"The fight for Donald Trump’s ear.
Below is a transcript of an episode
of “Matter of Opinion” that has been condensed and edited for clarity. We
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Ross Douthat: On this week’s show, we’re continuing my one-on-one
conversations with figures who represent different, potentially clashing
worldviews within the new Trump administration. Two weeks ago I talked to
venture capitalist Marc Andreessen about the newest faction in Trumpworld, the
so-called tech right.
My guest this week, Steve Bannon,
represents what I might call Trumpism Classic: the populist and nationalist
movement that brought Trump to power in the first place and that aspires to
exert significant influence in Trump’s second administration. Indeed, a lot of
the wave of executive orders we’ve already seen from this White House on
immigration, reshaping federal bureaucracy and more are Bannon’s populist,
anti-establishment aspirations.
Bannon is also emerging as one of
the most vocal critics from the right of Elon Musk and other members of the
tech right. And we’re going to talk a lot about that brewing conflict.
Steve, welcome to the show.
Steve Bannon: Ross, thank you very much, but I got to correct you right
out of the box. Please don’t tell me, because I read your column, that you
consider Marc Andreessen a part of the right.
Marc Andreessen and the oligarchs
are nothing but a bunch of progressive leftists that had their Damascene moment
between 10 and 11 o’clock on the evening of Nov. 5 when the Trump movement won
Pennsylvania.
The oligarchs are not conservative.
They’re certainly not on the right. Everything they’re doing — crawling on
their bellies, to try to get into and pollute this movement — is because they
see the raw political power of this movement. I find it disgusting and
revolting.
Douthat: All right, we’re going to get into that. But first, I
thought I should do a little résumé refresher just at the top about who you
are. It’s a detailed résumé.
Bannon: I’m a convict.
Douthat: That’s at the end.
Bannon: I’m a convict. You can just sum it up in that.
Douthat: I think “a man of parts” is what we like to say.
Bannon: That’s good. [Laughs.]
Douthat: So we’re going to say: Steve Bannon, U.S. Navy, Goldman
Sachs, Hollywood producer, impresario behind the success of the website
Breitbart, founded by Andrew Breitbart — but I think raised to special
prominence by you — one of Trump’s leading strategists in 2016, an architect of
an upset victory over Hillary Clinton.
Briefly a leading adviser to the
Trump White House. Exiled from Trumpworld after Michael Wolff’s book “Fire and
Fury” came out because you were a prominent source. A would-be organizer of an
international populist movement. Host of the podcast “War Room.” Involved in
the Jan. 6 protests and a very prominent promoter then and now of President
Trump’s stolen election claims. A four-month stint in prison — see, I said we’d
get around to it — for defying a subpoena from the Jan. 6 committee, then
released.
Donald Trump wins, and you’ve been
in Washington D.C. celebrating while also, as we’ve already heard, attacking
some of the president’s key allies, including Elon Musk.
Is that a fair sketch?
Bannon: I’ll do it quickly. Working-class Kennedy Democrat, a
blue-collar Catholic family whose father was essentially a foreman at the phone
company and got to lower management. He spent 50 years there, as his father
did, and helped organize the Communications Workers of America back in the ’30s
before it went off the rails.
Stay-at-home mom, five kids.
Land-grant university, naval officer. Educated at Harvard Business School —
that’s the West Point of capitalism, particularly, at the time, globalization.
Studied under Michael Porter, the great theoretician of competitive advantage
and globalization.
Became an expert in intellectual
property. Met Andrew Breitbart and helped him finance Breitbart. Then Andrew
died tragically right before the launch of the Breitbart site. It was his site.
He died literally 72 hours before we were about to launch.
I was the first group behind
President Trump. And I said from the beginning, I only gave him a year of my
life, so I didn’t get run out of the White House. I’m not so sure I was run out
of Trumpworld. It depends on how you define Trumpworld — or maybe we get to
that later — but I’ve been working on populist nationalism for 20 years.
And I’m a hard-core populist. I’m a
hard-core nationalist.
I’m not a conservative. I think
conservatives are [expletive].
The Republican Party is a bunch of
[expletive]. They’re controlled opposition.
And I think you see the culmination
of a lot of work we’ve done. And you see what I call flood the zone days of
thunder. And it couldn’t be a better time to be alive in the spring of this
great effort.
Douthat: So let’s talk about the kind of populism that you’ve been
involved with basically from its beginnings as a force in global politics.
Populism in the U.S. goes back to Andrew Jackson. It’s had a lot of different
incarnations, a lot of different versions, some more cultural, some more
economic. People in my line of work have been arguing since Donald Trump came
down the escalator about what Trumpism is. Is it about economics? Is it about
class? Race? So —
Bannon: No, no, no, hang on. The public intellectuals, and I
consider you one of the top, have — and let’s just be brutally frank —
Douthat: Let’s be —
Bannon: No, let’s be brutally frank. Public intellectuals have done
a horrible job because you haven’t had the interest in really understanding
what populism is. It’s this thing like Trump. It’s always going to fade. It’s
just about Trump. And it’s never about the core, where this springs from.
Think about it: Trump came down in
June of 2015, and for 10 years there’s been no real work done to even begin to
understand populism, except that the deplorables are an exotic species like at
the San Diego Zoo.
It’s only now that anybody has got
any interest in really getting behind it? And I’m really appreciative of coming
on your show. And of course, we’ve got to have some combat here — otherwise it
wouldn’t be interesting. I have tremendous respect, but no one’s really lifted
a finger.
The Tea Party was the precedent of
Trump. Every financial collapse or every financial crisis you’ve had worldwide
has some sort of reaction to it. In the financial crisis and collapse of 2008,
brought on by the established order and a little bit by the Bush regime, the
Bush junta, I call it. By the way, the worst presidency in the history of our
nation, except for James Buchanan’s.
Douthat: Franklin Pierce just breathed a deep sigh of relief.
[Laughs.]
Bannon: But Franklin — come on, man. Franklin Pierce did not do the
damage that Bush did to the country, on so many different levels, in particular
the financial crisis, which was not totally his fault but the fault of the
established order. And the basic schmendrick underwrote all of that bailout and
didn’t get a bailout themselves. In fact, they got blown out of their equity,
and they blamed it on African Americans and Hispanics that didn’t have the
income. But they blew them all out of the equity of their homes and, by the
way, kept the title to those homes, I might add, so they could resell it later.
It’s one of the greatest financial scandals in the history of this country.
None of the crooks and the criminals that did this were ever held accountable.
And when I say crooks and criminals,
I mean the top accounting firms, the law firms, the entire establishment. I
know you’re an Ivy Leaguer also, and I went to the trade school at Harvard.
None of the elites in this country were ever held accountable for it. And that
lit a fuse that went off on Nov. 8 and the early morning of Nov. 9 in 2016 with
President Trump. It was basically the forgotten man and woman’s vengeance.
Our platform at the time was fairly
ill defined. I came in with the Breitbart philosophy of economic nationalism up
in the blue wall and down in the South in the border states, and I started
looking at demographics. People were mocking me, saying Bannon has never done a
campaign. Why does he have Trump in Michigan? Why does he have him in
Wisconsin? Why does he have him in Pennsylvania? He’s not going to win those
states. To get it close, he’s got to focus on Southern states.
And then we won all three of them by
a combination of, I think, 70,000 votes. But we won them.
That was really the culmination of
the first phase of this kind of populist revolt coming from the Tea Party in
2010, the big off-year election victory —
Douthat: All right. Well, let me go back for a minute, though, to
the genesis. And let me tell you what I see is sort of the Tea Party-to-Trump
narrative. And you can tell me what’s right or wrong with this story.
To me, I agree with you that the Tea
Party comes in as sort of the first reaction on the right to bailouts, to the
financial crisis. But it starts out with Rick Santelli giving this famous cable
news speech. But he’s not talking about the biggest Wall Street bailouts. He’s
talking about basically bailouts for homeowners.
Bannon: Of your neighbors. Yep.
Douthat: And this turns into — for a little while in the history of
the Tea Party — a narrative that sort of works well, I think, with what used to
be movement conservatism. This narrative that the only problem here is big
government: There’s just too much spending. We have to cut spending.
This gets taken up by Mitt Romney
and Paul Ryan. They run in 2012 on big plans to overhaul Medicare and Social
Security. That version loses.
And then Trump comes in as someone
who has no background in movement conservatism, like yourself. Not a
conservative — a populist — and comes in and says: Well, actually, we’re going
to protect Social Security and Medicare. We’re not going to be the big
government cutters. We’re going to be economic nationalists. We’re going to do
industrial policy. We’re going to change the trade rules. We’re going to cut
immigration and try to raise wages that way, and so on.
That to me is some of the same
energy that’s in the Tea Party. But it’s a pretty different agenda and a
clearer break in principle with what came before. This is just 2016.
Bannon: You’re a thousand percent correct. Let me give some depth
of that for a second.
The Tea Party mainly had the classic
limited government conservatives. And you can see this in what I call the
traditional grass roots that had really come up from President Reagan’s time.
But from what I saw was that they
couldn’t articulate it. They were still speaking in an old nomenclature. And I
saw this in the 2012 campaign in the primary.
And remember — it’s a very famous
story — I tried to recruit Sarah Palin. I saw Sarah Palin. And I said: Wow.
That’s a populist right there. And I spent a year making a film with her and
tried to talk her into running as a true populist for the nomination.
I didn’t realize Romney was normally
next man up for the Republicans, but there you saw the nomenclature, even
calling them Republicans and Democrats. What became very obvious to me, given
my H.B.S. training and Goldman Sachs, is that you had kind of a populist, more
nationalistic flavor on one side, and you had a globalist, more elitist
[flavor] on the other.
And I knew a lot of the donors at
that time because Breitbart was getting some traction. I was starting to meet
some of these donors, and they were absolutely convinced that Romney and Ryan
were going to win. And these people were crushed. And I told them early on, I
said: Romney, this thing is not going to be close. It’ll be a couple of points
at least.
Because they’re not connecting, and
they didn’t want any connection to the Tea Party. But I said: There’s something
brewing out there that’s much different. These people’s lives are being
destroyed. The country is slipping away. All the high-value manufacturing jobs
are going to China. And you saw the H-1B visas and discussions about this were
all starting to percolate at that time.
And when those guys lost, I
realized: Hey, people here really don’t get it. And what happened right after
that is a guy named Reince Priebus, who I didn’t know at the time, was running
the Republican National Committee. They did this thing called the hot wash-up,
or —
Douthat: The autopsy!
Bannon: The autopsy, thank you. They did the autopsy. And I think it
was RealClearPolitics. It was a guy named Sean Trende. And he does this
analysis about how the white working class wouldn’t support Romney, because
they didn’t reach out to them. And he said: There’s a clear path here that you
can win by more of a populist coalition talking about working-class things.
And I said: Hey guys! This guy has
nailed it. This is it. And, they came back to me and said: No, you’ve missed
it. It’s amnesty. It’s everything like that. And I just took the other side and
said: No, this is the winning philosophy here.
And I met with Jeff Sessions and
Stephen Miller, whom I was very close to, and I said at the time: We got to
find a populist candidate. I said: Jeff, you know, you’re an agrarian populist.
We can even start with you to get it out there. And he says: No, I’m not the
guy, but that guy will arrive.
Then I started going to these cattle
calls early on where you’ve got to get the grass roots. And it was May 1, I
think, of 2014 where I went to — I think it was Hanover, N.H. — with Breitbart
radio. Rand Paul was there, Mike Lee was there, Ted Cruz was there, Newt
Gingrich — all of them. And this guy Donald Trump was there.
And the nomenclature from everybody
else was all the same. They may have a different inflection or a different take,
but it didn’t have any depth to it, it didn’t resonate, it didn’t grab people
viscerally.
Trump came up and just starts. It
was like Mort Sahl. He’s just taking today’s headlines and just riffing on it.
But in riffing on it and talking about the border and jobs in China, people
were leaning forward in their seats. And I called later and told Miller and
Sessions and others. I said: This is our guy. I said: If this guy is serious
about this, we can do this. This guy — this guy is the personification of what
we need. He’s a hammer, he’s a man’s man, and if he’s serious — which at the
time, there’s a big question. I always thought he was serious. Big, big
question, just doing this to negotiate a better deal for “The Apprentice,” and
the people like Roger Ailes would tell me: Bannon, you’re a [expletive] moron.
This is all — this is a negotiating strategy. You look like an idiot.
So that’s really Trump’s version of
populism. It’s both cultural and economic, but it’s really a push against an
established order that’s truly globalist in nature and has really lost touch
with the American people, with the working class and lower middle class in this
country. They are the backbone of the country.
And that’s why I just said: Hey, we
just got to start focusing on these folks. Eventually, we got to work out some
policies that work, but we’ve just got to make the American citizen first. And
if we do that, this is going to turn out fine.
Douthat: I want to get into the policy from the first Trump term,
but it’s just worth thinking about the time you’re talking about. The most
powerful idea in elite discourse about politics was this idea that there was a
sort of emerging Democratic majority that basically consisted of white
college-educated, socially liberal Americans and then the growing population
of, especially, Hispanic voters, minority voters and so on. And that the only
way for the Republican Party to compete in this environment was, as you say, to
either become more liberal on social issues generally or to become more liberal
on immigration in particular.
Sean Trende wrote this series called
“The Case of the Missing White Voters.” And it’s about how there were all these
voters who didn’t turn out for Romney who could turn out for a Republican.
And then the other argument
connected to that, that also turned out to be right, was that there were a lot
of Hispanic voters who weren’t actually interested in necessarily voting for
open borders and large-scale illegal immigration, who were culturally
conservative, who didn’t want to vote for a sort of racist-seeming Republican
Party but would be open to a kind of populist appeal.
It’s funny because I used to go on
cable news back then in a different incarnation of my life, and I was on a few
times with Stuart Stevens who ran Romney’s campaign in 2012. And this was while
the Trump campaign was getting going and competing.
And look, I didn’t think Trump was
going to win, so I don’t claim any foresight there. But Stevens would come on,
and he would say,: Oh, Trump is trying to get voters who just aren’t there.
He’s going up the river, beating the drums, trying to summon voters from the
hills, and they’re just not there.”
And that was the default assumption
that I do think your 2016 campaign and then 2024 proved wrong.
Bannon: Yeah. We’ll get to that. Stevens is kind of the epitome of
the dumb, lazy, you know what. And he seems like a decent guy, but it’s just
moronic stuff that cable TV puts up all the time.
I want to go back to something. I
cannot overemphasize enough how powerful Sean Trende was. This is the reason I
read everything. I read all the journals. That hit me right in the solar
plexus. I go: That is exactly what happened. I couldn’t get anybody to pay
attention to it.
I’ll tell you who I got to pay
attention to it: Stephen Miller. I’d met Stephen and Sergio Gor, who are now
huge players in the White House and were two grundoons on the staff of Michele
Bachmann, who was eventually the person who did kind of try to run as a
populist —
Douthat: Another name out of the mists of memory.
Bannon: But I tell people: Hey, people, get hot, and the gods give
charisma — and if you don’t grab it, like Chris Christie in ’12, or Michele
Bachmann and Palin, the gods take it away.
Let’s go back to Sean Trende. I
would actually say that was an inflection point in American history because it
got me excited about what the possibilities were and what the math was.
What really proved our chops was
right after I saw Trump on May 1, 2014. Six weeks later, Zuckerberg, that
criminal, was coming here to get the amnesty deal done in this huge
announcement the night before on Tuesday, I think, June 7 in 2014. An economics
professor named Dave Brat from Randolph Macon actually defeated Eric Cantor,
the first time a sitting majority leader had ever been defeated in a primary.
And he ran on a 100 percent anti-immigration platform.
That was really the beginning of
feeling the power. We really had something here that could win elections and
win votes.
Douthat: So let’s just drill down on immigration for a minute. Why
is it so central? And what do you say to someone who might be on the left,
who’d be listening to this conversation and would say: Oh look, Bannon is
absolutely right. There was a financial crisis. Wall Street got away with
murder.
Not literally, just to be clear, but
there needed to be a populist surge. But all being anti-immigration does is
scapegoat a bunch of hardworking people trying to come to America for the sins
of global finance. And so on, what is the —
Bannon: No, it’s the reason — you just mentioned a moment ago, the
emerging Democratic majority. The reason that didn’t happen. I never thought it
would happen, because Bernie Sanders and all these guys that have been
pro-worker and pro-union, you saw them flip. All of a sudden they were: Open
borders. Look, let me step back for a second. The entire postwar international
rules-based order, all of it, Bretton Woods and all of it — the Pax Americana —
it is all on the shoulders of the little guy. It gets down to the shoulders of
the working class and the middle class.
And you can see the Democratic Party
transferring into very wealthy donors: the credential class of a bunch of
people coming out of college or graduate school, and then the plebeians.
The key on immigration — and I’m
anti- any immigration. I want a moratorium on all immigration right now because
I want American citizens to get a shot at the brass ring. Which they deserve
since the entire world’s economic system is on their shoulders.
And it’s the same people whose taxes
and pension money support everything. Where their sons and daughters are
standing watch on destroyers and the carrier battle groups in the Red Sea to
keep the Suez Canal open for trade to Europe.
They’re on patrol in the Hindu Kush.
They’re in Romania with the 101st Airborne. And I saw it. I served in that. And
all the people in my destroyer, post-Vietnam, in the all volunteer forces, had
a choice in that those early years of the Navy, were jail or the military. And
my daughter, later, went to West Point. An officer who served and fought in
Iraq.
And all of her enlisted, I think of
16 enlisted guys of First Command — I think 12 were minorities who had done an
average of 10 or 12 tours and had broken families and all the pressure. So it’s
on them for the system to work — yet they get no real benefits from the system.
And most important, the capitalists
are always trying to drive down wages. Now they do it two ways. They either
allow illegal immigration at the border, which drives down wages of
lower-skilled workers, particularly African American and Hispanic. But they
also scammed the system with a whole set of visa programs, and they call it
kind of fancy names — the H-1B visas.
All they’re trying to do is bring in
indentured servants into the country at a third less or 50 percent less and are
very compliant about what they have to do, to make sure they don’t have to pay
American graduates. And this is why Silicon Valley is an apartheid state. It’s
the reason you have no Hispanics or Blacks.
There’s no shot to get into Silicon
Valley. It’s not because Americans are dumber. It’s not because Americans are
lazy. It’s because American citizens are — you have a globalist system.
And the capitalists, because
remember we’re in a capitalist system, are always looking to drive labor costs
down. And the Democratic Party could have done this, but Bernie Sanders and all
the guys who supported labor, all became open borders on immigration, and they
made it some sort of racial, xenophobic thing.
And I kept telling people: Hey, I
don’t give two [expletive] if you call me a racist. I don’t give two
[expletive] if you call me a xenophobe or anything like that. I’m standing up
for the American citizen. I come from a working-class family. And I can tell
you that when they fully understand the economics, and they look around at
what’s happening, African Americans and Hispanic families are going to vote for
us.
And Sean Trende gave us a little bit
of a map. And we did a little bit of action, but it was just kind of putting it
in a direction. It was so obviously there, and it’s so obviously going to
getting bigger and bigger and bigger if we deliver it now on policies. And
we’re going to have some massive fights on policies because the dumb, lazy
media keeps saying the Republican Party is all Trump, he controls it. He
controls it because they fear him, but you scratch the surface of most of these
congressmen and almost all the senators, they’re just standard stock
Republicans. They’re, they’re neoliberal neocons.
Douthat: So let’s talk about Trump’s first term and how this cashed
out then. And I want to read a quote —
Bannon: It’s a little bit of a dog’s breakfast policy-wise, I’m the
first to admit.
Douthat: I just want to read a quote from you, via Michael Wolff, so
we can take it with a slight grain of salt. But this is you talking just before
Trump was inaugurated, and he quoted you saying, “The conservatives are going
to go crazy. I’m the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan with
negative interest rates throughout the world. It’s the greatest opportunity to
rebuild everything. Shipyards, ironworks, get them all jacked up. We’re just
going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It’ll be as
exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution.”
So that’s a vision of populism where
it’s secure borders, it’s cutting immigration, it’s everything that you’ve just
been talking about — but it’s also industrial policy, rebuilding industry. And
I think it’s fair to say that a lot of that just didn’t happen in Trump term one
—
Bannon: Ross, Ross, Ross — hang on. Stop. No, no. We had 300
infrastructure weeks —
Douthat: All right, yes, that’s right. No, 300. Were there only 300?
Every week was infrastructure week. [Laughs.]
Bannon: I’m adding up. I’m adding up all four years. I don’t know.
[Laughs.]
Douthat: Right.
Bannon: Maybe I’m overcounting. It just seemed like 300
infrastructure weeks.
Douthat: Every week was infrastructure week. What happened to that?
The industrial policy side of things?
Bannon: It was, listen — so, OK, hang on. So I step in and take it
over. And look, I ran for student body president as a junior in college and
won. I had never done anything in politics since then. I’ve never been to a
campaign office. I had no [expletive] idea what I was doing.
But we figured that given how badly
the campaign was being run, that I couldn’t do worse than close this thing up
to a couple of points loss, worst case. And so we made a coalition. I made a
pact with the Republican establishment. We had to win.
Douthat: So you got it with a coalition. And the coalition doesn’t
want industrial policy. They don’t want the big deal spending. And so that
doesn’t happen. And I’m going to try to bring us forward quickly to the
present.
Bannon: It’s a fail in transition. We just don’t want the people,
and President Trump is not there, and the mandate is really not to take on the
administrative state.
We do get the tax cut, which I’m not
happy with. And I lose that. President Trump will listen to you. He’ll look at the
facts. He makes a decision. Then he does his tax cut. The same one that we’re
going to have a fight on. Again, that’s coming up to be renewed. But we do
deregulation. We get enough done that you get the — and President Trump is a
man of peace.
So by the fall of 2019 you have low
interest rates, low inflation.
Douthat: The economy is good. I think this is absolutely true. Even
without the $1 trillion infrastructure bill, it’s better for blue-collar
workers than it was under Obama. That’s a big, big —
Bannon: Infrastructure, you’re correct, was an epic fail. The
Republican establishment had zero interest. That Mitch McConnell had zero
interest. We had a couple of infrastructure weeks, and they just considered it
a joke, and we never made any progress.
Douthat: So flash-forward: We’re back. Trump has more of a mandate
for some form of populism than before. He clearly has more of a mandate on
illegal immigration, in part, just because of how much of it there’s been under
Biden. So clearly you’ve got a populist focus on that issue. It’s no question
about that.
But on everything else, what does
populism want as a movement on economic policy from this administration and
related to that, the administrative state stuff. We’re having this conversation
in a week where a bunch of the headlines are about both the Trump team trying
to sort of take more control over the agencies, also claim more power from
Congress.
There’s going to be a Supreme Court
battle, probably over presidential authority over certain kinds of spending.
But you say deconstruct the administrative state. For what? What is the actual
goal of that?
Bannon: We’re totally different now. I shouldn’t say totally
different. Right now, in the days of thunder, we have scale, we have depth, and
we have urgency. How do we even get there?
When Trump leaves on Jan. 20 of 2021
and when he gets back to Mar-a-Lago, it’s a lion in winter. And the only reason
that McCarthy’s guys go down is to make sure the lion is still caged. It’s all
DeSantis, Nikki Haley and the next thing. Trump is done, he’s finished. And now
you’re down to the hard-core populist, even on our audience.
At the same time, something very
important happens. There are donors — not many of them — and public
intellectuals and guys that are going to start these small think tanks. And you
have Brooke Rollins, who was in the White House, she was head of the Domestic
Policy Council, and Stephen Miller essentially set up the America First Policy
Institute. Russ Vought, who is Office of Management and Budget and a critical
guy in the first administration, one of the secret weapons, starts Center for
Renewing America with Mark Paoletta and Jeff Clark. And Heritage does Project
2025.
And you’ve got a few more, but
you’ve got these four or five groups, and we call the rubric Project 2025. It’s
to take policy — because one of the problems we definitely had is that there’s
a gap between the populist nationalist promise and the populist nationalist
delivery. And that has got to be in policy.
And you’ve got to keep Nikki Haley
in mind. Fourteen or 15 percent, maybe 18 or 20 percent, of traditional
Republicans that are just not there with you — they’ll be there if you give
them a policy suite that they can buy into. And you need those people. You need
them to win as you expand your own populace with African Americans and
Hispanics. But they’re a bridging element.
So over the four years, you have
serious public intellectuals for the first time thinking through serious policy
alternatives on military strategy, national security, foreign policy,
economics, all of it.
But you’ve also had, as important as
a policy art, you have people start working as a team, networking. Remember
you’re building teams and networks of subject matter experts and people who
know how to work together. And we’re flooding the zone with the cabinet
nominations. This is just so much different.
Now what I was able to do was just
not on policy verticals but also taking on the Leviathan. And this is where I
take special pride and tell the limited government service: Go [expletive]
yourself. Because you didn’t do [expletive] except get this thing [expletive]
bigger. So it’s out of control.
The deconstruction of the
administrative state, and this goes back to 2016 — this is why Gorsuch is on
the Supreme Court and Kavanaugh, to a degree. This is a young group of
intellectual people in the judiciary that are very focused on this fourth
branch of government that’s metastasized to basically become a permanent
government.
And basically, whoever wins —
whether it’s Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Donald Trump — it
doesn’t matter. They’re the permanent government, and they got a permanent way
to do it. That has to be deconstructed. And that’s one of the things I was so
proud of.
Douthat: OK, but I want to go back to the populist.
Bannon: Yep.
Douthat: So this — the voter, right? The blue-collar voter in, you
know, in 2016 — it’s the blue-collar white voter. In 2024, it’s the
middle-class Hispanic voter.
They vote for Trump in part because
they agree with a populist critique of how the economy has been run the last 25
years — in part in this election because they were just sick of inflation and
the border being out of control. What is the concrete deliverable for those
voters out of the deconstruction of the administrative state? That’s what I’m
trying to get at.
Bannon: The concrete deliverable first is the deportation. First
off, if you don’t vote for the Democrats, that’s one vote to us. If you vote
for us, it’s two votes swing.
The first step is just to say: These
guys have done nothing but [expletive] you the entire time. Why are you
continuing to vote for them? And I think they started to see that as we started
to bring up immigration.
They could see in their communities,
not just the lawlessness and the crowding of the schools, all that, but the
competition for wages and for labor. This is what it’s about. That’s the first
time that people were prepared to listen to you. That, hey, these guys aren’t a
bunch of white racists, nativists, etc. They’re actually talking about my
economics. And they understand in my community: It’s not the lawlessness, the
schools, the medical, which are all terrible, because of the flooding of this —
and the elite don’t care because they don’t have to deal with it —
Douthat: But is it just immigration then? I mean, I’m not trying to
minimize immigration. We had the largest surge under Biden in decades. All of
that is real.
Bannon: People can look. Yes. And inflation, by the way. And, hang
on —
Douthat: But inflation cuts both ways. Because yes, immigration
gives you competition for jobs, but immigration also can reduce prices.
You take low-skilled workers out of
the economy, prices go up. That cuts in both directions.
But I just want to focus in for a minute,
because to me, looking at a lot of the different people you’ve mentioned and
the agenda you’re talking about, to me, there’s still sort of a through line
from the Tea Party era where you have a lot of people voting for Republicans
who hadn’t voted for Republicans before, who have sort of big picture economic
concerns, law and order concerns and so on. But there is a part of the
Republican Party that I think is part of your sort of vision of the MAGA
coalition. That still wants to deliver those voters. We’re going to keep taxes
low for the upper class, and we’re going to pay for it by cutting Medicaid and
so on. That still seems like a pretty powerful part of whatever the Republican
Party is right now.
Bannon: We are about to see. This is why I’m so adamant we can’t
have one big, beautiful bill. We need two bills. So we —
Douthat: On the tax policy. Yeah.
Bannon: For the donor class and The Wall Street Journal and the
Murdochs, you’re a million percent correct. They want the permanent
installation of the Trump tax cuts. They’re all welfare queens on corporate
welfare, and this is why I’m so adamantly opposed to them.
I support the president, but look, I
didn’t support the tax plan in the beginning, and I still think my ideas would
have been even better for President Trump and the country. Although his turned
out pretty well. But you know, as Scott Bessent said the other day, I think,
that it’s $4 trillion. It will be the biggest tax increase in history. And 2.6
trillion of that goes to people in joint incomes under $400,000 dollars. Still
over a trillion, $1.2 trillion goes to the wealthy. And my point is quite
simple: Not only you’re not going to get the tax cut, you’re going to get
dramatic tax increases unless we can get spending under control.
And when I say “spending under
control,” I mean a trillion dollars cut this year. When they talk about the
10-year cycle, they’re lying to you. It’s irrelevant. I worked at Goldman in
turnarounds. The only thing we should be talking about is fiscal year ’25 and fiscal
year ’26. Those two years: What do we cut, how close can we get to a realistic
economic model that gets us close?
And the best way to do this is put a
gun to the head of the wealthy and say: OK, [expletive], if you don’t help us
cut spending by backing your lobbyists off and backing off the corporatist and
backing off your big shareholders and you yourself, if we don’t get that out —
and let’s start with the defense budget. We just agreed to a $900 billion
National Defense Authorization Act. Which, as a former serving naval officer
and a guy whose daughter went to West Point — and she gave eight years of her
life — we got skin in the game. We’re hawks. The defense budget is an obscenity
and must be cut.
Unless we’re prepared to do that
then your taxes are going to go up and not just your income taxes. We’re going
to have financial taxes. We’re going to get to a balanced budget, and we’re not
going to do it on the back of the little guy.
President Trump has promised over
and over again, no tax on overtime and no tax on Social Security, which is the
big kahuna. So we have, Ross, I think roughly, another $500 billion shortage on
revenue. So we’re probably four or four and a half years with the tax cuts. The
populists need for the people to get more income to the American citizen, the
hardworking American citizen. So no, I’m adamant about this and —
Douthat: So you’re basically saying: Do a version of the tax
reauthorization that actually takes out some of the upper-bracket stuff and
combine that with discretionary spending cuts? I just want to be clear. Is that
the combination?
Bannon: Yes, but I want to go back in time just a bit to the first
90 days of the Biden regime.
Douthat: OK. Just for a minute.
Bannon: Just for a minute. But remember that they put forward this
huge tax the wealthy, tax the billionaires. It didn’t even get a committee
hearing. It was performed as a joke to hang out there.
Douthat: Right.
Bannon: I’m talking about significant spending cuts, starting in
defense. Medicare and Social Security are off to the side. Significant spending
cuts, and if we don’t get the cuts and the wealthy don’t have some cuts, I
don’t want to increase taxes on the wealthy just because I believe in soak the
rich. Maybe I do, but I would not want to be part of policy.
I want to do that to get our
financial house in order because we just can’t keep borrowing a trillion
dollars every 100 days. So yes, if we can’t balance it, in addition with more
tax cuts for the working class, particularly Social Security, then we’ve got to
close that gap from $2 trillion, and Congressional Budget Office backs me up.
House Freedom Caucus has said it’s got to be $2 trillion a year. We got to
close that.
I think it’s spending cuts, and if
it has to be increased taxes — not just they don’t get the tax cuts reinstalled
from Trump ’17, but you actually increase taxes on these people. And I believe
in incentives. I believe, Ross, that will incentivize the donor class to get
focused on cutting government spending.
Let’s make them part of the process.
So that’s the only way you can do it. When I mention tax cuts, and I’m going to
tell you, when I go around and give speeches — I gave one to Wall Street, a
third of the audience of a Wall Street crowd standing ovation, one-third didn’t
applaud, and one-third spit on the floor. But when I go to Denton, Texas, or
places like that and I say this program about increased taxes for the wealthy,
it’s a standing ovation. The people are there, and the voters are there.
Douthat: I think you’re totally right that there is a big
constituency, especially now that the party has been transformed, of
Republican- and populist-leaning Republican voters who would be fine with some
soaking the rich in the context of a bigger budget deal. I’m completely
skeptical that there is any large-scale elite faction, including everyone you
just described, who are fanning out over the agencies that would be up for that
beyond the margins. Like, can the Trump administration tax university
endowments? Sure. Absolutely. They can do that.
Just maintaining the changes to the
state and local tax deduction that was, I think, one of the genuinely populist
victories of the first Trump term. And I should say, it soaked me, it soaked
the upper middle class in blue states. Just maintaining that, I think, will be
challenging.
But I want to turn us and bring us
back to where we started. Because the last conversation I had ended with me
arguing with Marc Andreessen, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist, about
whether he and his allies, who also have a big role in the Trump
administration, who are filling a lot of jobs, could easily find big spending
cuts. I’m just generally a skeptic of the ability to find big spending cuts. So
maybe that’s one small point of overlap between you and — I won’t call them the
tech right — we’ll just call them Silicon Valley people who support Donald
Trump,
Bannon: No, no, no —
Douthat: But, we don’t even have to go into the overlap —-
Bannon: You’re too smart. You’re one of the leading public
intellectuals, particularly —
Douthat: I’m not one of —
Bannon: No, no, you are. They’re oligarchs. It’s an oligarch.
They’re 100 percent oligarchs. They believe in technofeudalism.
Look, they’re all down here for one
reason: They either knew we were going to win, they were smart enough to look
at the math, or they saw after we won. I mean, Facebook’s Damascene moment
wasn’t until 10 o’clock that night. Now he’s down there. They’re oligarchs who
believe in technofeudalism.
They have nothing. They’re not even
on the spectrum where we can argue against Rachel Maddow and A.O.C. and Bernie
Sanders on the spectrum. They’re not on the spectrum. They’re a totally
different thing.
Douthat: This phrase is sitting here in my notes because you’ve used
it a bunch: technofeudalism. We’ve talked about immigration. You’ve talked
about the idea that Silicon Valley is basically trying to bring in as much
foreign labor as possible to presumably keep its own costs down.
That’s obviously part of what you
mean by technofeudalism — but I don’t think that’s all of it. This is not just
about H-1B visas.
Bannon: No, no, no —
Douthat: Suppose Elon Musk came in tomorrow and said: It’s fine —
I’m reforming the H-1B program. You would still disagree with him. So give me a
broader view of what you think is wrong with the Silicon Valley view.
Bannon: Let me just give you a quick bunch of history. Obama and
the progressive administration — him and Biden — are the most reactionary in
American history.
No. 1, he made a Faustian bargain
with the sociopathic overlords on Wall Street to bail us out of the 2008
crisis, which still hasn’t been resolved. At the same time, Obama and the
established order went to Silicon Valley and made a deal with them.
And the deal was the following: We
will allow you to become the wealthiest people in the history of the world. We
will let you create an apartheid state. We will let you become monopolies. We
will get no anti-trade. In fact, that’s why you got Google and Search. You got
Facebook and what they do. You got Twitter and what they do. You’ve got Amazon
destroying small businesses for the C.C.P. Every one of these guys is a
monopoly. And the Justice Department for 10 or 12 years would just look the
other way.
So we’ll let you become monopolies,
we’ll let you become the wealthiest people on Earth. But here’s the bargain —
here’s what you have to do: You have to make the hegemon, the United States,
and the postwar international rules-based order and the ruling class of this
country — you have to make us a dominant technological power of which we can
have the commanding heights that can never be questioned.
And over the last 72 hours, what
we’ve seen is two things: No. 1 is social media. The Chinese Communist Party
and the People’s Liberation Army created TikTok, which is far more powerful
than all the social media platforms of these guys put together.
Forget that they use the information
and the ownership. I’m just talking about the addictive nature and how evil can
be put in it. And we now know that all the really — let’s say hundreds of
billions of dollars, not tens of billions — that we put into the theory of the
case of blunt-force computing power that say that the Green New Deal is forgotten.
Climate change is forgotten. You’ve got to build power generators everywhere.
You got to give over federal land for data centers everywhere. We got to burn
more coal, more oil for these data centers because of our method of artificial
intelligence. We understand that if this is not a PSYOP — which I don’t think
it totally is, we’ve had our Sputnik moment — and guess what? The oligarchs
that we created, who were all progressive Democrats, absolutely [expletive]
face planted.
Now here’s the point. In technofeudalism,
you’re just a digital serf. Your value as a human being, as someone built and
made in the image and likeness of God and endowed with the life spirit of the
Holy Spirit — they don’t consider that. Everything is digital to them.
They are, at the end of the day,
transhumanist. And what is transhumanist? Transhumanist is somebody who sees
Homo sapien here and Homo sapien plus on the other side of what they call the
singularity.
And that’s why they’re all rushing —
whether it’s artificial intelligence, regenerative robotics, quantum computing,
advanced chip design, CRISPR, biotech, all of it — to come to this point of
which the oligarchs are going to lead that revolution. And why are they going
to do it? No. 1, when you get to know them and see where they’re spending the
money, it’s because they want eternal life.
You know why? Because they’re
complete atheistic 11-year-old boys that are kind of science fiction “Dungeons
& Dragons” guys, and we’ve turned the nation over to that. And yes, I’m
going to fight it every [expletive] step of the way. This is taking us back a
millennium to feudalism. Their business model is based upon that.
And the progressive left made a deal
with these guys. They’re all lefties. Elon had the first awakening because as
an engineer, he could kind of see the math. He fully supported our plan of a
base plus election, to go get the low information voters and the Moms for
America who had flipped during the pandemic.
He backed that strategy, and the
dude wrote a $250 million check over five months, unprecedented, to back our
play. He’s the first, but the rest of them, even Andreessen, they’re all
superprogressive liberals, they’re all technofeudalists, they don’t give a
flying [expletive] about the human being. And I don’t care if you’re Black,
White, Hispanic, Chinese — they don’t care.
And they have to be stopped. If we
don’t stop it, and we don’t stop it now, it’s going to destroy not just this
country, it’s going to destroy the world. And you see this in artificial
intelligence. We have no controls over this. We’ve allowed these monopolies to
exist.
And now we know they’re getting
their ass handed to them, I think, by the Chinese Communist Party.
We’re in deep [expletive] right now.
We’re in a crisis.
Douthat: All right. I want to go to the transhumanist stuff first
and then to the policy stuff and Trump and whether any of this can be stopped.
So to me, I think that there are
different groups in Silicon Valley. I think that you’re right that generally
people, including readers of this newspaper, listeners of this podcast,
underestimate just how weird the long-term ambitions of a lot of people deeply
involved in Silicon Valley are, especially around artificial intelligence. And
that there is this sort of —
Bannon: Hold on, hold on —
Douthat: Wait, wait, let me —
Bannon: Balaji Srinivasan and the network state — let’s talk about
that. They’re not weird. They’re radicals.
Douthat: All right, the network state we can save for the next time
I have you on. For now, let’s just focus on transhumanism —
Bannon: Hold it, we’ve got breaking news: Bannon’s actually going
to be invited back.
Douthat: Every week, man.
Bannon: Stop it! [Laughs.]
Douthat: Listen. So the transhumanism stuff to me — it seemed like
one of the things that pulled Elon Musk into the conservative coalition. He’s
certainly not a religious conservative but he is a kind of weirdo humanist,
right? He likes the human race. He wants the human race to continue.
Bannon: Oh, no. Stop.
Douthat: No? OK, to me it seems like Musk is in one group.
Bannon: Look, Musk is —
Douthat: Just as transhumanist as the rest of them?
Bannon: Since Edison, he is maybe our greatest applied engineer. He
is a genius at that level.
Douthat: OK, agreed.
Bannon: Agreed. And so he looks at the thing as all kinds of
mathematical equations. When he puts himself on something, he can solve it.
He is the most prominent of that
crowd that has warned against artificial intelligence and artificial general
intelligence. It’s one of the reasons he and Sam Altman at OpenAI have had so
many big fights besides the profitability.
Douthat: Not big fans of each other.
Bannon: No, they hate each other. Part of that’s personal, but part
of it is philosophical. And Brother Musk is probably the farthest down the line
because he’s the most advanced in chipping.
I think Neuralink is one of the most
aggressive about Homo sapien 1.0 or Homo sapien 2.0. Elon is at the tip of
this, and Elon is actually on an applied engineering basis, not [expletive]
talk, he is probably the farthest advanced for transhumanism.
People have to understand in the
life, and when I say “life” I mean the next 10 years, of your audience, we’re
going to be facing a dilemma for yourself and your kids: Do you enhance
yourself? Do you enhance yourself either by genetic engineering? Do you enhance
yourself by advanced chip design plugged into you? Do you advance yourself by
artificial intelligence?
Elon is one of the top
accelerationists about driving this thing faster. Accelerating at an increasing
rate. You’re going to have to make a choice in your own life, not just
politically in society — your own life.
Do I do this? Am I a Luddite? Will I
get left behind? More important, will my children get left behind? Do my
children have a shot to really play sports at a Division I level? Or will my
kids have the ability to go to an Ivy League school unless I get them enhanced?
These questions, deep questions, never before handled in mankind’s history, are
going to happen in the next couple of years.
Douthat: But so let’s then take it back to politics. I don’t see
this critique that you’re offering, a kind of — we’ll call it a kind of
religious humanist critique of Silicon Valley, where A.I. is going, where maybe
digital augmentation is going — I don’t see this as expressed in any kind of
powerful way in the Trump White House.
Two weeks in, you know, making big
announcements with Sam Altman, right? Big announcements about investing in A.I.
One of the main reasons clearly from my conversation with Marc Andreessen that
part of Silicon Valley swung toward Trump was a fear of regulation on A.I. from
the Biden administration.
I completely agree with you that the
Obama era made this kind of broad-based deal with Silicon Valley. Different
people would describe it differently, but there was a deal. The Biden
administration reneged on the deal. They did antitrust stuff. They tried to
regulate all these things.
Bannon: Hang on. I’m going to disagree with you. The whole of
government and even the whole of society had a thing that they wanted a few
large entities of which they then could kind of control. And stop the
entrepreneurs. And that’s what I think Andreessen and the venture capitalists —
Douthat: Yeah. Andreessen obviously did not like that. But I mean,
even from your perspective, if A.I. is a threat to our humanity, and it’s going
to happen in some form, it’s going to happen in China in some form — wouldn’t
it be better to have the Biden approach of a kind of state capture of A.I. than
to have endless proliferating technology? Which form of A.I. do you as an A.I.
skeptic prefer? The Andreessen version or the Biden three big company version?
Bannon: Let me say if you have the beginning of the kinetic part of
the Third World War in the Eurasian landmass and you have —
Douthat: Meaning China versus Taiwan, just to put it in layman’s
terms. No?
Bannon: No, no. I mean, a million people killed in Ukraine or
wounded in Ukraine, the Middle East, I’m talking about that. And by the way,
China–
Douthat: We have already.
Bannon: I’m saying Trump has got to handle that. The problems are
on such a scale, and what he’s doing there is magnificent. Now when you talk
about the deeper issues we face, it’s a process.
When I first started, people that I
really admire were just like: Populism? What are you talking about? And: Don’t
say nationalism because that’s — nationalism doesn’t go to a good place. I
said: No, we’re populist nationalists.
So I’ve had long odds before. This
one is long odds. Now we’ve got the Sputnik moment: Can you let the Chinese
Communist Party get ahead of you? Can you let these bad actors get ahead of
you? And now we’re in a horrible national security dilemma.
And yes, President Trump, as he
always does — this is the way President Trump rolls. President Trump listens to
a lot of voices, and he will think it over, and then he’ll make a decision. And
clearly, the tech broligarchs have, because of their ability to get in there,
and I consider the Inauguration Day like they’re on display, like on the deck
of the battleship Missouri. And he’s MacArthur and they’re the Imperial
Japanese staff sending the surrender document. But they’re in there — they’re
inside the wire.
Douthat: Well, and there’s a difference. I think what you said about
Zuckerberg, though, is right. There’s a group of people in tech who decided to
support Trump the night that he won the 2024 election. That’s absolutely true.
And a lot of the guys who were there for the inauguration were, I think,
defeated generals paraded in a Roman triumph.
But Musk is not like that. A bunch
of the people around Musk are not like that.
Bannon: Yes. And I don’t think Andreessen is like that either.
Andreessen came over early.
Douthat: These are people who were already deeply alienated from —
Bannon: Hang on, Andreessen and Musk are smart enough to be able to
get below the surface on the numbers and see the direction of the country and
climb on board as the technofeudalists early on.
They are hard-core technofeudalists.
They’re not populist. I tease Elon all the time. If I could turn him from a
technofeudalist globalist to a populist nationalist, we could make some
progress here. He’s definitely a technofeudalist. One of the hardest-core
technofeudalists. And so is Andreessen.
With these guys you’re talking about
genius level intelligence. These are not dumb people. But they’re not with us
when it comes to the little guy.
Douthat: But their view is connected to the argument you just made —
which is that there’s a technological frontier. We are competing with China on
a technological frontier.
Andreessen did not make a populist
argument, but he made a nationalist argument. He said: Look, we want — and what
the Trump administration has promised us — is for America to win, for our
companies to win, for us to outcompete the Chinese and have what it takes to
keep America ahead of the curve. Which we are at the moment.
I agree that DeepSeek, the Chinese
A.I., raises a lot of questions about A.I. strategy —
Bannon: I don’t believe one [expletive] sentence of that. They don’t
believe that. They don’t believe in this country. They believe in this country
right now because it protects them and provides some benefits to them.
Remember, we bailed out these
[expletive] on Silicon Valley Bank. Biden bailed them out when they couldn’t
make payroll. They could make payroll if they put more of their own
money in, but they wouldn’t. They had the little guy bail them out in the
Silicon Valley Bank.
Now, in the last couple of days,
what are they talking about? Oh, my gosh, we need a Marshall Plan. We need a
space plan. We need a Mercury Plan. We need hundreds of billions of dollars
from taxpayers.
They want essentially a bailout. If
it’s a Sputnik moment, somebody’s got to ask the question: Yo, Andreessen! We
made a deal with you guys. Elon, we made a deal with you guys. We made you
oligarchs. We made you the richest people in the [expletive] history of the
Earth. We stopped any antitrust.
This is what pisses me off the most.
No antitrust, not breaking these companies up and allowing entrepreneurs to get
in there. Marc Andreessen doesn’t believe in the entrepreneurial system in the
country. No way!
Douthat: I don’t know. Just to defend prior guests on this program
as a matter of policy, I think there is a big difference between how the big
social media companies regarded themselves and how the venture capital world
regarded itself.
I’m not going to look into anybody’s
soul and think about whether they believe in America —
Bannon: Ross. Ross.
Douthat: But they do believe they believe in a different form of
competition than does Google, Facebook and so on. And I think that’s why
they’ve always been more sympathetic to the right.
Bannon: Hang on. I’m not saying Andreessen’s a bad guy at the heart
of it. But their America is an idea.
America’s not an idea! It’s not.
It’s a country with a border and a group of citizens that’s the greatest
resource we’ve ever had.
And the apartheid state of Silicon
Valley thinks we don’t need our greatest resource, which is the American
citizen. They’d rather import basically indentured servants to work for a third
less and have an apartheid state. And then as soon as they can replace them
with digital serfs, they will do it.
Douthat: All right. Let’s bring it back to policy and then to Trump
himself.
On policy — and again, I don’t think
any of this is happening — but what is the specific populist answer to the
oligarchs that you’re talking about? Is it that Trump should keep Lina Khan
around and do antitrust stuff? Is it taxation on these companies? Is it just
not spending money and not investing in A.I.? Is it regulations on A.I.?
If you could wave a magic wand and
have the Trump White House do what you want around this stuff, what would you
do?
Bannon: No. 1, I would be a huge supporter of Lina Khan remaining,
and I would love to see her given more power. I think we ought to go and break
up Silicon Valley, because obviously in their scale they haven’t performed very
well.
Let’s be brutally frank. If we’re to
believe the power of TikTok, which is self-evident, and if you believe the
nascent power of DeepSeek and other things that are being released right now —
we can’t be in a situation where the state underwrites and it gives the accumulation
of power. If the revolutionary generation came back, they would spit on the
floor.
And look, it’s complicated. There
are no easy solutions. I would like to have a quick investigation into exactly
how the intelligence community missed DeepSeek.
There’s so many questions. I realize
that people who are humanists are people who are religious and put their
religion at the center of their being, and they are going to be really on their
back foot now with all the forces of world power against you.
And you won’t be able to be a
Luddite. To be a Luddite and to want this to slow down or to be like the people
in “Fahrenheit 451,” who are out in the woods memorizing —
Douthat: They’re memorizing the great books.
Bannon: Right.
Douthat: Well, we’ll have podcasts, though.
Bannon: You don’t have that moment, because right now we have to
strike because you have to compete on a national security basis because this is
like Sputnik. It’s an arms race. We’re in a nuclear arms race.
And I would just tell people — and particularly
your readers, who do not agree with me politically on anything — if I can
beseech you for one thing, it’s that you must start to understand the moment
we’re in. This is an inflection point not just for this country, this is an
inflection point for the world.
And President Trump will always
listen to the entrepreneurs who have been very successful. It’s just his
default position. And I realize that this is going to be a complicated argument
to make. But we’re going to have to think this thing through collectively. This
is, this is a whole of society decision.
What I want is a public discussion
and debate over the biggest issues of the day, particularly the size and scope
of the federal government and how we spend money and where we spend it and who’s
taxed and who’s not taxed.
Also a discussion about what comes
after the postwar international rules-based order. I think President Trump
thinking through hemispheric defense from the Panama Canal to Greenland is
genius. It’s genius. And having been a naval officer, I will tell you, it has
so much logic to it.
There’s so much going on, but give
this guy a chance on the basic plan that he’s got for the safety and security
of this country, and with asking hard questions, etc., and let’s get into these
deep issues.
We’re in a real fix.
Douthat: So Trump himself — let’s try and wrap up there. Early in
our conversation, you said something about how populism is just like a cult of
personality around Trump — or that Trump has all the power. And obviously,
that’s not true in the sense that there really are big divides within the
Republican coalition, there are big divides within this administration.
What is true, though, is that
President Trump has a lot of power, a lot of personal power over what many
conservatives tend to think. He’s got a lot of trust built up, where people are
like: Well, you know, I don’t know exactly where to look, but I stand with
Trump.
He’s got that. And then he also is,
I think it’s fair to say, not an ideological guy. He’s a flexible guy who
listens to the last person in the room. And he’s a guy who has his own
incentives.
And you talked about TikTok, right?
Donald Trump had one position on TikTok before —
Bannon: Oh you’re so cynical.
Douthat: I hate to be cynical about our president. He had that
position on TikTok and now he has a different position on an issue that you say
is an example of effectively a Chinese Communist PSYOP infecting American life.
So to what extent is populism, in
all the forms you’ve described, just completely lashed to the personality and
character of Donald Trump? And to what extent is there a world beyond it? Is
there going to be a moment where populism needs a new leader and you’re back to
that cattle call in New Hampshire looking at different opportunities?
Bannon: Look, he’s a guy from Queens.
Douthat: I’ve heard that about him. Yep.
Bannon: President Trump, for people that don’t know him, and I know
for your audience that this is where they may opt out of the podcast —
Douthat: They’ve seen a lot of him. I think.
Bannon: But he’s actually an incredible, kindhearted, empathetic
individual. I kind of say he’s a moderate.
I’m a crazy right-wing populist
nationalist. President Trump balances everything. He’s a common-sense
conservative and a common-sense populist nationalist. In our movement, the core
base of MAGA is hard-welded to Donald Trump because they admire his moral
clarity.
I put him at the level of President
Washington and President Lincoln in this regard. This is the age of Trump. No
person in American history — and go read Jack Kennedy’s “Profiles in Courage.”
You can add up the whole book, and it doesn’t come close to Trump —
Douthat: I’m not a big fan of Jack Kennedy’s “Profiles in Courage,”
but I take your point.
Bannon: I should say Ted Sorensen’s “Profiles in Courage.”
Douthat: Yeah, Ted Sorenson’s “Profiles in Courage.” [Laughs.] But
go on.
Bannon: He came back knowing all that was going to happen. I call
him the American Cincinnatus to return.
They wanted him to die in federal
prison. I can tell you as a guy that went to prison — and not a camp — the
federal prisons are very tough places, particularly if you’re in your 70s.
They’re tough places. They’re just tough and dangerous. And then the physical
courage to come back and stand up and say: Fight, fight, fight! On the
assassination attempt made him both gladiator and leader.
And so our movement will go where
President Trump leads us. And I can disagree on policies and on the margin.
Like on taxes. And I really disagree on transhumanism. But at the end of the
day, if he says we’re going in this direction, I’m going to say: OK, I don’t
agree with this, and I don’t think it’s the right direction, but I’m all in.
Let’s roll.
Douthat: Wait, wait, wait — you’re all in for transhumanism if he
says that? If he’s like: Steve, get the chip in your brain. Let’s do it!
Bannon: Well, President Trump is a germaphobe. He’s not going to
get a chip in the brain. He’s a germaphobe. Shaking hands was a big deal. I don’t
think you’re going to get a chip in the brain.
Douthat: But so then what you’re saying —
Bannon: OK — he’s definitely not a transhumanist. It’s going to be
tough. I didn’t say these weren’t tough conversations. And we’re going to have
tough moments.
Like, for instance, the deportation
of all 12 million illegal aliens. I see already in the Republican Party, some
people suggesting that maybe we just get the criminals, maybe we just get the
bad ones —
Douthat: That’s basically my position. But —
Bannon: Did I tell you, Ross, at the beginning of this what
[expletive] the conservatives are? You [expletive].
Douthat: Yes, especially the ones who write columns for The New York
Times, Steve.
Bannon: You’re too much of a humanist. That’s your problem. You’re
too empathetic. [Laughs.]
Douthat: But so you’re — the vision that you have then in the next
four years — I guess we can talk about a future JD Vance presidency on another
show — but your vision of the next four years is, in effect, a battle for
Donald Trump, right?
Bannon: Yes.
Douthat: That’s what it comes down to? I wrote a column over the
weekend about the idea that this is court politics.
And in a way, I’m just trying to end
us on a pretty strong note here. You’re basically saying that the future of
Homo sapiens, the future of the human race itself, as we’ve known it for six
thousand or six million years, depending on your interpretation of creationism,
depends on people arguing and contending for the views and positions of Donald
Trump? Is that what you think right now?
Bannon: I think that’s correct. I think that the globalist elite
thought he was dead, and he’s been resurrected. He resurrected himself. And he
has a movement that has his back.
The fundamental questions about this
republic and the sovereignty of it and about the direction of humankind are all
going to play out in the next four or five years. It’s going to be the most
intense part, I think, of modern political and social history.
Convincing President Trump — and
he’s a guy that listens to the arguments and he’s got tremendous common sense —
it’s incumbent upon us to be able to make those arguments to him. But he’s got
his own decision-making process.
President Trump is a very imperfect
instrument. He’d be the first to tell you. As I am and you are and Tucker and
Elon and everybody. And in his imperfections is his true greatness. He
overcomes that to be one of the most unique leaders in world history.
And we’ll just have to see how it
plays out. But the populists and the far right war room — we’re going to be
fighting hard every day to make sure the voice of our element on the far right
of this movement is heard.
Douthat: Steve, thank you so much.
Bannon: Thank you so much. Appreciate you." [1]
