The Anchormen Show with Matt Gaetz ｜ Steve Bannon
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Summary
In this episode of The Anchor Podcast with Matt and Dan, host Dan Ball sits down with Steve Bannon to discuss the importance of the War Room Posse, a group of patriots who came together to fight for President Trump in the early days of his presidency.
Transcript
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Now, it's time for the Anchorman Podcast with Matt Gaetz and Dan Ball.
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Welcome back to the program. I'm here with my good friend and longtime mentor, Steve Bannon.
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And I got to know Steve Bannon in the early days of Bannon's War Room, a show that he still hosts
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now on Real America's Voice. It's an incredible podcast. But more than that, it was the launchpad
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for the defense of President Trump during the first impeachment. I remember those days when
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in any given moment, we had half of the cabinet and members of his own government, members of
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House leadership working to install Mike Pence as the president of the United States. And we had
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this band of pirates led by Steve Bannon and the brilliant Jason Miller and the ever productive
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Raheem Kassam. And we would get together and strategize. And we built this army of patriots.
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And now more than a television host, what Steve Bannon really is, is the leader of a group called
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the War Room Posse. And what's interesting about this group of Americans is they range from Wall
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Street executives to CEOs to people that are, you know, cleaning out dumpsters in the middle
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of the night. It's every walk of life of American. And what Steve does every day for four hours a day
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is direct these people into action. It's not it's not an audience. It indeed is a posse. They call
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lawmakers. They show up at rallies. They donate to candidates. They buy books and become
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the pollinators of key information that the MAGA universe needs to thrive. And it's in the
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leadership of that group, Steve, that I really want to direct our conversation tonight. Good to be
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here. Yeah. Thank you. Love the podcast. And by the way, people people I don't think even really
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fully understand the extent to which in in some of our toughest moments in Congress, you were right
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there. I mean, you weren't just a television host. You and I were having 11, 12 conversations a day.
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And so were a bunch of my other colleagues who were trying to kind of find their way around
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fighting this crazy system. But you made this pitch to the War Room Posse to fill the billets
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at a Republican executive committee. Right. Precinct strategy, all that. Right.
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The posse is white, but not whiter than your normal Republican club meeting. And it's boomer,
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but not more boomer than your normal Republican club meeting. And so you had people that were a
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little more diverse, a little younger, working class, and they started showing up at these meetings.
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And now what has happened is they started seeing who was coming around to like run for county
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commissioner or mayor or state representative, and they've started to run for office. Yes. And what
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I want to use some of our time on today is for that posse member or that American that says, you know
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what, I've got the ability to go and actually build a campaign. What is the Steve Bannon C-Spot run plan?
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How does that integrate with my own experiences? Because here's what I've noticed. While they have
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the vigor and the drive that you've instilled in them, there is a tactical feature to running for
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office that sometimes evades even your most loyal posse members. Oh yeah. Remember, most of these
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people have never really been engaged in politics and definitely not elective politics. So the first
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thing is just to convince them that the way through here is human agency. And that really started
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because we went through phases of the show. It was the, it was the Borum impeachment of which you
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were essential in. Then we had pandemic in the run-up to 2020. Then the fight to stop the big
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steel. And then kind of what the, the nuclear winter of January, February, March, April of 2021,
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when it looked like the world had abandoned President Trump, you know, even half the MAGA
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movement was so crestfallen. How could Trump have won and won so big and, you know, 74 million votes
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and been destroyed. That's when we really started revving up the precinct strategy. And the first thing was
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just show up. If you show up in most of these precincts, there's going to be empty billets.
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And so you can get voted in. Now the, the establishment, whether, whether it's in
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central Florida or central Arizona or North Carolina are going to have a huge fight, right?
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But the first thing you got to do is get your chops at the precinct strategy by just the,
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because the Republican party structure is actually a grassroots structure. It's actually, you know,
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it's, it's got, I think 250,000, um, 250,000 open seats or, or seats that you can go all over the
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country to do. And our first thing is just get off the couch, go get engaged. And people,
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you know, by the way, love it. Now, a couple of years into this process,
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the resistance is so strong, like in Texas at this, we control the state parties of Texas,
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Georgia, uh, North Carolina, South Carolina, uh, Nevada, uh, Oregon, uh, Nebraska, Colorado, but
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we really don't. It's this big fight between the grassroots and the, and the businesses. So I tell
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people, go get engaged, work up the thing, get to the state level, uh, go to the state convention.
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Uh, and then if you want to, it's county super, we had so many people go to county supervisors,
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school board, school board, school board is huge. That school boards came in for the,
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that really came in for the moms of America, moms of Liberty. I started noticing the school board,
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you know, the, the, the, the, the, that's a terrible job. My dad was on the school board,
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screaming and yelling at him every day. There is a special place in heaven for anyone willing to be
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on. When people would come up and say, I'm running for the school board. Yes. Part of me would think,
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why? But it was. And even that's less controversial than it is today with the libraries and what
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they're teaching the kids. So that was a huge one. And of course, these have gone back and forth
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already the first wave of the Maha mother or the mother's gauge. We've already, we've won school
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boards and had them flip back as, as the liberals are getting engaged. So it's constant war.
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Here's what we know is that for the hoplites, for the, for the grundoons, for the war and posse,
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it is a great training ground. And what it does is also expands, you, you, you know, our audience,
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you know, is a little older, right? But no older than the Republican party. But here's the thing,
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you talk to people and their lives get narrower and narrower as they go on. Once they join one of
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these things, it opens up, they meet new friends, they get new relationships, there's a new sense of
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purpose. And so by and large, people are very happy about it. Now it is an absolute grind. And that's
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why like today we had Steve Stern on, they had like 200 guests on half the show was Tina Peters,
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who's in prison out in Colorado. The other half was about election integrity, a bunch of things
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come up in primaries that you got to get on top of. We had, uh, but when people make that decision
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to run, like what's, what's the Steve Bannon checklist that you say, write down, do these
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things to prepare yourself for candidacy, not just within that structure. First, I say that first,
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I say, Hey, everything that you ever done, they're going to throw up against you. So you got to have
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courage just to work through that. I honestly think that we're so much more resilient to that
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these days. Maybe just I am, but, uh, I think as a society, Facebook and the fact that a lot of
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people have had every stupid Halloween costume posted on Facebook, we don't have the,
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well, the pearl clutching of the boomers. But you see the fights, you know, Trump came down 10 years
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ago, uh, this June, right? 10 years ago. If you look at, and I keep saying this 10 years is the
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preamble to what is in front of us in the Trump movement, right? Over these particularly next
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hundred days, couple of hundred days. Trump's a moderate in our movement. Oh, very much a moderate.
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He's not close because he's a, he's a, he's a, he's got a good heart. He's trying, he tries to
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accommodate people. He's a deal maker. He's a deal maker. And he comes from the hospitality industry.
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Principally, that's where his roots were. That's what he, he understand media and hospitality,
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mass communication. You totally know that when, when you're around him and you see the way
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Trump is so attentive to everyone's comfort. Yes. So attentive, uh, laser focused. It's why he
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doesn't like people to even consume alcohol around him because he wants you at your sharpest so that
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when he engages with you, that it's going to be mutually productive and beneficial and joyful.
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What I tell people is know yourself, prepare for combat. You'll obviously learn the issues.
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You will win if you don't quit. That's the key thing. You will win if you don't quit. And we've got-
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Wait, wait, wait, wait. No. I know a lot of people who like run every single time for sheriff and-
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No, no, no. I'm not saying, I'm not saying about that. I'm saying the precincts right,
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which is our entry entry level. Right. And once you get to that, and I actually recommend that-
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But these people who become the precinct people, they're not just moving up in the Republican
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party. No, no. They're going, no, they're going, they're going to town councils. Yes. As soon as they
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get to- They're paying attention. Yes. And they're like, look, I just saw this, this just total-
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County supervisor. You know, limp rag rolled in for state representative. I don't want to vote
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for that person. I have better ideas than they do. And they're running. And I think a lot of them
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would say to me, could I just get 10 minutes with Steve Bannon? And I want to give everyone that
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right now. When you say, you know, all right, know yourself, know they're going to throw everything at
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you. Like, what do you tell people about how to resource a campaign? Because it's, it's an
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uncomfortable discussion. Well, first off, you're not going to probably have a big donor. I say,
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just go out small, put your things out. Some do. You got posse members who are
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self-unders. Oh yeah. No, no, no. You do. But I'm saying the average person.
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You know what? That's the first question I ask. The first question I ask anyone, it's deeply crass.
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How much of your own money are you going to put into your campaign?
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Well, I do that at a certain level, like for Congress or state level, state house. But I'm
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saying for the entry, for the precinct and above. I mean, state Senate race in like Florida
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costs like five million bucks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just, the guy's running for,
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wants to run for Congress in Connecticut. It just came two days ago. First question I asked him,
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stop. I said, how big a check are you prepared to write to get off? And he gave me a number. I said,
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I don't think that's going to be enough. I think you're going to have to be,
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you're going to have to think this through and see if it's, you know, really worth it.
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Well, you have to build a finance strategy. Yes.
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And it's not one size fits all. But what I tried to do was open up every vector. You know,
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there might've been four or five big donors that cared about who the state representative was in
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Destin. So man, if you could get one or two of them, fill out that vector, even if it's small
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at the beginning, get you a small dollar donor base. People that, I call it the Christmas card
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list, you know, and get that working. That's actually the smart, I think that's the smart
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because it also breaks the ice, which is the hardest of people actually asking for money to
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actually do this, right? People need that self-confidence. And I think doing that small
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donor is where they start to break the ice of actually asking their friends. It's like an angel round.
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Friends and family round in venture capital, right? You've got to make the ask.
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You know what? Every single time a member of Congress meets a new person, the first thing
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that comes to their mind is, can this person become a donor to my campaign? And what is the
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maximum amount of money I can extract out of them?
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But that's the way the system has done it though, because it takes so much money. You're,
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you're extraordinary. I think you're the only person in the house that didn't take any PAC money
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or lobbyist money or lobbyist money. And how tough was that to, to, to, to, what lessons did
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you learn in that? I never, ever felt the pinch of it. I felt relieved. I remember when I made the
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announcement and then just saying to myself, win or lose, I never have to go to one of these like,
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you know, 8 a.m. breakfast fundraisers where the Southeast regional pipe distributor is wearing a,
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you know, a name tag and giving me $500 and asking me to sign on to some stupid amendment.
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When you got to the house to get to your committees, didn't they give you a number?
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Like you're, you're on armed services, right? That's the money.
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And you had never raised for, Pat, you'd never gone to those folks before.
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No. But what I knew was more people might be willing to come up with the 75 G's than there
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were slots. So I paid double. I, I, I got a check for 150 and brought it. And that's how I got on
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the judiciary committee. They looked at me and said, boy, you're a real comer.
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I'll bet you still 90%, 95% of the audience doesn't understand that. That once you get
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up here, regardless if you've been Matt Gaetz and saying, I don't want corporate money.
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I don't want lobbyist money. Once you get into the system, the system demands that you pay
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something just for staying around. Otherwise you're going to be on the, the, the agriculture
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committee or some committee that doesn't not even tie to your, it's tied to your district.
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Well, the, what you have to pay to get on a committee is directly tied to what, what the
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algorithm says you can extract from the lobby core that services that committee. And the people who
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traditionally pick who goes on the committee are the people who lobby that committee at freshman
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orientation. When they told, when I said, I'm real interested in armed services, they said, go sit at
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table 11. And it was like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, L3. And they're, they're sitting there
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and they're, they're sizing you up saying, if we give this guy the money to get on the committee,
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is he going to play ball? Is this somebody we're going to be able to work with?
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And you said that because your district is Pensacola. It's one of the most significant
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naval bases in the world. I think there's, there's air force assets down there, but the way they
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judge is how much money. And they thought you were a comer very early on, correct?
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Yeah. But do you think that like for new candidates, getting back to that, do you think that you have
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to impose some realism there? Because what I've seen, I've seen some policy members who they say,
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you know what, I have $50,000 that I can put into this race. And I have some friends who might be
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able to raise me another 50,000. So I'm going to go run for Congress when the reality is that is just
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not table stakes. And, and you may have the ability to do the job, but you can only do the job that you
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will get elected to do. Yes. Whereas if you took that a hundred thousand and put in a state delegate
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or a town, or city hall, and then, and then build a coalition. That's our recommendation. Yeah. So how
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do you, how do you have that conversation with people? What are the benchmarks you set? Well, first
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off, you know, we have a big screening element. So we have people that do this, but when they come,
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it's, you know, how realistic is this? It's going to be several million dollars to get a house seat.
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Are you known in the community? Do you have a track record? What's your message? How good are you
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at actually selling yourselves? You know, do you have a real, has you ever done really
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tough interviews? Have you been out there in the hustings? Do you understand this is every day of
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your life? You're going to have to be to the primary. So you're looking for drive and commitment.
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Driving commitment and also, and realistic, because so many, but I think it's not as bad today as it
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used to be. The worst I saw it was around the Tea Party effort in 2010 with a big, and that time
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around there when the Tea Party first started, you had people coming in, wanted to run for Senate,
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want to run for governor, particularly Congress. I think it's, I don't think you've got those,
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because I think one of the things is media. People watch the shows. They're more attuned to
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what's going on. They see what a grind it is. It's not as bad as back then. Back then, you had
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people showing up. Hey, I've got $15,000, which is a lot of money for somebody. I want to run for
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the house. I can upset this guy in a D plus four district, et cetera. But you have a responsibility
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with this posse to direct them to the winning, to the winning places. Well, to make sure that they make
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their own decision and think this thing through, right? That they're just not running out there.
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Here's the other thing that I think the consultant class gets totally wrong.
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They all talk about building your bio as a candidate. Like, have you been the president
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of the Rotary Club? Were you on the Little League board? I don't think bio matters nearly what it
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used to be. And it might not matter at all. I think even Trump, yes, I agree that that's why
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governors, you know, in the old days, particularly like in the Democratic Party, run things. I think
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it's a new thing with media. But you've got to know what the issues are and how you play into
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these different interest groups. Are you known in those groups? Are you a leader in those groups?
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Are you showing up at like school boards that people know who you are? So more importantly than
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having the checkbox of, I've done Little League, I've done the PTA, all that. What have you actually
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accomplished and have people know you? And can you break through the kind of the white noise of media?
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Do you have a personality? Is that because people want to see authenticity? They want to see fighting
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spirit. They want to see stick to it, stick to it in this. They don't want to vote for phonies anymore.
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When I first ran in 2010, you would have never thought to ask somebody how many Facebook followers
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or Twitter followers do you have? Email was just starting to be a function of real political force
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I think so. I think it's to get a social media presence, to be interconnected people,
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to know how to be a force multiplier. One of the things we do is teach people at these academies
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how to be force multipliers and push out content, push out your own content, build your brand.
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I think it's absolutely vitally important. In fact, I remember when I took over the term
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campaign or came in as CEO, you know, we're in a dead sprint to get this thing finished.
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And in Florida, we had to get some gap in Florida and stop spending so much time down there
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because we're trying to pierce the blue wall. So Ohio and Florida, my two, I said,
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with polling, we've got to see if we've got a gap going here. And every time we would go somewhere
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towards even close to the western part of the state, you would show up in the tarmac.
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And Kayleigh McEnany would show up in the tarmac at the rallies. I said, this guy is dedicated.
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I miss the rallies. It was like a family reunion. It was an emotional experience.
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There was so much joy. I think all of these left-wing haters should like have to go to a
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Trump rally because what they will find is they'll feel better about themselves. They'll be happier.
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They talk about the anger in the media and everything like that. There's no anger.
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This is working class joy for a guy up there that's stepping up and trying to put him in the room.
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Well, Trump's running at 28. So we're going to have another run.
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We're going to have another shot at the rallies.
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In 2024, actually, I think they were not just bigger, but they were also a little more intense
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And that's what I'm saying. Even the Warren Posse, we're getting more of a black audience,
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a lot of Hispanics, particularly in South Texas.
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I have a theory that we've broken down our politics over race for most of your and my
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life. And now something very different happened where a bunch of working class black and Hispanic
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men showed up and said, whoa, you're telling me the third grade teacher gets to decide the
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And you're telling me that a bunch of my friends and people I grew up have to go fight in some
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war in Ukraine or the Middle East. And it was the machismo of Trump. It was the policy wins.
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And also the hectoring of the credential class and particularly the female credential class
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of the left. The MSNBC crew hectoring these guys every day.
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And I took a lot of crap when I went to the television and said, we're going to lose some
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Karens. But for every Karen we lose, we're going to we're going to find a Jamal or a Julio.
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I noticed that the only thing I put out of Danbury prison was on the 26th, I think, of September.
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I said victories at hand. My teaching up there at Danbury and living in one of the cell blocks,
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it was obvious that black and Hispanic men hate the Democratic Party and are not going to vote
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for Kamala Harris. It's just not going to happen. So I'm not saying they're going to vote for Trump,
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They're not going to vote for Gavin Newsom or Pete Buttigieg.
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No, not going to happen. I think if we deliver for that crowd, we've got to. If we can deliver
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What Democrat candidate do you think could assemble that coalition back for the Democrats
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Robert Reich said the other day, there's no economic populism. I'm not afraid of it.
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Well, I'm the one that's been promoting his candidacy. I have one on his podcast and
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he's going to come on mine. I think he is somebody they need in that Democratic primary.
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He's a five-tool player. And I think he's very serious about considering this.
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I think they don't have anybody in elected office now that could assemble the coalition
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No, but they do have these governors. So you've got two brackets. You've got the governor's
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bracket of Westmore, Brashear, Shapiro, Whitmer, that. And then you have what I call right
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now the celebrity and all other. That's Rahm Emanuel, Pete Buttigieg. It's going to be
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Newsom. You're going to have Stephen A. Smith, I think. Like I said, Mark Cuban. You're going
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to have a couple other people. AOC, I'm sure, are jumping there.
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No doubt. She's got no downside to do it. Does Bernie run again?
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Bernie is dying to run. The problem is he's 83. And I followed very closely all the populist
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rallies. This is why Reich wrote the piece. There's no economic part of it. If you go
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in and look at these rallies, and by the way, the people of their hunger, they're drawing
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massive crowds. At one o'clock on a beautiful Saturday, you're drawing 35,000 people in
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downtown L.A. People on the left are thirsting.
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Well, they're leaderless. They're totally leaderless. And they don't stick the landing.
00:21:01.100
They don't never talk about economic populism. They're talking about Green New Deal. It's
00:21:04.160
all the, you know, all the crap. They're against all the oligarchies, except the ones in Ukraine
00:21:07.460
they're willing to fund. And the ones they created. Those Silicon Valley,
00:21:10.760
apartheid state oligarchs, all those five big oligarchs are progressive Democrats, right?
00:21:14.680
I understand now they're hanging out in Mar-a-Lago and they're seeing the light. But they
00:21:18.880
were created by Obama and the progressive movement and the Biden regime. Remember,
00:21:25.440
they had Lena Kahn and never unleashed her. She tightened up the FTC lawsuit against Facebook
00:21:33.300
that Zuckerberg went into the Oval Office five times and begged President Trump not to pull
00:21:37.760
the trigger on. Andrew Ferguson's got him in court right now. So no, we are the anti-oligarch
00:21:42.160
party. You see that in federal court. We got the, you know, the neo-Brandeisians in the Justice
00:21:47.220
Department. Biggest antitrust on the Gail Slater. You got Andrew Ferguson, FTC. You got
00:21:51.440
the FCC. Jim Jordan tried to break, Facebook got to him and they tried to break, tried to
00:21:56.640
get rid of the FTC two weeks ago in the one agency. Mike Davis came on. We got the article
00:22:01.820
three in the Warren Posse bombarded these guys. What these guys call about? 24 hours
00:22:06.680
later, they said. That was lonely for me on the Judiciary Committee defending Lena Kahn and
00:22:10.040
the FTC because I love Jim Jordan, but he was, he was never on the same page.
00:22:14.620
Oh, he's Facebook. I mean, he's a big tech guy. That's, he's been one of the torturers
00:22:18.660
of Mike Davis in this crowd. So the torture goes both ways with Mike Davis.
00:22:22.880
Yeah. Mike Davis likes it too. You mentioned Danbury prison. Yeah.
00:22:26.560
I did everything I could to see that you didn't go to prison. I thought that was a terrible
00:22:30.080
injustice. And Matt actually tried to come and see me. I just said, hey, you should have
00:22:34.880
seen when Matt Gates. Yeah, that wasn't very pleasant. No, no, no. I was threatening the
00:22:38.640
head of the Bureau of Prisons that they better let me go see you. And then they were saying
00:22:42.080
that you were refusing to see us. Yeah. And then I was saying to the head of the Bureau
00:22:45.620
of Prisons, we outrank Steve Bannon. Exactly. They put, you put shock. Apparently we didn't.
00:22:50.180
You put shock through the whole system. Well, I always envisioned you in prison taking like
00:22:57.020
20 minutes to be some sort of mafioso style cell block leader. That like people would be
00:23:03.400
bringing you tribute and like wanting to learn from you. Yeah. You don't do that because there
00:23:08.260
are, there are real guys that do that. What you have to do, and this is my thing to George
00:23:12.660
Santos, you got to stop whining. You just got to walk in there. You have to know yourself
00:23:17.760
and you have to be totally, completely focused every second of the day because these places
00:23:22.540
are incredibly violent. My cell block was 84 guys, 84 men, you know, a part of them are
00:23:30.240
child, you know, sex offenders, a part of inmates like myself and part are convicts, right?
00:23:35.520
People have either been in medium security and worked in, I mean, really hardened, hardened
00:23:39.960
people. Um, and you just got to be focused all day long. And the reason you got to be
00:23:44.080
focused, probably 20 focused on what you're focused on focus on just the present. What
00:23:50.520
is actually going on? What are you doing? What's the next evolution? What are you doing
00:23:54.700
that day? What are you doing for exercise? What are you going to do? And just a situation
00:23:59.900
awareness, wherever you move in a prison, cause things are changing. Here's why that sounds
00:24:03.660
like a good idea outside of prison as well. It is, but it's tough to keep that focus.
00:24:07.440
I can tell you, I was not as focused. When I was in, I was focused and I lost 30 pounds.
00:24:11.780
I haven't eaten meat. Uh, I read meat. I just, the first steak I had was two nights ago from
00:24:17.640
the first day I showed up in Danbury because the food's like animal slop. The, um, but you,
00:24:23.160
you have to, the reason it's so dangerous is the feds have, have federalized these drug crimes
00:24:29.660
under RICO charges. So it's all these conspiracies to, to sell drugs. These kids are 25 years old,
00:24:38.100
Hispanic and black principally. They are in prison for 15, 20 and 25 years in a small place like
00:24:45.600
Danbury. So in Danbury, which is a hundred years old has 800 of accommodation for 800. I think we
00:24:50.760
had 1200 at one time there because of so many foreign nationals and child molesters. It's so overcrowded.
00:24:55.800
These young men get there. They have 20 years of their life are going to be spent in the confines
00:25:01.220
of Danbury prison. That's hard. It was hard for me for four months for 25 years. When you're 25
00:25:06.700
years old, it can break a person. And what they do is they start doing this drug K2 that K2 can get
00:25:12.180
into the prisons. And once that happens, it's they're violent, uh, uncontrollable, and that can
00:25:16.960
happen at any time. How do they take K2? They get K2. They, uh, I think they smoke it. It comes in on paper.
00:25:21.940
It's the one that's, it can come in on paper and legal documents on books. People send them books
00:25:26.380
and they got it on there. In prison, you can get anything you want. They get phones, they get drugs
00:25:31.100
in there. Uh, are the guards the ones getting into them? I would say that, uh, a third comes in from
00:25:36.340
drones, right? Which is crazy to think about. It's unbelievable. They've, we had, we had a drone,
00:25:41.960
they had a drone, uh, thing come in on the beginning of Labor Day weekend that dropped phones and,
00:25:47.320
and drugs down in the yard. Uh, they locked the yard down. Then they locked us all down for Labor
00:25:51.800
Day weekend. If we would have known this, we could have coordinated a posse drone attack
00:25:55.920
on Danbury prison, like dropping the constitution. Yeah. The problem is you get locked up. I mean,
00:26:01.220
they, they have a, they have a, they have a thing for that, but no, it's, uh, it's, this is why
00:26:05.900
I've tried to get involved with Jared and Peter on, on, on, uh, uh, prison reform. The article,
00:26:12.000
the, uh, the, uh, the first step act was absolutely brilliant of what Jared and you and you and these
00:26:17.180
guys worked on to get through. It was not been implemented. So your wing of the kind of
00:26:21.420
Breitbart, uh, side of the party was very critical of us as we were doing.
00:26:25.240
I was critical until the end. I started, I came on board towards the end when I saw the politics
00:26:29.880
of it and it came to me about what the politics are dealing with friends of mine, like Jeff
00:26:32.960
Quatnitz. It is the politically, the most brilliant thing I've ever seen. It is a way
00:26:38.700
to really get, because the federal prison system is set up to break families. And these people,
00:26:44.680
I'm telling you, the black and Hispanic men in those prisons don't support the democratic
00:26:49.400
party. I think the democratic party has screwed them over.
00:26:51.180
The Tom Cotton, uh, counter argument would be, you can't, you can't let these people
00:26:55.920
out into our communities. They become even more expensive wards of the state one way or
00:27:02.260
No, I think the rescission rates on, on guys coming out of first step is, uh, is, is, uh,
00:27:06.980
is lower. I think it's fantastic. And this has got to be implemented.
00:27:09.560
But first step is, is not the final step. Like the argument for prison reform ultimately
00:27:15.060
has to be a data driven argument about reducing the number of victims because eventually everybody
00:27:20.160
gets out. Yes. Very few people don't ever get out. Yes. Um, and by the way, the other thing
00:27:25.400
it has to be is the sex offenders. You got it. You got to figure out that they have the sex
00:27:28.700
offenders are in there. Also 15, 20, 25 years. And they're sitting in these prisons. They've
00:27:37.080
never had a traffic ticket except what they do, which is obviously I think a disease. It's
00:27:41.560
not a medical facility. It's a prison. And in that prison, like I said, you have inmates
00:27:46.020
and then you have convicts. So you do have predators in there. This is why for Santos,
00:27:50.340
my first recommended him, he's like, go on TV and crying on these things. Dude, you just
00:27:54.540
got to man up. You, whatever it was, uh, you got found guilty. You got sentenced for this.
00:27:59.800
You're going to go, you shouldn't, you should assume president Trump's not going to pardon
00:28:02.840
your commute to sentence. You've got to, you've got to, you've got to toughen up because
00:28:06.780
this is a very dangerous place. You don't want to look like you're going in there and
00:28:10.300
you're, and you're, and you're open to these types of emotional swings. You got to be very
00:28:13.880
hard. And so, but what you guys did in a first step is it's quite frankly, brilliant, absolutely
00:28:18.680
brilliant. And now we're trying to implement it more. People don't know this, but it's
00:28:21.140
actually one of the reasons I'm, I'm most disappointed that I didn't get the chance
00:28:24.600
to be attorney general because I have a real passion for prison reform. I chaired the criminal
00:28:29.200
justice committee in my state legislature and did everything I could to see that that time
00:28:33.720
was used effectively. It was like, to me, it's like a crime against humanity that you
00:28:38.120
would have that much humanity and not find as much useful purpose for it as possible,
00:28:43.460
even for the folks that aren't ever getting out. And we have so much to do on that front.
00:28:48.620
And I hope it took us a hard, by the way, it took a hurt and I, to Jared and Peter Navarro
00:28:53.120
just to find the Bureau of prison. I mean, it was so tough to find people, even they're qualified.
00:28:58.920
We finally got, I think, Will Marshall from, from West Virginia, Rick Stover, who was the
00:29:04.460
warden at Danbury, but left a couple of days before I left. But every guy, when I would ask
00:29:09.280
people who you thought, they said, this guy was fantastic. He's now, I think the deputy,
00:29:14.080
we got a guy named Josh Smith, who's a former felon, who's now a programming guy. So we're
00:29:18.440
starting to do that and it started to begin the process.
00:29:20.160
So you know all these guys, you talked to them?
00:29:23.180
So in a way, you ultimately did become the prison ward boss, because now, now instead
00:29:28.500
of you being, being a guest of the state, you're, you're the one talking to all them.
00:29:32.340
No, it's, it's really Navarro and, and Jared, I got to tell you, the, the impression that
00:29:37.380
happened from his dad, right? And what his dad, ambassador to France, ambassador to France,
00:29:41.440
what his dad went through really. And I got to tell you, you guys were onto something way
00:29:45.800
before. Well, first of all, the Republican Party are conservatives. At first I dismissed the
00:29:49.480
thing. What are we doing this for? Later on towards the end, we jumped in the back of
00:29:52.900
it, uh, to help push it over to you guys done so much work, but it's absolutely, first
00:29:57.240
off, it's the right thing to do. Number two, it's great politics. Now what you're going
00:30:00.740
to find out, Navarro's working on this right now, it has barely been implemented. Oh yeah.
00:30:05.000
It's barely been implemented. At first I thought it was because it was Trump. Part of it's that,
00:30:09.420
but the other part is just the system. It's never really had the talent at the Bureau of
00:30:13.340
Prisons. That, that's, that's what I wanted to pour into really, really getting people
00:30:18.080
excited about those jobs. Uh, they're tough to fill. They are tough. You know why they're
00:30:22.540
tough, Phil? The reformers say it, the system's so ossified, right? You got unions, you got,
00:30:29.500
you know, administration. Well, the smartest people work at the private prisons. Yes. So
00:30:31.840
you have to convince people to come out of the private sector and, and to come and do
00:30:35.260
this. Uh, and, and it, uh, it, it, it's where we can do the best. We got to work on some
00:30:40.220
prison reform here. There's a lot to do and a lot to do. I know president Trump is, uh,
00:30:43.620
is, is, uh, very serious about this. I think it would be a major thing. And it's politically,
00:30:47.620
it's so smart. These people feel the democratic party has abandoned it, which it has has abandoned
00:30:52.900
the working class, uh, African-Americans and Hispanics. That's our greatest opportunity here
00:30:57.460
for this realignment. Look, we've all seen how unpredictable things can get, whether it's
00:31:00.980
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it right. I want to talk a little bit about what we're observing in the Congress and how they're kind
00:31:59.380
of going about their business. And like you've always taught me and the Bannonites, you find territory,
00:32:05.540
you seize territory, you occupy it. Try to seize institutions. Yeah, you utilize it for the benefit.
00:32:11.220
But one of the problems we have, let me be blunt because you're too, you're too self-effacing.
00:32:15.940
And I would love, and I love the fact you call me your mentor, but I'm not. You, you are an
00:32:20.500
extraordinary. I mean, you and I have probably spent on the, on the phone like a hundred hours.
00:32:24.900
We've been in the tough fights. That's a lot. That's a lot of time.
00:32:26.820
We've been in some tough fights. Look, you know this after you get elected, the purpose is to get
00:32:32.820
reelected, right? To get reelected. You, there's not a lot of profiles and courage up here.
00:32:36.900
There's not a lot of people who want to seize those grounds. There's a handful. There's like,
00:32:40.020
there's like two dozen. Yeah. And right now, you know, you had the, you had the hard eight
00:32:44.660
under you that changed history with the, with the speaker. But even guys like today,
00:32:49.060
like the Eli Cranes and this, they're looking for leadership. And some of our greatest,
00:32:52.660
some of our greatest people are punching out. Andy basically wants to go back and run for
00:32:56.340
governor. Everybody there, Byron Donalds, everybody's looking at.
00:32:59.940
Even your sentence ended. Yeah, exactly. All sentences have to end. Well, that's why it's
00:33:04.900
not looked at the people that are the best and the fighters and want to seize territory
00:33:10.660
and make some changes are not the ones that are looking at leadership and go up a leadership path.
00:33:15.220
I just don't, I don't see Congress as a savable institution in that regard. I actually,
00:33:19.460
What do you mean though? Because you did, you changed this institution more on the Republican
00:33:24.660
side than even Newt Gingrich did not change it as much as you changed it.
00:33:28.500
I believe that we gave hope to those who are fighting. I don't believe that we took the power
00:33:35.620
away from the lobbyists and the special interests that we had hoped. And until you do that, it's
00:33:40.500
failure. Can you do that in the system we have with the money? I don't really think so. I am
00:33:43.460
increasingly of the view that it takes the Donald Trump will and drive. It takes the Elon Musk intelligence.
00:33:52.980
It takes the, you know, the talented people coming into the agencies. But I have given up
00:34:00.820
my own fever dream that like one day there's going to be a Congressional Oversight Committee
00:34:05.540
doing programmatic view of the budget, review of the budget. That made so much sense to me.
00:34:10.340
When I went on the road, the people want it, even though it sounds wonky.
00:34:13.300
No, they love it. I believe when you talked about it, you said-
00:34:17.140
Yeah. Well, I just think they would actually save the Republic and no one really gets excited
00:34:21.380
about it. And I understand, I think President Trump is really informed by what happened to
00:34:26.180
him on healthcare last time. He tried single subject bills.
00:34:32.420
By some of our own allies, the House Freedom Caucus. Remember, we made a strategic mistake in allowing
00:34:39.300
Paul Ryan to sit there. So we triage what we're going to do about that.
00:34:43.060
Well, he convinces, look, he convinces at the time of the speaker that,
00:34:46.660
let us go. We've passed 40, you know, anti-Obamacare bills. We're ready to go. We'll have this done.
00:34:52.900
And then we realized very quickly that the reason they had done it was all performative.
00:34:57.220
That the Republicans had no set. This was your freshman. You had just gotten there.
00:35:01.540
You saw the chaos. And even our, it turned out our biggest allies in the long run,
00:35:05.780
the House Freedom Caucus guys were the guys that fought us the hardest coming out of the box.
00:35:10.980
And remember, they actually passed something. And President Trump said, that's a mean bill.
00:35:15.620
I don't know if I want to pass a mean bill. So it was chaotic because the Republican Party
00:35:21.620
in the House wasn't used to governing, right? It was all performative. And so that is what got,
00:35:26.580
now finally we got the tax, his tax program done in the fall of that year, right?
00:35:32.500
That was it? That was legislation? The infrastructure never got done?
00:35:34.900
So don't you think that that's shaping how he's thinking about the big,
00:35:37.540
beautiful bill as a strategic vessel? That you better just put all your capital into one thing?
00:35:44.820
I think that's what Trump's thinking. My concern is that becomes a lobbyist smorgasbord.
00:35:50.340
Well, you see it right now. I mean, look, let's go back to what you fought for. And I said this on the
00:35:56.500
show today, but I think it's worth repeating. You actually negotiated hard in January of 2023.
00:36:05.300
And you presented a framework that Kevin McCarthy, if he had executed on the deal that he agreed with,
00:36:11.380
right, could have been one of the greatest speakers in the history of the country,
00:36:15.700
right? But as soon as it passed, all they were trying to do is get out of the one thing they
00:36:20.980
didn't want to do. And this shows you how powerful it is. Single subject appropriations bills,
00:36:26.500
right? They didn't want it. They fought that time and again. You finally, I think in the summer of 2023,
00:36:31.940
got it. And if you want to talk about USAID and all this, all those fights were in the summer of 2023.
00:36:36.980
Our audience, we were having 10, 15, 20,000 people a night stay up two, three, four o'clock in the
00:36:42.660
morning. Remember on the House floor, you were Republicans arguing against each other. Democrats
00:36:47.860
kind of off to the side. You'd had the fighters, the Eli Crane, you, the MTGs. Talking about USAID,
00:36:54.180
we got to cut this. And Republicans, the rhinos, you could really expose them, saying this had to go and
00:36:59.940
pass in the committee, starting passing these bills. And on the floor, override our amendments,
00:37:04.660
all the amendments. And so there you saw it, where change could really come from.
00:37:09.220
The apparatus itself didn't want change. That's what I think has to happen. I believe President
00:37:13.300
Trump, I think a little bit, he may be getting tapped along by Johnson and leadership that are
00:37:18.820
not filling him on the details of what's in this. You don't think that Trump is actually farming out
00:37:25.540
the thought process of this to Johnson? I mean, you know, Mike Johnson. Not the thought process,
00:37:29.940
but my point is, it's so complicated. Look, he's got the world on his shoulders. He's
00:37:34.260
trying to stop the kinetic part of the Third World War. We're in a bloodier conflict in World
00:37:38.340
War II right now in the first couple of years. In the arc of instability from Ukraine all the way
00:37:42.900
down through Kashmir and Afghanistan, you've had 1.5 million casualties, right? We've had two
00:37:48.660
explosive conflicts, one in Ukraine and one in Gaza. And about that, we've had two U.S. Navy battle
00:37:55.300
groups. And coming from a Navy guy that was in a battle group 50 years ago in the North Arabian Sea,
00:38:01.140
we've kind of had them fought to a standstill. I mean, we've taken it to the Houthis,
00:38:05.140
but we've lost a couple of fighter aircraft. We've taken some incoming on destroyers.
00:38:10.580
So, my point is, this is- By the way, the neocons, and this is sinister and dark to have to say,
00:38:17.300
I think they wish we were already drawn into some war with Iran as a consequence of American casualties.
00:38:22.900
They would think that if we lost a ship full of sailors, that that would be their patriotic
00:38:29.460
duty to pay to give their life in that manner and to die at sea in order to get us into some
00:38:35.460
righteous war with Iran. We risk that. That's the problem with being up there.
00:38:39.540
Keeping the Suez Canal. And people don't understand, that doesn't bode well for the
00:38:45.060
Straits of Taiwan and the South China Sea when the flag goes up with the Chinese.
00:38:47.940
But wasn't that the best part of the Houthi group chat scandal? I mean, the best part of that
00:38:52.260
was seeing J.D. Vance, who I do believe is the caretaker of our movement going forward,
00:38:58.180
really articulating what we're saying about that being Europe's interests and
00:39:02.180
us not having to be the military largesse of that very crowded real estate.
00:39:08.820
I agree. What I didn't like about the group chat,
00:39:11.620
it was obvious President Trump is directly talking to CENCOM. I mean,
00:39:15.060
this is kind of a sidebar conversation of all of our leaders. Pete, J.D., Tulsi, you've got hitters.
00:39:21.860
I would like to have that in the situation room around the president, getting that guidance.
00:39:26.260
He's clearly talking to combatant commander, get ready to light things up.
00:39:30.260
So I think that the, this situation right now, and so when you talk about Trump
00:39:34.500
knowing the details of what's happening in the big, beautiful bill,
00:39:38.100
I think he's basically signed off on the fact, not two bills, one bill, because you're telling
00:39:42.260
me if we do two, I get the smaller one for the border and for the military, I may not get the taxes.
00:39:47.700
But see, that's the false choice. You and I would do 12. We'd say, you know what?
00:39:51.860
We are going to force feed them in our immigration agenda.
00:39:54.900
And we're going to have all the smartest people on it. And they're going to have to vote no against.
00:39:56.980
And by the way, we're going to put them on the worst side of the worst 80-20 features of that.
00:40:00.820
And by the way, right when that medicine's gone down, we are going to come in with trade.
00:40:05.620
And it is going to be all of our trade policies.
00:40:08.020
And by the way, right on the heels of that, our environmental D-reg and hit their budget.
00:40:14.260
And by the way, that's how you make it durable. That's how you draw people in.
00:40:17.700
So that's my problem. I don't think he's at that level. Look, he's over in the Middle East now.
00:40:21.940
He's got all these conflicts. Even Axios today said there's like, I talk about the convergence of all
00:40:26.660
the crises, right? The constitutional crisis that you talked about so articulately on the show today,
00:40:32.180
the Third World War kinetic part, which Axios did a great thing about how he's juggling five
00:40:37.540
different conflicts and trying to solve them peacefully. And then this massive kind of economic
00:40:42.340
model of the United States, including redoing world trade. At the same time, you start to do
00:40:46.980
these budgets and how we're going to finance it. The bond market's starting to speak.
00:40:50.260
Look, that's why we have to do the work we do. I mean, that's why, you know, in our roles with
00:40:54.340
audiences and with people who want to be more than just spectators to this process, I do want to
00:41:01.220
get into this Gaza-Israel thing. I mean, what do you think really went down on October 7th?
00:41:07.700
Look, I think it stinks to high heaven. It is impossible, impossible,
00:41:13.940
given CIA intelligence assets, Mossad intelligence assets, Israeli military intelligence,
00:41:21.300
the Saudis, the MI6, the Brits, to know that that group, because we covered it live,
00:41:28.580
we just happened to have it on a Saturday, to know they did over a 40-mile stretch air-sea land attack,
00:41:37.140
coordinated and actually, you know, knew exactly where to go, knew on the kibbutzes what room to go in,
00:41:42.980
the level of detail they had. I was sitting in that day going, hey, and the only reinforcements
00:41:48.260
that were coming down were the old guys that fought in the 73, 67, 73-4 in their own cars with
00:41:53.780
their own weapons. There's something, and that investigation should, I know Israel is at war,
00:41:58.340
but that investigation should have happened. This is why I think you're seeing a real split between
00:42:04.340
Netanyahu's government and the Trump administration. There's something wrong in this relationship right
00:42:09.140
now. There's a fundamental lack of trust. I think this is because they've continued to push as only
00:42:14.420
the military option. Do you buy that that really is why Michael Waltz has been moved to the UN?
00:42:21.860
Because, you know, there was that reporting that Trump believed Waltz was so cozy with Netanyahu and
00:42:29.300
Israel that he wasn't exclusively helping. Well, two things happened. Number one, first off, when
00:42:33.860
B.B. came, and I was a thing of Waltz, particularly this thing, I was pretty vocal, no scalps. We can't
00:42:39.300
get in the business we had in the first two years. As you know, no scalps, no scalps whatsoever. We can
00:42:44.500
win every fight we want to win. So you got to give the guy the benefit of the doubt, and we'll figure it
00:42:49.460
out after Labor Day. But I think what happened, when B.B. came over for the Trump-Gaza, you know, B.B. comes over,
00:42:56.260
and all of a sudden, Trump's talking about Gaza and going to make it, and B.B.'s like sitting there.
00:43:00.740
He was there to push the military option. They're going to have to go to the East Room and have the
00:43:04.980
big press conference later. All Trump's talking about is Gaza. And you could tell, then they come
00:43:09.380
back, they're the first guys to come back on the tariff day. They came back on that Monday to talk
00:43:13.780
tariffs. Well, the tariffs with Israel is not a huge topic. It was there once again to push the military
00:43:19.700
option. And Trump's not having it. I mean, he kind of cut the guy off, you could see. Now, what we found out
00:43:24.900
from the reporting later is that Waltz, either staff or Waltz himself, was either meeting with
00:43:30.500
or having discussions. We know that the Israelis were quite upset with Pete Hexeth, that the Defense
00:43:35.540
Department hadn't really had alternative bombing operations or support operations. So you're seeing
00:43:41.460
a real breakdown. President Trump is not going to get sucked into another Middle East war. Not in
00:43:47.860
Persia, not in an ancient civilization. And the bombing you have to do there is so horrible. He said it
00:43:53.380
yesterday. The buried lead in that magnificent speech, which, by the way, the mainstream media
00:43:58.660
barely covered, the buried lead is when he said, it's not verification. We are not going to let
00:44:04.180
them get a nuclear weapon. It's impossible. And we have all kinds of economic warfare aspects
00:44:09.540
that do this, diplomatic. We're not going to do it. The Arabs almost stand an ovation. It was the loudest
00:44:14.180
applause line of the speech. And that's not the Knesset. That's the Arabs.
00:44:18.020
The Arabs. They're all going to have nuclear weapons. I mean, what Saudi said right there,
00:44:22.180
if they want one. In our lifetime, you're going to have Saudi, Qatar, the UAE, Iran, Kuwait.
00:44:28.340
They're all going to have nuclear weapons. If you were running those countries,
00:44:30.180
would you not have nuclear weapons? With the resources they have, the talent they can acquire,
00:44:35.300
and the way they think about deterrence. And you think Pakistan, Dr. Khan may make a visit.
00:44:38.980
By the way, I'm not entirely sure that there won't be able to be a sufficient deterrence there,
00:44:44.660
like you've seen in Kashmir. What you saw in Kashmir, this last week or so, is that you can
00:44:50.180
have a conventional scuffle that does not escalate. That's probably a good thing for the world.
00:44:57.300
I think it's a very good thing. And people should know, President Trump did get J.D. and Marco
00:45:01.700
involved. And I think they had a big influence over that. How will you know if at the end of this four
00:45:09.300
years we give ourselves the A? And don't say that it's if he's running in 2028. At the end...
00:45:17.540
Yeah. When you look back and say, this is the report card Steve Bannon is going to give this time.
00:45:23.540
Well, here's one thing I think that we need a Matt Gaetz, we need Matt back now, is that
00:45:28.820
on redoing the commercial operations, kind of what I said at CPAC in 2017, America first,
00:45:36.180
national security, economic nationalism, and deconstruct the administrative state.
00:45:39.940
I think on the economic nationalism, if we can get control of the spending, which we haven't
00:45:44.660
shown, but I think we're going to work through this. There's going to be some intense fights.
00:45:47.620
People are going to be yelling and screaming at each other. Sometimes President Trump's not
00:45:50.180
going to be happy. I think the bond market's going to also dismantle us. I think that's going
00:45:53.940
to happen. We're going to... We have to. On the America first national security side,
00:45:57.860
the hemispheric defense, what he's looking at, stopping the kinetic war, I think you're seeing
00:46:01.940
that. The biggest thing I think we get the D on right now is the deconstruction of the administrative
00:46:06.980
state. Elon took a crack at it. It hasn't been codified in the budget right now, but the deep
00:46:13.380
state part of that. We only have four years to do this. This combination of the Pentagon,
00:46:18.980
the Justice Department, the CIA, parts of DNI, this kind of, the permanent kind of government
00:46:27.540
underneath on the national security side, the Praetorian Guard, the group that kept
00:46:31.700
Biden propped up, as we're now finding out by liberal reporters, the reason that nothing changed
00:46:36.980
between really Bush and Obama, that has to be broken. That is a full-time job, because they're
00:46:42.820
not sitting there... They don't care if it's Trump now and AOC next. They're not going to change.
00:46:48.100
We have to break that. The report card from... How do we know if they're broken?
00:46:52.660
That if you make a decision in the Oval Office, it gets done like that, and you don't have...
00:46:56.580
Yeah, but how will regular people know? Like, how will they observing it know?
00:46:59.620
Well, I think, first of all, they'll have to hear it from people like us or President Trump to know
00:47:02.900
that, hey, we've decided that we're not going to get us sucked into a war here, and they're not
00:47:07.700
going to drag us into it, and here's what I'm doing, and here's what I'm commanding, and this is going
00:47:10.980
to happen right away. And guess what? No troops are going. People have to know that. Also, the exposing
00:47:16.020
of, like, the funding of the NGOs, the shutting down the American people, things of the Justice
00:47:20.260
Department. That's why I think there needs to be mass investigations, grand juries. That part of it,
00:47:25.220
I still think, you know, even when we had Ed Martin, he's now turfed out because of Republicans.
00:47:30.580
They whipped it for six votes against President Trump. Isn't it funny that it was like me and Ed
00:47:35.620
Martin that the establishment Republicans had the biggest problems with?
00:47:40.260
But I think he shows you guys are getting things done.
00:47:43.940
Matt, you're target number one. Matt, I don't say this lightly. I'm a pretty good judge of horse
00:47:50.020
flesh in this area. If you continue on doing what you're doing and you have interest in this,
00:47:54.500
you're a future President of the United States.
00:47:59.060
No, no, no. I'm in the war room. I've got enough. I got enough going on right now.
00:48:03.700
Is that it? Yeah. Is that it for Steve Bannon? The war room is the final chapter?
00:48:10.020
Never. No chance. Zero. The war room is much more. You need a platform. MAGA needs this platform
00:48:15.700
for the vanguard. It's a vanguard of a revolutionary movement. You need this interactivity,
00:48:23.220
information sharing, esprit de corps. You need it. So I'm doing exactly what I'm doing now,
00:48:28.260
and this is what my legacy will be at MAGA, and I'll do it for as long as I can possibly do it,
00:48:33.220
but that's important. But it's to support the young talent I see like that. If we can get to the
00:48:37.780
2030 census and get the Matt Gaetz's of the world, we're going to be in good shape. But we got a tough
00:48:43.780
bridge thing, and one of the things we had to do, we had to take down the deep state.
00:48:47.060
And if we don't, they'll be in power again, and you and I will both be chatting under different
00:48:52.580
circumstances, but the good news is now we're familiar with them. Well, I went to Danbury,
00:48:55.860
so I don't have any problem. I now have to roll what your daily schedule's got to be like,
00:49:01.140
so I don't fear that. But we will go to prison if we don't take these guys down,
00:49:05.940
there's no doubt. These people are ruthless. I believe that. Steve Bannon, the jefe.
00:49:11.540
Thank you, my friend. Appreciate you. Make sure to subscribe to the show,
00:49:15.060
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