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There's going to be a confrontation. I think the convergence, particularly of spending cuts and the simultaneously constitutional crisis that we're hurtling to is going to make this summer a summer like no other. How do President Trump's first 100 days look to Steve Bannon? He's an early backer of the president who served in his first White House and remains influential. We'll listen for clues to where Trump's movement may be going in a special episode of Up First from NPR News.
Steve Bannon promoted Trump's cause in the 2016 campaign when his Breitbart website pushed out stories about Trump and immigration and the left. In 2020, he supported Trump's bid to overturn his election defeat. We talked with Bannon as the president finished the first hundred days of his second term. Settle in for Up First from NPR News.
Steve Bannon did not go into the second Trump administration the way that he did for the first. His position of influence today is instead a daily webcast that is also a podcast. War Room. Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon.
Okay, it's Monday, 28 April, Year of Alert 2025. He puts out hours of programming that people follow when trying to understand a wide swath of Trump supporters. Bannon has understood the MAGA voter better than basically anybody on the right. Tim Miller is a former Republican strategist and writer. The language that he uses, the policy positions that he takes...
are kind of a window into where the Republican Party is going. We visited Bannon at the studio where he broadcasts, the basement of a Washington, D.C. townhouse. It's filled with books and newspapers. When we last visited just before the inauguration, he was broadcasting in front of a mantle covered with Christian icons and slogans.
when we came by 100 days later, the mantle had a few additions. Signs reading, God will not be mocked and we can do hard things. We've got to start making things again. The high value added part of manufacturing has to come back. Something that a man or a woman can have a job and have a family and have their spouse stay home if they so want and raise their kids. Once we're back to that, the country is going to be vibrant and robust again.
Bannon describes a return to an older economy, which is connected with a more traditional idea of the family.
He sees that distant goal amid the trade war, the firing of government employees, and a drive to deport as many people as possible, all of which he discussed in a characteristically expansive conversation about the first hundred days. It's a revolution about America's role in the world, our position geopolitically, the global commercial relationships, plus the administrative state and how the country is governed. He's so much farther down the path now.
And so much more aggressive than I think anybody would ever thought. Certainly a lot of attention, but help me understand how much has really changed. I've heard you talk about government spending. Doge has gotten a lot of attention. Elon Musk has a lot of attention. Analysts have said the actual savings are not that great. It might end up costing the government something. Well, first off, I do think, and I've had tremendous disagreements with Elon Musk,
I do believe you had to have a trauma-inducing force like Doge to kind of rattle the administrative state. I think they really served a purpose. Now, to the degree that they find actual trillion dollars, which I was always skeptical about, in waste and fraud, but there will be something. I've actually called for an audit of that.
Number two, there also has to be a certification that no data or data sets of American citizens have gone anywhere except to the Trump administration and or the U.S. government. You have doubts?
Trust, but verify. When you listen to Steve Bannon, you hear some of the debates within Trump's coalition. Bannon is focused on government debt. He wants to reduce spending, even military spending, which Republicans traditionally support. He says he personally would raise taxes on the wealthy. And he's hoping that Trump's trade war eventually restores those high-paying jobs for the working class.
What have you thought about as the president imposed tariffs on China, raised the tariffs on China dramatically, then backed off on key products, and then talked about making a deal with China even though there's been negotiations? Why do you think he changed so much?
Well, number one, I think we started a process with the nations of East Asia. You have Japan, you have South Korea, you have Taiwan, Philippines, Vietnam, and now India, all in discussions around a basic architecture that kind of stacked up for Besson to get these deals done, or at least to get the architecture of it done, not the actual finished deals. Yeah, we have no deals yet that we know. Well, but you do have, I think this week, they're talking about maybe two or three deals
Memorandum of Understanding on the architecture of it. But President Trump went in full force. He's got his own negotiating style. I think he's been quite smart about how to do this. He's obviously wants to make sure that the store shelves are not totally empty. I mean, as of –
Yesterday, we have a full embargo on Chinese goods. Except for consumer electronics, iPhones, anything that we consider truly valuable. Some of that's starting to come through as we alleviate somewhat. Does he look weak by changing all the time?
I don't think he looks weak. I think he looks like a very smart deal guy trying to move the chess pieces, right? When we visited Steve Bannon at the start of this week, he had just finished his morning webcast. He spent parts of it pressing the president to go even further than Trump has. Here's what I would do with Harvard.
And I don't think President Trump's being hard enough. First off, I would... Bannon has a Harvard MBA and made money on Wall Street and in Hollywood, but now speaks out against the elites. He wants the government to target top private and public universities. I give him a list of 200 faculty members and 200 administrators. We're cutting off all federal money, all federal money, until they're gone. Once they're gone, we'll start bleeding it back in. And oh, by the way, all 350,000...
Chinese nationals, students that are here in the country, got to leave immediately. Bannon talks of expelling all these students who pay billions of dollars per year in tuition to American universities. His allegation is that they take away U.S. research. It's a position that fits his broader support for deporting people in the U.S. without legal status.
Clearly, you're in favor of mass deportations, and the president has made some high-profile moves in that direction and has run up against judicial resistance, including from people appointed by the president. A judicial insurrection. A judicial insurrection. You've got a judge. Okay, but wait, wait, wait, wait. You have a unanimous Supreme Court saying all nine of us agree there should be some kind of due process. It might not be a full trial, but—
Somebody should be brought before a judge before they're thrown out of the country. You have a U.S. citizen who was two years old taken out of the country and a Trump-appointed judge said the other day there was no meaningful process. Does it bother you at all as an American citizen that due process is not being followed in some cases? It bothers me that a – we never had – there's no way in the Constitution it talks about judicial supremacy. Right.
Nowhere in the Constitution talks about judicial supremacy. What you're seeing is a court trying to step between President Trump and his— Isn't it just a court checking it against the law to say that's illegal, not legal? Absolutely not. It's stepping in the middle of President Trump and his—the unitary theory of the executive or Article II, his role as commander-in-chief. This happened before in our country. It's happened a couple times.
A guy named Abraham Lincoln. Bannon, who loves history, began telling a story about the Civil War president. Lincoln sometimes exercised the government's power to detain people without charges during a rebellion. He defied the Supreme Court Chief Justice, who said that only Congress could allow this. Congress later did.
Bannon insists on a parallel in dealing with immigrants. If every one of these criminal terrorists have due process, it's 200 years before they get out. It's not going to happen. It's just not going to happen. The American people back Trump on this and they have to go and they're going to go. And the argument against due process is just that it's inconvenient.
It would take too much time for millions of people. The convenience thing is one, but it's just you don't need it. It's not necessary. It's time of war, and they're going to leave. Let me ask about another thing, though. Having to do with the Constitution and tariffs. This is another instance where the president says there's an emergency. I'm going to raise taxes tomorrow. I'm going to lower taxes the next day. Tariffs.
Okay, if you want to call them tariffs, I'm going to raise them, I'm going to lower them. Did you call them taxes? They are taxes paid by Americans, according to economists. In any event, whatever we call them, Americans seem to pay them when the imports are brought in. The president has asserted the right to massively affect the economy and then change it again today and hours later and hours later without consulting Congress because he says it's an emergency. It's gone so far that some Republicans in Congress are trying to reclaim their power.
Does it concern you at all that a president could claim the power to completely transform the economy all by himself just on his say-so? Well, it's not just on his say-so. He did execute emergency powers to do this given the emergency that's there both on fentanyl and on the national security aspects. But the emergency is he says there's an emergency. That's all there is. No, he gave backup document to it on the fentanyl issue.
Canada? The deficits alone. The trade deficit's $25 trillion, brother. That's not an emergency. The United States does have an annual trade deficit with other nations, which the Trump White House estimates at $1.2 trillion last year. We buy more stuff than we sell. It's often balanced by foreign investments in the United States.
And that's not a bookkeeping thing that the Wall Street guys say. That's resources that went to us, to other countries, 18 trading to China. Granting everything you say, would it be possible to work it through Congress? Just pass a bill, do the constitutional thing. He's called for emergency measures. If Congress had been doing its job on trade and tariffs over the last, let me just guess, I don't know,
since they allowed China to come in as a World Trade Organization, they would have some backup from people saying, yeah, you know, we should get Congress in here because they've done such a great job. What has Congress done? The House and Senate have rolled over to the globalists for 30 or 40 years. Pardon me if I don't take their concerns when somebody steps up and says, hey, look, I'm going to put America and I'm going to put American citizens first. You're no more confident in this Republican Congress than in past ones?
Good God, no. I mean, look at Johnson, a speaker. Bannon has been watching Speaker Mike Johnson's House Republican Conference and its effort to pass a single giant spending bill as the president wants. It involves more borrowing than Bannon would like. No, the last one, we were very proud that we turfed out this show as the leader in turfing out McCarthy. Johnson, I think, may actually be worse because I think he's tapped along the president. Everything I've seen coming from this conference so far about the big, beautiful deal,
Looks like fiscal insanity. We're listening to Steve Bannon, the sometime advisor to President Trump. After a break, we look overseas. Did some budget cuts by the Trump administration cause the U.S. to damage itself in its competition with China? Stay with us.
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Earlier this year, I was reporting in China and sat down with a Chinese scholar named Da Wei. I asked what he thought when the Trump administration shut down Voice of America. The VOA gave news and information to much of the world, especially to places like China. So the first reaction was, oh, it's so sad because when we were in college, we learned English through Voice of America.
Voice America have a special English program. It spoke very slowly. They were famous for this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we learned English through that. I still remember, you know, when I was a freshman in college, for the first time I listened to the Voice America special English. Also while in China this spring, somebody told me of hearing about China's Uyghur population through Radio Free Asia, another U.S.-backed service to which the Trump administration cut off funds.
Those facts led me to ask Dawei a question as we talked in a tea shop in Beijing. I'm thinking of a soccer term, own goal, where you score for the other team accidentally. Are foreign policy specialists here looking at the Trump administration moves as an own goal?
You can say that. You can say that. To be honest, I think the majority view here is this is in China's interest. That was in China in March. Back here in the United States, I interviewed Steve Bannon about Trump's attack on some U.S. agencies. Bannon himself has been skeptical in some ways of Elon Musk's Department of Government efficiency. So I asked him the same question that I had asked the Chinese scholar.
If you're concerned about China, was some of this an own goal for the United States?
No, I don't think so. And here's why. And I'm glad you brought up the Mandarin language and the Chinese. That was replete with Chinese agents and had to be broomed anyway. And I think you're going to see a major investigation into Voice of America, the Mandarin language thing. They're the ones that cut Miles Guo off first time ever in a live interview. This is a dissident to Chinese. A Chinese billionaire. He was giving a live interview about
on Voice of America. This was in 2017 when Bannon was working in the White House. Miles Guo made accusations against China's Politburo during a long live program. VOA management did stop that program, though an inspector general later found the choice was a legitimate journalistic call.
Bannon says he experienced it otherwise. They actually came to my office in the White House and said, hey, just pulled some dissidents interview live. So the answer is to shut it all down? I think what President Trump is going to do and Carrie Lake and others, Brent Boesel, is take the whole thing down to its statutory deck plates and then rebuild it. But the Voice of America had not been pitching the American story of American exceptionalism and American entrepreneurism. It had become a totally politicized story.
of really the progressive left, and it had to go. I mean, the criticisms it made of President Trump were outrageous, just outrageous. So it had to go. Going into this project, we were asking, how has the first 100 days changed the world? And I think you focused on the effort to put a new trade regime on the world. And geopolitically. Right now, you have the post-war liberal rules-based order. It's made on a couple of... And if you go around the Eurasian landmass, it is a...
replica of the Second World War. That is strictly true. The victors of World War II set up the United Nations and remain its most powerful forces. The United States has been the most powerful of all, and Bannon sees the U.S. doing too much. And what you see in the post-war era is to have a containment policy from NATO and Western Europe
to the Gulf Emirates in Israel, to the South China Sea and the Straits of Taiwan, up to Japan and Korea. Okay, those four kind of nodes, you have commercial relationships codified by trade deals. We have capital markets, some cultural interaction, but it's American security guarantee. It's one of the reasons we have a trillion dollar defense budget.
That has to stop. Bannon describes a broad U.S. retreat from many of its responsibilities in Europe and Asia and a sharper focus instead on the Western Hemisphere. What we're saying, what President Trump, I think, is saying by this hemispheric defense is that from Greenland to the Panama Canal, we will take care of the Russian Navy.
the Russian army is kind of NATO's problem, U.S. problem, and we're there to help. But you're not going to see a massive amount of resources. And I think you see this in Ukraine and bringing the war to an end. Zelensky knows that the American money's cut off. You're not going to have American troops. The Europeans talk big, but never deliver. And so you're going to see some sort of winding down of that war on the new reality on the Eurasian landmass. Once you get off of having to have
standing military and all these four nodes around the Eurasian landmass, you have a complete ability to cut the defense budget. I don't know, three, four hundred billion dollars. Wouldn't everybody want that? I think the president hasn't been clear about what he would want to replace the liberal international order, the rules based international order, whatever you want to call it, or even if he does want to replace it.
There is a camp that believes that he wants to transform geopolitics. There is a camp that believes that he just wants to spruce things up and make them work better. Do you feel you understand what is supposed to come after? I totally feel. What is supposed to come after? I think it's back to the Treaty of Westphalia. You have strong, independent nations, right, with the United States looking to itself first and its citizens first, with the understanding is if America's strong, healthy, and prosperous,
The world can be at peace. The post-war international rules-based order...
shifted the weight to too many international organizations and away from the focus of the American people. Steve Bannon, it's a pleasure talking with you. Thank you. Steve, always great having you here in the War Room. That's some of our wide-ranging discussion with Steve Bannon, the political strategist who backed Donald Trump's rise. He closed out there with a reference to the Treaty of Westphalia, which is a name for agreements in 1648 that ended a decades-long European war.
Our interview is also on video, and you can find it on the NPR app and on YouTube. This has been a special episode of Up First. Our producer is Barry Gordimer. Our editor is Reena Advani. I'm Steve Henskeep. Want to hear this podcast without sponsor breaks? Amazon Prime members can listen to Up First sponsor-free through Amazon Music. Or you can also support NPR's vital journalism and get Up First Plus at plus.npr.org. That's plus.npr.org.