In this episode, we talk with Treasury Secretary Scott Besant about his vision for the future of the country and how he thinks we can get back on track with economic growth and a smaller federal government. We also discuss the impact of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the tax reform bill that passed the House of Representatives and is now heading to the Senate.
00:00:00.000One of the reasons, other than my support for President Trump, that I came out from behind my desk, and I had a pretty good life, and I wanted to come out and really tell people that I was worried about an impending financial calamity, given the high levels of government spending that were leading to high levels of government debt.
00:00:23.360So what we are doing, on one side, the president is reordering trade. On the other side, we are shedding excess labor in the federal government and bringing down federal borrowings. And then on the other side, that will give us the labor that we need for the new manufacturing, and we're going to relever the private sector.
00:00:51.280So the private sector, in essence, has been in recession during the Biden years. And this is an opportunity to right-size the federal government and unleash the private sector again, because it's been hemmed down by excessive regulation, and it's been crowded out by the government.
00:01:10.260We are under your direction. We're reprivatizing the economy. We're bringing down government spending. We're bringing down excess employment in the government sector. On the other side, we're going to releverage the banking system.
00:01:22.780We're going to have all the new manufacturing jobs, so everyone who's laid off from the government will have an opportunity to go into the private sector, and that is going to lead to disinflation.
00:01:35.260Inflation is under control. We're going to get the affordability crisis fixed.
00:01:39.620So lower energy, deregulation, more private sector jobs that will naturally get interest rates down, interest rates down, mortgage rates are down almost every week since January 20th.
00:01:53.940The energy costs are down about 15 percent. Crude oil is down about 15 percent.
00:01:59.420And as we keep that going, interest rates are going to keep declining.
00:02:03.880It'll be good for mortgages. It'll be good for credit card debt. It'll be great for auto loans.
00:02:09.620This is the primal scream of a dying regime.
00:02:17.120Pray for our enemies, because we're going medieval on these people.
00:02:22.340You're just not going to get a free shot at all these networks lying about the people. The people have had a belly full of it.
00:02:28.520I know you don't like hearing that. I know you try to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it. It's going to happen.
00:02:33.900And where do people like that go to share the big lie?
00:02:36.600Mega media. I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience.
00:02:44.100Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose?
00:02:47.840If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved.
00:02:54.040War Room. Here's your host, Stephen K. Vance.
00:02:57.460It's Wednesday, 2 July in the year of our Lord, 2025.
00:03:08.340There's a very dramatic activity on the floor of the House as the big, beautiful bill.
00:03:14.140Actually, they try to pass an amendment to a rule and then pass the rule, so they actually vote on the bill and debate it tonight.
00:03:19.760And I imagine they're going to try to go through the night.
00:03:23.860Officials from the White House have just gone and briefed certain members of the House Freedom Caucus.
00:03:27.420Ross Vogt's been down there. I think he's back now at OMB.
00:03:31.420We're honored to have the Secretary of Treasury, Scott Besant, with us.
00:03:35.280Mr. Secretary, I think it was about a year ago, April, May of 2024, you made the statement here on the show that, hey, I think this is the last chance we'll ever have, the country will ever have, to have a supply-side solution to the economic and financial problems of the country.
00:03:54.600My belief is that's gotten kind of lost here in the last couple of days as the Senate dealt with this bill and now the House deals with this bill.
00:04:02.680You have all this discussion about structural changes in the out years and CBO.
00:04:09.640It was always about growth and about growth that grows faster than the deficits, faster than debt, and gets you on the plan to go from 6 percent deficit to GDP down to 3.
00:04:19.840Can you just step back for a second and walk us through with the overall economic and financial plan that is embodied, manifested in this piece of legislation that we're trying to get pushed over the coal line either late tonight or tomorrow, sir?
00:04:35.580Steve, good to see you, and it's good to be on because the War Room audience is my favorite audience, so I miss being on.
00:05:08.740But as I've said before, President Trump's economic agenda is a three-legged stool, so trade, tax, and deregulation.
00:05:19.260And on Friday, I think we made great progress in the House today.
00:05:24.760And I've got to say, these Freedom Caucus congressmen and a couple of senators have reset the center of gravity in terms of the spending.
00:05:36.860They're holding people's feet to the fire.
00:05:40.040And I think that we are going to have economic growth like we haven't seen before.
00:05:46.760And here, this bill has something for everybody.
00:05:52.480But one of the main parts is the 2017 Tax Cuts and Job Act that was 100% expensing of capital goods.
00:06:03.500So we've added 100% expensing for factories and agricultural structures.
00:06:10.880So we're going to have this boom in the country that it could be growth like we haven't seen since post-World War II, since the 1890s, at least back to the 1990s.
00:06:26.220And we are making the U.S. the best destination for capital.
00:06:32.260You're going to have tax certainty because we're never going to have to listen to this twaddle again that these are the biggest tax cuts in history.
00:06:40.120Because it's going to become the baseline.
00:06:46.620And the power of this permanence and giving people certainty, I think, is going to drive a lot of growth.
00:06:53.840So we're going to have tax certainty, cheap energy, and we are going to deregulate and make it possible for long-term projects for private sector and the public sector to do what we should be doing in terms of our long-term electricity needs, our fossil fuel needs, for businesses to be able to have great certainty and make long-term investments.
00:07:20.540You make a good point that I think is lost on people.
00:07:25.320I want to go through it right now that if you look at Biden with the massive spending they had and the huge deficits, the real economy, the actual – if you took out the federal spending, the economy was in a recession and had been in a recession.
00:07:36.940One of the things you said you and President Trump were focused on doing was reprivatizing the American economy.
00:07:42.820Can you explain that to folks, what that means?
00:07:46.580Yeah, it means the pulling down – exactly as you just said, pulling down this government spending and letting the private sector take over.
00:07:57.280And I was with – on Friday, I was with the Senate Republicans at lunch and one of the senators said, you know, I used to be in the luxury car business and I'll tell you that my biggest clients were the people who were feeding off the IRA and the Green New Deal.
00:08:23.240And they would come in to my showrooms and they were buying Porsches, Maseratis, Rolls Royces, and they were laughing at everybody in Congress and how much money they had taken.
00:08:35.140So like these subsidies and – these are just stranded assets that are going nowhere.
00:08:42.540One of the biggest – as I said, I had very good conversations with the Freedom Caucus members yesterday.
00:08:48.820I'm sure that they are going to get to yes on behalf of the president, on behalf of the American people.
00:08:58.220But I told them one of the biggest changes between the House and the Senate was the House – when the bill left the House, full expensing for factory equipment, farm equipment, any business equipment was only for five years.
00:09:13.680The Senate made it permanent, so that was probably another $400 billion scoring over the 10-year window.
00:09:47.380I've been meeting with business leaders.
00:09:49.080And they've all been waiting to start their CapEx until they have the certainty that they're going to know here.
00:09:56.780So I think this could be a private sector boom like we haven't seen in years.
00:10:02.100And that's what it was structured for.
00:10:05.620You've got full-spectrum energy dominance to lower energy costs.
00:10:09.540You've got the changing in commercial relationships internationally with the tariffs or trade deals.
00:10:13.960Either we'll reshore the factories here and get the tax revenue from production here and from incomes here, or we'll get the $300 billion to $400 billion.
00:11:13.100And, Steve, I know you want to focus on the one big, beautiful bill today.
00:11:17.400But I will say one of the things that President Trump has done with this trade agenda that no one has noticed yet, and it's going to become very obvious we're going to start talking about it, for 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, the trade negotiators were willing to sacrifice the manufacturing base.
00:11:39.020Okay, we want, as your friend Larry Fink said, in a good quote, capitalism without guardrails.
00:11:49.480We want capitalism without guardrails.
00:11:58.840So there was this false choice between manufacturing and ag.
00:12:04.920And the trade deals now, because President Trump was very aggressive with the Liberation Day tariffs, we are getting a tariff wall up that is going to help our manufacturing sector.
00:12:20.020And part of our trade negotiations is selling the mag.
00:12:23.800So it is possible, President Trump has shown, and we are going to reap the benefits that we are going to get both.
00:12:30.720We are going to have a revitalized precision manufacturing sector with good, high-paying jobs that allow families to save for the future, own homes, and the agricultural sector is going to do great.
00:12:44.640With the announcement of the Vietnam deal today, corn, soybeans are up 2% or 3%.
00:12:50.560So what had happened in the past is over, and both sectors are going to do well.
00:12:58.520The capital markets right now are looking at this and are responding.
00:13:17.360It looks like we're going to go to Brazil here next to Philip Patrick.
00:13:20.620But you've a little bit chop-blocked the global south in their efforts to get off the dollar.
00:13:24.320Do you agree with that, the capital markets are receiving, the more they understand about the big, beautiful bill, they like what they see?
00:13:31.780Steve, 35 years in the markets, markets live in the future.
00:15:27.760This transition won't not happen overnight.
00:15:30.680But trust me, it's going to start in Rio.
00:15:33.520The Rio Reset in July marks a pivotal moment when BRICS objectives move decisively from a theoretical possibility towards an inevitable reality.
00:15:43.720Learn if diversifying your savings into gold is right for you.
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00:17:39.800Get up to speed, all this debt ceiling, debt, deficits, canes, all of it, how it relates to the U.S. dollar, which is the prime reserve currency.
00:17:49.420The entire world revolves around the U.S. dollar, and that directly affects your financial situation.
00:17:56.200Understand how gold has been a hedge against this since the beginning of time.
00:17:59.980And actually, since so much of the bad stuff has happened to us since 1971 when Nixon took us off really the gold standard, the convertibility into gold.
00:18:22.760This is a very big deal, and here's the reason.
00:18:24.720The – I think, and this is my interpretation, they may be off of instituting an alternative plan now, but the rumblings of the BRICS nations has getting louder every day.
00:18:39.200And it's not just the big, beautiful bill and some of the deficit financing.
00:18:42.180This is really kind of now forming into a block that is a geopolitical unit of the global south that controls most of the resources in the world, and they want their own currency.
00:18:53.400So walk us through – you're down there.
00:18:55.920You're going to be bringing it all to us over the next couple of days.
00:18:58.380What's your sense as you've arrived there?
00:26:34.760Brother, I thought we were past these.
00:26:37.280I guess what just happened, sir, with a federal judge that just put the brakes on President Trump's deportation program?
00:26:44.000Yeah, we have another Democrat activist judge, this time D.C. Obama judge Randolph Marks, telling the President of the United States that he needs to reopen the border and let in the flood of fake asylum seekers who came into our country.
00:27:05.480Apparently, 20 million fake asylum seekers during President Biden wasn't enough for this Obama judge, Randolph Moss.
00:27:15.640And so he's telling the President of the United States that he is no longer the commander in chief, apparently.
00:27:25.320He can no longer repel this invasion of our border.
00:27:28.680These judges have forged the legitimacy of the Supreme Court of the United States and the lower federal courts.
00:27:37.560The Supreme Court just ruled 6-3 that these judges cannot issue these nationwide injunctions.
00:27:46.320And here we are a week later, less than a week later, and this Judge Randolph Moss, this D.C. Obama judge, is saying,
00:27:55.180OK, we're not going to do nationwide injunctions.
00:27:58.680He's just going to certify a class of every asylum seeker in the world and say that every asylum seeker in the world is a class under this lawsuit.
00:28:11.820And therefore, they're in, that Obama, that Biden needs to let down them.
00:29:47.160Okay, folks, while we have this battle royale on the hill about the big, beautiful bill and trying to get it passed, you heard the Secretary of the Treasury.
00:30:01.500You've got this other huge fight that's going to take place down in Rio de Janeiro where the third world or the global south, as is now called the resource-rich global south, I think is going to put a shot across the bow of the industrial democracies on this.
00:30:18.080The centerpiece – and actually at the White House today, Mike, they were arguing – they're arguing for the guys on the hill to say, look, if everything else, the centerpiece of this and centerpiece of President Trump's program is the sealing of the border in the mass deportations.
00:30:33.380This is what they're arguing about, the big, beautiful bill, because I think it's got $150 billion in there to build the wall, secure the – keep the troops down there, secure it, get ICE working, get Border Patrol working, and build the logistics systems like things like –
00:30:47.360Although it's a state level, like Alligator Alcatraz to basically start shipping these bad hombres and the other hombres home.
00:30:55.480And now a federal judge in D.C., which I thought used to be the – Southern District was the finance – prestigious finance thing for the judiciary.
00:31:06.360You have another wild man actually come out a week after the Supreme Court and give a class to the asylum seekers, which is between 10 and 20 million that came here illegally in the Biden regime, sir.
00:31:21.460Yeah, this is an insane and unacceptable ruling by this D.C. Obama judge, Randolph Moss.
00:31:31.900Just last week, the Supreme Court ruled that these activist judges cannot issue nationwide injunction.
00:31:41.100This judge, Randolph Moss, today, tried to get around that by saying, oh, I'm not issuing a nationwide injunction.
00:31:47.740I am certifying a class of every asylum seeker on the planet and saying that President Trump cannot keep these asylum seekers out of America.
00:32:00.180Essentially, Randolph Moss thinks he's going to overturn the last election, overturn the will of the American people,
00:32:08.600and sabotage the president's core Article II executive power as commander-in-chief to protect our country from a foreign invasion.
00:32:17.640The Supreme Court just said these judges can't do this.
00:32:20.880This judge turns around, does an opinion today, ignoring the Supreme Court, saying it's not a nationwide injunction.
00:32:31.020This is a class certification, even though he did not go through any of the steps required for class certification.
00:32:38.820And to certify an entire class of every asylum seeker on the planet is absolutely insane.
00:32:45.980This needs to get appealed immediately to the D.C. circuit.
00:32:50.440The D.C. circuit has become lost to Obama and Biden judges.
00:32:56.120Hopefully, they'll get a three-judge panel that stops this.
00:33:00.960But that could go unblocked, meaning the full D.C. circuit, all the active judges on the D.C. circuit could take the case.
00:33:08.600And then that's dominated by Democrats.
00:33:11.140And so this is going to come up to the Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who's the circuit justice to the D.C. circuit.
00:33:19.780It could get referred to the full court.
00:33:21.900But I'll tell you, to John Roberts, we've been warning you for months that you have to get your judicial house in order, that these activist judges are not operating in good faith.
00:33:33.660And this is Exhibit A with this D.C. Obama judge, Randolph Moss, who is clearly ignoring the Supreme Court's order last week, that these activist judges cannot issue nationwide injunctions.
00:33:46.000This guy is effectively doing this worldwide.
00:33:52.740Number one, when you certify a class, is he saying that everybody that claims their asylum seeker, everybody that came here, the 10 to 20 million right now is like a protected class, and they will move through some legal procedure as a class?
00:34:10.520Under Rule 23, the full rules of civil procedure, you have certification.
00:34:15.560And your classes, when you are certifying a class of plaintiffs, that means that their claims are all the same, are essentially all the same.
00:34:26.880You have different people who are claiming asylum from different countries for different reasons, right?
00:34:33.540And so even if he did go through the Rule 23 class certification, which he did not properly go through that process, clearly, he just did it by fiats.
00:34:44.360Even if he did that, he committed reversible legal error by doing this.
00:35:22.540Or you have to – isn't this something that's going to require an oral argument, sir?
00:35:27.620What I think will happen, I think this judge, if I'm reading this correctly, he's saying his order will take effect in 14 days.
00:35:34.620So that gives them 14 days to get to the D.C. circuit, and hopefully the D.C. circuit will get to the right result.
00:35:41.220If not, then the Solicitor General of the United States, John Sauer, will file an emergency petition on the emergency docket of the Supreme Court.
00:35:50.360And I – you know, the Supreme Court justices work until the end of June, and they take two months off.
00:35:57.620Well, they're going to be working this summer because they failed to get their judicial activist in line.
00:36:05.620They failed to get their judicial house in order, and now this sabotage continues.
00:36:11.380It used to be through nationwide injunctions.
00:36:14.200Now it's through bogus class certifications worldwide of every asylum seeker in the world is part of this class apparently.
00:36:21.820So, you know, I mean this is the problem with the Supreme Court.
00:36:26.920If the Supreme Court – if they would have just put their foot down many, many months ago, as we said on your show many times, if they would have slapped down these activist judges many months ago, we would not be dealing with this.
00:36:39.920No, Mike, I remember saying this, that by June 30th, by the end of the session, they had to really – particularly Roberts had to force the issue of so many things about the president's Article II powers, particularly the powers as commander-in-chief to repel the invasion.
00:37:06.660I mean it's so obvious that Roberts didn't step into this and force this because we said it will be a long, hot summer.
00:37:14.000This is going to be – this is not going to be taken care of.
00:37:18.080The office of the president is not going to be reinforced, and you're going to have a long, hot summer because you have not come in and really backed him on his Article II powers.
00:37:49.800The president of the United States has the constitutional power and the constitutional duty to repel an invasion of our country.
00:37:59.900And Joe Biden let in 20 million illegal aliens, foreign invaders into our country, including fighting-age men under the pretext of asylum seekers.
00:38:13.840Where the hell are their wife and kids, right?
00:38:16.240They're persecuted so much they left their wife and kids at home.
00:38:20.880And when they are marching for weeks through Mexico with safe passage, they couldn't stop there after they were free from their third country, from their BS asylum claim.
00:38:37.640And then the Supreme Court and the lower federal courts let this happen for four years.
00:38:42.160The Supreme Court in 2023, in an opinion written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, said that the governors didn't have standing to stop this invasion, right?
00:38:52.180So here we are two years later, and President Trump is trying to do what he promised American voters what he would do,
00:38:59.920his constitutional duty as commander-in-chief, and it's to get these foreign invaders the hell out of our country.
00:39:05.760And we have these activist Democrat judges and these weak sister justices on the Supreme Court who have allowed this to happen.
00:39:22.820And the most fundamental sovereign power is controlling our border and controlling our populace.
00:39:29.680We never gave that sovereign power away at any time.
00:39:33.420Not at our founding under the Fifth Amendment, not after the Civil War, under the 14th Amendment, not at any subsequent Congress since then, certainly not after the last election.
00:39:44.280We the people get to control our border.
00:39:46.440We the people get to control our populace.
00:39:49.440And we made a decision to get these 20 million foreign invaders the hell out of our country.
00:39:56.200And these courts are trying to stop this.
00:39:58.000They are violating a covenant between we the people and our governments.
00:40:03.340They are violating the Constitution in the most poor way you can violate it.
00:40:07.780Mike, so clearly they didn't learn the lesson that was delivered last week by the Supreme Court.
00:40:15.500And I'm telling you now more than ever, this is going to be an epic fight between the executive branch and the judiciary.
00:40:23.300And I'm just telling you, I think that these radical judges on this judicial insurrection are giving the middle finger to the Supreme Court.
00:40:32.700And that's going to have a whole different and dark element to it.
00:40:36.600So we're in treacherous territory right now, Brother Davis.
00:40:41.840Obviously, you've warned the president.
00:40:43.940You've warned the Senate Judiciary Committee.
00:40:46.300You've warned the American people on War Room.
00:40:48.960You've done a great job at Article III.
00:40:50.340But I'm telling you, this is just in your face.
00:40:53.920This thing is so bold, so aggressive, so outrageous, given everything we've gone through and the centrality of this to all of President Trump's plan to get the country back on its feet that I got to tell you.
00:41:07.400And they're just showing you they're daring you to do anything about it, Mike Davis.
00:41:12.040Well, I would dare to say this to the chief justice of the United States.
00:41:16.120You have only failed to get your judicial house in order.
00:41:20.820You have these radical activists who are continuing to not only sabotage the president of the United States, the presidency, the will of the American people under Article II.
00:41:31.540They are giving you a middle finger as the chief justice of the United States.
00:41:36.980This started under Biden, D.C. judge Amir Ali when he sent $2 billion out the door to his terrorist buddies under the guise of foreign aid.
00:41:48.820And not a damn thing happens to stop him.
00:41:51.500The Supreme Court lets this happen, doesn't let the president of the United States do a national security review.
00:41:57.320And this has only gotten worse since then.
00:42:00.120Not only are they sabotaging the presidency, they're sabotaging the Supreme Court.
00:42:05.120And this is a test for the chief justice because he keeps failing over and over and over.
00:42:32.500We are not going to let 20 million foreign invaders in our country.
00:42:37.440We're not going to let America turn into third world Marxist trash with birthright citizenship for the kids of this trash so they can take every welfare program in this country and turn us into Europe.
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00:44:42.560Okay, to get you up on some inside baseball, what's happening is that they're trying to get this rule passed.
00:44:50.680They're trying to get the big, beautiful bill passed, but they are working with Freedom Caucus and others about maybe a series of executive orders that will take care of some of the issues that happened between the Senate.
00:45:01.320I just want to give one great example.
00:45:03.240We've got Nick Icovella, who's over at the American Prosperity Group, the Committee for Prosperity.
00:45:13.000Sir, give me this outrage about the Chinese Communist Party.
00:45:15.500What happened in the Senate that was stripped out?
00:45:17.540This is the kind of thing I want the audience to understand.
00:45:19.060This happened all over, and this is why people in the House are outraged.
00:45:43.100You're an entity from one of those four countries.
00:45:44.940You shouldn't get American taxpayer dollars, and the House put great provisions in their bill to stop this money from going to these Chinese companies, and the Senate just gutted it.
00:45:58.480What's going to end up happening is the subsidies aren't going to go away, and we're going to lose the actual American solar manufacturers who are investing in the country and providing decent jobs.
00:46:09.740And the Chinese are going to flood the entire country with CCP solar.
00:46:25.800We were going to have Nick back on tomorrow to go in more depth, but Nick, why can't you join us tomorrow?
00:46:31.980Tomorrow's an important day because I'm going to become a dad, so some things are a little more important than work.
00:46:37.660That's much more important than the World War Committee for Prosperous America.
00:46:43.300Nick, social media and where they go for the group.
00:46:48.160We're at prosperousamerica.org and CPA trade reform.
00:46:53.180What we do every day is fight for the American worker, the American manufacturer, and that means we're fighting against China every single day.
00:47:01.240And that's literally what this is about.
00:47:02.960We're either giving money to Chinese companies and opening the floodgates to them, or we're stopping.