Stephen K. Bannon, John Solomon, and Treasury Secretary Scott Besson join host Stephen K. B. to discuss breaking breaking news including the latest on the Mueller investigation, and the ongoing investigation into the Trump administration's handling of the Uran Uranium One scandal.
00:03:03.000Fulton County has basically taken the strongly worded letter about the 400,000 ballots and, and, and told, uh, main justice to put it where the sun doesn't shine.
00:03:13.000So I'm waiting for us marshals to be selected in a warrant, get a warrant and go down season.
00:03:20.000We got a, we got a short cold open for, uh, our former colleague, uh, still our friend, but former colleague, uh, the secretary of treasury, Scott Besson, who's down in, in South Carolina.
00:03:30.000Let's go and play the, let's go and play the, uh, the, um, the clip.
00:03:35.000I'm willing to go all the way with it and set people ablaze in this conversation, but we should be at least at the start, not insane.
00:03:44.000This is an off year election in blue states.
00:03:47.000There was built in advantages for the Democrats that were running as for us, missing messaging.
00:03:53.000I will take this and not put it on the consultant class.
00:03:56.000I'll put this on the treasury secretary, Scott Besson, who wants to keep telling people that everything is going great.
00:05:10.000It was the scale of the loss and across the country and other these districts.
00:05:14.000And quite frankly, state assemblies and other things that we had been shifting dramatically.
00:05:19.000Trump, particularly New Jersey, it's points on the by.
00:05:23.000It was consulting class doing going back with Citrielli talking about tax cuts and talk about, you know, size of government, just issues that are not top of mind right now with residents.
00:05:33.000And, of course, the disaster of Glenn Youngkin and the destruction of the Republican Party in the Commonwealth of Virginia, which is 100 percent on his shoulders with terrible candidates.
00:06:25.000One, this is I'm going to be delivering to President Trump in the Oval Office when I get back.
00:06:31.000This is the first magnet to come off this line here in Sumter, South Carolina.
00:06:37.000And I will tell you, Sumter is real South Carolina.
00:06:40.000Where I'm sitting now, this 500,000 square foot facility, which makes these magnets, and we'll come back to the importance of them, used to be a soybean field.
00:06:53.000And, President, the tax policy has brought this home.
00:06:57.000And not only these high-precision manufacturing jobs, this is national security.
00:07:03.000We let China take control of the rare earth, the rare earth magnets.
00:08:13.000You were able to renegotiate in South Korea at one-year extension
00:08:19.000because I don't think people realize our production lines would be shutting down in six or seven or eight weeks.
00:08:24.000You were able to get that with President Trump using the leverage.
00:08:28.000We already hear that the CCP is maybe not totally living up to that.
00:08:32.000But talk to people about how absolutely urgent it is for us to get magnet production and other processed rare earths in the control of the United States of America for our sovereignty.
00:08:45.000Well, Steve, it's a disgrace that this happened.
00:08:50.000And the Chinese, you know, started with a plan.
00:08:53.000In 1995, they bought up a rare earth magnet facility.
00:09:10.000They've accumulated all the rare earth assets in the world.
00:09:15.000They have control about 70% of the mining, about 90% of the production.
00:09:22.000This one German company managed to stay in business as the Chinese cut prices, tried to put them out of business.
00:09:32.000And now they have stood up this beautiful 500,000 square foot facility in Sumter, South Carolina, and for us to take control of our supply chain.
00:09:46.000And, Steve, these magnets are in everything, from fighter jets to iPhones to every car to every medical device to machines used for CAT scans.
00:10:00.000And the Chinese used this as a big negotiating tool in April when President Trump raised the tariffs on them.
00:10:09.000They tried to roll it out again on October 8th.
00:10:13.000And, Steve, this is against the entire Western world, not just against the U.S.
00:10:18.000It's against Europe, Australia, Canada, U.K., Japan, Korea.
00:10:25.000And through President Trump's leadership and facilities like this, we are going to take back leadership and end this choke point that they have on us.
00:10:37.000Okay, this gets to the central part of capital investment, capital equipment that drives, you know, bringing things back.
00:10:46.000The tariffs help companies like the Germans think, hey, let me build something in the United States.
00:10:51.000We talked for years in the show when you were a contributor about this being the last shot for a supply-side tax cut.
00:10:59.000That bet was on a supply-side tax cut that focused on manufacturing and focused on bringing, you know, investment in capital equipment to return us, coupled with tariffs, to return us to be the manufacturing superpower we are.
00:11:14.000And I want to get to affordability in a second, but the more important thing than even affordability is jobs and growth.
00:11:21.000Is the supply-side tax cut, as you envisioned it and executed for President Trump, do you believe it's working right now?
00:11:43.000National security is economic security.
00:11:47.000So, you know, without economic security, we don't have any of that.
00:11:52.000And, you know, there is an industrial planning aspect here that this administration, President Trump, came in.
00:12:01.000He signed an executive order on rare earth right at the beginning, right in the first few days, and that these magnets are now coming off the line.
00:12:14.000The tariffs, you know, the revenue is great, but I have described the revenue as a shrinking ice cube in terms of the tariff income, because what would happen, the goal is to rebalance global trade.
00:12:30.000That the US became free trade was not fair trade.
00:12:39.000Right now, the tariff income is very substantial.
00:12:42.000Over time, what will happen is, as we reassure the factories, tariff income will go down.
00:12:48.000And from facilities like this and companies like this, the income tax receipts and the payroll receipts from these high-paying jobs will go up.
00:12:59.000So, you know, a successful tariff regime results in reshoring and better balance.
00:13:06.000So that is, by definition, lower tariffs.
00:13:09.000And then the third part of that was, as you talked about, the tax bill, which has immediate expensing for factories, immediate expensing for equipment.
00:13:22.000So we are making the US the best place to build your factory.
00:13:32.000And then the third part is deregulation, because we had gotten out of the ability to build things in the United States.
00:13:42.000I had an hour-long meeting with the management here beforehand, and I said, why are we sitting in a former soybean field in Sumter, South Carolina?
00:13:53.000And they said, you know, Governor Henry McMaster and his team got us all the permits in eight weeks.
00:14:01.000And, Steve, I'm walking through the factory, talking to the workers here.
00:14:08.000Many of them had been seven to 15 years at a Caterpillar factory that had closed, probably because the foreign competitors, they undercut them.
00:16:35.000Sign up for free and be part of the movement.
00:16:37.000Mr. Secretary, just mentioned the phrase Gamecock and this being old and real South Carolina.
00:16:44.000I think particularly for the vast new audience that's joined us over the last, you know, six to nine months, may not be that familiar with your background because you come across as either, you know, so professorial as a professor in the finance department, economics department at Yale, or a Wall Street capital markets guy.
00:17:00.000What is your background in South Carolina, sir?
00:17:03.000Steve, my family, they came here over 300, where are we now, 370 years ago.
00:20:14.000And these are, like I said, high paying jobs.
00:20:17.000And the size of this facility may go up 10x.
00:20:22.000You know, Tom Peters wrote that amazing book back in the 90s that became really the Bible for so many companies called In Search of Excellence.
00:20:29.000And it went back to the beginning of Silicon Valley and why American was a tech superpower.
00:20:35.000It was called management by wandering around.
00:21:33.000So we are going to see this capex boom.
00:21:36.000And again, this magnets facility here, there were 800 or and it's still continuing.
00:21:43.000There are 800 construction jobs going going on as they're building.
00:21:48.000You know, those will keep going as this facility gets six, eight times bigger.
00:21:53.000And every line they add is 300 permanent jobs.
00:21:58.000So, you know, I just think we are at the beginning of this liftoff that I wish that we could have thrown a switch and the jobs and the manufacturing would have come right back.
00:22:16.000But I can tell you that your friend there who criticized me that you can be optimistic about the future.
00:22:26.000The house got burned down and it takes a while to rebuild it.
00:22:30.000And we are rebuilding it from the foundation of the foundation of this.
00:22:36.000The concrete that we poured was this tax deal.
00:22:40.000So we've got the foundation and now we are starting to rebuild our economy.
00:22:45.000And one of the answers to this affordability crisis, you know, there are two parts to it.
00:22:51.000Part of it is, you know, stopping the price increases, bringing the prices down where you can for things, you know, like gasoline, like certain foods.
00:23:00.000But then on the other hand, the real home run is real wage increases, which we saw under President Trump's first term.
00:23:10.000You know, our hourly workers did better than supervisory workers.
00:23:13.000The bottom 50 percent of households net worth went up faster than the 10 percent.
00:23:19.000And, you know, the Wall Street Journal can take a shot at me when I talk about Main Street prosperity.
00:23:26.000But, you know, I call it parallel prosperity.
00:23:29.000Wall Street has done well, exceeded everyone's expectations.
00:23:34.000And, you know, it's called the Wall Street Journal for a reason, not the Main Street Journal.
00:23:39.000And they don't want everyone to have a fair shot.
00:23:46.000Part of the deregulation that we've done in Treasury is to help small banks.
00:23:51.000We've lost half of our small banks since the GFC.
00:35:44.000Are you, one of the theories of the case here underlines this, it was President Trump,
00:35:48.000and this was the first term too, and you mentioned by 2019 fall and winter was, you know,
00:35:54.000blue-collar wages rising faster than white-collar wages, and non-college graduates faster than college graduates.
00:35:59.000It was extraordinary for working-class people.
00:36:02.000Are you and President Trump comfortable with the full-spectrum energy dominance?
00:36:08.000Are you there yet as far as other things you're going to do on energy?
00:36:12.000We're working as hard as we can, but a steep, big part of it is energy transport because the two sides,
00:36:26.000we talked a little about the AI data center, and the other side is their use of power.
00:36:34.000And any time you cross the state line in the U.S., unless it's kind of red state to red state, things can get a little dicey.
00:36:46.000And, you know, as I mentioned, I was at this AI summit in Pittsburgh, and Pittsburgh is going to be one of the AI hubs of the U.S.
00:36:58.000And that's because of the energy, right, the Marcellus and all the energy resources that are in Pennsylvania,
00:37:09.000that Pennsylvania lets them be exploited right across the border where Pennsylvania and New York meet.
00:37:17.000New York is impoverished energy-wise, so, you know, we are doing what we can, but many of these states are a problem.
00:37:27.000Yeah, and I don't think, particularly in the campaign, we've had Dave Walsh on here now for three years talking about how some of this green new scam,
00:37:38.000the net zero carbon that de-industrialized Germany was done in states like New Jersey, right?
00:37:46.000And they didn't stick the landing on making sure they understand that the radical Democrats did this.
00:37:52.000Mr. Secretary, we've taken too much of your time. We really appreciate it. I know you're busy today.
00:37:56.000Make sure you say hi to the folks, all the working folks up there, the Gamecocks and Boeing and also down at the Magnet Factory.
00:38:03.000Really appreciate you, sir. Where can people go? I know you have the number one comms team in the entire government.
00:38:09.000Where do people go to get all your latest thinking and your content, sir?
00:38:14.000You know, I have an X account at Treasury, and then Treasury also runs an X account, and we're very, very active every day.
00:38:25.000And, Steve, I will go back to my third grade. South Carolina is one of two states that still teaches state history, South Carolina and Texas.
00:38:37.000I will go back to my third grade South Carolina state history.
00:38:42.000And I will tell you the reason the University of South Carolina is called the Gamecocks is because General Sumter,
00:38:48.000we're sitting in Sumter, South Carolina, was called the fighting Gamecock because he was so tough.
00:38:53.000So a little history, a little economics. Great to see you in the war room crowd.
00:39:00.000Yes, sir. Thank you. The posse loves you. So keep fighting. Thank you, sir. Appreciate you.
00:39:19.000And here you took a shot at really the last shot to really use kind of Reagan-esque,
00:39:28.000the one part of Reagan, you know, the Reagan-esque supply-side tax cut focus on capital because capital is essential to becoming a man,
00:39:37.000or returning to be a manufacturing superpower.
00:39:40.000One of the central tenets of the MAGA movement, to return America to her greatness,
00:39:46.000you must stop the bleeding of shipping high-quality jobs out to basically lower labor-cost areas,
00:39:55.000East Asia and South Asia particularly.
00:39:58.000And this is why some Central America and Latin America, but principally that.
00:40:04.000This is why now the Frankenstein monster that Wall Street, the corporatists and big tech created,
00:40:11.000the Chinese Communist Party become a manufacturing superpower, was done by our elites.
00:40:18.000This is what led to the managed decline.
00:40:20.000This was the managed decline of this nation in the rise of the Chinese Communist Party in a form of state capitalism.
00:40:28.000And this is what the United States and the way it's governed is kind of evolved to.
00:40:34.000The Chinese Communist Party did not become a open democracy based on freedom, based on liberty, based on free speech, religious, all that exact opposite.
00:40:42.000More and more controlled by state capitalism and an authoritarian government.
00:40:49.000This is what you saw, you saw it manifested in the Biden regime, the illegitimate Biden regime, I might add.
00:40:58.000Illegitimate? Why is the Biden regime illegitimate?
00:41:18.000This is why the damage done during those four years is monumental.
00:41:23.000President Trump had enough to clean up, given the fiascos of Bush, Clinton, Bush and Obama.
00:41:31.000That was kind of stopped the decline or to try to put a tourniquet on it.
00:41:36.000Then after the pandemic that was hit that delivered by the Chinese Communist Party, coupled with the storm, the summer of love and the stolen election of 2020 in the four years of an illegitimate regime.
00:45:13.000Talk to me about it because you're one of the leading voices now and the president's adamant about this.
00:45:18.000And I take it this breakfast did not end too well the other day.
00:45:21.000But talk to us about why a guy like Tommy Tuberville, who's a traditionalist, who believes in customs and traditions and the Constitution, why would you be one of the leading voices in saying we've got to junk the filibuster and we've got to do it now?
00:47:46.000Are you, is an underlying conviction of yours in the president is that the Democrats are going to do this immediately?
00:47:57.000One of the fears is that if you, if you, if you do this, you've opened the path for Washington, D.C. as a state, Puerto Rico as a state, you know, 15, 20 judges on the Supreme Court, all of that.
00:48:10.000Are you guys convinced that the Democrats are going to do this anyway and that's why you want to be preemptive?
00:50:12.000I just want people to understand this.
00:50:13.000Everything they've got is about illegal aliens or bringing in, uh, foreigners now and turn them into Americans in like two weeks and let them vote.