The president of the United States has come to the truest conclusion that anyone has ever come to about Steve Bannon: He's the worst person ever. And it's not even close to being a good one. Today, Ben and I discuss why this is a good thing, and why we should all be glad that Steve got cut in half by President Trump. Plus, Oregonians apparently don't know how to pump gas, which is a weird thing I didn't know, but we'll talk about all of that and more on The Ben Shapiro Show, wherever you get your news. Today's After Show Was Hosted By: Ben Shapiro Ben Shapiro: Steve Bannon's Worst Person Ever - The Lead-Up to the Trump Assassination of Steve Bannon by the President of the U.S. - Why Steve's Assassination Was Good For The Administration - Why It's Good For Trump - Why He's a Bad Man - What's Next - Why Trump Is Wrong About Steve Bannon - Is Steve Bannon a Bad Person? And much, much more! Thanks to our sponsor NatureBox for sponsoring the show! If you're watching the news and you feel like a snack as I so often do these days, then NatureBox is the place to pop in your mouth as you watch the news cycle, then go to NatureBox.com/BenShaw and get 50% off your first order! It's just fantastic! and you'll get a box of snacks that tastes like a lot healthier than the ones you ve been getting in the past your local Whole Foods! by NatureBox! And if you don't like snacks, then you want to be healthy and healthy, you'll be getting a whole bunch of healthy, whole-foods that sipping on it, like that, you can be the best of what you ve got in your day in the office, right here, right to your door, and it's just like that. That s what you re gonna be getting, right in your inbox! . Subscribe to the News Cycle! - Ben Shapiro's newest podcast, The News Cycle. - Subscribe to Ben Shapiro s and subscribe to his podcast, Subscribe to his podcast! Subscribe on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about what's good, what s going to be good for you, and what s good, who s getting better than you can do in your life?
00:00:26.000So, to watch the President of the United States turn his wrath towards Steve Bannon is very much akin to the scene in the new Star Wars film, spoiler alert, in the throne room, with Kylo Ren, with the lightsaber.
00:00:51.000But the question is whether it's good for the administration short and long term.
00:00:54.000And the answer is the disembowelment of Steve Bannon and
00:00:58.000Strewing the the planes with his intestines was I think in the end a quite good move for the administration I'll explain why in just a second.
00:01:05.000We'll go through all the details all of the gory details why this has happened What's going on?
00:01:12.000So we'll talk about it in just a second But first I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at nature box So if you're watching the news and you feel like a snack as I so often do these days Then nature box is the place to go.
00:02:10.000It's perfect for days like yesterday when you're just sitting there and you need a box of something to just pop in your mouth as you watch Twitter flash by.
00:02:18.000Naturebox.com slash Ben, official sponsor of the news cycle.
00:02:30.000Now, you may sense a bit of personal satisfaction from yours truly that Steve Bannon just got cut in half by the President of the United States.
00:02:41.000I've been saying for well over a year that Steve Bannon is a bad man.
00:02:44.000I said in March 2016 that Steve Bannon had betrayed Andrew Breitbart's legacy and that he had sold out Breitbart to become his personal political vehicle.
00:03:24.000is constantly leaking to the media for his own self-aggrandizement.
00:03:27.000I've been saying this to members of the media.
00:03:29.000Look at every interview that I've done over the last year, I've been saying, Steve Bannon does not have any actual power, he just had the perception of power.
00:03:35.000That perception of power was being driven by a rabid media interested in painting President Trump as a rube and a hick who didn't know what he was doing, and therefore Bannon was the power behind the throne, manipulating things like some great puppeteer.
00:03:49.000Bannon was always a guy who plastered his lips to the ass of the most powerful person that he could find and glued them there like a barnacle until he could ride them to glory.
00:03:57.000And then, when the whale died, then he, like a virus, would find a new host and the parasite would move on.
00:04:05.000He did this to Andrew Breitbart, who literally died, not because of Bannon, but then he took over Breitbart's shop and turned into Bannon.com to the point where they were selling Bannon fidget spinners like five months ago.
00:04:15.000We were trying to get some yesterday here at the office, but unfortunately they are all out of stock.
00:04:19.000In any case, Steve Bannon has been doing this as a career move for a very long time.
00:04:24.000And he had cultivated a lot of people.
00:04:26.000Like he had cultivated some of the hosts at Fox News.
00:04:28.000He'd become close with people like Sean Hannity.
00:04:31.000He tried to paint himself as the intellectual veneer of Trumpism.
00:04:34.000And then he started to buy his own press.
00:05:00.000He was the brain of the Trump administration.
00:05:02.000Trump was the balls and the heart, and Steve Bannon was the brain.
00:05:05.000He was the guy who was really driving all of the activity.
00:05:08.000And he tried to make the media believe this, right?
00:05:10.000He would go into the White House, and he would have his whiteboard behind him with all of the promises, I'm the guy who sits here for 20 hours a day trying to get things done.
00:05:16.000Within three months, he'd been marginalized.
00:05:18.000Like, very quickly, he'd been marginalized.
00:05:20.000So he put himself basically on the cover of Time magazine, and that was step number one.
00:05:23.000And Steve started to believe because he would go to these rallies, and people would cheer for him because they saw him as a proxy for Trump.
00:05:29.000Instead, he started to believe that people actually cared about Steve Bannon.
00:05:37.000People cared about Andrew Breitbart, who is a legitimately good human being, whose legacy has been betrayed and spit upon by a subversive, disgusting con man.
00:06:07.000He was not even part of the Trump campaign except for Mercer Money.
00:06:09.000The reason that Steve Bannon was on the campaign is because the Mercers went to Donald Trump and they said, we want to put money into your campaign.
00:06:14.000Why don't you take a couple people we're close with, Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway.
00:06:17.000That's how they both got on the Trump campaign.
00:06:19.000This is obvious and publicly available information.
00:06:22.000Okay, Bannon was not the great manipulator.
00:07:11.000It's this grand philosophy of a government that is going to stand up for blue-collar working Americans through tariffs and infrastructure plans and higher taxes on the rich.
00:07:20.000It'll be a merger between Bernie Sanders' domestic policy with regard to taxing the rich for the benefit of the Rust Belt workers, and it'll be a combination of that with Pat Buchanan-esque isolationism on foreign policy in some areas.
00:08:01.000They voted for Trump not because of his policy.
00:08:04.000I know Ann Coulter has this shtick today where she's saying people voted for him because they wanted the immigration reform.
00:08:08.000It's true that if he had run on a different platform on immigration, he might have gotten a different voter base.
00:08:13.000But to suggest that if Donald Trump moved to the left on immigration, his entire base would desert him, that they are all ideologically driven, is just not the case.
00:08:39.000What Steve believed is that he was powerful enough to dupe people into believing that he had a political philosophy, and then he was building a movement around that.
00:09:05.000He thought, how do I distinguish myself in the marketplace?
00:09:07.000Well, if I'm a typical conservative, then I'm no different than Mitch McConnell, or than Paul Ryan, or than a bevy of other conservatives who push conservatism.
00:10:49.000But, if you're still live listening, go get a life insurance policy, because honestly, your family needs to be taken care of if something bad should happen to you.
00:10:56.000People don't think about this until it's too late, and then it really is too late.
00:10:59.000Because we don't have the capacity to bring you back to life and buy life insurance.
00:11:49.000And that way, if you buy it right now, you could literally just pull over on the road while you're listening, buy your life insurance through policygenius.com, and then your family won't have to care if you die in a car crash five minutes from now.
00:12:24.000He uses all these people, and then he turns on them when they become inconvenient, and he throws them under the bus, because that's who Steve is.
00:12:29.000He did it with the alt-right as well, right?
00:12:31.000He said that he made himself a platform for the alt-right, and then when Milo Yiannopoulos ran into trouble, then suddenly Milo was dead to him.
00:12:37.000He rode Roy Moore until Roy Moore dropped like a horse.
00:12:40.000And then suddenly he said, Roy Moore is dead to me.
00:13:40.000So, he can't do Karl Rove and just fund things from behind the scenes and build a movement, which is what you would actually do if you wanted to build a movement.
00:13:46.000Instead, he has to do something different.
00:13:48.000And what he has to do is he has to find candidates who will allow him to go on stage and be the biggest guy there.
00:13:53.000He has to go find a place where he is different than Mitch McConnell and the quote-unquote establishment, and he has to try and channel Tea Party anger against the establishment into support for the Bannon philosophy movement.
00:14:09.000And the person who chooses to do this, because Bannon is not a particularly bright political operator, is Roy Moore.
00:14:15.000He says, I'm going to make Roy Moore in Alabama my man.
00:14:17.000So first, he tries to support Mo Brooks in Alabama, which is the correct move.
00:14:20.000Then, when Mo Brooks loses, he says, I'm going to support Roy Moore over Luther Strange in the runoff, despite all of Roy Moore's toxicity.
00:14:28.000And in part because of Roy Moore's toxicity, because Roy Moore is the kind of guy who will say anything.
00:14:31.000He's much more of a Trumpy figure than Luther Strange.
00:14:34.000He'll say anything that he wants to say.
00:15:05.000Such a horrible candidate that Roy Moore goes on to lose, goes on to lose, for the first time in 30 years, a Republican seat in Alabama because of allegations of child molestation.
00:15:15.000And Steve is so deep down this hole now, he can't pull out.
00:15:18.000Steve is so deep down this hole that he takes Breitbart, a publication he had always used as his personal baton to wield against his enemies,
00:15:25.000He takes Breitbart and he uses it as a baton to wield against the alleged victims of molestation for Roy Moore.
00:15:30.000He has Alex Marlowe, a guy I know well and a guy with whom I was once close friends.
00:15:34.000He takes Alex and he, and Alex goes out and says openly that he believes the accusers against Roy Moore, but then they deploy reporters down to Alabama to try to discredit the accusers against Roy Moore and get Roy Moore elected senator, supposedly in an attempt to defend Trump or something, which makes no sense since Trump was not even supporting Roy Moore in that primary.
00:15:53.000And then Bannon, to make matters worse, convinces Trump to jump in last minute to support Roy Moore, humiliating the president, humiliating Bannon, and humiliating the Republican Party as Roy Moore goes down in absolute flames, as morally he should have considering the allegations against him.
00:16:07.000So all of that said, now Bannon is in a real pickle.
00:16:11.000He's in a real pickle because he's picked a bunch of candidates and they all lost.
00:16:14.000And Mitch McConnell is suddenly working hand-in-glove with President Trump.
00:16:17.000Suddenly, Bannon has not only been edged out, he's been edged out by the establishment.
00:16:21.000There's suddenly Republican unity around a Republican program.
00:16:24.000And his philosophy of, I'll burn it all down and build a giant statue of Bannon in the aftermath, that's completely fallen apart.
00:16:32.000Because Mitch McConnell did not back Roy Moore in Alabama.
00:16:35.000Mitch McConnell, the Senate Conservatives Fund, did not back Roy Moore in Alabama.
00:16:39.000The National Republican Senatorial Committee did not involve itself in that race.
00:16:43.000So Mitch McConnell was not the guy who convinced Trump to go all in for an incredibly alleged child molester.
00:16:49.000And then Mitch McConnell passes tax reform.
00:16:53.000The only big win, the only big legislative win of Trump's administration comes after Steve Bannon leaves and comes in direct contravention to Steve Bannon's own tax reform plan, which would have involved raising taxes on wealthy people, which this bill did not do.
00:17:50.000The only ally he has left are the people who built him up in the first place, and that is the members of the mainstream media.
00:17:54.000That's all he has left, is the members of the mainstream media who have a concern
00:18:00.000And an interest in making Bannon continue to appear a powerful figure so they can foster conflict inside the Republican Party.
00:18:05.000Because the longer Bannon is out there lurking, sniping at Trump, sniping at McConnell, creating chaos, the better it is for the media, the better story it is, the better narrative, and the worse it is for conservatives and Republicans.
00:18:16.000So Bannon has to go back to the media, right?
00:18:18.000He goes finally back to his only ally, the people he's been lying about ripping, right?
00:18:22.000The reality is that when Bannon left the White House, only one thing was lost.
00:18:28.000Only one thing declined when Bannon left the White House, and that was the phone bill to Maggie Haberman at the New York Times, and the phone bill to Politico, and the phone bill to all the other outlets that Steve Bannon was allegedly leaking to.
00:18:39.000Steve Bannon loves talking to the press, which is why he was quoted recently, and this is what I'm going to talk about now, he did an entire series of interviews with Michael Wolff, who has now written a book called Fire and Fury.
00:18:54.000It's doing all sorts of business because it's basically a bunch of gossip from the White House.
00:18:59.000The guy who brought Michael Wolff in was Steve Bannon.
00:19:02.000Steve Bannon was sitting there for hours a day, apparently, talking with Michael Wolff on tape about his perception of the universe, right?
00:19:07.000How Steve Bannon was the most powerful figure who would be the next president of the United States.
00:19:10.000So he goes back to his friends in the media, and his friends in the media, he's going to leak to them and make it appear that he's still a power player, even though he is not a power player, even though he never was a power player, even though the only perception of him as a power player had been created out of whole cloth by Steve Bannon and the mainstream media.
00:19:27.000And the luck of Andrew Breitbart dying and leaving him in charge of Breitbart.
00:19:30.000By the way, he wasn't left in charge of Breitbart.
00:19:31.000Larry Solove was Andrew Breitbart's partner in crime.
00:19:34.000Larry Solove should have taken the reins at Breitbart as well he should do now by firing Steve Bannon.
00:19:38.000He should never have hired Steve Bannon.
00:19:39.000I urged him at the time not to hire Steve Bannon, but in any case, he did.
00:19:43.000Now he should move away from that as fast as possible.
00:19:46.000So, he goes back to his members of the mainstream media, and he leaks to them, just as he was fired from the administration for leaking to the American prospect about how Trump didn't know what he was doing in North Korea.
00:19:55.000And what he dropped to Michael Wolff was a bunch of crap about all of his enemies in the administration.
00:20:01.000It was just him riffing about the administration.
00:20:03.000And a bunch of people in the media picked up on this Wolff book and they say, well, he must have inside knowledge of corrupt activities inside the Trump administration.
00:20:11.000They're looking for an excuse to club Trump into submission over Trump-Russia collusion or over criminal activity because, let's face it, the members of the media are still waiting for the D.O.S.
00:20:20.000machina, they're still waiting for the God and the machine to come in
00:20:25.000Or outside the machine to come in and fix everything.
00:20:28.000They're still waiting for Mueller to come in from the skies like a vengeful Valkyrie and behead President Trump and make Hillary president.
00:20:35.000So now, Bannon is out there telling the press that Donald Trump Jr.
00:20:38.000acted treasonously, he was unpatriotic, and it was bad bleep.
00:21:30.000He went after Jared Kushner, and he said that his involvement with Russia was greasy, and it was all about the Deutsche Bank corruption, and they're sitting on a beach trying to stop a Category 5.
00:21:40.000We went through some of this yesterday.
00:21:42.000And then Steve Bannon apparently says in the book also that Ivanka is dumb as a brick.
00:22:30.000It packs just the right amount of vibrations into an ultra-slim design with guiding pulses to simplify better brushing at a fraction of the cost of bulkier designs.
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00:22:41.000They send you the brush heads in the mail so you don't have to worry
00:22:43.000About running to the store or you forgot about changing your brush head and now you're getting canker sores because you didn't replace it and you're four months overdue.
00:22:51.000So when I had a different electric toothbrush I wouldn't travel with it because it's heavy and bulky and you have to bring the charger and the whole deal.
00:22:57.000Quip is basically the size of a normal toothbrush and yet it's electric.
00:23:02.000It starts at 25 bucks and right now when you go to getquip.com slash Shapiro you get your first refill pack free with a Quip electric toothbrush.
00:23:29.000Finally, President Trump loses it on Steve Bannon, right?
00:23:34.000He just, he absolutely loses it on Bannon and releases one of the great epic burns in the history of American presidential politics.
00:23:42.000It really is unprecedented for the president to take a member of his own cabinet, basically, and just dump, I mean, this dump, it's an epic dump.
00:23:51.000I mean, it basically is the scene from Back to the Future where Marty McFly
00:23:55.000somehow maneuvers Biff into driving his brand new car into the back of the manure truck.
00:24:01.000And that's essentially what happened here.
00:24:03.000And so Trump, here, we'll do Trump's statement in just a second, but you know what?
00:24:23.000Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my presidency.
00:24:26.000When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.
00:24:30.000Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating 17 candidates often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican Party.
00:24:38.000Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn't as easy as I make it look.
00:24:42.000Steve had very little to do with our historic victory, which was delivered by the forgotten men and women of this country.
00:24:46.000Yet Steve had everything to do with the loss of a Senate seat in Alabama held for more than 30 years by Republicans.
00:24:54.000Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spends his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was.
00:25:04.000Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue whom he helped write phony books.
00:25:11.000We have many great Republican members of Congress and candidates who are very supportive of the Make America Great Again agenda.
00:25:16.000Like me, they love the United States of America and are helping to finally take our country back and build it up, rather than simply seeking to burn it all down.
00:25:27.000Slow clap that builds into an impressive round of applause for the President of the United States.
00:25:35.000Steve Bannon is not responsible for Trump's victory.
00:25:36.000He is not responsible for Trump's agenda.
00:25:38.000He is not responsible for Trump's philosophy.
00:25:41.000He is not responsible for Trump's accomplishments in the last two months.
00:25:44.000Trump has gotten more done in the last two months without Steve Bannon there than he did in the entirety of Steve Bannon's tenure in the White House.
00:25:51.000Now, other members of the Trump team have also sounded off about Bannon.
00:25:57.000My former colleague at Breitbart and my friend Larry O'Connor, he had a good piece of the Washington Times saying, that's basically correct.
00:26:21.000in a conservative approach to governance.
00:26:23.000He is not somebody who believes in anything but Steve Bannon.
00:26:26.000And watching Bannon burn down and watching Trump recognize the flaw in Bannon and cleanse his administration of a nefarious force that was willing to make common cause with him.
00:26:35.000It was Bannon who was telling Trump, apparently, to blame both sides in Charlottesville.
00:26:38.000It was Bannon who originally formulated the travel ban that ended up being struck down by the courts because he was too stupid to actually go to the lawyers and ask them how to do it.
00:26:48.000Trump's administration just got a lot better by separating off from Steve Bannon.
00:27:28.000I believe that a lot of the people who follow Breitbart aren't doing so because they want to follow Steve Bannon down the rabbit hole of his personal ambition.
00:27:35.000And I think that people are beginning to wake up to this.
00:27:39.000It's basically the recut of Return of the Jedi, which I just watched recently.
00:27:44.000The recut, which is not as good as the original.
00:27:45.000But in the recut, after the second Death Star is blown up, spoiler alert, there are a bunch of shots of random people around the galaxy celebrating.
00:27:54.000They just inserted this for the re-release and it's like people on Naboo celebrating.
00:27:58.000Okay, that's basically how it was around conservative media yesterday when Steve Bannon was torched by the president, when he was set on fire.
00:28:05.000The metaphor actually works because Bannon called himself Darth Vader.
00:28:08.000went off on Bannon and he's exactly right.
00:28:11.000He says, Steve had the honor of working in the White House and serving the country.
00:28:14.000Unfortunately, he squandered that privilege and turned that opportunity into a nightmare of backstabbing, harassing, leaking it, lying, and undermining the president.
00:28:20.000Steve is not a strategist, he is an opportunist.
00:29:51.000I think the president's statement is extremely clear what his position is.
00:29:55.000Once again, I think the President's statement fully addresses what his position and what his relationship with Mr. Bannon is.
00:30:17.000OK, so this is exactly right, and all of this is well-deserved.
00:30:21.000This was coming to a man who thought that he was bigger than the president, not only bigger than the president, bigger than the conservative movement, bigger than the Tea Party, bigger than Andrew Breitbart, bigger than Sarah Palin, a man with outsized ambition buried by his own ambition.
00:30:32.000If you want to see whether this is good for Trump, all you have to do is see how Democrats are reacting to it.
00:31:17.000I can't talk about what I heard in the interview, but I can tell you that my impression, after sitting through those hours of that interview, is that the president should be concerned about issues of money laundering, of collusion, and of obstruction of justice.
00:31:32.000I say that—that's my impression, not only from hearing that witness, but also many of the other witnesses that have come before the committee.
00:31:40.000So, this White House should be nervous about what has been told to the committee.
00:31:44.000And do you believe, as you said you can't necessarily tell us exactly what you heard in those hearings, do you believe that you heard evidence of crimes committed by members of this administration?
00:31:56.000Okay, so again, they're jumping on the Bannon stuff in order to try and discredit Trump, which shows you why Bannon had to be ousted and why he had to be burned by Trump here.
00:32:04.000Well, we're going to have to take a break here in just a second.
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00:33:44.000So, in just a second, I'm going to explain the conservative fallout, because what you'll see is there's a split a little bit in the conservative movement
00:34:24.000So you actually get to ask your questions live to me, and I will answer them and make your life that much better, which is to say, immeasurably.
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00:35:17.000So the goal of the media is to keep Bannon around.
00:35:19.000So understand that capping Bannon, taking the gun and leaving the cannoli is the best strategy for Trump and for the conservative movement at this point.
00:35:28.000The leftists want to keep Bannon around because they want to keep fostering this internecine warfare.
00:35:32.000If you read the excerpts from Michael Wolff's book Fire and Fury, it's a lot of inside gossip.
00:35:36.000It's a lot of stuff about how Trump's a crazy guy who likes to stay up late and watch TV and he tweets a lot.
00:35:42.000OK, if you follow his Twitter, none of this is foreign information to you.
00:36:03.000And a lot of it is Steve Bannon basically just mentally masturbating about his own power.
00:36:09.000I tweeted yesterday that this book should have been called As Told by Steve Bannon because it just reads like that.
00:36:13.000It reads like Bannon's fever dream about what his role in the movement is and who Trump is and calling all of his enemies bad people and idiots and morons.
00:36:21.000And yet, magically, the administration seems to be working incredibly better since Bannon left than while he was there.
00:36:32.000People are making a big deal out of the revelations in this book.
00:36:35.000The revelations are of no value to me.
00:36:37.000The reason they're of no value to me is because I already knew this.
00:36:40.000If you think that Trump was not a dysfunctional character, I don't know what show you've been listening to for the last couple of years.
00:36:45.000I've always thought that Trump had serious character issues.
00:36:48.000Now, the question is, how do those manifest themselves in policy?
00:36:50.000In the last couple of months, they've manifested themselves in some bad tweeting, in some silly statements, in undercutting his own popularity.
00:37:40.000But the media is going nuts over it because they want to paint the picture of Trump as a crazy person, and the country can't handle a crazy person, when in reality, the stock market just crossed $25,000, and the economy is doing really well.
00:37:51.000And on foreign policy, we are making moves that are excellent for our national prestige and power.
00:38:42.000Now, there have been a number of conservatives who have been sort of hedging their bets in the Bannon vs. Trump flame war.
00:38:48.000So, Bannon himself went silent yesterday.
00:38:51.000He hosted Breitbart News Radio, and he had nothing to say.
00:38:53.000He said, Trump is a great man, and I support him in every way.
00:38:56.000Except for, you know, routinely leaking on him and ripping his children and tearing apart members of his administration and crapping all over his agenda and leaking to the American prospect that his North Korean policy is stupid and suggesting that he's a child and a moron.
00:39:08.000Except for all of that, I'm really on his side.
00:39:30.000There's also the possibility that Steve shut up because Trump actually had his lawyers draft up and send a letter.
00:39:35.000Threatening Steve with violations of his nondisclosure agreement.
00:39:39.000So Steve had, apparently, a pretty strong nondisclosure agreement with the Trump campaign.
00:39:43.000Now, the nondisclosure with President Trump isn't going to hold because, for public policy reasons, when you leak about the President, unless it's classified material, no judge is going to uphold that.
00:39:52.000There are First Amendment concerns that come into play when you're giving out information about a public official like the President.
00:39:58.000When it comes to private information on the campaign trail, then Steve very well could have violated the NDA, and there is a significant possibility that Trump could actually have a pretty strong case for violating the NDA in all of these leagues.
00:40:55.000And then they were still useful to him, so he hadn't thrown them over yet.
00:40:58.000Sean is torn because Sean had basically painted Bannon as the ideological sort of avatar of the conservative wing of the White House.
00:41:07.000I don't know how Sean—honest to God, I don't know how Sean holds that view, given the fact that the White House has gotten more conservative, not less, since Bannon left.
00:41:15.000I've never understood how Sean has been able to rectify his view of Bannon-esque policy with conservatism, right?
00:41:27.000But I've never understood how Sean was able to so easily move into nationalist, populist nonsense when he spends his entire career advocating conservatism.
00:41:35.000So you'll see Sean try to play the middle road here.
00:41:37.000He feels bad about just dumping on Bannon.
00:41:40.000But he also knows that Trump is not going to stand for him not dumping on Bannon.
00:42:37.000When do they ever talk about making your life?
00:42:39.000Okay, so as I've said, I agree with Sean that the media loves this internecine warfare, but the solution to the internecine warfare is to go after the guy who's the leaker!
00:42:47.000Right, we kept hearing that leakers were bad.
00:42:49.000You know who was the head of the Deep State leaking in favor of his own interests?
00:42:53.000The head of the Bannon Deep State was Steve Bannon.
00:42:55.000Steve Bannon was the Steve Bannon Deep State.
00:42:58.000And Sean's trying to avoid that implication, but that is the reality.
00:43:00.000The media doesn't have this material unless Steve, in his self-aggrandizing arrogance, believes that he can leak all this material to the press and get away with it.
00:43:07.000Laura Ingraham did the same thing last night, slamming Trump and Bannon and saying, well, why do you guys have to fight?
00:43:13.000But, fellas, it doesn't really make sense for a high-profile advisor and his former boss to publicly attack each other when the stakes are this high.
00:43:40.000It was Steve Bannon hitting Trump, doing it publicly, hitting his kids, suggesting there was actual crime committed inside the Trump campaign, which would lead to the impeachment of the president.
00:43:48.000According to Michael Wolff's book, he was leaking to Michael Wolff that he thought there was a one-third chance of impeachment and one-third chance of resignation, and a one-third chance Trump finishes his term, and he wanted to run for president to replace Trump.
00:43:59.000If you are a fan of Trump, if you want Trump to succeed, how in the world are you still holding out for Steve Bannon after that?
00:44:05.000How in the world are you holding out for Bannon?
00:44:07.000In what world have I become more pro-Trump than a lot of the Trumpites who are now trying to defend Steve Bannon?
00:44:14.000First of all, there aren't very many of them.
00:44:16.000And all of the ones who are think of themselves as personal friends of Bannon.
00:44:19.000But for Laura to draw moral equivalence between Trump and Bannon in this fight is just ridiculous.
00:44:39.000I think Steve is a bad man who did bad things, sided with bad people, made good people's lives miserable, used those bad people to target his opponents.
00:44:46.000I think Steve is a very bad influence on the president of the United States.
00:44:49.000I think the president is much better off that he's no longer associated with this piece of crap.
00:44:52.000But with all of that said, I would believe that whether or not I knew Steve Bannon.
00:44:57.000Steve has not been of net benefit to this presidency, and I dare anyone to name me a way, one way, in which Steve Bannon has been of net benefit to the President of the United States.
00:45:07.000Do you really believe that Trump wouldn't have won if Bannon hadn't joined the campaign?
00:45:11.000Because you'll have to explain to me how that works, considering that Bannon never did anything with the campaign.
00:45:15.000In any case, I want to get to some things I like and some things that I hate, but that's a lot of Bannon for one day, and hopefully that will be one of the last times we have to mention Steve Bannon on air.
00:45:26.000Alrighty, time for some things I like and some things I hate, and then we'll do a little bit of Bible talk in which I will mention Steve Bannon.
00:47:27.000I've seen him in three or four different films now, and he inhabits characters in a way that, really, there are very few actors who inhabit a character.
00:47:34.000Like, I actually think Channing Tatum does in this movie, too.
00:47:37.000I think Channing Tatum's actually quite good as well.
00:47:38.000But Adam Driver, I can't speak highly enough about his ability to perform.
00:47:47.000Like Christian Bale, when you're watching a Christian Bale movie, you don't actually see Christian Bale, you just see the character that Christian Bale is playing, which is the opposite of movie stars like Jack Nicholson, where no matter what part he's playing, he's Jack Nicholson playing the part.
00:47:57.000I think even Meryl Streep has that problem.
00:47:59.000When you watch Adam Driver, you're like, wait, is that Adam Driver?
00:48:02.000Even though he's not wearing any makeup or prosthetics or anything?
00:48:30.000People get so used to the government taking care of them, they get so used to a regime of regulation that they forget how to be normal human beings.
00:48:37.000This is a criticism that a lot of people on the right have had for a long time, is that every time the government passes a law and makes you dependent on that law, every time the government does something where they essentially tell you what to do and what you can't do,
00:48:53.000When they tell you you can't do something, then they fill it in with government regulation, then you start to think you can't do it yourself.
00:49:00.000People started being able to receive a check for being a single mother, and so people said, well, maybe I don't need to marry a guy, right?
00:49:53.000And retailers in counties with a population of less than 40,000 are now allowed to have self-service gas pumps.
00:50:00.000Drivers in those 15 counties can now pump their own gas any time of day, while in those other three rural counties, they can do so after business hours, between 6 p.m.
00:50:09.000The idea was, there are a bunch of un-hireables, except for pumping gas, and so we will actually make a law preventing you from pumping your own gas.
00:50:16.000But the result was, thousands of people who don't know how to pump their own gas and think they're gonna light themselves on fire.
00:50:22.000So these are some of the Facebook posts from these people.
00:51:46.000But again, it shows that human nature is that when you've been told for years and years and years you can't do something, you actually think you're not qualified to do something.
00:51:52.000There are a lot of people in blue states who feel this way about guns.
00:52:04.000Speaking of the ridiculous left, a food safety expert has now warned that there is a raw water trend.
00:52:11.000OK, there's a raw water, this is a real thing.
00:52:14.000OK, there's a New York Times trend piece on Silicon Valley's recent obsession with raw water.
00:52:18.000According to the Times, demand for unfiltered water is skyrocketing as tech industry insiders develop a taste for water that has not been treated to prevent the spread of bacteria or other contaminants.
00:52:49.000Why do you think people die of dysentery in third world countries?
00:52:51.000Why do you think they tell you to bring bottled water when you go to Mexico City?
00:52:53.000The whole point here is that if you have untreated water, you could die.
00:52:57.000Virtually every contaminant is neutralized by treatment of water.
00:53:02.000Why do you think it's imperative that we actually give equipment to people in third world countries so they can boil water and turn it into drinkable?
00:53:08.000People in the West are so stupid, we're so dumb, and we've become so prosperous that we now think that going back to primitive ways of living that killed people are more healthy.
00:53:18.000This is the same when people say, organic.
00:53:55.000At Moon Palace Books, and I just found the book that strikes fear in the heart of Donald Trump.
00:53:59.000And it's him holding up a book called Antifa, the anti-fascist handbook.
00:54:03.000Antifa is basically a domestic terror group.
00:54:05.000Okay, Antifa, there's tape of Steven Crowder's assistant, not Gay Jared, being offered actual weaponry at one of my lectures by members of Antifa.
00:54:17.000Antifa is a, the reason that they call themselves Antifa, they say they are anti-fascist, but then they say by any means necessary, meaning violent means.
00:54:24.000One of the leading Congress people in the Democratic caucus is now calling for support for a violent leftist group.
00:54:30.000And then you wonder why we think, why there's been a reactionary move to Trump?
00:55:01.000As I say, I hope that he takes over all three broadcast networks to do it.
00:55:04.000And members of the media don't understand what's happening.
00:55:07.000So they've been releasing ads trying to troll Trump.
00:55:10.000So here is the one from Stephen Colbert.
00:55:13.000And it's a picture of Stephen Colbert looking like he's in Good Night and Good Luck with a series of quotes from Sean Hannity and various other people saying how terrible he is.
00:55:27.000And a quote from Trump himself, and it's a nomination poster, right?
00:55:30.000It's like a nomination poster for the Oscars.
00:55:50.000I will also suggest that one of the problems here is that Stephen Colbert actually does disseminate a bunch of left-wing talking points.
00:55:58.000And if you want to make the case that you're not a left-wing talking points organization, the way you do that is not by trolling Trump about his fake news stuff by saying, we are fake news, right?
00:56:06.000The only people I understand, you know, Colbert doesn't portray himself as an objective news source.
00:58:59.000Maybe Steve should have read First Kings, because there were some lessons in there about how the king actually treats you when you disobey his wishes.
00:59:07.000His anger may sleep, but not for long.
00:59:09.000Alrighty, we'll be back here tomorrow with all the latest news, plus the mailbag.
00:59:12.000So if you're going to subscribe, now's the day to do it.