Steve Bannon (33:10)
We knew that once this reporting was out there that when Trump saw it, he would likely, you know, if he learned about this meeting, he would likely cancel it. And my colleagues Eric Schmidt and Maggie Haberman have reported today that's just what happened, that after Trump learned about this meeting last night, after our reporting broke, he put an end to it. Not the meeting meeting itself, but the discussion of the war plans. He explained in his Oval Office remarks why, right, that he does not think this is something that Elon needed to see. He cited the very importantly he incited the business conflicts, essentially putting some guardrails here on Elon Musk for perhaps the first time and certainly kind of extraordinary limits that were not articulated before. So our report says that this meeting was going on, he was going to be briefed on the war plans, and then when Trump learned about it, the meeting was canceled. Okay, let's have an adult conversation. Everybody knows I've got big differences. Elon Musk. The two biggest issues I have with Elon Musk, his relationship with the Chinese Communist Party. The second one's transhumanism, I guess the third one's being an oligarch. But I have said from the beginning and had his back on this Doge situation, because it's very important that we get to the bottom of exactly waste, fraud and abus, so we can then also go through programmatically and start to cut the budget. We have a crisis and people just want to be diverted to all this kind of sidebar stuff. There is, it is impossible, impossible that Pete Hexseth and the Joint Chiefs of Staff scheduled a meeting to show Elon Musk, who doesn't have the security clearance for it and quite frankly, does have business relationship with the ccp. He's the first to admit that. He praises them all the time, the war plans, the operational plans, in a classified basis in a classified space in the Pentagon. Without running it past President Trump. The thing is phony. It's a fake news, a fake story. It didn't happen, what they were doing. And remember on this show, we're the ones that were yelling and screaming and banging on the table. Cross the Potomac. Cross the Potomac. Cross the Potomac. Today was kind of the initial day of it. They've been over there for four and a half weeks is I'm going to discuss tomorrow when Philip Patrick joins me, the buried lead on the Federal Reserve's announcement this week. The headline they all ran well, no rate cut and we're going to have two rate cuts going down range. They didn't pick up or nobody emphasized the fact the Fed put out new numbers on our economic growth, on GDP growth, and that number was 1.7%. Let me be brutally frank. The model doesn't work at 1.7% growth. It doesn't. If you back out. Massive government spending. We're already in a recession. The only reason this thing keeps going, and this is what President Trump's trying to do. Oh, by the way, did I mention that Johnson and Johnson announced Today, was it $55 billion of advanced plant and equipment being brought to the United States for manufacturing, Advanced manufacturing starting in North Carolina. You Got Honda in Indiana, you got Johnson Johnson, North Carolina, you have Taiwan Semiconductor, $100 billion in Arizona. Nvidia just says they hundreds of billions of dollars of essentially design because they don't really manufacture. Manufacture that much. Hundreds of billions of dollars here in the United states. Apple at $500 billion. These are not, it's not UAE announcing they're going to do all this and put, you know, a day, a trillion dollars, right? Or the SoftBank saying $500 billion or the Saudis say they're going to put a trillion dollars in. That all may or may not happen. These are companies are telling their shareholders, making public announcements and coming to the White House and saying it. These are people that going on the hook, publicly traded companies. Here's what we're doing. They're bringing manufacturing jobs back. But what President Trump inherited. And I don't think, if I can make one observation about the comps team, I don't think they've done an adequate job of presenting the awful situation that Besant and President Trump were handed on the economy. But it's out there as of yesterday or the other day when he says 1.7% growth, the model doesn't work like that. So what does that mean? It means we have to stop the cosplay when it comes to cutting spending. You've got a couple of ways you're going to close this gap. And if you don't close a gap of $2 trillion every year, and that's what's baked in right now, folks. Either through growth, you get higher revenue because in the existing tax structure, you have it just mathematically, the denominator goes up, you get higher growth, you get more revenue. Number one, right. Number two, tariffs are external revenue starts to generate additional revenue. Or the companies that move back here, although it's going to be longer term, they generate, they generate product, manufacturing, more tax revenue. So you're getting tax revenue either through tariffs externally or companies are moving back higher taxes or the existing tax structure you have, you have higher growth, you get more, you get more cash. But then at the end of the day, you have two things to go. And right now, if you look at those, you still have a gap. What do you do? Well, you can raise taxes. You just can. It's possible. It's not the second law of thermodynamics that you can't. Now certainly you can't raise them on the working class or the middle class because, you know, you have 9 million people that have two jobs. Jobs, it's what, 6, 7% of the workforce. Two jobs. People are working nonstop. They're working like crazy. Credit card debt's exploding. People can't make ends meet. The other is wait for it. You can cut spending. And right now the appropriations process is going to start. It's got to be done. All these single subject appropriations bills, which would kick the can down the road for years, have to be done in the next few weeks. That's going to be programmatically. But the waste, fraud and abuse part has to be now. You just heard Andy Biggs on here. He just gave you a big scoop. What's the big scoop in the first hour? That OMB in the next couple weeks is going to start with the impoundments. Massie sends out a thing today, kind of. Ha, ha, ha. You know, I told you, if you vote for the cr, Department of Education on there. We got it, Congressman Massey, and we do appreciate the fact you were very. You stuck to your principles. And I agree. It's going to happen. This is why Russ fought. And these guys are going to start coming back with impoundments and we're going to have a big old fight. It's going to be every bit as intense as the fight we're having now to ship these criminal terrorists out of the country. And I'm not so sure Roberts and these guys have the stones to back up the press. I just don't. I think we have the legal arguments, think we have the constitutional arguments. You certainly have the arguments of the destruction of the country. Because if you add a national security threat, as bad as those terrorists are, and they're terrible, cutting people's arms off, all that terrorizing people out in Colorado and everyplace else, the existential threat to take down this republic is this debt that's metastasizing. That means that Doge. And that's what we said. You got to go to the Pentagon. Waste. Foreign abuse. Are programmatically, and I hate to break it to people, that's a $900 billion defense authorization. And they're asking in the. In the supplemental or in the reconciliation, another hundred billion that gets. I just do some math. Let's see, 900 plus 100. Oh, we're at a trillion dollars. As a young man. I used to work in that building. I came off sea duty, off a destroyer. I was over there as a special assistant to the chief of Naval operations. I was a Grundoon, okay. I was a Grand Dune. But I saw how it worked. And there's so many good people. They're great people over There and back then, the budget was nothing compared to if you had told guys back then, hey, one day we're going to sit here and we're going to have a $900 billion to a trillion dollar budget. And guess what? We're not going to have a Navy. The Navy's going to be a joke. They would sit there, go. You're out of your mind. You're insane. Well, no, we're not insane. We have to get serious. And this is why Doge has to be let go and go through and find out what they can find a way for an abuse. The Pentagon is rife with it. They're the first to admit it. Rife with it. Now, what you do about what he has to see and what he does not see, that's all going to be worked out. But you know what? Pete Hegseth is not only a good man, Pete Hegseth is a safe pair of hands. Pete's got some real judgment, he's got the warrior ethos, but he's a safe pair of hands. So we need Doge to get on it on that. And then programmatically, we have to take this hemispheric defense that President Trump is talking about in laying out the defense budget got to be wrapped around that. Because guess what? Our problem's not the Russian army anymore. Just not. It's going to be the Russian Navy from Greenland all the way down to the Panama Canal in the Atlantic, and then the vast. The vast heartland of the Pacific or the vast Pacific Ocean, the new heartland of the United States and the three island chain. Bang, we got it. Western hemisphere, the island off of the Eurasian landmass. Secured. You throw in an iron dome. Super secured. Let's get a defense budget that reflects that. You're not going to be able to cut anything until you cut defense. I realize they're all sitting there, oh, my God, you're a Republican. You got to be a hawk. Well, I am a hawk, but I think I'm a smart hawk. Thought this thing through and been around the world at places and sent to God knows where. The North Arabian Sea and a carrier battle group and understood. Hey, what is smart and what is not smart? As a junior officer, okay? And a lot of these, these desktop admirals are just missing the plot. We have to make cuts to defense. We have to. Because with cuts to defense, then you can start smartly cutting the social programs. You're going to have to finding the waste, fraud and abuse which is Doge's mandate. Waste, fraud and abuse. We have to know that now, we have to know it now. And knowing that we're going to start impoundments in two weeks, guess what, folks? Wait for it. We can impound the money immediately, then fight it out in the courts. That's what has to happen. That's kind of what the kickoff meaning today. If you read Pete Hegseth's, you know, Twitter feed last night, he said, hey, he's coming over here. We're going to talk to him about efficiencies, effectiveness, that sort of thing. Okay? And you can do it in a. And he said it was not going to be in a classified way. You can do it enough so they can get onto the waste, fraud and abuse. We need to know that number. What was not a good sign? The Social Security, the judge that dropped a bomb of stopped them at Social Security. And look to me, Social Security, sacrosanct people have worked all their lives and they get 800, $900 checks. Look, I don't care if the system's good or bad. We can talk about how we reform it, how we think about it going forward, how you make it smarter. But that's what a lot of these folks have worked their entire life in. Backbreaking jobs as waitresses and in construction sites. They did what they did for decades and decades and decades and they paid into it. And that little 900 bucks, that's what they got. And no, Howard Lutnick, you can't just wait. You just can't skip a month. That's not how the world works, bro. You're a billionaire. Multi billionaire. Your mother in law, if it missed you as not a problem. Hey, Howard, can you advance me the cash? Not a problem. That's not the world we live in. These people depend upon that. How that happened and how we got here is a different conversation. And I think we got to be prepared to have that conversation. But you have to show the people that you had the discipline to cut the discretionary spending first. And the best way to cut the discretionary funding is find some ways fraud and abuse. Let's find it. The disturbing thing, and I'm waiting for the government's response today, the disturbing thing on Social Security, she basically listened. She read it. She says there's nothing there. You haven't found anything. It's a wild goose chase. We need to know about that. We need to know about that. And I think we got to. The White House has got to go on offense on this. This we need to know. We got to see some numbers. Time is ticking. This is a ticking time bomb. Just like I tell you about. Done with that. In the, in the, in the, in the Tax Service Tax Network usa we got the letter from the irs. It's a ticking time bomb. The interest payments cre every day and go, where do they go? They go to add to the face amount of the debt. This is why we're the first one to do the math. Said, you know, we're kind of adding a trillion dollars every hundred days. That's essentially what it is. It's sometimes shorter, sometimes longer. It's not sustainable. And now people say, well the reason the deficits have never had a thing and the debts all talk and nobody thinks because then effectively you're talking about future generation. It's like defending democracy for the left. It's a theoretical, it ain't theoretical anymore. It's not the supply chains causing the problem. You may have some of that issue in eggs and some other things. Yes. But the overall problem is that the law of large numbers, the now the interest payment so huge and refinancing a third of that where Scott Bessens got to go out this year and I don't know, sell $10 trillion of government securities. And what did Ray Dalio warn you about? Ray Dalio said, hey, you're going to have a failed treasury auction. Point blank, you're going to have a failed treasury auction. If we have a failed treasury auction, folks, something so obscure you've never heard about, your life is going to change. Not your children's life and not your grandchildren's life, your life. And if you're under 40 years old, your life is going to change to such a degree that you may never ever get financial freedom ever. That's what they're hiding from you. That's what they don't want to talk about because they don't have the political will to actually make the cuts. Right now the business model we have is not sustainable. The only reason it's sustainable is that every transaction in the world has to be converted into a dollar. So we have the greatest export in history. It's called a greenback. And even that the world's sitting there going, man, this thing gets so devalued, the purchasing power drops because the elites over there won't get it together. And the brics nations form up and say, hey, we got rubber and tin and oil and gas and all this other stuff and maybe we hold it back and maybe we form together and maybe we get some sort of, you know, gold backed currency. That's why it's important for you to go. Don't listen to me. Learn it yourself. You owe this to your country and you owe it to yourself. This is why the Birch gold. We've done all the work on the end of the Dollar Empire to put out debt and deficit and modern monetary theory. Why we said, you're smart enough. You need to understand these ideas that have driven it and driven it and driven it and driven us into the ground. It can't go on anymore. And you and this generation have to make that decision. No, we're not going to do this anymore. And yes, it's going to have some pain. They said they go, oh my God, it's going to be pain. It's going to be pain. What in the hell did you get us into? And the phoniness of running around with the oligarchs. You're so phony. You can't. And look at the speeches it says and Bernie, dude, it's not only a phony, It's a bore. Birchgold.com End of the Dollar Empire promo code Bannon. Get it. Read it. Birch is going to be here tomorrow. Philip Patrick, I'm going to talk about it. Make America healthy again. Trevor, you join us here. Sacred human health. Make me feel better. Now I got myself all worked up. Made me feel better. I get out of here about how, how am I to take a supplemental and be great, get energy and make myself healthier? Take it away, sir.