An important discussion on the deep state, how big business runs the government, how American involvement in Israel’s war with Iran would be the end of MAGA, the GOP as controlled opposition, opposition to deporting illegals as “neoconfederacy,” the continuing coverup of the CIA’s role in the Kennedy assassination. Touches on Jewish power—AIPAC, the Israel Lobby, and talk about the hate-America attitudes so common on the left, naming Julia Ioffe and Mark Levin (later they throw in Gavin Newsom). They both understand the reality of Jewish power but won’t be explicit about it. Mainstream conservatism inching toward the truth.
Tucker [00:00:00] Donald J. Trump gets elected in November on the back of this amazing coalition, unprecedented coalition, different parts of American society, you never thought of anything in common. Trump paints a picture that makes it really obvious that the old structure, left versus right, Democrat versus Republican, is basically BS and a control device, I think. This is my interpretation anyway. So he creates this brand new coalition. New York Times writes almost nothing about it because it’s such a massive threat. But this coalition, which you are… You described earlier and more precisely than anybody by far is the defining fact of American politics and it kind of feels like it’s being blown up over this war in Iran. That’s my observation.
Steve Bannon [00:00:47] I think if you look at the three planks, no forever, stop* the forever wars, seal the border and deport the illegal alien invaders and redo the commercial relationships in the world around trade deals and bring high value added manufacturing jobs back here. They’re trying to shut all three down, right? But the one that they’re obsessed with the most. Which I find strange, is the forever wars. They’ve got to be in the forever war, and particularly in the Middle East. I mean, this is what, and I’m a big supporter of Israel. And I’m telling people, hey, if we get sucked into this war, which inexorably looks like it’s going to happen on the combat side, it’s gonna not just blow up the coalition, it’s also going to thwart what we’re doing with the most important thing, which is the deportation of the illegal alien invaders that are here. If we don’t do that, we don’t have a country. And you just see right now… They’re doubling, tripling out. This is actually potentially a real civil war in our biggest cities, and President Trump has to have our backing. And this came out of nowhere. I mean, the trade deals that you saw, he put together the Liberation Day, but they’ve been thinking about it a long time. I mean Trump’s been talking about this since Lou Dobbs back in the 90s. He lays that out there. It’s very sophisticated. He’s got Scott Besant running around with Lutnick. They’re trying to make these deals. He sealed the border already in the first 60 days. Now we’re really going down and actually having the deportation, see the fight. And then out of nowhere comes a war with Persia. It’s like a shooting war with Persian, a massive shooting war of Persia, and it’s like, how did this happen? And that’s why I’ve been up as a defender of Israel, and someone that’s very pro-Israel. I’ve saying, hey, this is going to be the end of Israel because of the way these decisions have been made. And you have, I think, shockingly today early when we had you on the show. You bring up a point that we have to address, which I think it’s the thing itself. What is it about this apparatus? When you have a coalition that’s like 1932 that’s coming together, like Roosevelt had Harvard professors and crackers and exilocrats and ranchers out west and big city bosses and the Irish and the Italians, and he put it all together and they juggled it.
Tucker [00:02:59] Brooklyn, Butte, Montana, Birmingham, Alabama, and they’re all on the same side. Look, how does that happen?
Steve Bannon [00:03:04] And they govern literally almost all the way to Trump. You know, Reagan took out part of it, Newt Gingrich took out a part of, but it was 50, 60, 70 years. We have the same ability. We have hardscrabble Hispanics on the rear of Grand Valley to South Texas. We have tech bros. We have, you know, economic nationalists. We have economic populists. We have people that want to stop their forever wars. There’s three planks. And right at the beginning of it and it’s on the 10th anniversary of coming down the golden escalator. That was 10 years ago. Sunday and I tell people as many triumphs and tragedies victories and defeats good days and horrible days when we’re winning and sometimes We’re losing those ten years of everything that’s gone on it’s just the preamble for where we are today on the convergence of these crises and now all of a sudden a Shooting war where they’re taking the Nimitz battle group out of the South China Sea and sending three carrier battle groups Now to the North Arabian Sea Red Sea plus Arleigh Burke destroyers and a whole fleet in the Eastern Mediterranean. We’re prepping for a major shooting war. And how did it happen? I think what’s most shocking is what you said. Hey, it was like Iraq. You’re in exorbitantly just drawn and decisions kind of just happen. It’s like, what’s happened over the last 72 hours? How do we even get to this point? How did this actually happen? Who made these decisions when we had the intel out there that this was not like a thing? This was something that was going to happen a year or two from now. Bibi admitted to Bret Baier on Sunday night and so The question before us is not simply the Israel-Persia situation, is what the fuck is going on in this city that just drives this city, whether you’re Barack Obama or Donald Trump. And if we don’t sort it out now, and I mean right now, that’s what we have to have a throwdown. We have to name names, we have the expose it. If we don’t throw it out, throwdown now in the summer of 2025, we’re not gonna have a country. Forget the midterms, forget the next election still. So we have to have this. What the CIA… What happened in Ukraine, what the CIA has done, what DNI is doing, what the Justice Department, what it’s what the FBI, what DIA in the Pentagon, because right now we only have a tenuous grip on those. We have two people at FBI, Cash and Bongino. We’ve got a handful of people over at the Justice Department in a massive 30-some person or 15,000, 20,000 person operation. We have three or four people at DNI with 17 agencies. We’re putting a couple of people in there. At the Pentagon, we got Pete. And a handful of guys and every time a guy steps up or the team steps up to say they want to stop the forever wars, they’re turfed out. He’s lost 10 people since we’ve even got there. Every time Bridge Colby tries to do something, you know, Bridge Colbys on the front page of that he’s an appeaser. So my point is that now we’re getting down to it. With all these converging crises, we have a apparatus. That reports to Wall Street, to foreign investors, to Silicon Valley, in business with the Chinese Communist Party, that’s running the deal. And now’s the time we got, if we don’t lance the bull over this, this country, you’re not gonna, if you can’t turn around with Trump, the Trump team he has, people like you, myself, and they’re blessed to have these apparatuses. If we can’t do this now, it’s not gonna get done. And so that’s why, to me, it’s gone of everything we were doing, stopping the forever wars. Redoing the commercial relationship of trying to bring jobs back, and sealing the border, and sending home the deporting 10 million, which is gonna be massive, almost like a civil war in these big cities, of all of those, and I’ve always said the deportation is the most, to get our sovereignty back, the war we have to have now, the throwdown we have have to now is with the deep state, and we can’t… I think we’ve looked away too often. We just kind of kicking the can down the road, and if we can do it now with Trump, It’s not going to get done.
Tucker [00:06:55] It does feel like Fox News is playing, and I never criticized Fox because they were so kind to me, but they are playing like a central role in the propaganda operation here, it feels like.
Steve Bannon [00:07:11] It’s the…let’s go back to the Iraq War. I mean, you were there, you saw it. Look at the Iraq war. I promoted the Iraq war. Because of the information you were given, knowingly what they did, if you go back to look at Iraq, it’s not like these things are successful. They’re not successful. They’re unsuccessful. They can’t be successful because, as Lincoln told us, what you need is popular opinion to have your back. And we don’t do enough about educating the American people on what reality is. In fact, they give them the exact opposite. That’s why it’s all, that’s why. This is…the rise of Trump is from two things. The rise of the Trump is the failed Iraq war and from the 2008 financial collapse. You had Buchanan before that. We had Perot before that, we had even Reagan from some populism national. You had these sprouts…you could see people were trying to get there, but they couldn’t. It was those two cataclysmic events, right? . An epic failed war. That we were lied to about everything, the reason we went in. Because remember, first the American people supported it, given the information they were given. Then later, they realized that, hey, not just was the initial predicate for this a lie, all the updates were kind of a lie. All the updates are a lie we really weren’t winning. Until we sent General Kelly to the Anbar province to be the toughest tribe, it was, and it took forever, and what, 8,000 dead, 50,000 wounded? Nine trillion dollars, two trillion, or seven trillion in Iraq and two trillion in Afghanistan. You’re just lied about the entire time. That’s what’s happening here. We’re not being dealt with straight. And I’m just saying on the information that’s put out, the Israeli position on this has changed three or four times. First it was the nuclear bomb, the processing, there was going to be something like last weekend. You had to go now. You had go on Thursday night. It had to happen. Right. And then we find out it’s a year away at earliest. And then it’s a decapitation strike. Then they’re trying to have regime change. That just kind of came up over the weekend and saying, oh, well, since they’re there, we’re there. We have to do it. Understand, they said, this is unilateral. We’re doing our own. But understanding that they needed American air assets on the defense to protect themselves. And this is why the early Burke were rushed in. And this was why American air defense assets have been used nonstop. Now they’re talking about, oh by the way, we really can’t take out Fordow. We can’t take out the. The hidden mountainous, second part of this, we need American combat sorties. We need American tankers to refuel us. We need the bunker busting bombs and we need assets. This thing changes all the time. When Tulsi Gavrid is still out there, as the last thing publicly said by a senior intelligence official, she said in March, they don’t have a program. They haven’t had a program, and Brett Baier asked, that’s what Brett Baier asked asked Bibi on Sunday night, and Bibi said, well, we have new information, new intelligence. Well, hold it. We were told that we gave you exquisite intelligence. You weren’t giving us intelligence. We have to have a total vetting. And by the way, we need to get a vetting on Ukraine. We need to vet [whether] American intelligence was involved because it’s a zero probability that without our satellites, without targeting the information, without fire control information, There’s no chance that the Ukrainians, as courageous as they are… As much valor as they have could have pulled out something so complicated. And so this is right now the fight. The fight has to be we have to take on the deep state, we have name names, and we have to basically take these organizations and take them apart. And then you’re going to unmask everybody in D.C. that’s not really on your side. You’re going to unmask all those people that say they’re conservative and say they are Republicans. When they start protecting this, you’re gonna say, well, hang on for a second. This doesn’t mean we’re a constitutional republic. Trump’s commander-in-chief, this is what a constitutional republic is about. I don’t care if AOC is the president later on or Bernie Sanders or JD Vance, another right-winger. Right now, we have a system that’s like the Pretorian Guard. It’s got its own national security policy. It’s got its own reason for existence. And it doesn’t care who, whether it’s progressive like Barack Obama or an economic populist nationalist like Donald Trump. And so that is the fight we have to take on today.
Tucker [00:11:19] There’s this mad scramble in Washington on the right to invoke Trump’s name and to make the case that, no, no. I represent Trump. He’s on my side. I’m true MAGA. And you wind up with these kind of hallucinogenic scenes where you have people who hated Trump or were never Trump. Mark Levin, you know, hates Trump, which is fine, but he’s like the standard bearer. What makes it even more perverse is that these same people are allied with a deep state that is subverting Trump’s stated agenda, which is negotiation toward peace, both in Ukraine And in the Middle East, Trump has said, we want to get to an agreement with a lasting peace so we can all be richer, safer, and happier. And in both places, his so-called allies who secretly hate him have destroyed that.
Steve Bannon [00:12:08] And most of those guys are almost all of them to a person for the Ukraine War. People in your audience should understand one principal thing. We are farther down the pike in a kinetic part of a Third World War than how World War II started. If you go back from September 1939, the invasion, the start of the European War, not the Asian, but if you start with the invasion of Poland by the Germans, and you go to June of 1941. The invasion of Russia by the Wehrmacht. And you look at that time, which really they called the phony war. You look at the casualties from the Battle of Britain, the Blitz, the fall of France. You look what happened in North Africa early on. Finland, throwing 300,000 Finland. You add it all up. It’s not half of what’s happened between Ukraine and Gaza today and now in Persia. We are much bloodier. This is a much, we’re in a shooting part of the Third World War. The Third World War is not about to start. It has started. And that’s what Trump is saying. What he wants to do is have everybody lay their guns down. Let’s get to the table and figure out a tenuous at least certain, you know, subtle piece that we then use capital and trade and commerce and try to rebuild these countries. And let’s get people back to work and maybe tamp this thing down. Whereas the apparatus is exacerbating the conflict part of it. That’s where we are right now in the summer of 2025. And that this thing is gonna be in the next 200 days, the next two hundred days are some of the most perilous times for the American Republic in its history. Because if we don’t get this sorted, we’re going to be drawn in totally into a conflict as a combatant, as not a supplier of logistics or as an actual combatant or participant. In the situation in Ukraine, what they did in Russia, in the situation of what Israel is right now doing to the Mullahs, as bad as they are and as evil as they are, right? We’re going to get sucked into a shooting war. Of which it’ll be 10 years and the casualties will dwarf anything you saw in World War II.
Tucker [00:14:08] One of the lessons that we never talk about formal war, too, since you evoked the comparison is that the second the shooting war started in Great Britain and the United States, opponents to war went to jail. And Winston Churchill’s entire political opposition went to jail with their wives, with their wives for the duration of the war, and some of them died. That’s been completely…that’s just a fact, and you can call those people whatever you want, and they may have been terrible people, whatever, but they were his political opponents, and he put them in jail. And Roosevelt did, you know, sick the federal government on opponents of the war. So if Lincoln Lincoln did the same and Lincoln did the same that’s exactly right and I love Lincoln.
Steve Bannon [00:14:46] In the Revolutionary War, which not a lot of the same thing happened. That’s called war. This is what happened.
Tucker [00:14:50] Exactly. And opponents of war are invariably described as allies of the enemy, and they’re persecuted. Do you worry about that happening to you? You just said on camera, I don’t want this war, but we’re moving toward a third world war.
Steve Bannon [00:15:06] Well, I saw a po- look.
Tucker [00:15:07] Are you worried about going back to?
Steve Bannon [00:15:08] I went to prison on a misdemeanor, but it was kind of one of the same things. I wouldn’t testify, I wouldn’t turn…because I said this committee is not legitimate, doesn’t have a ranking member, doesn’ have a minority council, is totally illegitimate, plus he’s got executive privilege. That’s good enough for me. And if I have to fight this and I think it’s gonna go to the Supreme Court, although I’ve served my prison sentence, I’m taking it up to the supreme court because I had a pretty good ruling, not terrible, from the appeals court. A couple of the judges are making arguments about why I should take it further. It’s definitely gonna happen. Look what’s happening to you. I mean, I’ve known you for a long time, and I sit there and I look at what they’re saying about Tucker, I said, what is Tucker saying so bad? He’s kind of laying out these arguments that ought to be debated right now in the halls. Are you a brain moderate? Tom Cotton’s coming out and saying, all these influence and podcasters aren’t, well, let’s have a debate. When we had a debate about the Ukraine, about the funding of Ukraine in the Senate, we beat them. This is why Mitch McConnell had to resign. We, because why? Because the podcaster and influencers are much closer to the MAGA base and can deliver the heat into the House and the Senate. And they know that. I’m all for having a War Powers Act debate right now. Exactly. Let’s have the American people weigh in because you’re gonna see the American people are 90% against forever wars. Even people that support Israel are saying exactly what we’re doing here We thought we had this thing in Gaza. You had to clean up with the Muslim Brotherhood in Hamas next thing You know, we’re dropping we’re bombing that we’re bomb in Tehran and you’re taking income is what’s happened in Tel Aviv over the last 24 hours is pretty shocking because you’re taken these ballistic missiles. What’s Trump’s been saying? Everybody calm down. Let’s get back to the table. I can get actual thing He said I can gather we can take it apart We can blow it up if we want to but I can cut a deal and Witkoff and Trump If you’ve got to talk about two deal makers that are not like diplomats, but guys actually going to get stuff done, I feel more confidence with Steve Witkoff and Donald Trump trying to work something out than continue on the shooting war where, trust me, with a carrier battle group heading over there and all these tankers heading over to the Middle East, we are prepping right now to come in on the offensive side of combat sorties. And that’s a game changer. As bad as it is now that we’re combatant, because we are combatant. Which I say, if they’re unilateral, why do we get sucked in here? Where is that decision? Where you said, hey Steve, decisions just get made, you never know how they get made.
Tucker [00:17:32] They’re organic. There’s never a moment where we stop and we say, do we want to be involved in another Middle Eastern war? You just wind up there. Just like everything in life. You’re just like, how did I get here?
Steve Bannon [00:17:41] But I think that’s why they’re attacking you, because you’re saying hang on a second. Let’s have a national discussion on this right now before we get in, and they don’t want that.
Tucker [00:17:48] But why the viciousness, not toward me, I mean, I’m kind of punched out of society, but like, why is it this topic evokes a cruelty and a dishonesty that no other topic does?
Steve Bannon [00:18:01] There’s never been question out in the open. We’ve never had this debate that you’ve kind of led for the last couple of months and now we’re actually having this debate. They’ve never had people in government like Tulsi Gabbard, like Bridge Colby, like others. And look, I don’t think Bridge is hard enough in the Chinese Communist Party, but his book was amazing and he’s got the pivot to Asia, which we have to get to. If people want to see. How the institutions and apparatuses work, and this is why the Democrats are all institutionalists now, We’re the anti-institutional guys because you see how corrupt they are. You need not look further than CENTCOM. One of the problems we have is that Obama tried it. Obama put his whole presidency on the Nationalist Chinese?? side. We’re going to pivot out of Asia. We’re gonna pivot out Middle East to Asia, the pivot to Asia. Put Joe Biden in charge. After eight years, he had one combat brigade of Marines forward deployed to Darwin, Australia. That was it. No other changes. No other change. Hey.
Tucker [00:19:04] On our… I supported that. That was like the… I despise Obama. I think he wrecked the country. But I don’t think that’s a…that was not a crazy idea to pivot.
Steve Bannon [00:19:12] We’re having this debate. I had Flynn on today after you. We’re have the same debate today. Remember, the carrier battle group that’s over protecting Taiwan in the South China Sea is now en route to the Malacca Straits. The Nimitz battle group is going to the North Arabian.
Tucker [00:19:27] So you’re a former naval officer, give us a sense of the decision-making process that leads to…
Steve Bannon [00:19:33] Well, here’s what, on November, what, 5th of 79, I’m a destroyer officer, navigator on a destroyor in a carrier battle group. We’re doing the changeover from San Diego from, we’re home point. The third fleet to the seventh fleet all takes place in Hawaii, the Hawaiian operator. You do like three or four days of work up because they have a certain different lingo and a different tempo, so you’ve got to get to how they do it. We get called in in the middle of night on the red phone, everybody line up single file and head into Pearl Harbor. We’re pro harbor. As a sea detail is almost impossible to do because it’s so narrow, right? And Honolulu’s up there, so it’s not like World War II. It’s very dangerous. We go in there, we hear the hostages have been taken, and now all of our assets in Korea in the South China Sea and in Japan are heading towards the North Arabian Sea, which the United States Navy had never been at. We had a couple of white painted destroyers in Bahrain, but we were not used to that. So they go we follow a carrier all the way to Korea because you had to be we were a gas turbine. We’re the only ones who could keep over the carrier. 35 knots for like two weeks. Damn. We destroyed the ship. We’ve destroyed the sonar dome. Because you go through a typhoon, you go to some heavy weather. Because we had a treaty at the time with Korea, we would keep a carrier battle group within a 24-hour strike of North Korea. So we have to get there. Once we get there, they peel us off. Us and our squadron of ships, the famous destroyer squadron early births of little beavers, we go to the North Arabian Sea. Why they’re working up for, and that is like a, I tell people, if you haven’t been off the coast of Iran, or Persia as I call it, it’s like the landscape of the moon. This is the most inhospitable place on Earth. The whole, you’ve been, the Straits of Hormuz, the Persian Gulf, the North Arabian Sea, and our carrier battle group stayed. We rotated out after about four months. People stayed and eventually, a couple months later, actually did the failed rest car. We practice every day. You could see every day, they had the lift capacity, the helicopters were practicing. We were actually going to do plain guard against potential Russian fighters in the Persian Gulf, put the radars up, because nobody knew what was going to happen. It was a failed effort. But I tell people, and it turns out the Nimitz is now about to be decommissioned. This may be their last cruise. They were there 50 years ago, is the first time they really got commissioned. And their first assignment was in Gonzo and Camel Station in the North Arabian Sea. These are big decisions the Pentagon makes when they, particularly today, when they decide to take a carrier battle group, strike group, away from the South China Sea in the defense of Taiwan, given how on pins and needles we are there because the Chinese Communist Party are not doing exercises, they’re doing rehearsals for an invasion. To take that out and to take it to the North Arabian Sea is signaling the world that we’re about to do something. And that’s what’s so scary right now. And when you get to your theory. That these decisions you’re just getting inexorably drawn in. Now we have all of our basically air assets that are ready to launch combat sorties on Tehran and whatever else happens, they’re in place. So it just takes, it’s not like you make a decision while it takes us a week to get there. They’re in-place, the tankers are over there. We can do in-tank refueling. So I think in the next 24 to 48 hours, a decision could be made. And that’s why I’m getting more and more vocal, So, not less vocal, that. We need to go full stop right now. We need find out, because there’s too many moving pieces. And moving pieces about exactly what’s going on, what’s the risk. We haven’t had a full debate about this. And I would like to see some voices come forward. I’d like to Tulsi Gabbard come forward and tell us, has anything changed in DNI, which is 17 agencies, including the CIA for this, has anything change from what you told the public at a hearing in March? If it’s changed, let’s just hear it. I would like to have John Ratcliffe go to the sticks, and I think Ratcliff’s a good man. John Ratcliff should go to sticks and say two things. Number one, we had no involvement at all in the Ukraine assault under Russia. Just say it, because he’s kind of been in hiding in that, and then he ought to be open to questions. He’s never criticized.
Tucker [00:23:38] No one ever criticizes John Radcliffe.
Steve Bannon [00:23:40] Well, the reason I think they’re not criticizing John Ratcliffe, and John Ratclyffe’s a good man, but you have to remember John Ratliff was a mayor of a small town in Texas that went to Congress, did a great job. President Trump likes him a lot. He’s got Mike Ellis over there, but they’re two guys, right? We don’t have 10 political appointees, which we should have. If we got two guys running that building.
Tucker [00:24:02] That’s the way the agency’s structured. There’s no civilian control of the DIA.
Steve Bannon [00:24:05] Well, you know better than anybody, but it runs the way it’s going to run. I mean, we sent Pompeo over there as well.
Tucker [00:24:13] It’s an army. It’s a business. It’s government agency. It’s country. It’s literally a venture capital firm and its budget is unknown. Its reach is… And we have no idea what they’re doing. Because the majority of things that they do are not, you know, U.S. Government employees Even the door kickers. No, it’s they’re working through some exile group. They’ve been funding for 30 years.
Steve Bannon [00:24:36] They will also look you right in the eye and lie to you. Because that’s the wilderness of mirrors, right?
Tucker [00:24:43] It’s… Look, look. And they’re smart. Somebody said to me the other day, someone knowledgeable said, the problem with the U.S. Government is like, why can’t we do this or that? And like, if you wanted light rail, you know we couldn’t do it. And this person said, because all the smartest people in government are at CIA.
Steve Bannon [00:24:57] They also, with the inter-agency process, they control the entire process. This is why downsizing NSC was so important. When you have this, we had these detailees that come from all the different departments because NSC should have 30 people, but it had 250. There are 60 political appointees, right? And there’s 280 come from different agencies to do all the different paperwork. They have the interagency process. The CIA controls that process. They control the process of the Pentagon. They control of the DHS. Yep. They control over the Justice Department. They are embedded deep because they’ve been around, you know, they’ve been around so long and they know how to embed deep, right, with the smartest people out there. And so if you don’t get control of that, you’re not going to get control. They’re like a Peturian Guard right now. We have to, we have to lance this. This is like the Roman, late stage of the Roman Empire, when the Pretorian Guard kind of ran the deal and they would put forward every legionary captain that they thought was going to be good for a time. And they are planning right now to thwart President Trump’s a second term, make sure they wait him out, and they’re gonna have a hand-selected person for the third term. And I don’t say this as a conspiracy theory guy. This is just basic facts.
Tucker [00:26:04] Totally true. They’re so clever that if you criticize them, they will leak to people that you work for I happen to know. Which is kind of brilliant. If you’re an effective critic of CIA, Joe Kent, I’ve lived this personally, but also Joe Kent is just a wonderful man, a totally sincere man, former CIA contractor, lost his wife in Syria in Obama’s Syria war, and became an opponent of the way things are running. And they, see I played in his primary. And the way they did it was by convincing Republican primary voters that Joe Kent, who’s the single most effective critic of CIA in the United States, was actually working for I mean, like, wow. I tip my non-existent hat in deference to the brilliance of that.
Steve Bannon [00:26:49] This is how brilliant they are. You notice from President Trump the arc that he went through on Friday. You know something’s up when David Ignatius at the Washington Post, which we call the Langley bugle, he’s ahead of the comms. Oh, I’m aware. When Ignatian comes out on Morning Joe and says, Trump is doing such a really magnificent job here, he’s acting like your commander-in-chief, that should be the red flare that goes up and goes, what the fuck? No! So, I mean- It’s two friends-
Tucker [00:27:16] why don’t I have a TV? Because it’s too frustrating to watch. Like, I don’t know a single person who doesn’t like David Ignatius personally, and that would include me, and he’s just such a courtly man. He’s like the Murdochs. He can’t dislike him. He just got elaborate, wonderful manners. He was very nice. But like, he is the spokesman for CIA. And you wonder… The Washington Post is the Langley… It’s unbelievable. …The Langley Bugle. When Louis Joyland West, who was one of the last visitors to Jack Ruby in his before he went insane, was a CIA physician and deeply involved in a lot of really dark, some of the darkest things we’ve ever done. When he died, I went and looked up the Walter Pincus obit from the Washington Post. Walter Pinckes was the CIA. I think Walter Pinces wrote it. And there was no mention in the Washington Post obit that Jolly West worked for CIA. And I just look, oh, my God, this is like… But you wonder, like, do people watching Morning Joe have any idea who these people are?
Steve Bannon [00:28:11] That freaks me out. You know, there’s a great story, you talked about the Kennedy thing today, there is a great story in the book, the guy just came out about the the Kennedy assassination and the House and Senate committees, the Church committee, the biography of the Church Committee came out about a year or two years ago. He talks about when his first forum, Frank Church was going to be one thing, but they got Gary Hart in there who had just been elected. Mike Mansfield, the old head of the, you know, really a guy who knew how to run things, right? Mansfield from Montana, picked both of them. Church to head the committee, but Gary Hart was gonna be assigned to the CIA to find out what went on. So Hart’s seeing Colby and seeing some of the former directors, and they tell him and say, hey, the guy you really gotta see, all of them tell him, say, nice to have dinner, you gotta see Angleton. Angleton runs the deal, and he was the counterterrorism, counter-intell, yeah. Legendary guy, there forever. He goes to, I think, the Metropolitan Club for dinner. And Angleton would take a drink. And Gary Hart’s sitting there kind of working him. And so towards the end of the evening, he can’t get up enough courage to ask, like, the question. So finally, he says, you know, it’s about over, I got to do this, he said, look, Mr. Angleton, I just got a question from the committee. We need to know, did the CIA have anything to do with the Kennedy assassination?
Tucker [00:29:29] He has to Angleton that?
Steve Bannon [00:29:30] Ask Angleton. It’s in the book. Call it. Angleton takes another drink, puts it down and goes, Senator Hart, you were a theology major, were you not? He goes, yes. As a matter of fact, I was a theology major, so you know the New and Old Testament pretty well. He goes well enough. He goes in my father’s house, there are many mansions. Kerry Hart goes, what the fuck, didn’t ask another question. Went back to church in Mansfield, Mansfield goes, okay, shut it down. He goes, no, this is why they came out to see, remember, they had tried to kill guys in the Congo, they even had the cigar in Castro, nothing about the domestic stuff at all. That all got shut down immediately, and they figured, oh, there’s a Lumumba in a.
Tucker [00:30:16] Patrice, the London Congo.
Steve Bannon [00:30:17] In Congo, and they had tried to kill or killed three or four other guys, maybe Deg, Hamasher, who knows.
Tucker [00:30:23] But they definitely deck.
Steve Bannon [00:30:24] They’ve got into all these things that the American people are interested in why are you killing foreign leaders? But they didn’t get to the heart of many mansions. Very hard. Is that I I’m not going any farther on this one, right?
Tucker [00:30:33] And within 10 years, Frank Church is dead of galloping cancer, and Gary Hart is totally destroyed in 1988 through the…
Steve Bannon [00:30:41] The leading presidential candidate at the time. Oh, yeah. With a picture. Get lured onto the monkey business. And then his house, the first time they ever surrounded his house. Oh, I remember.
Tucker [00:30:51] You never forget it at all. And boy, and the Washington Post led the charge. And I’m not for Gary Hart or whatever, but he, by today’s standards… You’re awesome though. Oh. There’s going to be payback. It’s literally unbelievable. But you can’t… How do you have a real country in the middle of that?
Steve Bannon [00:31:06] I don’t understand. Well, you can’t. I think you make the point. Since 1963, we’ve devolved. And that’s why I’m not kidding. As Elon was the special government employee to do Doge to try to get waste, fraud, and abuse, I think because we’re at war now, and the war we’re in is an internal war. It’s an internal with this apparatus that we finally have a leader that will have the back of people that will go in because he wants it taken down. I think he’s getting terrible advice around that. Someone like you not to organize it, but who knows the history of these institutions and quite frankly, where the bodies are buried, have to come in as a special government employee to help get the people on they’re going to organize. We have to go to war against the deep state now. If we don’t go to work the deep-state immediately and have a couple of wins that we can point to and some momentum and put them on their back leg, their back foot in the next 200 days, nothing in America is going to change.
Tucker [00:32:02] And we should be clear about who’s serving its interest. Tom Cotton, who’s the chairman of the Senate Intel Committee, the select committee on intelligence, was one of the primary drivers of secrecy around the Kennedy files. So Tom Cotton I think was born in the 80s. And I like Tom Cotton a lot. I know him. I know his wife who worked at CI, super nice people. But when it came down to it, when Trump gets elected and gets inaugurated in January, Tom Cotton’s… He’s denied this, but he’s lying because it’s true. I know for a fact. Tom Cotton’s running around being like, well, whatever we do, we can’t put people in place, we’re gonna declassify all the Kennedy assassination files. Sixty-two years later, I think Tom Cotton was born in the 80s. Why would he care? It’s not a sources and methods thing anymore. Yeah, what is that? Why would Tom Cotton be so concerned about releasing the Kennedy documents that he’s trying to prevent people from getting jobs on the basis of his belief that they might reveal those documents? What is that? Because that’s disqualifying, he shouldn’t be in the Senate, of course.
Steve Bannon [00:33:01] The Senate, of course. Because he knows that that is the key that can pick the lock. That something happened in 1963. We had a coup d’etat. The country’s never faced up to it. The country understands that like 80 percent something’s dead wrong. They understood at the time the Warren Commission was gun decked. You go back and read this new book even by a New York Times writer, you see what a joke it was, how the FBI stepped in immediately. Jerry Ford was their guy. It was a complete joke. But who is-
Tucker [00:33:27] He’s a made president with
Steve Bannon [00:33:28] Made president with that election. I’m just saying there are no coincidences Jerry Ford of the Warren Commission
Tucker [00:33:34] becomes president without an election. And you’re like.
Steve Bannon [00:33:39] I read the testimony of the Warren Commission. In the Warren commission, in the depository where the gunman sat, right next to him, the guy, I think his name was Willie Davis, he was a worker, of the black guys were up on the top deck pointing afterwards when the shot took place. He was going to go join those guys. He actually sat there and had his lunch right next to where the assassin was. Now, you know, assassins and CIA and Navy SEALs, I mean, their heart’s beating out of their chest before that happens, because they understand it may be the last time they take a breath on Earth is when they fire. So they are really ready to meet their maker, and they’re highly focused. The last thing they’re gonna do on Earth is get that target. That is just these cartons just suppressing by a few feet. This guy’s giving testimony, and it’s unbelievably, they go, well, you were there? Yes, what were you doing? He says, I was eating a. A chicken sandwich, a bag of Fritos, and a Coke. And they’re going, you’re right next to them, and everything’s going, and you’re hanging on the edge of it. And then all of a sudden, Jerry Ford steps in and goes, excuse me, I have a question. Do you have a criminal record? And the guy goes, Excuse me? He goes, Do you ever criminal record. And the guys goes, Well, I was picked up. No, no, no. You’re a felon, right? And the whole conversation drops. I go, Oh, my God, we’re literally at the moment. In literally five, ten minutes before the shot takes place, we have a witness that’s there and you got to ask him, did you hear anything? Did you see anything?
Steve Bannon [00:35:10] And Jerry Ford told us, and as you mentioned with Angleton and the guys a few years later out of nowhere on Watergate, another operation they were deeply involved in, right? He’s made Vice President of the United States.
Tucker [00:35:26] Because the president’s most popular president in American history is undone by a naval intel officer posing as a journalist from the Washington Post. So you wonder, like, a lot of this is taking place in private, and it’s one of the great frustrations as an American is you don’t know what your government’s doing and you have no way to find out. Even when it’s done 60 years ago, you don’t know. But some of it’s taking place totally in public, the Tom Cotton stuff. And it grieves me to say this because I like Tom, and I think he’s smart, really Mark, actually, and a good guy in a lot of ways. But he’s acting on behalf of CIA, not on behalf of the people of Arkansas, obviously. But then there’s Lindsey Graham, who’s like, florid, out in public. Like, there’s no kind of hiding who Lindsey Graham is, and how does… What is that?
Steve Bannon [00:36:09] Ukraine thing, he and Pompeo, how the weekend before the drone assault takes place. He’s in Ukraine saying something’s going to happen. He’s is in France. I mean, if you talk to people over there, it’s like he had inside baseball. He was all jacked up, then good things are going to happened. Pompeo’s in like Odessa giving a talk. I mean what is Mike Pompeo? There’s a middle of a war over there. We’re trying to extract ourselves. What does Mike Pompea in Odessa given some, you know, a rally speech essentially pump these guys up and he’s talking about. Certain things that could happen, or certain positive things that hang in there on this Exactly what President Trump’s counter to. President Trump is trying to have everybody lay down their guns, and let’s, because right now the British papers are reporting there’s a million Russians dead or wounded. There’s 750,000 Ukrainians dead or wounded. I mean, this has been devastating, like World War I type of casualties. President Trump has said they’re going, we need to put the guns down. I need to get people at the table. We need to talk. We’ll even buy your dirt. We’ll buy your rare earths. We’ll put money in, which we oppose, but if President Trump thinks he needs that for a peace deal, we’ll support him. What is Mike Pompeo and Odessa jacking these people up? What is Lindsey Graham over there jacking people up about? These questions have to be asked. We have to ask what part of our government is going against the Commander in Chief and what the Commander of Chief is trying to do. Is it legal for Lindsey to do that? Well, there’s Logan Act. Well, yeah. I called for his arrest or cancel his passport. Do two things. See, don’t lean back in the country. Or arresting, and I’m adamant about this in Pompeo also, because I think there are arguments around the Logan Act that they’re over there countering what the commander in chief’s trying to do, and I think-
Tucker [00:37:46] And I think… And they have security clearances too, which I don’t have, and you don’t, I assume, a security clearance. Not anymore. But why does… I don’t want one right now. No, I don’t either. Because you said… Don’t blame me. But why is Lindsey Graham and why is Mike Pompeo…
Steve Bannon [00:38:03] Have a security clearance. Well, I think you got to ask Mike, because I’m very disappointed in him. I knew him for years. Me too. The guy I know today, the guy I see today is not the guy you knew. And I think people have to… I think they ought to come on when they come on TV, is they ought have the, like, NASCAR drivers, like who’s on the… Whose payroll are they on? Exactly. The American people are… At least ought to be in a Chiron, who they’re taking money from. This is Roku.
Tucker [00:38:27] Well, what’s the deal with Lindsay? Well, let me just say I’ve known Lindsay for 25 years and it’s impossible not to like Lindsey Graham. He’s one of the most charming, funny. He’s just a wonderful person to travel with. He’s the most charm person in the world. I’ll just say that because it’s just true. I like him. If he was here, I would be having fun with Lindsey Graham, but his effect on the United States is so destructive, I don’t understand what that is. What is his motive? You know him well, of course, because you’re…
Steve Bannon [00:38:54] Well, I know, look, I think, number one, he’s very involved in the Pentagon, on our services committee, the Pentagon. The building runs like the building’s gonna run. I mean, it’s a trillion dollar… Why, when President Trump says, we’re gonna go to a hemispheric defense, from Greenland to block the Russian submarines, to Alaska, maybe Canada for the Arctic, because that’s the new great game of the 21st century, to the Panama Canal, because they’re gonna block the Chinese and Russian neighbors and get the Chinese out of the Caribbean, We’ll deal with Venezuela. We’ll have the Central Pacific, which has always been kind of our strategic pivot, the three island chains, and America’s hermetically sealed. You add a golden dome or some sort of ballistic missile. America can live in peace and we can do- It’s been the greatest. And we can expeditionary, not that we’re not engaged in the world, you can do expeditionary forces anywhere you want in the-
Tucker [00:39:41] You can’t put Chinese infrastructure in St. Croix, which they have a lot of, in St Croix which we control. Exactly. So you can’t let the Chinese control your hemisphere. That seems reasonable. And they’ll say to us, okay, get out of Japan, at which point you say, okay. I mean, that seems like logical.
Steve Bannon [00:39:56] This budget is not a trillion dollars going up, right, because right now it’s over a trillion If you add the supplement that’s coming in, the reconciliation bill with the NDAA, you’re over a billion dollars and it’s only going to keep increasing. This is the way the defense contractors make money. They embedded it over there. They kind of run the building right now. You don’t see any pushback by armed services. In fact, every district’s got huge plants, as you know, our industrial policy that we do have. It’s really around arms manufacturing, right? And it’s a high margin business, and we want to sell weapons to the entire world. It’s that system that’s run in the country. Remember, the difference between President Trump’s first term and his second term is what happened under Biden is a massive concentration of power because they didn’t back Lena Kahn or the antitrust people like we have now in President Trump administration, like Gail Slater and what’s happening to the FTC under Andrew Ferguson, taking big tech to court and trying to break them up. Right now! Wall Street, you have big tech, you have big agriculture, you have big pharma, you had the big healthcare industry, you have the defense contractors, you have the concentration of these massive industries that have every lobbyist, every communications expert, all the big law firms on their payroll. If you and I wanted to start today and say, hey, guess what? We want to take on one of the Let’s take on Big Ag. You literally can’t get a great law firm to represent you or a great lobbyist because they’re all hired. By these guys. That con…
Tucker [00:41:25] And they’ll set up regulatory hurdles that are insurmountable. This is the regulatory capital. I’m living that in something that we’re doing on the side. And you just find out that it’s crazy.
Steve Bannon [00:41:37] That concentration of power, regulatory capture and really regulatory merger. We said when we gave China everything after Tiananmen Square, when we game most favorite nation status and WTO and access that the more they get prosperous because they were a backward agricultural country at the time, the more prosperous they get, the more they’ll become like a liberal democracy like the United States. We actually have copied the model of the Chinese Communist Party. They have a handful of state-owned industries, very powerful, merged in. With the central government, an authoritarian government. That’s what we have, and that’s what President Trump, the promise of President Trump is to break that. The American people don’t want it, they hate it. Now, they need the tools to do it, and that why I think this next couple hundred days coming after the 10th anniversary of really President Trump. Because what happened? At the top of the escalator, Trump was in seventh place. Because people didn’t know if he was serious about running or not. He had just gone to CPAC, I think, 90 days before. In the 2015 CPAC. Trump finished seventh in the poll at three and a half percent.
Tucker [00:42:40] I remember.
Steve Bannon [00:42:40] Behind all these guys. At the top of the escalator, he’s in seventh. That night, they do a flash poll, I think, on CNN. He’s first. Why? That talk was in a nomenclature and a vernacular that American people hadn’t heard from a politician about the border, about deportations, about China, about bringing jobs back, about ending the forever wars. Remember, as the campaign went on, he goes to South Carolina. I’ll never forget it. South Carolina. He literally blew up. The entire Bush apparatus, kind of Fox and kind of everybody on the right that had been in there. And when he said it, you could hear the audience gasp and so many commentators came on and said, well, that’s the end of him because…
Tucker [00:43:21] Said that except me because I was the only one at Fox News who I knew I was like yes thank you for telling the truth finally but everybody around you was that he’s finished they hated me for agreeing with them hated me person anyone in a landslide Karl Rove never who was my neighbor and always got along with him again perfectly charming guy sort of very not a good person at all but but smart and you know Carl but after that That was the moment I realized was in that Greenville, South County debate that all that mattered to them was a projection of force abroad. That’s it. Everything else was just…
Steve Bannon [00:43:57] Because they were so shocked he said it and united the fact that he can’t win.
Tucker [00:44:01] That’s when Bill Kristol turned against him was that night. And if you look, you could look it up, check his Twitter feed. The day before, Kristol was like, you know, Trump’s kind of a pig, but he’s our pig. And actually, we can kind of use him and maybe we should make peace with Trump. Bill Kristal said that, who I used to work for for many years. The day after that Greenville debate, he took the position that he has now, which is, you will destroy the country to prevent Trump from exercising power. Like he was a sworn enemy of Donald Trump’s after that when he came out against the Iraq War. How weird. Why…if you hit something, if you killed a child in a DUI, okay, you’re drunk, you accidentally run over a child, there’s no possibility you could meaningfully advance in American life because people would say, we’ve forgiven you, Steve, but you did something that’s so… So irresponsible. It’s just horrible. It was a mistake. It was mistake, but it was horrible. We allowed the architects of the Iraq War who gravely injured the United States, that all these people killed, Americans killed. To continue to advance. They were never held to account for what they did, ever, at all. They became the head of the World Bank. Well, how did we do that?
Steve Bannon [00:45:07] That, the specter of that is what we face over the last 72 hours. This is exactly the same pitch as the Iraq War. Weapons of mass destruction. Oh, I know. You have to get it. So they understand one thing. They think the playbook works. This is why we have to stop it now. If we don’t stop it, now it’s gonna work all the time. They think that playbook of lulling the American people to sleep and tell them there’s these evil people that have to be taken down, or if they’re taken down everything’s gonna be fine after that. And that we face an apocalypse that doesn’t happen, they’re running the Iraq War playbook over again with almost some of the same players, or at least the protégés, right, in the verticals of who those players were.
Tucker [00:45:46] But why does institutional conservatism allow it? If Mike Pompeo shows up at the Republican county of dinner in some state, like he’s treated as… I was in a restaurant with him recently. I was like, oh, Mike Pompea. He’s treated as like a legitimate person. No one has ever… The right does not hold its own people accountable on the most basic level.
Steve Bannon [00:46:07] Well, let me tell you the right, the Republican Party is controlled opposition, okay? Because they’ve never really put in a fight. Let’s go back to the three central tenets of Trumpism, you know, immigration, border and sovereignty, trade and ending forever wars. The official apparatus of the Republican party hates all three of them and doesn’t agree with… Do you think that’s still true? It’s 100%. Look what happened here in the last 24 hours on the immigration side. All of a sudden, they promulgated that. Because of big agriculture’s needs, that we can no longer have raids on farms, raids in hotels, all of it, that had to be counted by President Trump saying, hey, there’s 20 men, illegal aliens. I’m going to get them all out of here. And then today, or this morning, he came out with, we’re going to triple down the raids in sanctuary cities, right? I’m gonna get all these guys out of there. No, there is huge institutional fight led by Fox News, right. Their biggest is the forever wars. But if you look at the Wall Street Journal. And if you look at Fox News on the trade and bringing jobs back from China, they’re very ambivalent about that. They’re talking about the cost of living. I mean, they’ve putting up that, you know, because they’re all free traders, which is the way the country got in the first place. They’re also quite ambivalant on the immigration and mass deportation. Remember, mass deportations, it’s just not the criminals. You have to get, President Trump said today, 20 million. I say it’s 10, came in on Biden’s watch. They all have to leave. But you’re seeing a lot of ambivalence of that, particularly the Republican Party. They’re saying, the Wall Street Journal says, well, no, they add 2%, 1.5 to 2% to GDP, right, because they buy so much stuff. Number two, they’ve driven down wages among particularly low-skilled black and Hispanics. I say this is why we put the coalition together. This is why 39% of black men are voting for us. This is what South Texas is now MAGA territory, because they understand their wages to be driven down. So, I think the Republican Party hates the basic tenets. President Trump’s platform particularly the most one they most hate is ending the forever wars that’s tied to both Wall Street It’s tied the defense industry. It’s also tied to this mentality that we have an American Empire Remember you and I saying hey, we are actually a republic We want to go back to being a republic like the founders are a country when they set the Constitution They look to Republican Rome. That was their source of things not the Roman Empire what we’ve done. In fact, they said I think was General Washington Don’t go over seas looking for monsters to slay, right? We have enough to do here. Let’s do this. And I think that that’s what we’ve gotten so far of track, and we have an American empire. That empire has to be taken apart brick by brick, because all it’s done is to basically destroy the inner workings of the United States, and particularly destroy the very people who are the cannon fodder in these wars, right. And that’s why it’s.
Tucker [00:48:56] Just destroy the nation, drive around the country, just get in your vehicle and drive. And I don’t see how anybody could say things are better now than they were 15 or 20 years ago or 40 years ago. It’s a disaster. And so the empire destroys the country.
Steve Bannon [00:49:10] And you add on top of it the national debt and the trillion dollars every month and the discussions. We have a discussion, Doge goes to a bunch of different places, but they never go to the Pentagon. They’re not really allowed to go to the Pentagon, we have a budget that we’re talking about how do we make these cuts, how do you cut Medicaid, how to cut the food stamp program, which all have to be looked at and done. But it’s sacrosanct. We can’t even talk about defense. We have the trillion dollar defense budget. And I keep saying… Trump’s laid out a strategy of hemispheric defense. It’s very different than post-war where we were everywhere, the American empire and really around the ring of the Eurasian landmass, right? And I said, he’s talking about a hemispherical defense. The budget is totally misaligned with the hemispheres defense, both in the allocation than the Navy taking down big army. But hey, baby, the defense budget is gonna go and you’re not gonna cut a penny out of it because like you, you’re raising your voice. As someone that likes Israel and agrees with Israeli nation, you’re saying that you raise your voice and all of a sudden you’re being eviscerated, that you’re an enemy of the Jewish people, that your an anti-Semite, but not just that, you are an appeaser and he said
Tucker [00:50:18] appease and a pacifist because they understand… Show up at my house and find out how far my pacifism extends. No, it’s slander and it bothers me simply because it does convince people whose opinions I care about and who I care personally and it fractures relationships and it also comes from people I know really well and that Ari Fleischer who I’ve never, you know, respected but I always liked him and I He wrote something, somebody sent me this thing yesterday, and you know, I’m just a carnival barker, and I’m pretending to have my views, and I texted him, and I was like, come on. Like, this is not, you know I may be totally wrong, you of course disagree with me, that’s fine. But you know that I’m sincere, I am totally sincere. Why else would I do this? Of course he didn’t respond to me, but it’s pay.
Steve Bannon [00:51:03] Ari, who every day went to the podium and told us, just another day away from finding weapons of mass destruction. How could they sit there and lie in the nation? Now, I am quite serious. Given, because you’re a product of Washington, D.C., there’s no one better in an emergency. We have an emergency, we have a break the glass emergency, to actually be an advisor to the president, right, in a temporary thing, than you who know the whole… You know the canvas. Not that you were Oreo, but you could sit there in the NSC, in the tank or the tanks of Pentagon, but down where the Kennedy room and actually walk through, this is the apparatus. This is what we have to do. This is where we have do with the FBI, this we have the do with CIA, this rather do with D&I, the Pentagon, and then we have people execute that.
Tucker [00:51:52] Yeah, I would never survive that. But I mean, I don’t come back… I had breakfast alone in the dining room in the Metropolitan Club this morning, which is a place I love. It’s the only person there, just me and the waiters, who I know well and love. And the second I walk outside that building, I’m like, whoa, the vibe in the city is… It’s good. Can you feel that?
Steve Bannon [00:52:10] Ever since, ever since President Trump left in January of 2021, because there was an armed camp then. We had a round of the rest.
Tucker [00:52:18] I had left by then, I was like, I’m…
Steve Bannon [00:52:20] Out. You came to the war room, we had 100 National Guard troops with two Humvees, barbed wire everywhere. It took from the guys at Fox and One America to come up to the War Room. It’s only a five-minute walk up the hill, 45 minutes to get there, you got to go through checkpoints. Ever since that time, and I hate to say with all the positive energy President Trump has brought, it’s still a dark specter. This imperial capital is probably, I tell you why, they understand there’s an internal Civil War here. That one side’s gonna win and one side is gonna lose. Their belief is they’re gonna wait us out. That for all the Tucker Carlson’s and Steve Bannon’s and other people around President Trump are sitting there going, the Bobby Kennedys, right? And other people that know how this apparatus works at every level and are sitting there going we have to do this now, they believe that they will wait President Trump out. And I don’t put a possibility of an assassin, if President Trump is to go too far into this and bring you into that. Do not think they would not think of an assassination attempt. They have no intention of turning over control and power of the most powerful empire in man’s history. It has to be taken from them. And I tell people, we either do it now, if we don’t do it, now, this wave of kind of people that have come together, we’re not gonna be able to do it. And if we do not do it I’m not sure we win another election because I think they’re They’re going to force us into doing either. Not deporting the 10 million, right, and not securing the border, not forcing China and not really cutting tough deals that start to bring real high value-added manufacturing jobs back because Wall Street doesn’t want that. They think our labor cost is too high. They think the environmental cost is to high. They love the slave labor of Lao Weijian. And most importantly, they’re not going to stop the war machine. They’re not gonna stop. And I’m not a passive. I spent eight years of my life as a naval officer. My daughter went to West Point. You fought in Iraq in 2010 under Obama. It’s not that we’re pacifists, we see what we see. And what we now see is a very evil specter over this imperial capital. And one side is going to win, the President Trump rebels or revolutionaries versus his praetorian guard apparatus, and that’s why this fight, to me, is going happen. The next two or three hundred days, we’re going to know if there’s enough momentum our side to actually win.
Tucker [00:54:39] Yeah, there’s a…it’s a spiritual thing and you can…I texted my wife this morning, second this administration is gone, I’m never coming back here and I’m gonna…got here in 1985 and it’s really shocking. You feel that though when you’re here. Yeah, it’s just dark. It’s super dark and where I live normally is very, you know, it is not thriving at all. It’s poor and there are lots of problems and people die of drug OD’s and all that but you don’t feel…a lot of people die with drug ODs but you do not feel this Kind of. We sold our house five years ago. My wife sold it over the phone. And next thing you know, there is a… It was a great, beautiful house, super pretty house, not huge, but beautiful in the District of Columbia. And she sells it to a CIA officer who pays the cash. And the next thing, you know there’s a Ukraine flag flying from my flagpole. I’m not making this up. And my neighbor sent it to me. He’s like, oh, look what happened to your house, a house I really loved. And I was like, wow, that’s just a metaphor. Okay, so let me ask you, you’ve made a couple of allusions, I almost don’t wanna ask you because it’s upsetting, but to the country coming apart, to conflict here, clearly there’s been a rise in violence, this weird Minnesota story, which I’m not even gonna ask you about because I don’t understand it at all, I don’t think anybody does. But I wanna ask about what’s happening in California, it does seem like resisting federal authority on immigration is an act of sedition, more profound than anything I did at Fort Sumter in 1861. This is not resolved. Like, I don’t, what are we watching right now in California with Gavin News?
Steve Bannon [00:56:14] You’re from DC. I’m from Richmond. Yeah, I’m raised in Richmond and I keep telling people I thought we settled this About federal law and and states rights and succession in the mid 1860s We had a civil war to determine the outcome of this. We’ve had that discussion. We had that argument. It’s been settled I said this president Trump in the first term that this whole thing of sanctuary cities and sanctuary states is Absolutely a neo-confederate, you know mentality that you can have Gavin Newsom Have you said that to this neoconfederate? It’s a neocontederate.
Tucker [00:56:49] It is, that’s exactly what it is. I’m stealing that by the way.
Steve Bannon [00:56:53] No, no, no. So good. Jackson, look, he had this thing before the Civil War with Andrew Jackson and John C. Calhoun on tariffs. Remember, the landed aristocracy in South Carolina were some of the richest people. I think Charleston had more what would be equivalent to billionaires at the start of the Civil war than any place on earth.
Tucker [00:57:10] And it shows in the battery down there.
Steve Bannon [00:57:13] Yeah. Magnificent today. It is. John C. Calhoun, as his vice president, was going to stop and go down and defend South He said, we’re not going to do these tariffs. And Jackson said, I’m going to call the army down there. And if Calhoun defying me, I am going to hang him from the first lamppost. I mean, Jackson was a guy who was going take immediate action. What’s happening in California is kind of the equivalent. You’ve had the sanctions. And if President Trump had not sent the troops in and federalized the National Guard… What happened in LA was what we see in all these cities. It would have exploded, been the summer of love of 2025, where there was a lot more rhetoric than actually action. One of the reasons President Trump had Bill Barr and Esper and all these people that wouldn’t execute what he wanted. Now he’s got a team, and that’s why I’m so glad he came out last night and says, I’m doubling and tripling down the rates. My recommendation on the show, the day after this stuff happened over that weekend was President Trump ought to triple the ICE raids. And he ought to go to, you know, he oughta go to schools. Hey, they gotta go, right? They have to go, and it’s not pleasant. We gotta be very humane about it, but you have to have a show of force. And if you need to send in the Army, if you needed to send a Federalized National Guard, we have to do it. California is the rail head of this. That’s why you have break it there. It’s gonna obviously pop up in Chicago and New York, but you had to take, and Stephen Miller said this, and I’ve known Stephen a long time, Andrew and Stephen Millar and Ben Shapiro, Alex Mueller, they all came out of kind of West LA. Right, Ben may have been the Valley, but they’re all West LA guys. Stephen Miller has been saying since the time I knew him, the war for America is gonna be won or lost on the streets of Los Angeles. He said this now for almost 20 years. And this is what, this fight, and this is, what’s so disturbing about the timing. We’re totally focused on that and President Trump actually implementing the deportations of mass deportations. And all of a sudden this thing breaks out in Persia, in the Middle East. And now the whole country is just focused on. It’s almost like a time diversion to get our attention. It does feel that way. Because B.B. Gave it up. There was no, it didn’t have to happen on Thursday night. We were told what was leaked, oh, there’s a bomb and they’re gonna have it and this is something they have to have immediately, immediately, immediately. He comes on Brad Bear and says, well, it’s 12 or 13 months. We’ve heard the 12 or 14 months for 20 years. Maybe it is 12 or 15 months, but that doesn’t mean you have to act on Friday. Why is it Thursday and Friday when we’re in the middle of actually the most important part of this Third World War is the 10 main invaders we’ve had in this country or 20 main according to President Trump, they all have to go. You understand that there’s many bad actors that came in on this, right, that are now sleeper cells in this county. Everybody’s got to go, and we have to do it. That is the… When I talk about Third World war, the central battlefront for the United States of America is internal to the United states of America. This is why we have to focus on this in the timing, because there’s no coincidences, of how all of a sudden we’re asked to do bombing runs in Iran a half a world away, and it sucks up all the media attention that you don’t even … There’s not even a discussion on this, and that’s why President Trump’s coming out and doubling down, and Holman and Stephen Miller, there ought to be three more raids tomorrow, and we’ve got to get the focus back on that. So,
Tucker [01:00:19] How should you deal with…I mean, when Orval Faubus, who was the governor of Arkansas in 1956, presides over the state that refuses to desegregate, after the Supreme Court says you have to desегregate in Brown versus Board. And Dwight Eisenhower, who’s not a liberal, says, you can’t ignore federal authority on a federal issue. This is a Supreme Court decision. And he sends the 101st Airborne to Little Rock to Central High School and says, sorry, you’re gonna desegregation. Now, whatever you think of that… It’s kind of disgusting in certain ways, but it’s also essential to preserving the union. I mean, I don’t understand, like, how can you have your biggest state being like, no, to the federal government? Like what… On a central issue. On a essential issue. On a… Who lives here? Yes. Who takes federal benefits? Who’s actually a citizen? Who has allegiance to this country? Who gets to choose our leadership? Right. In a democratic… This was a
Steve Bannon [01:01:14] This is why this radical neo-Marxist Democratic Party will fight. This is the hill they will die on.
Tucker [01:01:20] So, but I don’t understand how you can put up with that. How can you put up that? That’s like maybe a little more important than whether Iran gets the bomb.
Steve Bannon [01:01:27] Well, you can’t, and by the way, the American people, the American don’t, I think it’s like 60-40, where they agree with President Trump on these mass deportations. Remember, one of the reasons we’re winning the African-American vote is President Trump does not believe, like the Democratic Party and Kamala Harris, in mass incarcerations. He believes in mass deportation. When I was in prison, the only thing I put up from Danbury was like on the 26th of August, I said, hey, victory’s at hand. I can tell from the prisoners in Danbury, the young Hispanics and blacks who hate the Democratic party, And they particularly hated Kamala Harris. You guys said, look, the Democratic Party is for mass incarcerations to break our families and to make us dependent upon the government. I mean, these guys were smarter than guys going to Yale and the political science department because it’s a lived experience of them. And they support mass deportations because in a place like Danbury, 10% of the prison is bad hombres from these other countries that are the most dangerous criminals, convicts you have in these prisons. People at the street level have our back on this. This is this new coalition, but we have to succeed in this. We have to succeeded in the deportations and getting wages to rise. In fact, I think there was just something in the Wall Street Journal. They said wages for low skilled workers are coming up. Right? Because guess what? You have less non-citizens here competing as a people in their own country shouldn’t have to compete against a non- citizen for a job. This is President Trump’s, the centerpiece. Entire Make America Great Again movement. And that’s why it has to succeed. And everybody now in the official political apparatus is trying to thwart him in this. And this is why it’s so important for him to go. And the deep state is also, remember, one of the reasons that DHS is burning through money, and there’s not as many deportations, you talk to the guys of the White House, you’re talking to the DHS, they’re still playing by the old playbook. In other words, they have to have a deportation order from a court. They go to a guy’s house and make sure there’s no kids around. They take like 20 agents a week to go serve on two people and get them out of here. Well, obviously, that’s the old playbook. You have to get much more aggressive on your deportations. I think Miller and Holman are trying to change the culture over there to actually do it. But even there, the apparatus, the administrative state’s got its own mind of how they’re going to do things. I think this is one of President Trump’s big battles.
Tucker [01:03:41] My last question has to do with like the first principle from which these positions flow, which is there’s a certain segment of our population. I think the majority who think the US government’s job is to help American citizens in America. But there is another very powerful segment, which is most of the US Government that believes the opposite. Ten years ago, I’m on an amtrac train to New York from Washington for work at Fox. And I get a call from a neocon writer called Julia Ioffe, I think is Russian-born, ready for the New Republic. And she says to me, and at this point… I’m like, she thinks I’m in the O’Connor or something, but she’s calling me for like, what do we make of Trump? And she goes, Trump’s calling himself a nationalist. She was like, way offended. And it was just prima facie, like nationalism bad. And I said, well, I’m a nationalist, and she goes she’s not stupid. And she says, you’re a nationalist? I said well, well I don’t know, I think I am. I mean, I like America. I think the US government should work for America. She was horrified, and I don’t think I’ve ever spoken. Why does that idea, which is non-threatening, it’s not a Nazi idea, it’s like a basic idea, it was the founder’s idea that the U.S. Government should act on behalf of Americans. Why is that offensive? So offensive to some people.
Steve Bannon [01:04:50] I’m going to tell my Mark Levin story because I like Mark a lot, and I think he’s one of the smartest guys in the Constitution, although I will say I think we’re opposed on every big topic dealing with President Trump, just saying, because Mark is a neoliberal neocon, and that’s what Fox is, right? Which is different than populism, nationalism, totally different, they’re two different And I’ve always gotten along with Mark. Yeah, and this is why neoliberals, this is my neoliberal, neocons, the whole This is what the Murdex are. They’re much, they’re just the difference, you know, Gore Vidal said, it’s just two sides of kind of the same coin to run the American empire. Because the American Empire is run on neoliberal principles and neocon principles. So Mark, when I kept saying nationalism and populism and nationalism, he calls me up, and as you know Mark, he goes, Bannon, he was, you got to drop nationalism. And I go, this is 10 years ago, 12 years ago when I first joined it at Breitbart, and I go why, he says, it is Americanism. And I’d go, no, Mark, it was actually nationalism, right? And I tried walking through, he goes, no, no no no, it’s Americanism. And then he puts out a book later, I think Americanism, which talks about certain tenets of nationalism, but they don’t want to use that phrase, I think, because of connotations that came from Europe in the 19th century, and then obviously in the 20th century. I said, this is completely different. It is populist nationalism. It is a populist movement that puts America first and American citizens first. That’s the big part of the nationalism they never get to. That is what Unite says. How could they see that as bad?
Tucker [01:06:14] I’m honestly, 10 years in, I’m baffled by it. Like, what’s bad about that? About that.
Steve Bannon [01:06:18] If you mention that word, they get lit up. I have still many people today. People accuse me, oh, in fact, Ben, and Ben Shabrowsman, the smartest guys in the country, Ben said when I was running Breitbart, when he left, whether he left or was on a quarter or fired him is still a matter of debate, still a manner of debate. Ben goes, I turned Breitbart into Trump Pravda, right, with the populist nationalism and away from Andrew’s court tennis. So listen, that is an ideological fight. About nomenclature, which is very important in us going forward, but the tenets of it and what we’re trying to do, I think, is what you’re seeing President Trump do. We have a government apparatus of these people that when institutions carry on year after year after year and pass the baton and they control, and you know many of these these people, most of them come from middle-class backgrounds. They’re not coming just from elite. No, they’re not Rockefellers. Not Rockefell, no, there are some Rockefellas and there’s some NEPO babies, but-
Tucker [01:07:15] but they’re irrelevant.
Steve Bannon [01:07:16] Yeah, mainly just middle-class people strivers, but they’re in control of the greatest most powerful apparatus on earth And you mentioned early today The thought of going into war and actually killing people that’s something that turns certain people and the power of it right now And that’s why I say tell people when you come to Washington you can really feel it’s a spiritual war Yes, because of the dark spectrum that hangs over this town now that spiritual war manifests itself in money and power And you see so many people I’ve seen come here in Congress and people I know that come here and they get corrupted and they corrupted because that basic human nature of being attracted to money and power is very tough and we’re in a situation now that people we admire, people we like, people we’ve known, we have to go to war with them. This war against this apparatus is going to be as brutal as the war we’re fighting in the streets of Los Angeles today to make sure that actually Los Angeles is part of this American Republic, because right now California is not, but the major cities in this country led by Los Angeles and San Francisco are definitely not. They’re a totally different entity. I’m so-
Tucker [01:08:28] I’m sad to hear you say that because the last thing I wanna do was spend my day arguing with Ben Shapiro or Mark Levin. I mean, I agree with those guys on a lot and I know them, of course. I’m not mad at them personally even now. I don’t wanna fight with them. You know what I mean? I wanna fight it with George Soros or something or Gavin Newsom. But I feel like they are making it…this is my read, probably self-serving, but I feel they are make it impossible to sit back in silence as they wreck the country.
Steve Bannon [01:08:58] That fight as important as that is to me is a secondary tertiary fight right now Than the fight that we need you on in the fight. We need you. On you have a unique historical understanding Of the institutions of this town and the smarts We need a handful of smart people around president trump. They’re saying this is the look we put cash and bonjino into fbi We’ve put uh ellis and uh in ratcliffe the cia. We put a handful. Of great people at doj We put Pete and a handful of great people at defense. We put Tulsi and Joe Kent and a handful of people at DNI. It’s not enough. The apparatus still runs the deal. We are hanging on in a very tenuous shape. We need to go to war, like they wanna go to war in Persia, we need to go to a war with them and I mean, take the sword out of the scabbard and throw away the scabard. We have to do that now.
Tucker [01:09:49] If I got anywhere near any kind of institutional power, which I’ve never saw it and I don’t seek now, but if I ever did, you know, I think the Tom Cotton’s and the donors and people like that, I mean, I’d think that would be really… If they put kiddie porn on my computer, I’d get pancreatic. I don’t know, man.
Steve Bannon [01:10:10] First off, just the announcement of that, the intention of that would unmask. Part of this is going through an unmasking, who’s on our side and who’s not on our side, because a lot of people that are pretending to be on our sides are on the opposite side and we can go through a great unmasking.
Tucker [01:10:27] What they fear is sincerity, because I’m hardly the smartest person in D.C., well, not in D. C., but I’m the smartest in this conversation at all. And I don’t think I’m like, you know, have like brilliant, cohesive philosophical ideas or anything like that. I’m just sort of a bumbling middle-aged, you now, hopefully try to be Christian person. But I’m totally sincere. And that’s why they hated MTG, who’s also, you know, marginal. We’ve probably got the same SAT score. You know what I mean? It’s like- She’s not kidding. She’s total, in that kind of, in the chick way, where they get mad and they just start telling the truth. What you see is what you get. Only women do that?
Steve Bannon [01:11:06] No, she, look, she’s central to MAGA. I mean, what do you mean? She’s been… Well, she was written out today by Mark Levin. I know, she and I don’t always agree on everything, but she’s 100% MAGA, it’s not even a question. That shows you the level they’re prepared to go to. No, what you have is, which is tough in this town to get, is actually historical understanding of these institutions. The only other person, and this would be great if you did it, the only other I know that has that is Bobby Kennedy. Bobby Kennedy has that understanding, obviously what his family’s gone through, but he at a very deep level, he knows the interconnections.
Tucker [01:11:43] Friend of mine. Steve Bannon, thank you for taking the time to do this. I am grateful and Godspeed in this city.
Steve Bannon [01:11:52] Thanks, Tucker. It’s amazing. I can’t wait until you get your appointment. Be the first interview on Roar Room after he gets it. I’m not kidding when I get it. Hey, I’ve had longer odds on things than this, so stand by.
Tucker [01:12:08] Thank you.
