In this episode of the War Room, Steve and Josh take a deep dive into the latest in the tech bros vs. the populist nationalist movement. They talk about President Trump's recent victory in China, and what it means for the future of the tech industry. They also discuss a new piece from The Atlantic that suggests there may be a fusion between tech and populism.
00:01:43.900And then next thing you know, you've got the pandemic and you have and you have Wuhan.
00:01:48.360President Trump, this question has been, was he going too much for the tech bros?
00:01:53.240We know by having his FTC, his FCC, the antitrust people, they have this incredible group of folks they have over at the Justice Department.
00:02:04.140The President Trump has got the greatest set of kind of antitrust, break up the oligarchs that ever had.
00:02:09.340And you saw this past week with Josh Hawley, he's got support in the United States Senate.
00:02:14.640Look, there was a conference held in the last couple of days.
00:02:40.080And I make the case that they could be – they can actually be very compatible if you have the right type of regulatory apparatus.
00:02:47.320Josh Green, the great reporter from Bloomberg over there who wrote Devil's Bargain, kind of the rise of President Trump and populist nationalism, which I take a prominent role in that book.
00:03:01.520Rohit Chopra is someone from the Biden administration.
00:03:05.740He's actually one of the colleagues of Elizabeth Warren, and he ran the bureau that President Trump is in the process of shutting down.
00:03:17.040So he's the guy on the left, but he shares a lot of what we think about this thing, about these companies being too big, these oligarchs being too big.
00:04:01.860You've already written articles in the last month quoting Rohit and Steve, so I feel like I'm up to speed, and I want to get you guys up to speed, too.
00:04:09.280Looking ahead to this new Trump era, I wanted to start off by asking you both about an idea that was written up in the Atlantic yesterday that I think has big implications for what tech and antitrust policy might look like in the years ahead.
00:04:22.920The article suggested there's been a fusion on the right between MAGA nationalists like Steve and big tech barons like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Mark Andreessen, all in opposition to this specter of wokeness that people on the right are so worked up about.
00:04:41.540But the article goes on to suggest that big tech is actually the one in the driver's seat and that folks like Steve are, and I'm quoting the article here, political sucker fish riding a whale.
00:04:54.260My question for you, Steve, is this true?
00:04:56.760Are you in the MAGA crowd beholden to big tech, or does Elon Musk's humiliation in Wisconsin last night begin to weaken his political standing and his influence on policy in the Trump presidency?
00:05:10.640Are you assuming that someone spends $20 million and goes with a cheese head on a stage and bounces around and is humiliated?
00:05:32.060If we have, we admit, we're in a coalition, it is a coalition.
00:05:37.540But there's a much higher probability that we will have fusion with certain of the ideas of Rohit and particularly Lina Khan and others that have fought monopolies, have fought oligarchs for years.
00:05:53.160And I think that's where the fusion is going to come.
00:05:55.160One of the biggest scourges in our country are these oligarchs, the lords of easy money on Wall Street, the corporatists, and particularly the apartheid state of Silicon Valley.
00:06:30.160I think if you look at the first Trump term, you know, at the, at the Federal Trade Commission, for example, every single time you really saw the Republicans on the FTC speaking from a different hymn book than Trump.
00:06:49.160They were pro Chinese manufacturing, they were pro big tech, they were pro big pharma.
00:06:56.160And then you saw others who were really trying to fight against a lot of that money.
00:07:01.160And now we think Silicon Valley used to be lots and lots of little tech.
00:07:39.160The power we still have here and the difference in the first term, we've now evolved this party to be truly a working class and middle class party.
00:07:48.160And the Democrats have kind of lost that or lost focus on it.
00:07:54.160That's why we're building a bigger coalition.
00:07:56.160And I think if we do our job and somehow we can keep them together in an uneasy coalition, although I don't know if that's possible, we can build a, we can redefine politics like in 1932.
00:08:07.160We're at that inflection point that is upon us to do it.
00:08:10.160And things like last night obviously are a big setback.
00:08:14.160Looking ahead at the policy landscape though, if Elon and the six bros are representing big tech, who, if anyone, is standing up for little tech in the Trump administration?
00:08:30.160You've got our vice, where's Mike Davis?
00:08:33.160The fire breather Mike Davis is a fire breather for the unpopular side.
00:08:37.160If you look in the justice department right tomorrow, I'm going to be over there at justice with Omid and others, Gail Slater.
00:08:44.160I mean, we have, look, I think Lena Kahn is one of the most important political figures in this country.
00:08:51.160And I think if she had been listened to more by Democrats, they would actually have been more competitive against us in November of 2024.
00:08:58.160But I think you have a lot of people that I would call Neo Brandeisians that actually see the danger of concentration of massive concentration of personal wealth and power to government power.
00:09:16.160That was all caused by the Democrat and most progressive elements of the Democratic Party.
00:09:20.160The bailouts on Wall Street in 2008, which were unacceptable.
00:09:24.160And the kind of Faustian bargain given to the big six dudes to essentially say, you're going to have monopolistic power, but we'll make a deal with you.
00:09:34.160You have to be at the cutting edge of that because we're a hegemon.
00:09:37.160You have to have the commanding heights of technology.
00:09:39.160TikTok shows you they've blown it on social media.
00:09:42.160And quite frankly, Deep Seek, whether it's a Chinese PSYOP or if it's real, shows you that their method, right,
00:09:49.160which they do climate change overboard, all that overboard for this mass power of AI is wrong.
00:10:57.160I want to spice this up a little bit because you sound like you're half asleep.
00:11:01.160Ruin, you were recently on the receiving end of the Trump-Musk policy approach.
00:11:07.160And so, I'm imagining your view of Trump's approach is a little less rosy when it comes to big tech than maybe Steve's is.
00:11:13.160You told me at the time for a Bloomberg post I wrote, quote, defunding the police that watch over Wall Street and big tech will cost consumers billions of dollars.
00:11:21.160What's the case you'd make to folks like Steve and Republicans on the right for why a robust enforcement regime is necessary?
00:11:29.160Well, look, Steve mentioned the bailouts.
00:11:33.160I think this a lot of what our discourse is today, whether we know it or not, comes from the financial crisis and the big giveaways to those who are already powerful.
00:11:45.160In what planet can you mismanage your business so badly and go on the other side and become bigger and more powerful?
00:11:58.160So, I really think, look, it is a jump ball in so many places.
00:12:04.160When Musk and whoever took over the CFPB, one of the first people they fired were the tech people, the ones who were doing the investigations of big tech companies creating currency.
00:12:19.160They were the ones who were trying to make sure there was open tech so that small companies could challenge big banks.
00:12:26.160So, we're going to see a fight on both sides, I think, but I don't know how it's going to turn out if they keep getting rid of the watchdogs and just expect these agencies to be lapdogs.
00:12:39.160OK, so I want to dig in a little bit more on this idea of a struggle between big tech and little tech, how it might play out in the Trump years.
00:12:48.160And I want to provoke you both a bit by offering some historical context.
00:12:53.160Richard Nixon famously wanted his Justice Department to threaten investigations of the major TV networks in order to obtain friendlier coverage, perhaps a precursor to Trump's later threats against big tech.
00:13:07.160On the Nixon tapes, we hear him saying a DOJ investigation, quote, gives us one hell of a club, a sort of Damocles, Nixon called it, to coerce favorable coverage.
00:13:19.160Steve, is that Trump's real aim here, just a friendlier Facebook and a defang Washington Post?
00:13:25.160Or are there real populist instincts that might lean against the power of some of the big tech companies?
00:13:31.160I think, look, it's obviously, you know, something that's being worked out through the Trump administration.
00:13:36.160Like I said, we're a coalition. There's definitely voices on big tech.
00:13:40.160They have every lobbyist in this town, every law firm in this town. Let's say it's a rigged system.
00:13:45.160The system's totally rigged. If you want to go up against big tech now, I'm going to tell you how tough this is.
00:13:49.160But you talked to him personally about this.
00:13:51.160Here's what I think is, here's one of the things I think is important, is our going after the big law firms.
00:13:57.160We're trying to go after the machinery that has this system set up, to go after the big law firms.
00:14:03.160I think we have to go after the big investment banks, the big hedge funds, the money center banks.
00:14:07.160You have to go after all of them. And basically, you know, play smash mouth, because they play smash mouth with you.
00:14:15.160This system is run by money and power. It's run by oligarchic centers in both Wall Street, the corporatists, and Silicon Valley.
00:14:24.160And we're just not going to change it overnight. And there is a struggle.
00:14:26.160I mean, you have, I would submit to you that, and if you read the front two pages of the remedy section in the Google case
00:14:35.160and see where our Justice Department's coming at, it kind of stuns me of how antitrust the people we've put in.
00:14:43.160I mean, people know, I'm a big admirer, Alina Khan. I don't think we've made that big a shift. I would love to have her back.
00:14:49.160I think she'd be terrific. But we're just a difference in degree, not so much in kind, of what we put in place today.
00:14:55.160And I think you're going to see tough antitrust action taking place. That's why I think Wall Street's not enamored.
00:15:01.160They didn't see the big wave of M&A and M&A fees coming. So, this is all, but it's always going to be a struggle.
00:15:07.160It's who's going to be able to have muscle politically. In Florida 6, we were down three points, I think up to two weeks ago.
00:15:17.160When our show got involved, Breitbart got involved, we got our grassroots volunteers out.
00:15:22.160You know, Scott Jennings on CNN makes a very important point about, as we've reshaped this party to be more working class
00:15:28.160and middle class, we also are dependent upon low propensity voters. Low propensity, low information.
00:15:36.160And it's not, they're not degreed or not dumb by low information. They're just not interested in politics, right?
00:15:41.160These people basically come up for Trump. We have to have a massive grassroots effort every time to get them out.
00:15:47.160Scott's absolutely correct. And this is one of the reasons we won in Florida 6, has got it out.
00:15:51.160So, the power we have to, what do they call them, sucker fish?
00:15:55.160Yeah. We have to deliver, you know, mass amounts of grassroots, right, who are basically entrepreneurs, right?
00:16:02.160The little guy, the little shopkeepers, the workers. We have to deliver that, and we have to deliver it consistently.
00:16:08.160But I think you're starting to see that we did win, shouldn't be lost, we did win overwhelmingly the voter ID in Wisconsin last night.
00:16:17.160Although we lost, we lost, I think, we got blown out.
00:16:21.160I mean, since I've known you, you've been really outspoken.
00:16:23.160You just mentioned it now about the power of money in politics.
00:16:26.160And I'm interested in how that applies to tech and antitrust policy.
00:16:29.160What, is there evidence you can point me to that Trump is serious about pursuing a crackdown he's talked about in the past?
00:17:39.160And I think it shows you the beginning of a framework of what I would call a populist nationalist idea about antitrust and about taking on these oligarchs.
00:17:51.160Let me ask you, like, people don't think of you as this necessarily, but you were actually, in a manner of speaking, a two-time Trump official.
00:18:10.160So you look, but you, in all seriousness, you've had, it seems to me, a variety of experiences with Trump and his policy impulses when it comes to antitrust and other things.
00:18:22.160I remember you were at FTC when they first went after Facebook.
00:18:26.160You did some cracking down on companies that had abused the Made in America label, I remember, that Republicans were against.
00:18:33.160But I believe Trump spoke out in favor of that.
00:18:38.160I mean, how serious do you think he is about pursuing an agenda that would really police big tech and stand up for little tech companies, a lot of whom don't think they really have a voice?
00:18:50.160Well, I'm not his therapist or psychoanalyst, but I guess I'd say this.
00:18:55.160When you actually look at the people, the people that were put on the Federal Trade Commission in 2018, most of them were voting with big pharma, big tech, those guys.
00:32:03.160We're going to do a little more of the conference, then I'm going to come back and give you some of my closing thoughts.
00:32:08.160One thing here is that President Trump, and this is what he's going after, Charlie Gasparino's story that we talked about this morning with Dave Bratt, that he's now going to go after the money center banks.
00:32:20.160Everything President Trump's trying to do, if you look at it, is to support the forgotten man and woman.
00:32:25.160This is why this was a conference of entrepreneurs, of kind of people getting, you know, friends and family round, angel rounds, initial venture capital, and what they wanted, what they're trying to promote.
00:32:36.160And that's why they're in Washington, D.C., is a sense of competition and how important it is to have the entrepreneurial spirit.
00:32:41.160Well, listen, nothing has the entrepreneurial spirit more than, one, Donald Trump.
00:32:46.160He is the ultimate entrepreneur of what he's done in the real estate area, media, all of his endeavors.
00:32:54.160One of the most powerful driving focuses we have in the MAGA movement, in the Make America Healthy Again movement, if you think about it, you're against big tech.
00:33:05.160You're against these big, faceless, kind of heartless corporations that are just looking to do everything grinded out to the bottom line.
00:33:12.160There can be nothing that MAGA is more opposed to.
00:33:16.160And that's why I was very proud to speak at this conference.
00:33:19.160I will tell you, in this conference, and I'm not saying it was a hostile environment, but it's an environment of folks that don't listen to War Room and really haven't had access to what we've been trying to promote over the last couple of years.
00:33:30.160It was a very warm reception at the end.
00:33:33.160They agree with a lot that we had to say.
00:33:35.160And because it really is put forward President Trump's message that he's trying to stand up for the little guy.
00:33:40.160He's trying to stand up for the forgotten man and woman.
00:33:43.160And this is if you see everything that he's working on, every one of the verticals, whether it's national security, of which he wants to stop the forever wars so that young men and women's lives are just not thrown away on these foreign battlefields, to everything to his national, his economic nationalism, which is really focused on the American citizen and making sure they have a better deal or the best deal.
00:34:06.160And that their tax dollars are not thrown out and just come back to hurt them and to hurt their economic well-being.
00:34:14.160Everything President Trump does is really in defense of the little guy, the forgotten man and woman.
00:34:19.160That's why it was in his first inaugural address, the American Carnage address that had a little bit to do with.
00:34:25.160And I'm very proud that President Trump allowed me to do that because you see his direction was standing up for the little guy.
00:34:31.160OK, we've got a little more, a few more clips of this to play from this conference.
00:34:38.160And Josh Green is the is the moderator from Bloomberg News, one of the biggest reporters over there on, like I told you, the terminal in Bloomberg News, Bloomberg Businessweek.
00:34:49.160Very, very, very powerful in the financial community. Let's go ahead and play the tape and I'll come back with some closing observations and commentary in a couple of minutes.
00:35:00.160So I think there's I think there's I think there's a great future for populism, how we define it in economic nationalism.
00:35:07.160Let's let's broaden the aperture a little bit beyond the U.S.
00:35:10.160Steve, you've been quite active in supporting populist right wing causes, not just here, but across the globe and in Europe.
00:35:16.160Trump has two supporting populist politicians in December when he nominated Gail Slater.
00:35:22.160He said, quote, big tech has run wild for years, stifling competition in our most innovative sector.
00:35:28.160I think he posted that on True Social. Given that Europe is grappling with many of the same policy issues in regard to big tech.
00:35:35.160Do you support and should Trump support the EU's efforts to crack down on big players like Apple and Google in an effort to open up markets overseas?
00:35:45.160I do agree with trying to try to stop these people anywhere we can because I think they've gotten too much power.
00:35:52.160I would like to see instead of, you know, you have seventy five electric vehicle companies, but you have one search company.
00:35:57.160Right. We should have 100 search companies. We should have, you know, Facebook.
00:37:03.160I don't think we should outsource anything to Europe.
00:37:07.160But I will say this when they've been doing all their committees after their laws, the people who are actually going and using that process to challenge big gatekeepers from squelching them out are a lot of a little American companies because they want access to that market, too.
00:37:27.160So I don't know. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't do our own work here.
00:37:33.160We should not allow, you know, Facebook's Libra currency scheme to come back again.
00:37:40.160We should not have these new types of dollars that big tech companies control and can wall everyone out of.
00:37:49.160We should be passing laws and doing work here in Washington in every single state.
00:37:56.160And there are so many issues where I think there's a lot of agreement, child and teen privacy and exploitation of them, counterfeit goods and labeling.
00:38:23.160But what I really want to ask you about is can the U.S. and Europe effectively regulate tech companies at the same time that they're waging a trade war?
00:38:33.160Or will Trump wind up inadvertently helping big tech in an effort to jam the EU?
00:38:40.160I think they're kind of two separate things.
00:38:44.160I think today, and I think in the Rose Garden at 4 o'clock we're going to find out, I'm not so sure a decision's been made.
00:38:51.160And I realize there's some legal issues with that because I want to expose to the world how we've been taken advantage of by the political class in the United States,
00:38:59.160the globalists on Wall Street with these trade relationships with people that we pay for their defense that have hosed us for decade after decade after decade.
00:39:09.160And that all rolls down to the little guy. So I'm for reciprocity and tough reciprocity.
00:39:16.160I think there may be some tiered of 20 percent or some tiered system, which will be fine.
00:39:21.160And they'll use the emergency measures to implement that.
00:39:23.160But I think we have to think about and focus on bringing high value added manufacturing jobs back here to the United States and not assembly jobs.
00:39:34.160You know, the guys at Ford bitch and moan all the time, well we manufacture all this and we're going to lose a billion dollars.
00:39:41.160We need to bring high value added manufacturing jobs back here to the United States of America.
00:39:45.160People say we're manufacturing more than ever and there's 400,000 unpaid jobs.
00:39:50.160No. We assemble. We need to manufacture here.
00:39:53.160We need to rebuild the greatness of our industrial base and we can do it.
00:39:57.160At the same time we have to break up tech and give more access to capital entrepreneurs.
00:40:02.160We can do all that. None of this, the Republicans when I first got into the politics here with Andrew Breitbart 12, 14 years ago,
00:40:09.160this kind of Austrian School of Economics and all this, it was like they thought it was a natural property.
00:40:15.160They thought this was like the second law of thermodynamics. It's not. It's all human agency.
00:40:21.160We've proven this in this populist movement and getting people engaged and involved, the little guy who's engaged and involved now in politics.
00:40:27.160So, we can do this and we can build a system that's closer to the American plan that Alexander Hamilton and the great founders of our country set up in the 19th century that we can recreate here and become an economic superpower.
00:40:41.160A true economic superpower based upon people, not that what in the last six months the top 1% have accreted another $4.5 trillion of wealth to themselves, more than gone to the bottom 50%.
00:40:55.160We have a capitalist system or a quote unquote capitalist system with no capitalist and that's what we have to change.
00:41:01.160And we can change. All of this can be done. Don't think we have to take down the system and to do that you have to be relentless, you have to be prepared to be banned, to be debanked, to be shut out and to go to prison.
00:41:14.160If you're not prepared to do that, you're not prepared to take on the system and win.
00:41:18.160But getting back to the question of Europe, is Trump willing to let the EU crack down on American companies like Google, like Apple, or will he dig in his heels and want to retaliate?
00:41:29.160I don't think it's going to be retaliation against that. I think it's going to be retaliation against manufacturing and the German car companies and all that.
00:41:37.160So you don't think that bleeds over into tech policy to a degree, but I don't think it would be the driver.
00:41:43.160We'll see also the big ticket item is on China. So right now you have a lot of the largest tech giants saying, you need to listen to us and favor us to compete with China.
00:41:58.160I think if anyone gets distracted by that argument, we are in trouble.
00:42:03.160But here's the horrible thing of that argument. Their failure in being given the Faustian pact of allowing them to become oligarchs, they failed in social media, clearly they're not as good, and they failed in AI.
00:42:18.160They won a bailout, at least $500 billion, and the national ads will be turned over to them.
00:42:23.160They also put the gun to your head and say, hey, you can't regulate us now because you need national champions because the Chinese Communist Party has a fleet around Taiwan.
00:42:33.160That's a struggle we're going to have to go through, and we cannot agree to that. We can't agree to a bailout, we can't agree to turning the national labs over to them, the weapons labs for AI.
00:42:42.160We certainly can't genuflect, as you're so rightly pointing out, about the issue with the Chinese Communist Party.
00:42:49.160Roe, Democrats have been spondent by the results of the November election.
00:42:55.160With the exception of last night's victory in Wisconsin, it's been a pretty rough ride.
00:43:02.160A number of folks I talked to do see glimmers of hope on the antitrust front with the nomination of Gail Slater, other folks we've talked about.
00:43:10.160What are your thoughts? I see you've talked a lot about this idea of a populist cross-party alliance.
00:43:16.160What are your thoughts on that? How realistic do you think it is as you look ahead at the landscape over the next couple of years?
00:43:23.160And as somebody who's worked under Trump, who's clashed with Elon, who thinks a lot about the policy issues at the heart of all this, are you hopeful?
00:43:33.160Are you despondent? How should people think about that?
00:43:37.160I mean, look, I'm happy that some of them are using the policy ideas developed by Lina Khan and others who really came and started and lit a match on all of this.
00:43:51.160And if that is leading others to change good, I just want to go back to I still think it comes down to you saw anger across the board after the Wall Street bailouts.
00:44:02.160Occupy Wall Street, Tea Party, the whole thing. Most people yesterday in Congress, every single Republican except nine of them voted to like raise overdraft fees for people.
00:44:15.160There is maybe going to be agreement on certain places. But right now, those big oligarchs and big corporate royalty are still calling the shots in Washington.
00:44:29.160Do you disagree with that? No, they own this city. If you try to go for them legally, you can't get a law firm because they hire the law firms, they have all the lobbyists, they have tremendous power in Capitol Hill.
00:44:39.160That's why our movement is in this very early stages. And with President Trump at the top of the ticket, we can win national elections.
00:44:46.160As it proved last night since we have low propensity voters, we built those low propensity voters.
00:44:50.160I'm the first to admit we have a tough time otherwise and we have to build an apparatus that can do that.
00:44:55.160But it's going to come from, I think it was only one in the Senate, Josh Hawley, I think is the only person that voted, only Republican.
00:45:01.160So, we have a ton of work to do. I'm not sure so many of the elected officials in the House or the Senate are populist economic nationalists.
00:45:10.160We're still run in a neoliberal, neocon mentality. But I think, I believe, and if you look at Stoller, you look at yourself, Neocon,
00:45:20.160I believe since I would posit the Democratic Party and the official apparatus of it abandoned you guys who had some great ideas,
00:45:29.160great ideas that we as populist nationalists are getting a whole team to hopefully implement at least some of them, that there's much more.
00:45:37.160That fusion, to me, is more important than the fusion with the big tech bros.
00:45:42.160But we have to deal with political reality as we have it right now.
00:45:45.160But our party is only going to become more working class and more middle class. And I think that will tend to the fusion.
00:45:51.160Our time is ticking down. But Trump also got rid of populists like Rohit.
00:45:57.160So Rohit, you know, Steve's talked a lot about the positive idea of an alliance.
00:46:00.160But just as a last question, what's the worst case scenario for you?
00:46:04.160What do you what do you stay up at night worrying about?
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