Bannon's War Room - October 20, 2025


Episode 4864： One On One With Charles Murray; Trump Meets With Australian PM


Episode Stats

Length

58 minutes

Words per Minute

163.13406

Word Count

9,572

Sentence Count

784

Misogynist Sentences

3

Hate Speech Sentences

13


Summary

In this episode of The War Room, host Stephen K. K. B. Bannon is joined by Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve and Coming Apart, to discuss the recent plenum in Beijing with Chinese President Xi Jinping.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 This is the primal scream of a dying regime.
00:00:07.000 Pray for our enemies.
00:00:09.000 Because we're going medieval on these people.
00:00:12.000 I got a free shot at all these networks lying about the people.
00:00:16.000 The people have had a belly full of it.
00:00:18.000 I know you don't like hearing that.
00:00:20.000 I know you try to do everything in the world to stop that,
00:00:22.000 but you're not going to stop it.
00:00:23.000 It's going to happen.
00:00:24.000 And where do people like that go to share the big lie?
00:00:27.000 Mega Media.
00:00:28.000 I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience.
00:00:33.000 Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose?
00:00:37.000 If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved.
00:00:43.000 War Room. Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon.
00:00:50.000 It's Monday, 20 October, Year of the Lord 2025.
00:00:53.000 We're going to get back to the, um,
00:00:55.000 what is it, the insurrection here in the United States of America
00:00:58.000 and how it ties to global players.
00:01:00.000 We're going to talk about the, uh,
00:01:02.000 the plenum that's going on in, uh, Beijing right now.
00:01:05.000 Um, and all this controversy around Xi.
00:01:07.000 Is he in charge? Not in charge.
00:01:09.000 Captain Fennell is going to come back in a moment.
00:01:12.000 Also the representatives of the new federal state of China.
00:01:15.000 Forrest Ava and Roy will all be here.
00:01:18.000 And Jim Rickards on geopolitics and capital markets.
00:01:22.000 Gold, once again, blew through 4,300.
00:01:25.000 As you know, when we started partnering with Birch Gold years ago,
00:01:28.000 it was 1,100.
00:01:29.000 And we told you how this was going to happen.
00:01:31.000 We said, it's not about the price of gold.
00:01:32.000 It's about the process.
00:01:33.000 You understand geopolitics.
00:01:36.000 You understand capital markets.
00:01:38.000 You understand the centrality of the United States dollar.
00:01:42.000 The good old Federal Reserve note as the world's reserve currency
00:01:46.000 and where that's going.
00:01:47.000 If you understand that and you get,
00:01:49.000 we can teach you a little bit about pattern recognition.
00:01:52.000 You'll be on your own.
00:01:53.000 And, uh, you've done a magnificent job.
00:01:56.000 And it's only going to get scarier and scarier,
00:02:00.000 even with a guy like President Trump.
00:02:02.000 And man, if we didn't have President Trump,
00:02:04.000 we'd be in the abyss right now.
00:02:07.000 Uh, I'm honored to have on, I think,
00:02:10.000 the single most serious public intellectual in this country.
00:02:15.000 Uh, and it's through Encounter Books that he's got a new book out
00:02:20.000 that is going to be another, another game changer.
00:02:23.000 So Roger Kimball and the guys encounter great job.
00:02:26.000 It's one of the reasons I love Roger Kimball.
00:02:28.000 He's a man of, um, of utmost courage.
00:02:32.000 The author is Charles Murray.
00:02:34.000 And we welcome Charles.
00:02:35.000 We welcome you to the war room, sir.
00:02:38.000 The reason I say this, sir, you wrote two books,
00:02:42.000 the bell curve and coming apart that, um,
00:02:46.000 you were eviscerated over by the,
00:02:49.000 by the established order of intellectuals and,
00:02:52.000 and public intellectuals.
00:02:55.000 Both books were, were not only simply stunning analysis,
00:03:02.000 but the prophetic nature of both is stunning.
00:03:06.000 And if they had read them and embraced the message,
00:03:10.000 the country being a very different shape.
00:03:13.000 Why was the bell curve so controversial when it came out,
00:03:17.000 I think in the mid 1990s, sir?
00:03:19.000 No, it was just, uh, one chapter.
00:03:21.000 In fact, it was one paragraph in one chapter.
00:03:23.000 The book is, was had a subtitle intelligence and class structure
00:03:28.000 in American life.
00:03:29.000 And that was the topic of the book that, uh,
00:03:32.000 IQ had become a lot more important in determining success of this country
00:03:36.000 over the 20th century.
00:03:37.000 And it had created a cognitive elite that had unprecedented new influence
00:03:42.000 over the culture.
00:03:43.000 And in the course of writing the whole book,
00:03:46.000 we took on a topic that, uh, everybody asks about when you raise IQ,
00:03:50.000 and that's the black, white IQ difference.
00:03:53.000 And we discussed it and we didn't say it was the apocalypse coming.
00:03:57.000 We, we, but we put out the facts and, uh, that is so controversial in this country.
00:04:04.000 And it is such a touchstone for calling someone a racist
00:04:09.000 that, uh, very few people actually read anything else in the book.
00:04:14.000 The core of the book though, was about the, the white working class and the pathologies
00:04:21.000 that, uh, that they could eventually absorb.
00:04:24.000 Correct.
00:04:25.000 Well, it was about how that, that would, how that would have,
00:04:28.000 how that would have a massive change.
00:04:30.000 The country country had a, had a two centuries,
00:04:34.000 although we had a working class and quite frankly,
00:04:37.000 our working credit class,
00:04:38.000 it wasn't really hardwired in to the economic system so much that we had.
00:04:43.000 basic social stability because this working class had not,
00:04:48.000 had not gone to certain pathologies, which you identified, right?
00:04:52.000 Wasn't that, that wasn't, and you talked about the concentration.
00:04:55.000 I saw this when I went to Harvard that people would go and all of a sudden
00:04:59.000 you had these elites and they go to these elite universities,
00:05:01.000 which were more powerful than ever.
00:05:03.000 And people would, would connect with each other and get married.
00:05:06.000 And so throughout the country,
00:05:07.000 you had a, you had a greater and greater concentration of these elites that were
00:05:12.000 detached from the rest of American life.
00:05:14.000 Basically.
00:05:15.000 That's right.
00:05:16.000 That was, uh, that was elaborated coming apart, which was 2012 that I put that out.
00:05:22.000 And by that time,
00:05:23.000 a lot of the things that my coauthor and I had predicted in the bell curve
00:05:27.000 were already coming true.
00:05:29.000 And of course the title of the book is so self-explanatory.
00:05:33.000 The United States was clearly coming apart as of, uh, 2012 in a way that it had not been
00:05:40.000 in say 1960.
00:05:42.000 It was divided into antagonistic classes.
00:05:45.000 And the class on top was openly contemptuous of ordinary Americans.
00:05:53.000 And that was creating problems.
00:05:54.000 Even then.
00:05:55.000 If you read Charles Murray's two books and, um, in particularly the evolution of the books
00:06:05.000 and the argument and you read coming apart in 2012 and you looked at how they were trying
00:06:10.000 to solve the financial crisis of 2008, of course you knew that someone like Trump was
00:06:17.000 going to come and was going to become a political leader in this country.
00:06:22.000 People say, well, how did you know?
00:06:23.000 How'd you know this?
00:06:24.000 It's so evident.
00:06:26.000 It wasn't hidden.
00:06:27.000 And Charles Murray explained it to you.
00:06:30.000 And then with the 2008 and the financial, the financial crisis had the elites bound together
00:06:35.000 as a class, not politics, and took care of themselves.
00:06:39.000 They bailed themselves out.
00:06:41.000 The book, Chris Leonard's Lords of Easy Money, gets you, shows you the minutes of the Federal
00:06:47.000 Reserve in the arguments and debates.
00:06:48.000 They knew exactly what they were doing.
00:06:50.000 They knew exactly what the consequences were.
00:06:52.000 That heroic governor of the, of the Federal Reserve board in Texas laid it all out.
00:06:57.000 How zero interest rates and negative interest rates, all this was going to crush the working
00:07:02.000 class and, and, and greatly damage the middle class in our country, all to bail out the very
00:07:07.000 perpetrators of the problem.
00:07:10.000 So Charles Murray, after serious thinking and coming up with the bell curve, which is a called shot.
00:07:22.000 How do you, because Fox, the, the, the, the standard institutions of the right did not come and have
00:07:33.000 your back.
00:07:34.000 They wanted these arguments buried as much as the left did.
00:07:37.000 Did they not?
00:07:38.000 I mean, you had a few people that have you to speak and there's always a couple institutions
00:07:42.000 will do it.
00:07:43.000 But by and large, these books were not out and not part of a central argument.
00:07:48.000 It's one of the reasons when I read them, I said this, Hey, this is here.
00:07:51.000 It's called populist nationalism.
00:07:53.000 That's going to be the thing that people go.
00:07:54.000 You can't call it.
00:07:55.000 You can't call it nationalism.
00:07:56.000 I go.
00:07:57.000 Yeah, you can.
00:07:58.000 Cause that's, what's going to be about the American citizen.
00:08:01.000 How did it, how did you feel when really institutions on the right didn't support you enough
00:08:06.000 to say, no, no, no, this guy's right.
00:08:08.000 And this guy is telling us that if we don't turn this thing around, we're going to head
00:08:13.000 to a civil war, sir.
00:08:14.000 Well, I had always been, uh, as, as, uh, creating as much problems for some aspects of the right
00:08:22.000 as I was for the left, because it has always been simpler in the minds of a lot of conservatives.
00:08:28.000 I think to, uh, to avoid talking about things that will make them look like bad guys.
00:08:36.000 And some of the things I was saying in coming apart, we're really saying of the cognitive
00:08:43.000 elite, which includes people on the right, as well as on the left, that you are betraying
00:08:50.000 your, your duty, uh, to the country that you are, you are not fulfilling the traditional
00:08:57.000 role of an elite, which is to provide a moral example, to provide, uh, examples for other
00:09:05.000 people to follow in your personal life, in your business life and the rest, you were being
00:09:10.000 unseemly.
00:09:11.000 And people didn't like to hear that.
00:09:12.000 They didn't like to hear it whether they were on the left or the right.
00:09:18.000 You're now out with a new book and I'll be blunt, having been a, a fan and studied your,
00:09:25.000 your, your talks and your speeches and your writings and your research and your books.
00:09:30.000 Uh, I didn't see this one coming, taking religious seriously.
00:09:35.000 I want you to walk through, how did this come about?
00:09:38.000 How did all of a sudden this, this focus of Charles Murray on Christianity, um, it come
00:09:43.000 about, walk us through it.
00:09:45.000 It's not sudden.
00:09:46.000 It started in 1985.
00:09:48.000 Uh, it's, it went like this, Steve, I am like millions and millions of Americans, uh, who
00:09:55.000 are well-educated.
00:09:56.000 We've been successful in our adult lives and religion has never been an important part of
00:10:01.000 our life.
00:10:02.000 Uh, I was never a militant atheist.
00:10:04.000 In fact, I called myself an agnostic, but the main thing was I just didn't think much
00:10:09.000 about it.
00:10:10.000 And then my wife had our first baby, uh, in 1985.
00:10:15.000 And she came to me after a couple of months and she, she said, you know, my love for this
00:10:22.000 child goes beyond anything I've ever known.
00:10:25.000 And I think that I love her far more than evolution requires, which was a line that said,
00:10:32.000 look, I understand that, uh, women are supposed to love their babies if they want to pass on
00:10:38.000 genes, but something else is going on here.
00:10:41.000 And she thought it was a, she was being a conduit for a larger love that she identified vaguely
00:10:47.000 with God.
00:10:48.000 At that time, she was like me.
00:10:49.000 Religion was not part of her life.
00:10:51.000 Well, she then embarked on a religious life that, uh, got deeper and deeper over the years.
00:10:59.000 And I kind of watched from the sidelines, but then starting in the mid 1990s, I, I tried
00:11:07.000 to do my homework.
00:11:08.000 I tried to get more engaged.
00:11:10.000 I don't have a lot of spiritual perceptiveness.
00:11:13.000 You know, I'm kind of like a tone deaf person who listens to Mozart and can't hear the beauty
00:11:19.000 of the music.
00:11:20.000 And so, whereas she was approaching it from a very spiritual perspective, I kind of went
00:11:27.000 at it from an empirical perspective.
00:11:30.000 I, I got a variety of nudges that pushed me more and more towards saying that the God
00:11:36.000 not only exists, but it, and this came as a huge surprise to me.
00:11:40.000 We may be talking about a personal God.
00:11:42.000 I'm talking about a 20, 25 year evolution.
00:11:45.000 It didn't happen yesterday.
00:11:48.000 It give us the, can you give us the, the signpost, the mileage markers along that 25 year
00:11:55.000 journey?
00:11:56.000 Well, I'll tell you the, the first one where I said, I've got to take this more seriously
00:12:03.000 is when I researched and wrote a book called Human Accomplishment.
00:12:07.000 And part of that book looked at the arts and sciences in Europe from 1500 to 1900, which
00:12:15.000 is just a stunning era of accomplishment in both the arts and the sciences.
00:12:21.000 And a great deal of that, it became apparent to me, had been driven by Christianity, which
00:12:26.000 I had not expected to find.
00:12:28.000 Well, I ended up by saying that Johann Sebastian Bach doesn't have to explain his way of looking
00:12:35.000 at the world.
00:12:36.000 His music makes the case.
00:12:37.000 And it's up to you to start taking this seriously.
00:12:40.000 That was one signpost.
00:12:41.000 And the next one was when I encountered the physics of the big bang.
00:12:47.000 And now I'm not talking about religious teachings.
00:12:50.000 I'm talking about what physicists have discovered about the origin of the universe, which is that
00:12:56.000 at the moment of creation, there were a whole bunch of settings that had to come out exactly right in order for us to live in a universe that permits life.
00:13:08.000 And the odds of those settings being exactly where they were are calculated by the physicists at in excess of a trillion to one.
00:13:18.000 Well, that requires an explanation, you know, because I don't believe in trillion to one chances.
00:13:23.000 And I found myself believing that I lived in an intentional universe and in part a universe that was intended to create life.
00:13:33.000 Third signpost.
00:13:34.000 And Steve, this will be familiar to many of your Christian listeners and viewers.
00:13:40.000 C.S. Lewis and the book Mere Christianity.
00:13:43.000 A absolutely incandescently brilliant book, which when you read it, you are constantly challenged.
00:13:53.000 You are in a conversation with a man who is brilliant and who also is a deeply devoted Christian.
00:14:01.000 And that set me off much more directly on the path that finally ends up with this book that's just come out.
00:14:08.000 Charles, can you hang in for one second?
00:14:10.000 We're going to take a short commercial break.
00:14:12.000 Charles Murray is with us.
00:14:14.000 The book is Taking Religion Seriously and is by the most serious thinker in this great republic.
00:14:23.000 Charles Murray.
00:14:24.000 Short break.
00:14:25.000 We're going to return to the war room in just a moment.
00:14:28.000 I suggest you take a look inside.
00:14:35.000 Because I think you've changed already.
00:14:39.000 You went and lost your pride.
00:14:43.000 But I'm American made.
00:14:47.000 I got American part.
00:14:50.000 I got American made.
00:14:54.000 In America's heart.
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00:16:23.000 Hello, America's Voice family.
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00:17:03.000 Don't forget silver.
00:17:04.000 In the age of Trump, most importantly, talk to Philip Patrick and the team.
00:17:07.000 We're trying to get Philip back on here tomorrow, given everything that is going on, including in the box.
00:17:13.000 You can see the Australian Prime Minister is going to arrive.
00:17:17.000 And that, ladies and gentlemen, is all about rare earths.
00:17:21.000 A counterweight to the Chinese Communist Party.
00:17:23.000 More about that in a little while.
00:17:24.000 Charles Murray.
00:17:26.000 Charles, go back.
00:17:27.000 Human accomplishment.
00:17:28.000 1500 to 1900.
00:17:30.000 Unbelievable.
00:17:32.000 Extraordinary.
00:17:33.000 Never done in human history, in any culture, any civilization.
00:17:36.000 It's one of the things that makes the Judeo-Christian West different.
00:17:39.000 And you said that was all tied back to Christianity, or much of it was tied to Christianity from both the scientists, the thinkers, the artists, all of it.
00:17:51.000 What do you mean by that?
00:17:52.000 Well, let's first talk about the arts.
00:17:55.000 The great values of Christianity, truth, beauty, and the good, this triad of transcendental qualities that artists were supposed to use as ideals and did use as ideals during the Renaissance and subsequently.
00:18:14.000 Whether the individual artists and composers and writers were themselves devout was almost irrelevant because the environment was one in which they were trying to realize these ideals.
00:18:26.000 And as the arts secularized in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they started saying to themselves, oh no, great art is not supposed to express truth, beauty, and the good.
00:18:43.000 It is supposed to challenge the audience.
00:18:46.000 And artists should not be concerned about those false delusory ideals.
00:18:53.000 We should express our personal preferences.
00:18:56.000 And their personal preferences turned out to be nihilistic and banal and oftentimes very silly, whether you're talking about music or literature or the visual arts.
00:19:10.000 In the sciences, Christianity had a different kind of role, which is in a very real sense, the Catholic Church sponsored the scientific revolution.
00:19:21.000 The historians like to portray science and religion as being hostile to each other and the Catholic Church as the great evil in this, constantly getting in the way of science.
00:19:33.000 And that simply is a misreading of history.
00:19:36.000 Yes, were there episodes?
00:19:38.000 Yeah.
00:19:39.000 But the overall message of Christianity was God is rational.
00:19:45.000 God delights in having us explore and understand the mysteries of the universe.
00:19:51.000 And that was an enormously empowering force for scientists in pursuing their work.
00:20:00.000 The physics of the Big Bang in these settings, can you take a second?
00:20:10.000 Because you're saying that mathematically that you can prove or mathematically you led to the conclusion there has to be a supreme being or a God because of the way the Big Bang actually mechanically worked.
00:20:24.000 What do you mean by that?
00:20:27.000 Theory predicts a lot of things very accurately in physics, but there's what they call brute facts.
00:20:33.000 Physicists call them brute facts.
00:20:35.000 These are values for various things that are not set by theory.
00:20:41.000 They just happen.
00:20:42.000 So, for example, you have the ratio of the strong force within the atom and the very weak force of gravity.
00:20:52.000 If that ratio were slightly different, galaxies could not have formed, stars could not have formed, planets could not have formed.
00:21:01.000 We would live in a universe of black holes or a universe of radiation.
00:21:06.000 That's one.
00:21:07.000 There are maybe a dozen other of these parameters that are arbitrary in one sense, but that also, working together, make possible the universe we live in, which in turn permits life.
00:21:24.000 I really like the analogy that a Canadian philosopher came up with to illustrate this.
00:21:30.000 He said, suppose that you were sentenced to death by a firing squad of a hundred expert marksmen and they march you out and they fire and they all miss.
00:21:41.000 Well, you have a couple of alternatives.
00:21:44.000 One is to say, well, they all missed.
00:21:46.000 I'm alive.
00:21:47.000 There's no point in worrying about it.
00:21:49.000 And the other one is to ask why.
00:21:51.000 And in the case of the universe, it seems impossible that you would have this universe drilled into one chance.
00:21:59.000 And the only alternative to that is, no, these settings were driven by something else that was putting it together.
00:22:08.000 Or the alternative that physicists have come up with is to say, we actually live in a world of multiple universes.
00:22:15.000 I find that very hard to swallow.
00:22:18.000 If you're talking about plausibility, I think probably the one universe we've got is all there is.
00:22:24.000 And I also think that a trillion to one chance doesn't sound right.
00:22:29.000 And the third parsimonious plausible alternative is to say there is a God who created the universe.
00:22:37.000 That's that's where I came out.
00:22:40.000 This being a book, by the way, you can get it at Encounter Books.
00:22:45.000 Roger Kimball would recommend we go to you guys go to the site and get the book taking religious seriously.
00:22:51.000 Everyone should get this and read it.
00:22:53.000 If I look at the arc from the bell curve to coming apart to where we are now, you see a quite, quite contentious.
00:23:00.000 I argue in the show we're heading towards a civil war that this is an unbridgeable gap that can't be debated away.
00:23:05.000 It's taking religious seriously.
00:23:07.000 Are you laying that out as a potential that we can avert a catastrophe in this country by returning to the Christian roots of this country, sir?
00:23:18.000 Well, actually, in coming apart, I was saying we really needed a kind of civic Great Awakening.
00:23:26.000 We've had religious Great Awakenings before that we needed a new Great Awakening to turn things around.
00:23:33.000 And the good news, and I'm not generally optimistic about anything, is that there are signs that Christianity is starting to have a kind of reawakening of its own
00:23:47.000 among intellectuals.
00:23:49.000 There are a surprising number of people in mainstream media who are now openly saying good things about Christianity in a way that you never saw in the 1980s and 1990s.
00:24:02.000 You have columnist Ross Douthat and David Brooks, who are devout Christians and openly say so.
00:24:10.000 You have Ayanur C.L.E., and Neil Ferguson, who have not been, they were formerly atheists, who've converted.
00:24:18.000 And a variety of other intellectuals who seem to all have come to the same conclusion at the same time.
00:24:26.000 My theory is, Steve, that we're coming out of an adolescence.
00:24:31.000 I look upon the 20th century as a time when science had provided all kinds of body blows to religion.
00:24:41.000 And like adolescents who say their parents are wrong about everything, I think that intellectuals started saying that traditional religion was entirely wrong.
00:24:53.000 Our intellectual parents have been wrong about everything and rejected it.
00:24:57.000 And the nice thing about adolescence is you grow out of it eventually.
00:25:01.000 And a symptom of growing out of adolescence is to realize that maybe your parents were smarter than you thought.
00:25:07.000 And I think that's what we're looking at now.
00:25:09.000 Now, you can say to yourself, what difference does it make if few intellectuals are suddenly less hostile to religion?
00:25:16.000 It can make a lot of difference.
00:25:18.000 It can change the mood.
00:25:21.000 It can change the environment.
00:25:23.000 It can change the willingness of people to think seriously about these questions.
00:25:29.000 So I'm not saying it's a strong movement.
00:25:31.000 I'm not saying it's going to transform things.
00:25:34.000 But there is a possibility for a religious renewal which could go a long way toward at least making solutions to some of these problems possible.
00:25:49.000 But I must say, Steve, I wrote another book that got ignored because I was canceled called Facing Reality.
00:25:57.000 In the last chapter of that, I talked about the prospects of a revolution.
00:26:04.000 And I have since privately, I don't think I've published this anywhere.
00:26:09.000 I kind of think of the election of Donald Trump in 24 as putting a pressure cooker on vent, a pressure cooker that was about to explode.
00:26:20.000 And we've taken some of the pressure off that.
00:26:23.000 And that's good.
00:26:26.000 How far we will go in a direction of reconciling, that's up in the air.
00:26:35.000 Charles, we look forward to having you back.
00:26:37.000 Where do people go to get the book?
00:26:39.000 And where can people go to get your writings, website, social media, any of it?
00:26:44.000 And so it's mainly like everything else.
00:26:47.000 Amazon carries all of all of my works and you can get them there.
00:26:51.000 In the case of taking religion seriously, Encounter website has it as well.
00:27:00.000 Is there do you have a website for your for your writings?
00:27:03.000 Do you have one central place to go to or just go to Amazon or Encounter to get your books?
00:27:07.000 No, I have a page.
00:27:09.000 If you go to the AEI.org website, I have a page on that.
00:27:14.000 And on that, you can access all of my articles that I've written for about the last 30 years.
00:27:20.000 And and also a lot of videos, lectures I've given, things like that.
00:27:25.000 Also, if you go to on YouTube, you can pick up an awful lot of things that are at full length on YouTube.
00:27:33.000 We'll push we'll push people to it.
00:27:35.000 Charles Murray.
00:27:36.000 Thank you.
00:27:37.000 One of the greatest living Americans.
00:27:40.000 One of the greatest.
00:27:42.000 Thank you, Charles.
00:27:45.000 A modern day profit flat out a modern day profit.
00:27:50.000 OK, let's be honest.
00:27:51.000 You never thought it would get this far.
00:27:53.000 Maybe you missed the last IRS deadline or you haven't filed taxes in a while.
00:27:58.000 Let me be clear.
00:27:59.000 The IRS is cracking down harder than ever, and this ain't going to go away anytime soon.
00:28:04.000 That's why you need Tax Network USA.
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00:28:29.000 Even if your books are a mess or you haven't filed in years, Tax Network USA can help.
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00:28:36.000 This won't fix itself.
00:28:38.000 Call Tax Network USA right now.
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00:28:41.000 Talk to a strategist and finally put this behind you.
00:28:45.000 Call 1-800-958-1000.
00:28:49.000 That's 1-800-958-1000.
00:28:52.000 Or visit TNUSA.com slash Bannon.
00:28:56.000 Make sure you tell them Bannon you'll get a free evaluation.
00:28:58.000 That's 1-800-958-1000.
00:29:02.000 Do not let letters from the IRS or your failure to file work on your nerves anymore.
00:29:09.000 Take action, action, action, and do it today.
00:29:12.000 If you're a homeowner, you need to listen to this.
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00:29:41.000 You won't even know it's happened until you get a collection or foreclosure notice.
00:29:47.000 So let me ask you, when was the last time you personally checked your home title?
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00:30:33.000 Do it today.
00:30:34.000 I'm informed by the War Room engine room that Amazon, I think, is now, since the start of our interview, is now out of books.
00:30:48.000 They're restocking.
00:30:49.000 Go over to Roger Kimball's encounter books, an act of bravery of Roger to put it.
00:30:55.000 And this is the story of Charles Murray.
00:30:58.000 He spoke truth to power.
00:30:59.000 He spoke truth to the American institutions.
00:31:01.000 He spoke truth to the American people.
00:31:03.000 And he was essentially banned.
00:31:05.000 The single one of the single smartest guys we've got in the country.
00:31:08.000 Think about that for a second.
00:31:09.000 And, oh, by the way, the conservatives all ran for the hills, except for a few brave institutions that would have Charles speak.
00:31:16.000 And we're going to figure out something to do with him in Washington, D.C., to get him here for a talk.
00:31:22.000 It's so important to tie all the books together.
00:31:25.000 Bell Curve, Coming Apart, Facing Reality, and Now, Taking Religion Seriously.
00:31:31.000 And if anybody's ever going to push back on you for your Christian faith, read Charles Murray's book.
00:31:39.000 And, of course, obviously he tells you it's weird.
00:31:42.000 Mere Christianity is part of that.
00:31:44.000 Anyway, more on that.
00:31:45.000 We're going to have Charles Murray back.
00:31:47.000 The new federal state.
00:31:49.000 I'm going to go for now about what's happening with China because there's all kind of rumors going on about Xi.
00:31:54.000 The new federal state people are going to join Ben Harnwell tonight.
00:31:57.000 We're going to have a whole drill down of more geopolitics.
00:32:00.000 So much is going on that President Trump is trying to set things right, as I know he's pivoting for intense work on the American economy.
00:32:09.000 But you've got to get the situation globally or we're going to slide deeper in this third world war.
00:32:16.000 Captain Finnell, all kind of a President Trump, Besson's over there going to negotiate now.
00:32:21.000 We got the we got the Australian prime minister here because of rare earths.
00:32:26.000 President Trump is starting to engage with with Lula as much as he hates that because of rare earths.
00:32:31.000 There's all kind of rumors coming out of Beijing that, you know, Gordon Chang and guys I really I love and appreciate are saying, hey, this may be the end of Xi's run in this whole rare earth thing.
00:32:43.000 Maybe the last card he played, but the established order over there is getting a little jiggy on Xi.
00:32:48.000 I think the economy is all messed up. He's crossways with Trump.
00:32:51.000 He's threatening. He's threatening a kinetic war, but they can't win it and that he's going to be removed.
00:32:57.000 You're my naval intelligence expert. What say you, sir?
00:33:02.000 Well, Steve, this fourth plenum is, you know, the 20th Party Congress for the Chinese Communist Party.
00:33:08.000 It's a big event because what this fourth plenum does to set the stage for the next five year plan called the 15th five year plan that will cover from 2026 to the magic year of 2030 about where the Chinese Communist Party and the People's Republic of China are heading.
00:33:26.000 And so for the last year, there has been a lot of rumors about Xi is losing power.
00:33:32.000 And it started last October in 2024 with an article or a series of articles in the PLA Daily that talked about collective leadership.
00:33:41.000 And a lot of folks, good intentioned folks, interpreted that phraseology collective leadership as being an indicator that Xi was losing power and that the party was starting to emphasize, well, we need to collectively lead this country.
00:33:55.000 We don't need a strong man, singular person like Xi anymore, who's busted the rules and the norms for succession of power as he kept power past his second five year term.
00:34:06.000 But if you look at that series of articles and then another article in December of 2024, they talk about democratic socialism or democratic centralism, excuse me.
00:34:18.000 And it's not democracy or a check on authoritarianism, but it's a lenist organizational system, emphasizing unified leadership of the party and the tool that the party has used to curb internal corruption.
00:34:31.660 And so what we've seen over the last year is a series of purges of senior PLA officers that go back a year ago.
00:34:40.580 We saw leaders of the Ministry of Defense removed.
00:34:44.820 And just this week, we saw the formal announcement of nine more members, one of which was the vice chair of the Central Military Commission.
00:34:53.260 They have two chairmen or two vice chairs.
00:34:56.120 Xi is the chairman of the Central Military Commission, and there's two uniformed officers.
00:35:00.660 One of them was taken away, General He.
00:35:02.640 Xi and the other, General Zhang, has been attributed as having the supernatural power to be able to purge all these military leaders that they say are loyal to Xi, and therefore Xi has lost power.
00:35:15.860 And I can understand the argument and the wishful thinking that some folks have to think that Xi has now lost power of the PLA.
00:35:23.480 But what none of these analysts say, and where I think I try to bring in a unique perspective, is you have to watch what's been happening with the PLA over this time period, not just this last year, but over the 12 to 13 years that Xi's been running the People's Republic of China.
00:35:40.200 And as I've stated in other forums, there's just been the slow, steady expansion and aggressive nature of the PLA over this time period.
00:35:49.920 So these perturbations, these removal of these nine officers – oh, by the way, six of the nine weren't even active duty.
00:35:57.520 They had been former officers, and they'd been out of the system for some time.
00:36:01.980 So my assessment is that Xi still remains in charge of what they call the pen, the gun, and the knife hilt.
00:36:12.360 The pen is propaganda.
00:36:13.920 He's clearly in charge of propaganda in China.
00:36:16.200 We see him every day on PLA Daily, People's Daily, China Daily, Xinhua, Global Times.
00:36:22.940 He's in control of the messaging from the PRC.
00:36:26.520 He's got control of the PLA, in my opinion, based on what we see the PLA doing, like dual carrier operations this summer that went beyond the second island chain,
00:36:36.180 or even just this last Sunday, a week ago Sunday, Chinese Coast Guard ramming Filipino ships in the South China Sea.
00:36:43.940 And then the third area is called the knife hilt, which is essentially the state security.
00:36:49.360 And Xi appears to have control of the state security inside China and the people.
00:36:56.680 He's on police, and he seems to be in charge of the whole system.
00:37:01.140 And I think what happened in this process was that Xi was able to do some house cleaning in advance of today's start of the fourth plenum.
00:37:10.620 This was announced last Friday, and essentially Xi was able to ensure that nobody that was completely in alignment with what he has as a vision for the PRC,
00:37:20.420 for the 15th year plan, five-year plan, that they're out of the system now.
00:37:27.140 And so I think that's where we're at, is that he is firmly established in control.
00:37:31.920 Now, if I'm wrong, we'll know about it next week.
00:37:33.900 Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on.
00:37:37.260 And I want to get to that in a second.
00:37:39.880 Rickards, one of the most dangerous times in American history geopolitically.
00:37:44.180 It's one of the reasons he's got the Australian prime minister today, because Trump's no fan of that guy,
00:37:48.220 about the economic war Xi has unleashed on rare earths.
00:37:54.220 Do you agree with Fennell?
00:37:55.160 I mean, this plenum is so important, particularly because it's going to be right before President Trump's going to get into direct negotiations with Xi.
00:38:03.160 Jim Rickards.
00:38:03.760 Well, Captain Fennell has his facts absolutely right, so I don't dispute that at all.
00:38:09.600 I disagree on the conclusion a little bit when he says they're doing naval operations with aircraft carrier groups beyond the second island chain.
00:38:19.160 Is that a sign of weakness or a sign of strength?
00:38:21.240 I might suggest it's a sign of weakness.
00:38:23.500 In other words, putting on a little bit of a show, a lot of the PLA generals who have been purged were actually appointed by Xi.
00:38:30.540 Now, are they disloyal, or is what's actually going on the PLA's cleaning house of Xi loyalists?
00:38:37.920 The problem is it's very opaque.
00:38:39.320 I don't want to pretend to have inside information in terms of what's going on there, but look at the same facts and draw slightly different conclusions.
00:38:47.600 It is the case that Xi has been demoted in a sense.
00:38:52.120 He now reports to a committee, and the committee is run.
00:38:54.700 There are a number of members on it, but the committee is run by the PLA.
00:38:57.760 So he's already been knocked down a peg.
00:38:59.760 None of this is – and Captain Phelps is right about the propaganda outlets, but they don't actually want to talk about this.
00:39:06.080 They're doing it, but they don't want to talk about it.
00:39:07.740 But it takes other analysts and experts to kind of get to the bottom of it.
00:39:10.960 So my own view – yeah, facts are right, but I think Xi is in a very vulnerable position.
00:39:15.740 He's losing – you know the term – the mandate of heaven.
00:39:18.240 And it's an intangible concept that do the people support you or not?
00:39:23.880 And they do if you have what's called the mandate of heaven, and I think Xi has lost that.
00:39:29.220 This is what we talked about in the very first episode of War and Pandemic on the 20th of January 2020 when Jack Posobo was here.
00:39:36.740 We talked about that.
00:39:37.480 Let me ask you, given that, how is he doing – correct me if I'm wrong – the boldest stroke that I think they've done on economic warfare is here to threaten –
00:39:47.260 cannot just threaten to cut off Americans even after negotiating a soft deal from heavy rare earths,
00:39:53.720 which will grind our production lines in weapons and automobiles and international harvester John Deere, all of it to a halt in six weeks, sir.
00:40:04.520 Well, that's exactly right, but is that the last card?
00:40:09.480 It's a tough card.
00:40:10.500 It's a powerful card.
00:40:11.240 There's no question about that.
00:40:12.900 And shame on the United States for not having – you know, for trusting the Chinese and not having thought about this as the result of the globalists and the Davos crowd and all that.
00:40:20.780 And you're right.
00:40:21.400 Let's talk to Australia about it.
00:40:22.620 We have a lot of rare earths in the United States.
00:40:25.200 I happen to be fairly knowledgeable and the best are in some minds in Kazakhstan that are doing quite well.
00:40:30.420 But you can't do this overnight.
00:40:32.000 You can identify the resources, work out agreements, get going by all means.
00:40:36.760 But this is a – at least two years, probably longer to be self-sufficient, even with our allies, with a friendly trading group.
00:40:45.560 So, yeah, we're in a very tough place right now.
00:40:48.120 Trump's probably going to have to make a few concessions to get the Chinese to reopen that pipeline of magnets and rare earth-based batteries.
00:40:57.040 Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on.
00:40:59.720 They're digging in.
00:41:00.880 Give me the – by the way, we're going to have to go to this bilat starting a little bit early, I think.
00:41:06.880 We'll definitely get Fennell and Rickards back up somehow.
00:41:10.420 Rickards, what do you mean he's going to make concessions?
00:41:12.300 I thought Bessett and these guys are saying they're digging in.
00:41:14.880 No concessions, no deal, sir.
00:41:17.420 Well, let's be like the Chinese.
00:41:19.600 Let's play a longer game.
00:41:21.360 Captain Fennell is exactly right.
00:41:22.660 The Chinese economy – let's just talk about the economy, putting aside Xi, although they're clearly related, is extremely weak.
00:41:29.080 Their GDP numbers were weak.
00:41:30.800 They lie about them.
00:41:32.600 So take a point or two off just for propaganda, and then if you do some analysis, there's every reason to believe that China is very close to a recession.
00:41:41.160 Their debt-to-GDP ratio is worse than the U.S.
00:41:43.960 They have a worse debt problem than we do.
00:41:46.580 There's a dollar shortage going on.
00:41:48.620 People find that hard to believe.
00:41:49.880 Like, hey, didn't the Fed print $10 trillion?
00:41:52.500 They did, but that money doesn't go anywhere.
00:41:54.640 They give it to the banks to buy securities, and the banks give it back to them in the form of deposits.
00:41:59.500 That money doesn't do anything.
00:42:01.220 It's sterilized.
00:42:02.340 The money that drives the world economy comes from the banks, commercial banks, euro-dollar banks, and they're pulling in their horns.
00:42:08.000 So there's every reason to believe that there's a dollar shortage, a possible monetary crisis, and China's in the middle of it.
00:42:14.380 So their economy is – and by the way, six months ago, they stopped reporting youth unemployment.
00:42:18.880 They had always broken it as a separate category.
00:42:21.080 It was about 27% when they stopped reporting it.
00:42:24.360 Well, you know it's worse because that's why they stopped reporting it.
00:42:27.220 And so it's probably over 30%.
00:42:29.080 And after you kill 20 million girls, which they did, you got a lot of men without women, and they tend to be the least attractive men in the economy.
00:42:36.840 So there's an extremely volatile demographic time bomb sitting there on top of everything else.
00:42:42.780 What do you mean – before we go to break, we've got about a minute and a half.
00:42:46.600 What do you mean monetary crisis, Jim Rickards?
00:42:49.940 Now you get my attention.
00:42:51.140 There was a global dollar shortage.
00:42:54.120 And then the Wall Street – Wall Street loves narratives.
00:42:56.400 They're just stories.
00:42:57.120 They're almost always wrong.
00:42:57.980 Not always, but usually.
00:42:59.380 So what's the narrative?
00:43:00.560 The narrative is everyone's selling treasuries.
00:43:02.480 They're dumping the dollar, getting out of the dollar.
00:43:04.380 U.S. interest rates are going to go up, et cetera.
00:43:06.380 None of that is true.
00:43:07.460 And that's not an opinion.
00:43:08.300 We have data.
00:43:09.280 The Treasury issues what's called the TIC report, TIC.
00:43:12.240 Every month, you can see what countries own what.
00:43:14.960 They have not been dumping treasuries.
00:43:16.900 They wish they had more, as a matter of fact.
00:43:18.720 But you have to sell treasuries to get dollars to prop up your currency and prop up your banks.
00:43:23.920 There is some of that going on.
00:43:25.400 But that's not a sign of getting out of the dollar.
00:43:28.660 That's a sign of saying, I wish I had more, but the banks aren't like it.
00:43:32.840 Jim, you and Fennell, my producer, are going to deal with – we've got to go to the president in the Oval Office for the Prime Minister of Australia.
00:43:38.400 We're going to get you guys back up.
00:43:39.780 We'll figure it out.
00:43:40.500 Just stick around.
00:43:41.140 Let's go right to the Oval Office.
00:43:43.020 Rare Earths on the menu today.
00:43:44.760 military ships, vehicles, guns, ammunition, everything, the whole thing.
00:43:51.360 We've been long-term, long-time allies.
00:43:54.860 And I would say there's never been anybody better.
00:43:58.700 We fought wars together.
00:44:00.700 We never had any doubts.
00:44:02.320 And it's a great honor to have you as my friend.
00:44:05.100 It's a great honor to have you in the United States of America.
00:44:08.920 Please, would you like to say something?
00:44:10.740 Well, thank you so much, Mr. President, for the invitation here to the White House and for showing us around the improved Oval Office.
00:44:20.420 And for what you're doing around here as well and for the great honor as well of my delegation saying just across the road, we could have walked, but they didn't let us.
00:44:30.220 We drove all of 20 meters there from Blair House, but it's a great honor to be able to stay there.
00:44:40.660 We are great friends and we're great allies.
00:44:44.960 And this is a relationship that's been forged in the battlefields of the world.
00:44:51.480 We have stood side by side for freedom and democracy.
00:44:56.340 And congratulations, I must say, Mr. President, on the work that you've done.
00:45:00.220 With the Middle East, it's an extraordinary achievement.
00:45:04.400 And on defense, we've already had a discussion about taking it to the next level.
00:45:10.500 Our defense and security partnership with AUKUS is so important for us.
00:45:15.340 And I thank you for the support that the administration are giving as well.
00:45:21.320 You've had the chief of the Navy here as well, which will play obviously a very critical role with the subs.
00:45:30.220 And increasing the security for the region and the world.
00:45:35.100 And our economic relationship is so important.
00:45:37.960 The U.S. has a trade surplus with Australia, as you know.
00:45:40.680 And we can continue to take what is every opportunity to improve the relationship even further and make it even stronger.
00:45:52.280 And today's agreement on critical minerals and rare earths is just taking it to the next level.
00:45:58.520 Seizing those opportunities which are before us to take our relationship to that next level.
00:46:09.140 And it's been fantastic the contact that we've had together, the friendship that we've developed.
00:46:14.440 And Australians love America.
00:46:18.300 And I think Americans kind of like Australia, too.
00:46:21.200 That's true. We do.
00:46:22.000 And as we go forward, I think that today will be seen as a really significant day in our relationship.
00:46:29.920 So I thank you very much, Mr. President.
00:46:31.800 Well, thank you very much, Anthony.
00:46:33.340 It's an honor to sign this.
00:46:34.560 And we'll do it now.
00:46:35.440 And then we'll take some questions.
00:46:40.500 Some good ones, I think.
00:46:50.840 Okay.
00:46:51.280 Well, this is an eight and a half billion dollar pipeline that we have ready to go.
00:47:07.860 That's right. It's all ready to go.
00:47:09.460 Just getting started.
00:47:11.060 And we're doing a real job on rare earth and many other things.
00:47:15.980 Perhaps I could ask John to say a few words and then we'll exchange papers.
00:47:20.000 But just how are we doing on your naval purchases and all of the submarines that we're working on with Australia?
00:47:27.260 How's that going?
00:47:28.220 Thank you, Mr. President.
00:47:29.220 Obviously, Australia is a very important ally of ours in the Indo-Pacific and in every battle.
00:47:34.280 They've fought with us since World War I and have always been side by side.
00:47:39.180 The facility that they're building, Surf West, is critical and very important to our ability to project power in the Indo-Pacific.
00:47:50.000 And work with our allies.
00:47:51.700 So we're working very closely.
00:47:53.520 I think what we're really trying to do is take the original AUKUS framework and improve it for all three parties and make it better.
00:48:00.920 And clarify some of the ambiguity that was in the prior agreement.
00:48:04.780 So it should be a win-win for everybody, sir.
00:48:07.560 And the submarines that we're building for Australia are starting to really move along, right?
00:48:11.360 The process is getting very exciting, isn't it?
00:48:15.320 We're getting better.
00:48:16.220 That's good.
00:48:17.040 Very good.
00:48:17.940 It's going to be great.
00:48:18.740 Thank you very much.
00:48:20.300 Maybe we'll hold this up.
00:48:21.760 Okay?
00:48:22.060 Thank you.
00:48:22.380 Thank you.
00:48:22.420 Thank you very much.
00:48:34.580 It was made a while ago and nobody did anything about it.
00:49:04.680 And it was going too slowly.
00:49:06.420 We do actually have a lot of submarines.
00:49:08.360 We have the best submarines in the world, anywhere in the world.
00:49:10.900 And we're building a few more currently under construction.
00:49:15.480 And now we're starting.
00:49:16.660 We have it all set.
00:49:18.840 With Anthony, we've worked on this long and hard.
00:49:21.020 And we're starting that process right now.
00:49:22.720 And I think it's really moving along very rapidly, very well.
00:49:26.440 Mr. President, it's not going to guarantee Australia will get the bar.
00:49:30.900 Oh, it's getting.
00:49:31.560 Oh, no, they're getting.
00:49:32.320 Mr. President, it's not going to be.
00:49:33.460 At least 32 people have been killed.
00:49:35.580 Excuse me.
00:49:36.160 You're next.
00:49:37.140 Thank you.
00:49:38.140 Go ahead.
00:49:38.940 China's bad behavior has really only gotten worse since the AUKUS partnership was formed.
00:49:43.420 With that in mind, is the door open for Australia to get additional nuclear-powered submarines
00:49:48.680 or other military capabilities not already in the deal?
00:49:51.460 I think China has been very respectful of us.
00:49:54.000 They're paying tremendous amounts of money to us in the form of tariffs.
00:49:59.140 As you know, they're paying 55%.
00:50:00.780 That's a lot of money.
00:50:02.420 They never were paying anything over years and years and years.
00:50:07.260 But they were like anybody else.
00:50:09.160 A lot of countries took advantage of the U.S.
00:50:12.180 They're not taking advantage anymore.
00:50:14.040 China's paying 55% and a potential 155% come November 1st, unless we make a deal.
00:50:22.360 And I'm meeting with President Xi.
00:50:23.800 We have a very good relationship.
00:50:25.280 We're going to be meeting in South Korea in a couple of weeks.
00:50:28.060 And we'll see what we can do.
00:50:29.900 We have a very good relationship with China.
00:50:34.260 But, you know, it's been probably a little bit like your relationship with China.
00:50:39.900 They try and take advantage, but most countries do.
00:50:42.800 I mean, I can say the European Union took advantage, but not anymore.
00:50:46.500 We worked out a very fair trade deal.
00:50:48.600 Japan, we worked out a very fair deal.
00:50:51.940 South Korea, where I'll be meeting President Xi, we worked out a very fair deal.
00:50:55.440 And I expect we'll probably work out a very fair deal with President Xi of China.
00:51:01.600 So most of you will be with us.
00:51:04.040 It's going to be very exciting.
00:51:05.280 And I think we're going to work out something that's good for both countries.
00:51:08.560 Are you at least interested in expediting the nuclear-powered subs to Australia?
00:51:15.080 Well, we are doing that, yeah.
00:51:16.280 We're doing that.
00:51:18.860 We have them moving very, very quickly.
00:51:21.740 Mr. President, I don't think you've ever been to Australia.
00:51:26.780 Have you thought about coming to Australia and trying out some of the golf courses?
00:51:29.680 I would, and I actually have been to Australia.
00:51:32.700 And I did play one of your great golf courses.
00:51:34.960 They have great golf courses there.
00:51:36.840 But I have been to Australia, actually.
00:51:39.120 Would you come again?
00:51:40.100 Oh, I would.
00:51:40.700 In fact, I've been invited to go.
00:51:42.320 Indeed.
00:51:42.740 I'll have to give it serious consideration.
00:51:44.560 It's a real possibility.
00:51:45.680 Did the Prime Minister invite you today?
00:51:47.180 He did.
00:51:48.300 And perhaps we could time it, it must be said, with the President's Cup that Australia hosts as well.
00:51:55.360 When is the President's Cup?
00:51:58.480 We'll organize a time suitable for you, Mr. President.
00:52:05.480 Please, in the back, please.
00:52:07.420 Yeah, in the back, please.
00:52:08.640 Yeah, Mr. President, the Prime Minister mentioned that there's a trade imbalance that's very heavily in America's favor.
00:52:16.660 Why does America slap such heavy tariffs on a friend and ally in Australia?
00:52:20.920 Well, we don't, yeah.
00:52:22.320 Well, we do in some cases.
00:52:23.680 We do in many cases because we've been treated unfairly.
00:52:27.200 But actually, the tariffs are very light.
00:52:30.160 The one thing is you buy a lot of airplanes.
00:52:32.360 So that helps because you buy a lot of the beautiful Boeings, the best of the Boeings.
00:52:36.580 Boeing, and by the way, Boeing is really doing well.
00:52:39.120 They have lots of orders, and they're really doing a great job.
00:52:42.880 They make a great plan.
00:52:43.920 But Australia, because of its location, which is great, but one of the things dictated by that location is you have to order a lot of airplanes.
00:52:52.660 So I guess we have that advantage.
00:52:54.920 They need a lot of airplanes in Australia, and that gives us a little bit of an...
00:52:59.380 Mr. President, yeah, your Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, in his Shangri-La speech in, I think it was May, warned about the potential likelihood or threat of President Xi ordering an invasion of Taiwan.
00:53:14.540 2027 is also the year that Fleet Base West is supposed to start rotating those U.S. and U.K. submarines.
00:53:22.540 Do you see AUKUS as the deterrent for China in the Indo-Pacific?
00:53:26.540 Yeah, I do.
00:53:27.540 I think it is.
00:53:28.540 But I don't think we're going to need it.
00:53:30.540 I think we'll be just fine with China.
00:53:33.540 China doesn't want to do that.
00:53:35.540 First of all, the United States is the strongest military power in the world by far.
00:53:40.540 It's not even close.
00:53:41.540 Not even close.
00:53:42.540 We have the best equipment.
00:53:43.540 We have the best of everything, and nobody's going to mess with that.
00:53:47.540 And I don't see that at all with President Xi.
00:53:49.540 I think we're going to get along very well as it pertains to Taiwan and others.
00:53:55.540 Now, that doesn't mean it's not the apple of his eye, because probably it is, but I don't see anything happening.
00:54:01.540 We have a very good trade relationship.
00:54:03.540 We're going to have a very good, I think, when we leave South Korea.
00:54:06.540 It could be wrong, but I think we'll end up with a very strong trade deal.
00:54:10.540 Both of us will be happy.
00:54:12.540 I don't see that happening, no.
00:54:14.540 Mr. President, given the trade surplus that the U.S. enjoys with Australia, would you consider lifting the tariffs that you've imposed on Australia?
00:54:22.540 And can you give us any details about the critical...
00:54:24.540 Yeah, well, the tariffs have been amazing, because, you know, tariffs have been really a reason that I was able to settle almost all of the...
00:54:32.540 You know, I've settled eight wars in eight months.
00:54:35.540 Not bad.
00:54:36.540 I have one more to go.
00:54:37.540 It's Russia, Ukraine.
00:54:38.540 And I think we'll get there, but it's turned out to be nasty, because you have two leaders that truly hate each other.
00:54:45.540 You know, you can't have it all, right?
00:54:48.540 They hate each other beyond all else, and it makes it actually a little bit difficult.
00:54:52.540 But of the eight deals, I would say, because of tariffs, four or five of them were settled.
00:54:59.540 It's an amazing thing, the power of tariffs in terms of our country.
00:55:03.540 But tariffs have always been used against us.
00:55:05.540 We never use them against anywhere else.
00:55:07.540 And now you have a president that, for national security reasons and other reasons, is using them.
00:55:12.540 And we've become a very rich nation again, and a very secure nation again.
00:55:17.540 But we've also become a nation that used that power of tariffs and the power of trade to settle five of the eight wars that I settled.
00:55:25.540 I settled eight. I'm very proud of that.
00:55:27.540 Nobody else has settled one.
00:55:28.540 I don't think there's been an American president that settled one.
00:55:31.540 I think there probably hasn't been outside of the two countries involved, or however many are at war.
00:55:37.540 I don't think there's ever been an outside country that settled a war, period.
00:55:40.540 So I settled eight in eight months. I'm proud of that.
00:55:43.540 Now, in the meantime, I'm running a country that's, right now, we're the hottest country anywhere in the world.
00:55:48.540 We were dead. A year and a half ago, we were a dead country.
00:55:51.540 Now we're the hottest country in the world, economically and otherwise.
00:55:54.540 So, but I will say this. Australia pays very low tariffs.
00:55:58.540 Very, very low tariffs. In fact, Australia pays among the lowest tariffs.
00:56:03.540 Mr. President, there's been concern in Australia that it's taken nine months to get this meeting.
00:56:12.540 Have you had any concerns with this administration, with its stance on Palestine, climate change, or even things the ambassador said about you in the past, the Australian ambassador?
00:56:21.540 I don't know anything about him. I mean, if you said bad, then maybe he'll like to apologize.
00:56:26.540 I really don't know. Did an ambassador say something bad about him? Don't tell me. I don't know.
00:56:32.540 Where is he? Is he still working for you? Yeah, yeah.
00:56:36.540 You said bad? Before I took this position, Mr. President.
00:56:41.540 I don't like you either. I don't. And I probably never will. Go ahead.
00:56:46.540 Mr. President. No, you what? Go ahead. Behind you, President.
00:56:51.540 Mr. President, your secretary of the Navy said there will be some clarifications around some ambiguities on Wilkis. Can you tell us...
00:56:59.540 Well, he'll get that taken care of. These are just minor details that he'll take care of.
00:57:03.540 John, you're going to get that taken care of, right? There shouldn't be any more clarifications because we're just we're just going now full steam ahead buildings.
00:57:11.540 Yeah, please. Thank you. Mr. President, are you now satisfied with Australia's defense investment or do you want Australia to invest more in defense?
00:57:19.540 Well, I'd always like more, but they have to do what they have to do. You know, you can only do so much. I think they've been great. They're building magnificent holdings.
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