Steve Bannon on ‘Broligarchs’ vs. Populism
01:10:28 Share

All right, Steve, you ready? Born ready, sir. I know, born fighting. If we don't have a fight, why are we populists? If you want to deliver a long monologue about the genius of Elon Musk and Silicon Valley, if you've had AI write one for you, we can do that too. No, I've got a very specific take on the oligarchs. I'll share it with you today. ♪

From New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and this is Matter of Opinion. On this week's show, we're continuing my one-on-one conversations with figures who represent different, potentially clashing worldviews within the new Trump administration. Two weeks ago, I talked to venture capitalist Mark Andreessen about the newest faction in Trump world, the so-called tech right.

My guest this week, Steve Bannon, represents what I might call Trumpism classic, the populist and nationalist movement that brought Trump to power in the first place and that aspires to exert significant influence in Trump's second administration.

Indeed, a lot of executive orders we've already seen from this White House on immigration, reshaping the federal bureaucracy, and more are clearly stamped by Bannon's populist anti-establishment aspirations. Bannon is also emerging as one of the most vocal critics from the right of Elon Musk and other members of the tech right. And so we're going to talk a lot about that brewing conflict.

Steve, welcome to the show. Ross, thank you very much, but I got to correct you right out of the box. Please don't tell me because I read your column that you didn't consider Marc Andreessen a part of the right. Marc Andreessen and the oligarchs are nothing but a bunch of progressive leftists.

that had, most of them had their Damascene moment at, I don't know, between 10 and 11 o'clock on the evening of 5 November when the Trump movement won Pennsylvania. So no, I think the oligarchs are, they're not conservative. They're not on the, certainly not on the right. And so everything they're doing, crawling under their belly to try to get into this movement and pollute this movement because they see the raw political power of this movement, I find,

disgusting and revolting.

All right. We're going to get into that. But first, I thought I should do a little resume refresher just at the top about who you are. It's a detailed resume. I'm going to go through it. I'm a convict. It's a man. That's at the end. I'm a prisoner. I'm a convict. You can just sum it up in that. I think a man of parts is what we like to say. So we're going to say Steve Bannon, U.S. Navy, Goldman Sachs, Hollywood producer,

behind the success of the website Breitbart, founded by Andrew Breitbart, but I think raised a special prominence by yourself. One of Trump's leading strategists in 2016, an architect of an upset victory over Hillary Clinton, briefly a leading advisor to the Trump White House, exiled from Trump world after Michael Wolff's book Fire and Fury came out because you were a source, prominent source, and

a would-be organizer of international populist movement, host of the podcast show War Room, involved in the January 6th protests, and a very prominent promoter, then and now, of President Trump's stolen election claims. A four-month stint in prison, see, I said we'd get around to it, for defying a subpoena from the January 6th committee, released, Donald Trump wins, you've been in D.C. celebrating, while also, as we've already heard, a

attacking some of the president's key allies, including Elon Musk. Is that a fair sketch? I think it's the through line. I'll do it quickly. You know, working class Republicans

Kennedy Democrat family from a blue-collar Catholic family that, you know, father was essentially a foreman at the phone company and got to lower management, spent 50 years there as his father did, and helped organize the communication workers of America back in the 30s before it went off the rails. You know, stay-at-home mom, five kids, land-grant university, naval officer, educated at Harvard Business School.

That's the West Point of capitalism, particularly at the time, globalization. Studied under Michael Porter, the great theoretician of competitive advantage and globalization. Became an expert in intellectual property, met Andrew Breitbart, and helped him finance Breitbart. And then Andrew died tragically right before the launch of the Breitbart site. It was his site. He died literally there.

72 hours before we were about to launch and was the first really group in back of President Trump, one. And I said from the beginning, I only gave a year of my life, so I didn't get run out of the White House. And I'm not so sure I was running out of Trump world. I think I've always been very, depends on how you define Trump world, maybe we get to that later, but been working on populist nationalism for, you know, 20 years. And I'm a hardcore populist. I'm a hardcore nationalist. I'm not a conservative.

I think conservatives are pussies. The Republican Party is a bunch of pussies. They're controlled opposition. And I think you see the culmination of a lot of work we've done, and you see the kind of what I call flood the zone, days of thunder, and it couldn't be better. Couldn't be a better time to be alive in the spring of this great effort.

So let's talk about the kind of populism that you've been involved with, basically, you know, from its beginnings as a force in global politics, right? Populism in the U.S. goes back to Andrew Jackson. It's had a lot of different incarnations, a lot of different versions, some more cultural, some more economic. People in my line of work have been arguing since Donald Trump came down the escalator about what Trumpism is.

Right? Is it about economics? Is it about class, race? No, no, no, no, no. Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on. All right. The public intellectuals, I guess you're one of the top, have, and let's just be brutally frank. Let's be. Let's be brutally frank, have done a horrible job because you haven't had any interest in really understanding what populism is. It's this thing like Trump, it's always going to fade. It's just about Trump. And it's never about kind of the core, where this springs from.

Right. Where it comes from. We're 10 years. Think about Trump came down in June of 15. And for 10 years, there's been no real work done to kind of even begin to understand populism, except that the deplorables are kind of like, you know, an exotic species like the San Diego Zoo. It's only now.

Is anybody's got any interest in really getting behind it? And I'm really appreciative of coming on your show. And of course, we've got to have some combat here. Otherwise, it wouldn't be it wouldn't be interesting. I have tremendous respect, but no one's really lifted a finger. It's very simple. You know, the Tea Party was the president of Trump. Every financial collapse or every financial crisis you've had, I think worldwide has some sort of reaction to it.

And the financial crisis and collapse of 2008 brought on by the established order and kind of, you know, a little bit the Bush regime, the Bush-Hunter, what I call it. The worst, by the way, presidency in the history of our nation, except for James Buchanan.

Franklin Pierce just breathed a deep sigh of relief. Yeah, no, but Franklin Pierce, come on, man, that guy's erected. Franklin Pierce did not that much damage that Bush did to the country on so many different levels, in particular the financial crisis, which was not totally his fault, but the Establishment Order.

And the basic schmendrick underwrote all of that bailout and didn't get a bailout themselves. In fact, they got blown out of their equity, and they blamed it on African-Americans and Hispanics that didn't have the income, but they blew them all out of the equity of their homes and, by the way, kept the title to those homes, I might add, so they could resell it later. And it's one of the greatest financial scandals in the history of this country. None of the crooks and the criminals that did this were

were ever held accountable. And when I say crooks and criminals, I mean the top accounting firms, the law firms, the entire establishment, you having been an Ivy leaguer also, and I went to the trade school at Harvard, none of the elites in this country were ever held accountable for it. And so that lit a fuse that went off on the 8th of November, the early morning of the 9th of November,

of 2016 with President Trump. And it was basically the forgotten man and woman's vengeance. Our platform at the time was fairly ill-defined. I mean, I came in with a bunch of points behind, kind of with the Breitbart philosophy of economic nationalism up in the blue wall and the border down in the South and the border states. And I started looking at demographics. People were mocking me

Why? Bannon has never done a campaign. Why does he have Trump in Michigan? Why is him in Wisconsin? Why is him in Pennsylvania? He's not going to win those states. To get it close, he's got to focus on Southern. And we won all three of them now by a combination of, I think, 70,000 votes.

But we won them. And that was really the beginning of or the culmination of the first phase of this kind of populist revolt coming from the Tea Party in 2010, the big, you know, off your election victory, then kind of a throughput. And it was more. Let me go back for a minute, though, to to the genesis. Right. Yeah. So and let me let me tell you what.

I see as sort of the Tea Party to Trump narrative, and you can tell me what's right or wrong with this story. To me, I agree. The Tea Party comes in as sort of the first reaction on the right to bailouts, to the financial crisis. But it starts out with, you know, Rick Santelli giving this famous cable news speech, but he's not talking about the biggest Wall Street bailouts, right? He's talking about basically bailouts for homeowners. Yeah.

This is America. How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor's mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can't pay their bills? Raise their hand. How about we all? President Obama, are you listening? And this turns into for a little while in the history of the Tea Party, a narrative that sort of works well, I think, with what used to be movement conservatism, this narrative that

The only problem here is big government. You know, there's just too much spending. We have to cut spending. This gets taken up by Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. They run in 2012 on big plans to overhaul Medicare and Social Security. That version loses. And then Trump comes in.

As someone who's not who has no background in movement conservatism like yourself, you know, not not a conservative, right? A populist comes in and says, well, actually, we're going to protect Social Security and Medicare, right? We're not going to be the big government cutters. We're going to be.

economic nationalists. We're going to do industrial policy. We're going to change the trade rules. We're going to cut immigration and, you know, try and raise wages that way and so on. And that to me is, it's the, some of the same energy that's in the tea party, but it's a pretty different agenda and a clearer break in principle with what came before. You're one. This is just, you're 1,000% correct. You're the first guy. You're 1,000% correct. Um,

Let me give some depth to that for a second. But the Tea Party mainly had the classic limited government conservatives, right? And you see this in kind of what I call the traditional, the grassroots that had really come up from President Reagan's time. But what I saw in there, they couldn't articulate it. They were still speaking in an old nomenclature.

And I saw this in the 12 campaign in the primary. Right. That kind of, and remember, I recruited, it's a very famous, I tried to recruit Sarah Palin. I saw Sarah Palin. I said, wow, that's a populist right there. And I spent a year making a film with her and tried to talk her into running as a true populist.

for the nomination. I didn't realize Romney was normally next man up for the Republicans. But there you saw the kind of nomenclature, even calling Republicans and Democrats. What became very obvious to me, given my HBS training at Goldman Sachs, is that you had kind of a populist, more nationalistic flavor on one side, and you had really a globalist, more elitist than the others. And what happened is that

And I knew a lot of the donors at that time because Breitbart was getting to be kind of, you know, got some traction and I was starting to meet some of these donors and they were absolutely convinced, convinced that Romney and Ryan were going to win. And these people were crushed. They thought, and I told them early on, I said, Romney, this thing's not going to be close. It'll be a couple of points at least.

because they're not connecting and they didn't want any connection to the Tea Party. But I said, there's something brewing out there that's much different. These people's lives are being destroyed. The country's slipping away. All the high value manufacturing jobs are going to China. And you saw at the beginning of even the H-1B visas and discussions about this were all starting to percolate at that time. And when those guys lost, I realized that, hey, people here really don't get it.

And what happened right after that is a guy named Reince Priebus, who I didn't know at the time, was running the RNC. They did this thing called the hot wash up or the autopsy. Thank you. They did the autopsy. They did the autopsy. And I was reading and I think it was real clear politics. It was a guy named Sean Trendy. And he does this analysis about how the white working class wouldn't support Romney. They didn't reach out to him. And he said, there's a clear path here.

that you can win by a more of a populist coalition talking about working class things. And I said, hey, guys, this guy's nailed it. This is it. And they came back to me and said, no, no, you'd miss it. It's amnesty. It's everything like that. And I just took the other side and said, no, this is the winning philosophy here. And I met with Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller, who I was very close to. And I said at the time, I said, we got to find a populist. I said, Jeff,

you know, you're an agrarian populace. I said, we can even start with you to get it out there. And again, he says, no, I'm not the guy, but that guy will arrive. And then I started going to these cattle calls early on where you've got to get the grassroots. And it was May 1st, I think of 2014, where I went to, I think it was Hanover, New Hampshire with Breitbart Radio. And Rand Paul was there and Mike Lee was there and Ted Cruz was there and Newt Gingrich, all of them. And this guy, Donald Trump,

And the nomenclature from everybody else was all the same. They may have a different inflection or a different take, but it didn't have any depth to it. It didn't resonate. It didn't grab people viscerally. Trump came up, just starts, I mean, it's like Mort Saul. He's just taking the day's headlines and just riffing on it.

But in riffing on it and talking about the border and jobs in China, people were leaning for it in their seats. And I called later and told Miller and Sessions and others, I said, this is our guy. I said, if this guy's serious about this, we can do this. This guy is the personification of what we need. He's a hammer.

He's a man's man. And if he's serious, which at the time there's a big question. I always thought he was serious. Big, big question. Just doing this to negotiate a better deal for the apprentice. And the people knew him best, like Roger Ailes would tell me, Bennett, you're a fucking moron. This is all, this is a negotiating strategy. You look like an idiot. So that's really, you know, Trump's version of populism. It's both cultural and economic, but it's really a push against a,

an established order that's truly globalist in nature and has really lost the touch of the American people with the working class and lower middle class in this country, which are the backbone of the country. And that's why I just said, hey, we just got to start focusing on these folks. And eventually we got to work out some policies that work, but we just got to make the America, not just America first, but make the American citizen first. And if we do that, we're going to, this is going to turn out fine. Yeah. I want to get into the policy from the first term, but it's just worth thinking about like the time you're talking about the

Yeah.

of especially Hispanic voters, minority voters and so on. And that the only way for the Republican Party to compete in this environment was, as you say, to either become more liberal on politics

social issues generally or to become more liberal on immigration in particular. And Shantrande wrote this series called The Missing White Voters, basically. And it's funny about how there were all these voters, right, who didn't turn out for Romney, who could turn out for a Republican.

And then connected, the other argument connected to that that also turned out to be right was that there were a lot of Hispanic voters who weren't actually interested in necessarily voting for open borders, large scale illegal immigration, who were culturally conservative, who didn't want to vote for a sort of racist seeming Republican Party, but would be open to a kind of populist appeal. And it's funny because I used to go on.

cable news back then in a different incarnation of my life. And I was on a few times with Stuart Stevens, who ran Romney's campaign in 2012. Right.

And this was while, you know, the Trump campaign was getting going and competing. And look, you know, I didn't think Trump was going to win. Right. So I don't claim any foresight there. But Stevens would come on and he would say, oh, you know, Trump is trying to get voters who just aren't there. He's like going up the river, beating the drums, you know, trying to summon voters from the hills. And they're just not there. And that was the default assumption that I do think.

Not just your 2016 campaign, but then 2024 proved wrong. Yeah. We'll get to that. He's particularly, he's kind of the epitome of the dumb, lazy, you know, and he seems like a decent guy, but it's all, it's just moronic is what cable TV puts the stuff up all the time. I want to go back to something. I cannot overemphasize enough how powerful Sean Trendy is. This is the reason I read everything. I read all the journals, read everything. Yeah.

That hit me right in the solar plexus. I go, that is exactly what happened. I couldn't get anybody to pay attention to it. People, I tell you who I got to pay attention to was Stephen Miller. I'd met Stephen and Sergio Gore, who are now huge players in the White House, were two grundoons on the staff of Michelle Bachman, who was eventually the person that did kind of try to run as a populist. Another name out of the mists of memory. But I tell people, hey, people get hot.

And, you know, the gods give charisma. And then if you don't grab it, like Chris Christie in 12 or Michelle Bachman in Palin, when you get the ability to grab it, you got to grab it. Because if you don't grab it, the gods take it away. Let's go back to Sean Trendy.

I would actually say that was an inflection point in American history because it got me excited about what the possibilities were and what the math was. What really proved our chops was right after I saw Trump in May 1st of 2014, six weeks later, Zuckerberg, that criminal, was coming here to get the amnesty deal done in this huge announcement the night before on Tuesday, June

I think the 7th of June in 2014, an economics professor named Dave Brad from Randolph-Macon actually defeated Eric Cantor, the first time a sitting majority leader had ever been defeated in a primary. And I mean, ran on 100% anti-immigration platform. That was really the beginning of the feeling of the power. We really had something here that could win elections and win votes. Yeah.

So let's talk. Let's just drill down on immigration for a minute. Why is it so central? And what do you say to someone who might be on the left who'd be listening to this conversation and would say, oh, look, you know, Bannon's absolutely right. There was a financial crisis. Wall Street got away with murder. Not literally, just to be clear, but literally.

And there needed to be a populist surge, but all being anti-immigration does is scapegoat a bunch of hardworking people trying to come to America for the sins of global finance and so on. What is the— No, it's a reason—you just mentioned a moment ago the emerging Democratic majority. And—

The reason that didn't happen, and I never thought it would happen, because Bernie Sanders and all these guys that have been pro-worker and pro-union, you saw them flip. All of a sudden, they were open borders. Look, let me step back for a second. The entire post-war international rules-based order, right, all of it, Bretton Woods and all of it, the Pax Americana, is all on the shoulders of the little guy.

It gets down to the shoulders of the working class and the middle class. And you can see the Democratic Party transferring into a – of very wealthy donors the credential class of a bunch of people coming out of college or graduate schools and then the plebeians.

The key on immigration, and I'm anti any immigration. I want a moratorium on all immigration right now because I want American citizens to get a shot at the brash rank, which they deserve since the entire world's economic system is on their shoulders. And it's the same people whose taxes and pension money support everything, right? Their sons and daughters...

are standing watch on destroyers and carrier battle groups in the Red Sea to keep the Suez Canal open for trade to Europe. They're on patrol in the Hindu Kush. They're in Romania with the 101st Airborne. And, you know, I saw it. I served in that. And all the people on my destroyer post-Vietnam in the all-volunteer forces had a choice in that those early years of the Navy were jail or the military. And my daughter later went to West Point, officer and served, fought in Iraq,

And all of her enlisted, I think of 16 enlisted guys, her first command, 16 enlisted guys, I think 12 were minorities who had done an average of 10 or 12 tours and had broken families and all the pressure. So the pressure is on them for the system to work if they get no real benefits from the system. And most importantly, the capitalists

are always trying to drive down wages. Now, they do it two ways. They either allow illegal immigration at the border, which drives down wages of lower-skilled workers, particularly African Americans and Hispanic, but they also scam the system with a whole visa set of visa programs, and they call it kind of fancy names, the H-1B visas. All they're trying to do is bring in indentured servants

into the country at a third less or 50% less and very compliant about what they have to do to make sure they don't have to pay American graduates. And this is why Silicon Valley is an apartheid state. It's the reason you have no Hispanics or blacks. There's no shot to get in Silicon Valley. It's not because Americans are dumber. It's not because Americans are lazy. It's because American citizens are, you have a globalist system and the capitalists

capitalist because we're in a capitalist system are always looking to drive labor costs down. And so in the Democratic Party could have done this, but Bernie Sanders and all the guys who supported labor all became open borders on immigration. And they made it some sort of racial xenophobic thing. And I kept telling people, hey, I don't give two fucks.

If you call me a racist, I don't give two fucks. You call me a xenophobe or anything like that. I'm standing up for the American Senate. I come from a working class family. And I can tell you that when they fully understand the economics and they look around at what's happening, African-Americans and Hispanic families are going to vote for us. And Sean Trendy gave us a little bit of a map that you could see it.

And we did a little bit of action, but it was just kind of putting it in a direction. It was so obvious it was there. It was so obviously there. And it's so obvious it's only getting bigger and bigger and bigger if we deliver it now on policies. We've got to be a lot and we're going to have some massive fights on policies because the dumb, lazy media keeps saying the Republican Party is all Trump. He controls it. He controls it because they fear him. But you scratch the surface of most of these congressmen and almost all the senators and

They're just standard stock Republicans. They're neoliberal neocons. All right, let's take a quick break and we'll come right back.

So let's talk about the first term, Trump's first term, and how this cashed out then. And I want to read a quote. It's a little bit of a dog's breakfast policy-wise. I'm the first to admit.

Look, the conservatives are going to go crazy. I'm the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. With negative interest rates throughout the world, it's the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything, shipyards, ironworks, get them all jacked up. We're just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It'll be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution. So that's a vision of populism where—

It's secure borders. It's cutting immigration. It's everything that you've just been talking about. But it's also industrial policy. Yes. Rebuilding industry. Yes. And I think it's fair to say that, you know...

A lot of that just didn't happen in Trump term one. Ross, Ross, hang on. Stop. Okay. No, no. We had 300 infrastructure weeks. All right. Yes, that's right. No. Were there only 300? Every week. Every week was infrastructure week. I'm adding up all four years. I don't know. Maybe I've overcounted. It just seemed like 300 infrastructure weeks. Every week was infrastructure week. Yeah. So what happened to that infrastructure?

The industrial policy side of things.

We figured that given how badly the campaign was being run, that I couldn't do worse than close this thing up, you know, to a couple point loss, worst case. And so we made a coalition. I made a pact with the Republican establishment. We had to win. So you got it. So you got it. But as you said, you got it. You got it with a coalition. And the coalition doesn't want, they don't want industrial policy. They don't want the big deal, the big deal spending. And so that doesn't happen.

And I'm going to try and bring us forward quickly to the present. Right. It's a failing transition. We just don't want the people. And President Trump's not there. And the mandate's really not to take on the administrative state.

We do get the tax cut, which I'm not happy with. And I'd lose that. President Trump will listen to you. He'll look at the facts and he makes the decision, no, they does his tax cut, the same one that we're going to have a fight on again that's coming up to be renewed. But we do deregulation. We get enough done that you get the—and President Trump's a man of peace. So by 18 and 19, 19, the fall of 19—

Low interest rates, low inflation, blue collar. The economy is good and it's better. No, I think this is absolutely true. It's better even without –

the trillion dollar infrastructure bill. It's better for blue collar workers than it was under Obama. And that's a big infrastructure. Infrastructure, you're correct, was an epic fail. The Republican establishment had zero interest in that Mitch McConnell's interest. We had a couple of infrastructure weeks and they just considered it a joke and we never made any progress. So so flash forward. So here we are. Trump has more of a mandate for some form of

populism than before. He clearly has more of a mandate on illegal immigration, in part just because of how much of it there's been under Biden. So clearly you've got a populist focus on that issue, right? It's no question about that. But on everything else, what does populism want as a movement on the

economic policy from this administration and related to that, the administrative state stuff. And we're having this we're having we're having this conversation in a week where, you know, a bunch of the headlines are about both the Trump team trying to sort of, you know, take more control over the agencies, also claim more power from Congress. There's going to be a Supreme Court battle probably over presidential authority, over sort of certain kinds of spending. But

You say deconstruct the administrative state. Okay. For what? What is the actual goal of that? We're totally different now. I shouldn't say totally different. It's right now we have a, in the days of Thunderclap, we have scale, we have depth, and we have urgency.

How do we even get there? For four years, so when Trump leaves on January 20th of 2021, when he gets back to Mar-a-Lago, it's the lion and winner, right? And the only reason that the McCarthy's guys go down is make sure the lion's still caged. It's all DeSantis and Nikki Haley and, you know, the next thing. He's done. He's finished. And now you're down to, now you're to the hardcore populist. Even on our audience, at the same time, something very important happens.

There are both donors, not many of them, and public intellectuals and guys and things that are going to start these small think tanks. And you have Brooke Rollins, who was in the White House. She was head of the Domestic Policy Council. And Stephen Miller essentially set up America First Policy Institute. Russ Vogt, who is OMB and a critical guy in the first administration, one of the secret weapons, starts Center for Renewing America with Payaletta and Jeff Clark and others.

And Heritage does Project 2025. And you've got a few more, but you got these four or five groups and kind of we call the rubric Project 2025. It's to take policy because one of the problems we definitely had is that there's a gap between the populist nationalist promise and the populist nationalist delivery. And that has got to be in policy. And so you have and including you've got to keep along policy.

that Nikki Haley, 14 or 15%, maybe 18, 20% of traditional Republicans that are just not there with you, right? They'll be there if you give them a policy suite that they can buy into. And you need those people. You need them to win as you expand your own populace with African-Americans, Hispanics, but they're a bridging element. So over the four years, I mean, you have serious public intellectuals for the first time

thinking through serious policy alternatives on military strategy, national security, foreign policy, economics, all of it. But you've also had, as important as a policy art, you have people starting working as a team, networking. Remember, you're building teams and networks of subject matter experts and people know how to work together. And we're flooding the zone with the cabinet nominations. This is just so much different. Now,

What I was able to do was just not on policy verticals, but also taking on the Leviathan. And this is where I take special pride and tell the limited government service, go fuck yourself because you didn't do shit except get this thing fucking bigger so it's out of control.

The deconstruction of the administrative state – and this goes back to 16. This is why Gorsuch is on the Supreme Court. This is why Kavanaugh, to a degree. This is a young group of intellectual people in the judiciary that are very focused on this fourth branch of government that's metastasized to basically become a permanent government and basically –

Whoever wins, whether it's Bernie Sanders or AOC or Donald Trump, right? It doesn't matter. They're the permanent government and they got a permanent way to do it. That has to be deconstructed. And that's one of the things I'm so proud of. But I want to go back. I want to go back to the populace. So this is the voter, right? The blue collar voter in, you know, in 2016, it's the blue collar white voter in 2024. It's the middle class Hispanic voter in

They vote for Trump in part because they agree with a populist critique of how the economy has been run the last 25 years, in part in this election because they were just sick of inflation and the border being out of control. What is the concrete deliverable for those voters out of the deconstruction of the administrative state? That's what I'm trying to get at. The concrete deliverable first is the deportation. First off, remember –

If you don't vote for the Democrats, that's one vote to us. If you vote for us, it's two-vote swing. The first step is just to say, these guys have done nothing but fuck you the entire time. Why are you continuing to vote for them? And I think they started to see that as we started to bring up immigration. They could see it in their communities, not just the lawlessness and the crowding of the schools, all that, but the competition for wages and for labor. This is what it was about. That's the first time that people were prepared to listen to you.

That, hey, these guys aren't a bunch of white races, nativists, et cetera. They're actually talking about my economics and they understand in my community. It's not the lawlessness of schools, the medical, which is all terrible because of the flooding of this. And the elite don't care because they don't have to deal with it. But is it just immigration then?

Is that what it – I mean, I'm not trying to minimize immigration. We had the largest surge under Biden in decades. All of that's real. And inflation, by the way. Hang on. And inflation. And inflation. By his spending. But inflation cuts both ways, right? Because, yes, immigration gives you competition for jobs.

But immigration also can reduce prices, right? You take low skilled workers out of the economy, prices go up, right? That cuts in both directions. But I just want to say, I just want to focus in for a minute, because to me, looking at a lot of the different people you've mentioned and the agenda you're talking about, right?

To me, there's still sort of a through line from the Tea Party era where you have a lot of people voting for Republicans who hadn't voted for Republicans before, who have sort of big picture economic concerns, law and order concerns and so on.

But there is a part of the Republican Party that I think is part of your part of your sort of vision of the MAGA coalition. Right. That still wants to deliver those voters. We're going to keep taxes low for the upper class and we're going to pay for it by cutting Medicaid and and so on. Right. And like that, that still seems like a pretty powerful part of that.

Whatever the Republican Party is right now. We are about to see. This is why I'm so adamant. We can't have one big, beautiful bill. We need two bills. On tax policy, yeah. For the donor class and the Wall Street Journal and Murdoch's, you're 1 million percent correct. They want the permanent installation of the Trump tax cuts. They're all welfare queens.

on corporate welfare. And this is why I'm so adamantly opposed to him. I support the president, but look, I didn't support the tax plan in the beginning. And I still think my ideas would have been even better for President Trump in the country, although his turned out pretty well. But if you look at roughly, you know, as Scott Besson said the other day, I think that it's $4 trillion. It'll be the biggest tax increase in history if it's not $4 trillion. So

2.6 trillion of that goes to people in joint incomes under $400,000. Still over a trillion, 1.2 trillion goes to the wealthy. And my point is quite simple. Not only you're not going to get the tax cut, you're going to get dramatic tax increases unless we can get spending under control. And when I say spending under control, I mean a trillion dollars of cut

This year, when they talk about the 10-year cycle, they're lying to you. It's irrelevant. I went to Goldman and turnarounds. The only thing we should be talking about is fiscal year 25 and fiscal year 26. Those two years, what do we cut? How close can we get?

to a realistic financial model, economic model that gets us close. And the best way to do this is put a gun to the head of the wealthy and say, okay, fuckers, if you don't help us cut spending by backing your lobbyists off and backing off the corporatists and backing off all the guys, your big shareholders and you yourself, if we don't get that out and let's start with the defense budget, we just agreed to a $900 billion NDAA, which

As a former serving naval officer and a guy whose daughter went to West Point, she gave eight years of her life. We got skin in the game. We're hawks. The defense budget is an obscenity and must be cut. Unless we're prepared to do that, then your taxes are going to go up and not just your income taxes. We're going to have financial taxes. We're going to have all of it, financial taxes. We're going to get to a balanced budget and we're not going to do it in the back of the little guy. In fact,

The no tax on tips is just what President Trump has promised over and over again, no tax on overtime and no tax on Social Security, which is the big kahuna. So we have, Ross, I think roughly another $500 billion shortage on revenue. So we're probably four, four and a half with the tax cuts the populace need for the people to

They get more income to the American citizen, the hardworking American citizen. So, no, I'm mad about this, and I'll – So you're saying basically do a version of the tax reauthorization that either – that actually takes out some of the upper bracket stuff and combine that with –

discretionary spending cuts? I just want to be clear. Is that the combination? Yes, but I want to go, let's go back in time just a bit to the first 90 days of the Biden regime. Just for a minute. Just for a minute. But they, remember, they put forward this huge tax the wealthy, tax the beginners. It didn't even get a committee hearing. It was performed as a joke to hang out there. Right. I'm talking about, I'm talking about significant spending cuts starting in defense and Medicare and Social Security are off to the side. Okay. Right. Significant spending cuts starting

And if we don't get the cuts and the wealthy don't have some cuts, I don't want to increase taxes on wealthy just because I believe in soak the rich. Maybe I do, but I would not want to be part of policy. I want to do that to get our financial house in order because we just can't keep borrowing at a trillion dollars every hundred days. So, yes, if we can't balance it in addition with the more tax cuts for the working class, particularly Social Security,

Then that gap, we got to close that gap from $2 trillion. And CBO backs me up. House Freedom Caucus has going to be $2 trillion a year. We got to close that. I think it's spending cuts. And if it has to be, increase taxes. Not just they don't get the tax cuts reinstalled from Trump 17, but you actually increase taxes on these people. And that, I believe in incentives. I think, Ross, that that will incentivize the donor class to get focused on cutting government spending. Let's make them part of the process.

So that's the only way you can do it. And when I mentioned tax cuts, and I'm going to tell you, when I go around and give speeches, I gave one to Wall Street, a third of the audience of a Wall Street crowd standing ovation, two thirds, one third didn't applaud and one third spit on the floor. But when I go to Denton, Texas or places like that, and I say this program about increased tax for wealthy, standing ovation, the people are there and the voters are there.

I think you're totally right that there is a big constituency, especially now that the party has been transformed of Republican and populist leading Republican voters who would be fine with some soaking the rich in the context of a bigger budget deal. I'm completely skeptical that there is any large scale elite faction, including everyone you just described, who are fanning out over the agencies and

that would be up for that beyond like, you know, on the margins, like we're going to, can the Trump administration tax university endowments? Sure. Absolutely. They can do that. You know, just maintaining the changes to the state and local tax deduction that was, I think, one of the genuinely populist victories of the first Trump term, which, and I should say it soaked me, right? It soaked the upper middle class in blue states. Just maintaining that, I think, will be challenging. But

I want to turn us and bring us back to where we started, I guess, because the last conversation I had ended with me arguing with Marc Andreessen, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist, about whether he and his allies, who also have a big role in the Trump administration, who are filling a lot of jobs, could easily find big spending cuts. I'm just generally a skeptic of the ability to find big spending cuts. So maybe that's one situation

small point of overlap between you and I won't call them the tech right. We'll just call them Silicon Valley people who support Donald Trump. No, no, no, no, no, no. But we don't even have to go into the overlap. No, I'm not going to. You're too smart. You're one of the leading public intellectuals, particularly. I'm not one of them. No, no, you are. They're oligarchs.

They're oligarchs. They're 100% oligarchs. They believe in techno-feudalism. Look, they're all down here for one reason. They either knew we were going to win. They were smart enough to look at the math. Right. Or they saw after we won. I mean, Facebook's Damascene moment wasn't until 10 o'clock that night. Now he's down there. They're oligarchs who believe in techno-feudalism.

They have nothing. They're not even on the spectrum where we can argue against Rachel Maddow and AOC and Bernie Sanders on the spectrum of that. They're not on the spectrum. They're not. This phrase is sitting here in my notes because you've used it a bunch. Techno feudalism. We've talked about immigration. Right.

Right. You've talked about the idea that Silicon Valley is basically trying to bring in as much foreign labor as possible to presumably keep its own costs down. That's obviously part of what you mean by techno feudalism. But I don't think that's all of it. Right. This is not just about H-1B visas. No. Suppose Elon Musk came in tomorrow and said. No.

it's fine, I'm reforming the H-1B program. You would still disagree with him. So give me a broader view of what you think is wrong with the Silicon Valley view. Let me just give you a quick bunch of history. Obama is the most, in the progressive administration, him and Biden, the most reactionary in American history. Number one, he made a Faustian bargain with the sociopathic overlords in Wall Street to bail us out of the 2008 crisis, which still hasn't been resolved. At the same time,

the Obama and the established order went to Silicon Valley and made a deal with them. And the deal was the following. We will allow you to become the wealthiest people in the history of the world. We will let you create an apartheid state.

We will let you become monopolies. We will get no anti-trade. In fact, that's why you got Google and search. You got Facebook and what they do. You got Twitter and what they do. You've got Amazon destroying small business for the CCP. Every one of these guys, a monopoly in the Justice Department for 10 or 12 years to just look the other way.

So we'll let you become monopolies. We'll let you become the wealthiest people on earth. But here's the bargain. Here's what you have to do. You have to make the hegemon, the United States and the post-war international rules-based order and the ruling class of this country, you have to make us a dominant government.

dominant technological power of which we can, we have the commanding heights can never be questioned. And over the last 72 hours, what we've seen is two things. Number one is social media. The Chinese Communist Party and the PLA created TikTok, which is far more powerful than all the social media platforms ever.

of these guys put together, right? Forget that they use the information and the ownership. I'm just talking about the addictive nature and how evil can be put in there. And we now know that all the really, let's say hundreds of billions of dollars, not tens of billions, that we put into the theory of the case of blunt force computing power that, you know,

The Green New Deal is forgotten. Climate change is forgotten. You got to build power generators everywhere. You got to give over federal land for data centers everywhere. Five times the five. We got to burn more coal, more oil for these data centers because our method of AI, we understand that if this is not a PSYOP, which I don't think it totally is, we've had our Sputnik moment. And guess what?

The oligarchs that we created who were all progressive Democrats absolutely fucking face-planted. Now, here's the point. In techno-feudalism, you're just a digital serf. You're valued as a human being, as someone built and made in the image and likeness of God and endowed with the life spirit of the Holy Spirit. They don't consider that. Everything's digital to them. They are, at the end of the day, transhumanist. And what is transhumanist?

Transhumanists is somebody who sees Homo sapien here and Homo sapien plus, right? Plus on the other side, what they call the singularity. And that's why they're all rushing, whether it's artificial intelligence, regenerative robotics, quantum computing, advanced chip design, CRISPR, biotech, all of it to come to this point of which the oligarchs are going to lead that revolution. And why are they going to do it? Number one, when you get to know them and see where they're spending the money, it's because they want eternal life. You know why? Because they're complete atheistic

11-year-old boys that are kind of science fiction Dungeons and Dragons guys. And we've turned the nation over to that. And yes, I'm going to fight it every fucking step of the way. This is taking us back a millennium to feudalism. This is what their business model is based upon that. And the progressive left made a deal with these guys. They're all lefties. Elon had the first awakening because he could kind of, as an engineer, you kind of see the math.

He fully supported our plan of a base plus election to go get the low information voters and the moms for liberty and the moms for America who had flipped during the pandemic. He backed that strategy and the dude wrote a $250 million check over five months unprecedented to back our play. He's the first, but the rest of them, even Andreessen, they're all scumbags.

super progressive liberals. They're all techno feudalists. They don't give a flying fuck about the human being. And I don't care if you're black, white, Hispanic, Chinese, they don't care. And they have to be stopped. If we don't stop it and we don't stop it now, it's going to destroy not just this country, it's going to destroy the world. And you've seen this artificial intelligence. We have no controls over this. We've allowed these monopolies to exist. And now we know they're getting their ass handed to them, I think,

by the Chinese Communist Party. We're in deep shit right now. We're in a crisis. All right, Steve, hold that thought. We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back. All right. I want to go to the transhumanist stuff first and then to the policy stuff and Trump and whether any of this can be stopped. So to me, I think that there are different groups involved

In Silicon Valley, I think that you're right that generally people, including readers of this newspaper, listeners of this podcast, underestimate just how weird the long term ambitions of a lot of people deeply involved in Silicon Valley are, especially around artificial intelligence. And that there is this sort of. No, wait, wait, let me know. Belage in the network state. Let's talk about that. They're not weird people.

They're radicals. They're radicals. The network state we can save for the next time I have you on. For now, let's just focus on transhumanism. I'm going to be invited. You're going to get invited. Hold it. We've got breaking news. Bannon's actually going to be invited back. We're going to every week, man. No, stop. So listen. So the transhumanism stuff, though. So to me, it seemed like one of the things that pulled Elon Musk into politics

the conservative coalition was that while he's not, certainly not a religious conservative, not, but he is a kind of weirdo humanist, right? He likes the human race. He wants the human race to continue. No. Okay. So you don't, you don't see to me, to me, it seems like he must, he's in one group. Musk, look, Musk is just as transhumanist as the rest. No, since Edison, maybe our greatest applied engineer.

He is a genius in that level. Agreed. Agreed. And so he looks at this thing as all kind of mathematical equations from engineering in a big brain. When he puts on something, he can solve it.

He is the most prominent of that crowd that's warned against artificial intelligence and artificial general intelligence. It's one of the reasons he and the Altman at OpenAI have had so many big fights. Not big fans of each other. They hate each other. I mean, and part of that's personal, but part of it is philosophical. And Brother Musk is probably the farthest down the line because he's the most advanced in shipping.

So I think Neuralink is one of the most aggressive about Homo sapien 1.0 or Homo sapien 2.0. Elon is at the tip of this, and Elon is actually on an applied engineering basis, not bullshit talk. He is probably the farthest advance for transhumanism. People have to understand in the life, and I say life, next 10 years of your audience, we're going to be facing a dilemma for yourself and your kids, right?

Do you enhance yourself? Do you enhance yourself either by genetic engineering? Do you enhance yourself by advanced chip design plugged into you? Do you advance yourself by artificial intelligence? Elon's one of the top accelerationists about driving this thing faster, faster at accelerating at an increasing rate.

You're going to have to make a choice in your own life, not just politically in society, your own life. Do I do this? Am I a Luddite? Will I get left behind? More importantly, will my children get left behind? Do my children have a shot to really play sports in a Division I level? Or do my kids have an ability to go to an Ivy League school unless I get them enhanced? These questions, deep questions, never before handled in mankind's history are going to happen and going to happen in the next couple of years.

But so let's then take it back to politics, right? I don't see this critique that you're offering, a kind of, we'll call it a kind of religious humanist critique of Silicon Valley, where AI is going, maybe where, you know, digital augmentation is going. I don't see this as...

in any kind of powerful way in the Trump White House. Two weeks in, you know, making big announcements with, you know, with Sam Altman, right? Big announcements about investing in AI.

One of the main reasons, clearly from my conversation with Marc Andreessen, that part of Silicon Valley swung toward Trump was a fear of regulation on AI from the Biden administration. I completely agree with you that the Obama era made this kind of broad-based deal with Silicon Valley, right?

Different people would describe it differently, but there was a deal. The Biden administration reneged on the deal, right? They did antitrust stuff. They tried to regulate all these things. Hang on, I'm going to disagree with you. The whole of government leading the whole of society.

had a thing that they wanted a few large entities of which they then could kind of try to control, right? And stop the entrepreneurs. And that's, I think, Andreessen in the venture capital community. Yeah, Andreessen, he was, yeah, he obviously did not like that. But I mean, even from, but from your perspective, right, if AI is a threat to our humanity, right?

And it's going to happen in some form. It's going to happen in China in some form, right? Wouldn't it be better to have the Biden approach of a kind of state capture of AI than to have, you know, endless proliferating technology? Or is it better to have, like, which form of AI do you as an AI skeptic prefer? The Andreessen version or the Biden, you know, three big company version? If you have, Ross, let me just say, if you have

the beginning of the kinetic part of the Third World War and the Eurasian landmass. And you have... Meaning China versus Taiwan, just to put it in layman's terms. No, I mean a million seven people killed in Ukraine or wounded in Ukraine. Okay, okay. The Middle East, I'm talking about that. And by the way, China ready to go in time. What we have already, yep. I'm saying Trump's got to handle that. The problems are such a scale and what he's doing there is magnificent. Now, when you talk about the deeper issues we face...

You know, it's a process. I've started off, when I first started this, you know, people that I really admire were just like, populism, what are you talking about? And don't say nationalism because that's, you know, nationalism doesn't go to a good place. I said, no, we're populist nationalists. So I've had long odds before.

This one's long odds. Now we've got the Sputnik moment that can you let the Chinese Communist Party get ahead of you? Can you let these bad actors get ahead of you? And now we're in a horrible national security dilemma. And yes, President Trump, as he always does, and this is the way President Trump rolls, President Trump listens to a lot of voices and he will think it over and then he'll make a decision. And clearly the tech, the broligarchs have because of their ability to get in there. And also I consider the

inauguration day, like they're on display, like on the deck of the battleship Missouri, and he's MacArthur, and they're the Imperial Japanese staff sending the surrender document. But they're in there. They're inside the wire. Well, and there's a difference. I mean, I think what you said about Zuckerberg, though, is right. There's a group of people in tech who decided to support Trump and

The night that he won the 2024 election. That's absolutely true. And a lot of the guys who were there for the inauguration were, you know, I think general defeated generals paraded in a Roman triumph. Right.

Right. But Musk is not like that. Right. No, Musk is not like that. A bunch of the people around Musk are not like that. And I don't think Andreessen is like that either. Andreessen came over. Right. No, these are people who were who were already deeply alienated from. But they didn't. No, no. But hang on. Hang on. Andreessen and Musk are smart enough to be able to get below the surface on the numbers and see the direction of the country and climb on board as the techno feudalist early on. They are hardcore techno feudalist.

They're not populists. You know, I tease Elon all the time. If I could turn him from a techno-feudalist globalist to a populist nationalist, we could make some progress here. He's definitely a techno-feudalist, one of the hardest core. And so is Andreessen. Andreessen, these guys are smart. I mean, Andreessen, these guys, you're talking about genius level intelligence. These are not dumb people. But

They're not with us when it comes to the little guy. Listen, the bottom line is they don't think they don't.

We are competing with China on a technological frontier. Andreessen basically made a kind of his own. He did not make a populist argument, but he made a nationalist argument. He said, look, we want and what the Trump administration has promised us is for America to win, for our companies to win, for us to outcompete the Chinese and have what it takes to keep America strong.

you know, sort of ahead of the curve, which we are at the moment. Even, yes, I agree that, you know, deep seek the sort of the Chinese AI raises a lot of questions about AI strategy. I don't believe one fucking sentence of that. They don't believe that. They believe in this country because right now it protects them and provides some benefits to them.

remember, we bailed out these fucks on Silicon Valley Bank. Biden bailed them out when they couldn't make payroll. They could make payroll if they put more of their own money in, but they wouldn't. They have a little guy bail them out in the Silicon Valley Bank. Now, in the last couple of days, what are they talking about? Oh my gosh, we need a Marshall plan. We need a space plan. We need a Mercury plan. We need hundreds of billions of dollars from taxpayers. They want essentially a bailout. If it's a Sputnik moment,

Somebody's got to ask the question. Yo, Andreessen, we made a deal with you guys. Elon, we made a deal with you guys. We made you oligarchs. We made you the richest people in the fucking history of the earth.

We stopped any antitrust. This is what pisses me off the most. No antitrust, not breaking these companies up and allowing entrepreneurs to get in there. Because Marc Andreessen doesn't believe in the entrepreneurial system in the country. No way. I mean, I don't know. Just to defend prior guests on this program as a matter of policy, you know, I think there is a big difference between how the sort of

the big social media companies regarded themselves and how venture capital world regarded itself. I'm not going to look into anybody's soul and think about whether they believe in America, but they do believe they believe in a different form of competition than does Google and Facebook and so on. And I think that's why they've always been, that's why they were always more sympathetic to the right. I'm not saying even Andreessen's a bad guy at the heart of it, but

They're not, they don't think of the sovereign, you know, they're American as an idea. America's not an idea. It's not. All right. It's a country with a border and a group of citizens. That's the greatest resource we've ever had. And the apartheid state of Silicon Valley thinks we don't need our greatest resource, which the American citizens, they'd rather import basically indentured servants from

to work at third less and have an apartheid state. And then as soon as they can replace them with digital serfs, they will do it. All right, let's bring it back to policy and then to Trump himself on policy. Again, I don't think any of this is happening, but what is the specific populist answer to policy?

The oligarchs that you're talking about, is it, you know, we should, you know, Trump should keep Lena Khan around and do antitrust stuff. Is it taxation on these companies? Is it just not spending money and not investing in AI? Is it regulations on AI? What what you could wave a magic wand and have the Trump White House do what you want around this stuff? What would you do?

Number one, I would be a huge supporter of Lena Khan remaining, and I would love to see Lena Khan given more power. And I think we ought to go and break up Silicon Valley because obviously in their scale, they haven't performed very well. Let's be brutally frank. If we're to believe TikTok, the power of TikTok, which is evidence, self-evident, and if you believe the power or the nascent power of DeepSeek and other things that are being released right now. So I also believe you have to have

kind of massive. You cannot, we can't be in a situation where the state underwrites and gives the accumulation of power. If the revolutionary generation came back, they would spit on the floor. And look, it's complicated. There are no easy solutions. I would love to have, first, I would like to have a quick investigation in exactly how the intelligence community missed this. There's so many questions. And I realized that

People who are humanists or people who are religious and put their religion at the center of their being are going to be really on their back foot now with all the forces of world power against you. And the thing is going to be, you can't be a Luddite. To be a Luddite and to want this to slow down or like the people in the Fahrenheit, the book, or out in the woods have memorized the book. They're memorizing. Memorizing. Memorizing the great books. The humanist. Well, we'll have podcasts though. The human element and the humanist...

You don't have that moment because right now we have to strike because you have to compete on a national security basis because this is like Sputnik. It's an arms race. We're in a nuclear arms race. And I would just tell people, and particularly your readers who do not agree with me politically on anything, if I can beseech you for one thing is you must start to understand the moment we're in. This is an inflection point, not just for this country. This is an inflection point for the world. And President Trump will always listen to the

the entrepreneurs have been very successful. It's just his default position. And I realized that this is going to be a complicated argument to make, but we're going to have to think this thing through collectively. This is a whole of society decision. What I want

is a public discussion and debate over the biggest issues of the day, particularly the size and scope of the federal government and how we spend money and where we spend it and who's taxed and who's not taxed. Also, what comes after the post-war international rules-based order, because I think President Trump thinking through hemispheric defense from the Panama Canal to Greenland is genius. And as being a naval officer, I will tell you, it has so much logic to it.

There's so much going on. But give this guy a chance on his basic – on the basic plan that he's got for the safety and security of this country and with asking hard questions, et cetera, and let's get into these deep issues. The deep issues are only the credential class can actually help us think through because –

We're in a fix right now. We're in a real fix. So Trump himself, let's try and wrap up there, right? Because early in our conversation, you said something about how there's this idea that populism is just like a cult of personality around Trump or that Trump has all the power, right? And

Obviously, that's not true in the sense that there really are big divides within the Republican coalition. There are big divides within this administration. What is true, though, is that President Trump has a lot of power, a lot of personal power over what

Many, many conservatives tend to think right. He's got a lot of sort of trust built up right where, you know, people are like, well, you know, I don't know exactly where to look, but I stand with Trump if he's here, I'm there. Right. He's got that.

And then he also is, I think it's fair to say, you know, not an ideological guy, a flexible guy, a guy who, you know, listens to the last person in the room. And then he's a guy who has his own incentives. Right. And so, you know, you talked about TikTok. Right. Donald Trump had one position on TikTok. Right.

before he got some... Oh, you're so cynical. You're so cynical. I hate to be cynical about our president. You're so cynical. He had that position, and now he has a different position on an issue that you say is an example of effectively a Chinese communist PSYOP infecting American life. So to what extent is populism, in all the forms you've described, just completely lashed to the personality and character of Donald Trump? And to what extent is there a world beyond it

where, you know, is there going to be a moment where populism needs a new leader? And you're back to that cattle call in New Hampshire looking at different opportunities. His default... Look, he's a guy from Queens. I see this... I've heard that. I've heard that about him. Yeah, I heard... President Trump, for people who don't know him, and I know for your audience, this is where they may opt out of the podcast. They've seen a lot of him. But he's actually...

an incredible, kind-hearted, empathetic individual he is personally. And I kind of say he's a moderate. You know, I'm a crazy right-wing populist, nationalist. President Trump balances everything. He's a common-sense conservative. He's a common-sense populist, nationalist. On our movement, the core base of MAGA is hard-welded to Donald Trump because they admire his moral clarity. Because just for your audience,

And I put him at the level of Washington and Lincoln in this regard. This is the age of Trump. No person in American history, and go read Jack Kennedy's Profiles in Courage. You can add up the whole book, and it doesn't come close. I'm not a big fan of Jack Kennedy's Profiles in Courage, but I take your point. I should say Ted Sorensen's Profiles in Courage. Yeah, Ted Sorensen's Profiles in Courage. Yeah, go on. Go on. You're so cool.

Moral clarity, he came back knowing all that was going to happen. It was almost like, I call him the American Cincinnatus, to return. They wanted him to die in federal prison. I can tell you as a guy that went to prison and not a camp, the federal prisons are very tough places, particularly if you're in your 70s. They're tough places. They're just tough and dangerous. And then the physical clarity, the physical courage to come back and stand up and say, fight, fight, fight on the assassination attempt is

made him both gladiator and leader. And so our movement will go where President Trump leads us. And I can disagree on policies and on the margin. And some of these, like on taxes, I really disagree on transhumanism. But at the end of the day,

If he says we're going in this direction, I'm going to say, OK, I don't agree with this. And, you know, I don't think it's the right direction, but I'm all in. Let's roll. And you just have to wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. But you're all in. You're all in for transhumanism. If he says that, if he's like, Steve, get the chip in your brain.

Let's do it. Well, I think that I will convince President Trump. President Trump, as you know, is a germaphobe. He's a germaphobe. He's not going to get a chip. He's a germaphobe. It's hard. You know, we started shaking hands was a big deal. I don't think you're going to get a chip in the brain. But so what? But so then what you're saying? So there may be there may be a couple of three, but I don't think he's definitely not transhumanist. And we'll stop that part of it. It

It's going to be tough. I didn't say these were tough conversations and we're going to have tough moments. Like for instance, the deportation of all 12 million illegal aliens.

I see already in the Republican Party some people, you know, well, maybe we just get the criminals. Maybe we just get the bad ones. Maybe we do this. We're going to have so many fights going down. That's basically my position. Did I tell you, Ross, at the beginning of this, what pussies the conservatives are? You pussy. Especially the ones who write columns for the New York Times. No, you're too much of a humanist. That's your problem. You're too empathetic. But so your division that you have then in the next four years—

I guess we can talk about a future, you know, J.D. Vance presidency on another show. But your vision of the next four years is, in effect, a battle for Donald Trump. Yes. Right? That's what it comes down to. So it's like I wrote a column over the weekend, you know, the court, the idea of like this is court politics. Yeah. Right? And in a way, I'm just trying to end us on a pretty strong note here. You're basically saying that the future of homo sapiens—

The future of the human race itself, as we've known it for, you know, 6,000 or 6 million years, depending on your, you know, interpretation of creationism, depends on people arguing and contending for, you know, the views and positions of Donald Trump.

Is that what you think right now? I think that's correct. I think that the globalist elite thought he was dead and he's been resurrected and he resurrected himself. And then he has a movement that has his back. And the fundamental questions about this republic and the sovereignty of it and about the direction of humankind.

are all going to play out in the next four or five years. It's going to be the most intense part, I think, of modern political and really social history. And convincing President Trump, because he is our leader, convincing President Trump of our, and he's a guy that listens to the arguments and he's got tremendous common sense. It's incumbent upon us

to be able to make those arguments to him, but he's got his own decision making. President Trump's a very imperfect instrument. He'd be the first to tell you that as I am and you are and Tucker and Elon and everybody. And his imperfections, I think is just true greatness.

that he overcomes that to be one of the most unique leaders in all world history. And we'll just have to see how it plays out. But the populist, the far right war room, you know, we're going to be fighting hard every day to make sure the voice of we think of our element, our element on the far right of this movement is heard. All right, Steve, thank you so much. Ross, thank you so much. Appreciate you.

And thanks to all of our listeners. We'll be back if the cloud or the singularity doesn't claim us first for a regular conversation next week. This episode was produced by Sophia Alvarez-Boyd, Andrea Batanzos, and Elisa Gutierrez. It was edited by Jordana Hochman.

Our fact-check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Original music by Pat McCusker, Sonia Herrero, and Carol Saburo. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samuluski. And our executive producer, as always, is Annie Rose Strasser. ♪