force in that plan and they must be eradicated.
00:08:08.000To make the hemispheric defense work, you've got to take care of your problems inside that hemisphere.
00:08:14.000Number one problem, Mexican drug cartels.
00:08:17.000Todd Bensman, your reporting on this is amazing because last night the Central Intelligence Agency, I guess it got leaked out, the CIA is now repurposing some assets.
00:08:27.000And they're looking they're looking to get involved with the Mexican drug cartels in some sort of kinetic activity coupled with you got the 10th mountain.
00:08:36.000You got the seventh of special forces.
00:08:38.000You've got guys down training, pre-positioning.
00:08:41.000What do we have on the war that's coming, folks?
00:08:43.000And it's going to be a kinetic war against the Mexican drug cartels, sir.
00:08:47.000Well, the Washington Post is out with a very important story and their reporting usually is good on CIA.
00:08:56.000And they're saying that the CIA is realigning from protecting Ukraine's borders in its war to protecting our borders down in Mexico.
00:09:07.000Now, CIA has always been down in Mexico doing, you know, intel operations in support of Mexican and U.S. law enforcement regarding the cartels.
00:09:18.000But what it looks like here is a major treble down where they're going to really be enhancing and increasing their ability to infiltrate the cartels to provide intelligence against the cartels in a more dedicated, committed fashion, a wider, broader way to do counter narcotics operations with the Mexicans.
00:09:45.000And possibly even to do covert actions themselves, infiltrating the operatives into the cartels.
00:09:53.000So this all just fits in with a lot of other puzzle pieces that have been coming out in bits and dribs and drabs here and there about that all kind of point to the fact that the United States is resetting the table for something that is probably going to look like what we did with Colombia.
00:10:14.000With Colombia against the FARC all during the 90s and into the early 2000s, where the Colombians went to war with FARC, which is a major cocaine smuggling organization and an insurgency against the Colombian government leftists.
00:10:32.840Of course, of course, it looks like they're going to require the Mexicans to drop their hugs, not bullets policy of the last six, seven years and make it a bullets, not hugs policy.
00:11:13.920The not, you know, not in the vital national interest of the United States, the eastern Russian speaking border between those two Slavic entities.
00:12:03.060So the Green Berets sent a small contingent, at least initially, of trainers down into near the Bay of Campeche in the south to help the Mexican Navy train for counter-cartel operations, non-conventional.
00:12:27.920Which tells you that something is up, obviously.
00:12:33.160And that particular force, the Mexican Marines, I mean the naval Marines, are probably the most insulated of all the Mexican military forces from corruption.
00:12:47.440That tells you something that they selected them.
00:12:50.500They're probably going to be the tip of the spear in whatever happens.
00:13:59.640And they're pre-positioning for a fight, okay?
00:14:02.700And they're not going to be a law enforcement fight where the cartels actually outgun the cops.
00:14:08.260You're bringing in some heavies who are going to drop some, they're going to pound, ground and pound these guys like they've never been hit before.
00:14:16.880And we're going to see how tough the cartel is.
00:14:18.640The cartel is tough against civilians.
00:14:21.120They're very tough against the law enforcement that's outgunned by these guys, both on our side of the border, right?
00:14:27.720Because these people are vicious, and the other side of the border.
00:14:31.740Todd Benzman is with us, the great author of Overrun, a book that changed the direction of the 24 campaign from his years of putting himself in harm's way.
00:16:46.880The head of criminal division over at the D.C. under Graves, now Ed Martin's taking control of our good buddy Ed Martin and a friend of the show.
00:17:24.700You get an extra day at CPAC because we're going to do a Force Multiplier Academy.
00:17:27.680We are going to do the show live from there tomorrow.
00:17:31.080Poso's going to do his 2 o'clock show there live.
00:17:33.580We're going to have a ton of information and presenters to make sure that we take you next level given the tremendous, great results you had in 24, the 22 midterm, 24 election, and now getting the confirmations approved.
00:17:49.500Also, I want to talk – I'm going to go back to Ben and to – Ben's been here in a moment.
00:18:13.940I've talked to him about his book at length, The Strategy of Denial.
00:18:16.460And Bridge is not a – you know, if you read Josh Rogan's book, Chaos Under Heaven, which is she and Trump in the first term.
00:18:26.380And he's got – you know, he's got these definitions of groups.
00:18:29.280He's got the, you know, the accommodationist, which is the Wall Street crowd.
00:18:32.960You've got the realist, which is kind of the maddest crowd.
00:18:35.260You've got the hardliners, kind of the Pompeo crowd.
00:18:38.220And then he said you had a totally new group that had never been done in American history, and that was the Superhawks.
00:18:44.180The Superhawks were Navarro, Miller, and Bannon.
00:18:46.980And they don't believe in the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party.
00:18:50.380You want to see the Chinese Communist Party taken down 100 percent.
00:18:53.940That's why I'm the only civilian in American history ever be fully sanctioned by the Chinese Communist Party, as you guys know, one minute after high noon on the 20th of January 2021.
00:19:03.640Mike Pompeo, Matt Pottinger, Peter Navarro, Stephen K. Bannon.
00:19:07.880Those three were still government officials.
00:19:14.560All of this revolves around the CCP and the threat to the CCP and the criminals in Beijing.
00:19:22.860We have two existential threats to us right now, our own making our debt in our financial situation and also an existential threat in the Chinese Communist Party.
00:19:44.980You might have heard that name before.
00:19:47.080By the way, to tie it back to Todd Benson, when Todd Benson, William Colby's grandfather ran the CIA back in the days when it delivered some hammer blows before the church commission.
00:20:00.020A guy named either Lee Harvey Oswald or somebody pretending to be Lee Harvey Oswald actually went to visit, I think, the CIA, and the CIA reported on this in Mexico.
00:20:14.120I believe, Todd, it was September or early October of, wait for it, 1963.
00:20:18.520So the CIA has been very involved in Mexico for a long time and knows its way around there, and now is going to be utilized to action for our defense.
00:20:34.900I keep telling my super hawk colleagues, the Committee on the Present Danger, other guys, you know, the Frank Gaffneys and our colleagues who hammer every day about the CCP, the Brian Kennedys.
00:21:05.000It's very focused on East Asia, and he may not look at, as we look at the Chinese Communist Party, as having designs on all the Eurasian landmass.
00:21:11.840He doesn't think, by our theory of the case, that they really are the controlling element of the mullahs in Persia or the KGB in Russia, and that's why Saudi Arabia, the meeting yesterday, is so vitally important to break them off from their sphere of influence.
00:21:26.480But Bridge Colby is one of the first guys to say we've got to get out of Ukraine, and this is sensitive.
00:21:31.620Bridge Colby agrees with, I think, not just Tucker and Kurt Mills, but Stephen K. Bannon.
00:21:37.480We just can't, given the bad track record we've had over the last 30 years in the Middle East, it's been a disaster.
00:21:43.640Right now, there has to be other means, and this is why the Saudi Arabia meeting is quite symbolic, to have it in Riyadh and to have Russia and the United States coming together.
00:21:53.240There has to be other means than an air attack or a ground invasion into Persia to stop what they're clearly trying to do.
00:22:01.100And I say this as a young man that spent a couple of three days off the coast of Persia during the Iranian hostage crisis in the workup for that failed endeavor.
00:22:11.340And I will tell you, you don't understand that part of the world until you've been there, and you see it's like the landscape from the moon.
00:22:24.440And our allies, Israel, there has to be another way.
00:22:28.100And a guy like Bridge Colby, I think, can work.
00:22:29.840And this is one of the reasons he's being blown up right now.
00:22:32.280He's not perfect on China, but he's good enough for right now.
00:22:35.260He's been pretty perfect on Ukraine, and I think he's pretty damn good on Persia.
00:22:39.100And right now in that slot, which is an all-important slot, I'm a big supporter.
00:22:44.140Let's get Bridge in there, and then we'll figure it out because the other alternatives I don't see any better right now given the reality of where we are.
00:22:52.540So Bridge Colby, and right now they haven't scheduled it, but this is something we'll be reporting on as we go forward.
00:22:59.920Todd Bensman, the other thing, before we go to the post, anything else on this?
00:23:03.960Because you've been at the tip of the spear, and, folks, we're connecting dots here.
00:23:07.040You've got – Hex has sent the military to the border.
00:23:40.260Now, the deportations, Bensman, you're the first guy to mention – and this gets back to the two bills and not the reconciliations.
00:23:48.360Lindsey Graham's telling the president over the weekend – this will tie to my breath thing.
00:23:52.540He told the president on the weekend, say, hey, look, this continuing resolution is not going to have any more money for you than what we need to do.
00:23:59.440We need to get this one bill done, and we need to get it done now.
00:24:02.500We need $175 billion to secure the border and to basically – you want to deport 10 million people?
00:24:12.080You need $175 billion, and you need it now.
00:24:14.340Now, oh, by the way, let's throw in $125 billion on top of the $900, $125 billion on military, and they're going to say – Banner will shut you guys up.
00:24:28.320They're going to say this is all for hemispheric defense.
00:24:30.440You want hemispheric defense, you want the Panama Canal, you want Greenland, you want naval forces, you want to drive out the cartels, you want to have three island chains.
00:24:40.840That's not in our budget because our budget still ties to the post-war international rules-based order.
00:24:54.100Before I get to the deportations, I just want to point out the Washington Post, which is now breaking the story, I guess, about the CIA troubling down in Mexico, also is carrying a story talking about how, wow, nobody's coming across, but Trump keeps putting troops down on the border, and what are they going to do?
00:25:16.240But what they're not realizing is that maybe they want to have 500 troops of the 10th Mountain Division in Fort Huachuca as a credible threat to the cartels when kinetics, when fireworks start up down there.
00:25:39.660Because that's a light infantry division.
00:25:43.060Yes, they'll probably have them scaling cliffs in Arizona, going after drug traffickers and whatnot.
00:25:49.700But if the cartels decide to cross in and do something to our law enforcement, et cetera, they're going to be having to contend with these guys.
00:25:58.880I just wanted to point out that there is a reason other than tracking drug traffickers and shutting down illegal immigration for a group like that to be in Fort Huachuca, 500 of them with all their gear and ammo.
00:26:15.260So regarding the deportations, I just wanted to point out, like, there is pearl clutching going on around the globe over the fact that we are cuffing and leg ironing immigrants on these flights.
00:26:34.440India is just absolutely beside itself with outrage over a couple of flights that came in and everybody was handcuffed, usually young men handcuffed when they come in there.
00:26:48.000And I just – the New York Post piece that I have out today is just pointing out that there's a damn good reason for that.
00:26:54.300Just a few years ago, when the Biden administration was trying to shut down the migrant camp under the Del Rio Bridge, they did air deportations on the Haitians and didn't restrain them.
00:27:07.300And as a result, they tried to hijack flights midair.
00:27:12.220They tore the stuffing out of every seat and attacked the pilots, attacked ICE agents, mutinied on buses, took over buses that were on their way to Laughlin Air Base for the deportation flights, and they learned their lesson.
00:27:28.340And I just point out that that is the problem.
00:27:31.420You don't want to have a hijacking or a riot at 40,000 feet.
00:27:38.440Hey, Todd, by the way, the cover of your book is that – from the International Bridge, that amazing picture.
00:27:43.600This book, one of the most important books of the 21st century, because this book did more than any to show people the reality of what Biden had done at the border.
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00:30:11.920Okay, there's a tweet out from Lavrov, I think, on RT, so take it for whether it's worth, that state TV in Russia, but saying how they've already agreed to ambassadors, ASAP, and to take apart any kind of diplomatic restraints on getting together.
00:31:02.580And now it's time to start acting anti-imperial.
00:31:07.140In Paris, what you're seeing is they're having a discussion, and they're coming to the conclusion the smug elites in Europe is they can't afford and never could afford their own defense.
00:31:16.560This is why we bailed them out in World War I.
00:31:19.740We then went back and bailed them out again in World War II.
00:31:22.200We then went back and bailed them out again in the Cold War.
00:32:21.720Steve, you mentioned that the United States isn't looking for protectorates.
00:32:25.440I have to say, if you look at the Telegraph article from yesterday outlying the plan, supposed plan, the U.S. administration plan for Ukraine and the rare earths and the minerals, which you and I both posted.
00:33:54.080But the finance minister of the party that may actually win – it won't be alternative for Deutschland, but it may be the Christian Democrat right – this guy's a pretty low-key guy.
00:35:00.880I've got a great article at the top of my feed right now indicating, talking about this thing that Keir Starmer, the UK prime minister, was calling for in Paris yesterday, which was the US stopgap.
00:35:13.440Basically, the US would be underwriting the UK on the security guarantees.
00:35:47.560And all you get up here in Washington, they don't think the Pacific exists.
00:35:51.660They don't care about the Western Hemisphere.
00:35:54.500All they care about is their buddies in Northwest Europe and in places like Paris, places like Milan, places like the City of London and then Greater London.
00:36:13.240Dave Bratt, now we bring it back here.
00:36:15.160Our Wall Street Journal folks understand, big article today.
00:36:18.320They've targeted our own former co-host, Peter Navarro, Dr. Peter Navarro in the White House.
00:36:23.000They've targeted Navarro as he's the problem.
00:36:26.020You know, Trump's got this kind of master plan, but Navarro's the problem, and particularly he's going to destroy the agriculture and manufacturing sector.
00:36:33.560When the Murdochs come for you, they roll hard, baby.
00:36:49.420It's like cramming for an exam every time I come on because it's just exciting.
00:36:54.380And hearing you connect the dots, they all just flow, right?
00:36:57.160The war to the border invasions to the economy.
00:37:00.180I think you mentioned the other day Neil Ferguson, right, a great Oxford historian who connects the dots, that when your interest payments get bigger than your defense sector, your economy's in decline.
00:37:15.260And roughly that's just true intuitively, right?
00:37:17.640If you look at Western civilization, you need two things to be a successful empire or country or whatever, and that's a sound economy and a strong military.
00:37:27.800If you're missing any one of those, you're in trouble.
00:37:30.680Rome got in trouble precisely because they got over their skis, right?
00:37:34.920Their spending on wars and defense overcame their ability to generate revenues.
00:37:42.480And so at the beginning of your show, I love the autocratic breakthroughs, right?
00:38:04.960Name me an autocrat who doged himself, right, who voluntarily downsized his military, downsized his federal employees, downsized the workforce.
00:38:47.280I just want to make sure people know, Niall Ferguson is a tremendous historian.
00:38:51.200But the Mac daddy in this, a guy named Paul Kennedy, he wrote a book that was a must-read when I came out of the Pentagon and went to Harvard back in the mid-'80s.
00:39:00.220It was towards the end of President Reagan's administration.
00:39:02.960He wrote The Rise and the Fall of Great Powers.
00:39:05.460If I can strongly recommend to this audience, you get a book.
00:39:26.000It comes from you've spent too much money on arms, too much money.
00:39:29.560You've diverted too many – it plowshares the swords, and it's how you finance it.
00:39:35.760He gets to the part of it's not just the aggregate amount of what you're doing and the manpower you're killing, right, your own best guys, but he gets into how you finance it, the rise and the fall of great powers.
00:39:47.380And, baby, it is the United States today, and that's what these elites that run this nation have not got.
00:39:53.080They have not learned the true lessons of history that have been out there to learn.
00:40:11.060Now, I'm going to get to that in a little analysis here.
00:40:13.360But the Wall Street Journal, they're just silly, and it's all about framing.
00:40:16.860On our good friend Peter Navarro yesterday, they say reciprocal trade – they're calling that maximalist tariffs, reciprocal trade, which means just fairness, right?
00:41:11.520But he's talking about what we talk about here, that civic society has provided for the greatest market in mankind's history.
00:41:18.220And Trump thinks like, hey, if you're going to get a skybox at a sporting event or if you're going to get a front row seat at a concert, you've got to pay a premium.
00:41:24.320To get through the golden door, it's got to be a premium.
00:41:27.460And if you're not going to pay – if you bring your manufacturing here and make it here, then guess what?
00:41:33.660You don't probably have to pay the premium.
00:41:35.160But it is to a degree – the Wall Street Journal is smart to attack this because they're free traders, right?
00:41:41.800This is the Economist, the Financial Times of London, really the papers and magazines that inspired the Wall Street Journal were built in the time of free trade.
00:41:51.360These were ideological, almost religious fights in, I guess, the late 18th and 19th century in Britain when London was the centerpiece of the world.
00:42:02.480And the fights here from the Corn Laws and everything ahead, this was British politics for 150, 200 years.
00:42:08.740It's one of the reasons we had a revolution.
00:42:10.180Remember, our revolutionary generation would have been on the ground floor of an empire when Clive and these guys are doing India, they're doing North America, and these guys said, hey, look, we see how a worthless aristocracy has corrupted commons, has corrupted commons, taken it away from the little guy.
00:42:27.120And they have – they give these monopolies to their buddies like the British East India Company, and they saw this coming.
00:42:34.920In British history, what's not done enough is the power of these monopolistic companies to basically drive international strategy and geostrategy in North America here.
00:42:45.140And this is what the revolutionary generation is about.
00:43:02.540We'd rather opt out even to the point of being hungish traitors to have our own deal here because we see what's happening with this worthless aristocracy in London.
00:43:11.740We see how the corrupted commons will never be free.
00:44:18.700He's our wise man, a former CIA, Pentagon, and White House advisor with an unmatched grasp of geopolitics and capital markets.
00:44:26.940Jim predicted Trump's Electoral College victory exactly 312 to 226, down to the actual number itself.
00:44:36.320Now he's issuing a dire warning about April 11th, a moment that could define Trump's presidency in your financial future.
00:44:43.360His latest book, Money GPT, exposes how AI is setting the stage for financial chaos, bank runs at lightning speeds, algorithm-driven crashes, and even threats to national security.
00:44:55.560Right now, war room members get a free copy of Money GPT when they sign up for Strategic Intelligence.
00:45:02.160This is Jim's flagship financial newsletter, Strategic Intelligence.
00:45:24.060Okay, Brett is going to be here this afternoon in studio to co-host both hours.
00:45:30.000We're going to get to all of his brilliant analysis because I've been yelling and screaming into this microphone and taking away all his airtime.
00:45:37.620We're also going to have updates on the resistance, you know, the Supreme Court, all the legal, the federal judges, everything they're trying to do on Doge.
00:45:45.380Brett and I are actually going to take some time, besides his charts, we're actually going to take some time and walk through process.
00:45:51.220We're going to walk through the CR that's coming, and we're going to talk about the two reconciliations, everything else President Trump and the economic team are trying to do.
00:46:29.560We're going to have some of the experts on to break it all down at 6 o'clock, and Dave Brett's going to be with me besides economics and more updates on geopolitics.
00:50:18.020It's called What are the Odds from Crack Addict to CEO?
00:50:20.960I always use mathematics my whole life to prove that God exists.
00:50:24.740I said, well, what's the odds of that happening?
00:50:26.420A one in a million or a one in a billion?
00:50:28.780Or when do you add them together and it becomes a miracle?
00:50:31.840Well, I remember in 2017 being in the White House.
00:50:34.920Here's this next crack addict, and I go live with President Trump to the nation, and all my friends at home are going, what is this crack addict doing on TV with the president?
00:50:44.660Jesus is real because this would be impossible.
00:50:48.280And so eight years ago today, when those things kept happening, I go, this is, I did a full surrender to Jesus Christ, and I forgave myself for a lot of things that happened way back in the day.
00:50:58.380And I was able to then go forth to something I couldn't do, and that was speaking in public.
00:51:03.020Two months after that, I spoke at U.S. Bank Stadium, 60,000 people, and led them in prayer.
00:51:08.920That is something there's no way I could have ever done.
00:51:11.900And so it's a very special day for me, and I want to bring it back to the war room with the crosses that we're going to keep on sale for the, it means so much to me, 30% off.
00:51:24.040But also, we're going to go back in time with the pillow that God gave me the idea for, the MyPillow, the classics, for $14.88.
00:51:33.060We're bringing that special back for just a couple days here, exclusive to the war room posse.
00:51:38.560You guys, this is where it all started.