American Thought Leaders - Steve Bannon: Trump Is Waging ‘Economic Warfare’ on the Chinese Communist Party

Episode Date: May 4, 2025

“Never before in history have two great trading entities ever engaged in outright economic warfare, like is being engaged today. And that’s why I say we’re living in historic times,” says Steve Bannon, former White House chief strategist during President Donald Trump’s first administration and host of the “War Room” show.“It’s not just tariffs. They’re a tool. [Trump]’s reorganizing the world system of commerce and of trade,” Bannon says.In this episode, we dive into the U.S.–China trade war, Trump’s tariff strategy, his first 100 days in office, and where America is headed in the weeks and months to come.“The next 100 days is going to be three times more intense, dramatic, and meaningful than the first 100 days,” Bannon says.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Never before in history have ever two great trading entities ever engaged in outright economic warfare like being engaged today. And that's why I say we're living in historic times. The elites have been concentrating wealth, have been gaming the system on their own workers, and have made a fortune. In this episode, I'm sitting down with former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, host of War Room and former executive chairman of Breitbart News. It's not just tariffs, they're a tool. He's reorganizing the world's system of commerce and of trade. What President Trump looks at the United States is as a premium market. And just like you would pay to get a skybox at a sporting event,

he's saying there's going to be a premium to get here. The next 100 days is going to be three times more intense, dramatic, and meaningful than the first 100 days. This summer, we're going to have a constitutional crisis. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Steve Bannon, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. No, I'm a huge fan of the show. And thank you so much for coming here in the war room and having me on. Let's start with this. President Trump has instituted this regime of tariffs. You've

described it as economic warfare, potentially putting Xi Jinping out of business. Before I get you to tell me about the 100 days, tell me what this whole thing is. Paint me a picture of what— I think what he's doing is reorganizing—it's not just tariffs, they're a tool—he's reorganizing the world's system of commerce and of trade. And why is he doing this? Because for the last 40 or 50 years, the elites in the West, both in the city of London, which is their Wall Street and our Wall Street, along with the global corporatists, have essentially worked with the Chinese Communist Party as a partner to essentially shift all high value manufacturing from England and the United States to mainland China as their active business partners.

I think what hasn't really dawned on people because the mainstream media covers it because the corporate media is part of this, is that you've had a systematic deindustrialization of the West for the last 30 or 40 or 50 years done by the people and the leaders in the West, the elites, at the detriment of working class and middle class people. And that's what President Trump is trying to reorganize that global trading commerce and trading systems around it. And here's where you're finding is that you're finding the biggest appetite for this to happen is in Japan and South Korea and Taiwan and Vietnam and the Philippines and India.

Those are the countries right now, I can tell you, are stacked up over the Treasury Department trying to finish the architecture, a memorable understanding of the deals that will kind of be this new trading relationship. And this is very different than TPP. People say, why do you just do TPP? TPP was a total disaster. So President Trump is doing that because the Chinese Communist Party has engaged in an economic war against the West for 20 or 30 years. This is what unrestricted warfare is

about. And as the Epoch Times has shown, you know, in every issue, the People's War that they declared that, Wan Xhi-Shan and Xi declared against the United States in May of 2019, after walking away from two years of tough negotiations of Lee Ho, the vice premier, with Bob Lighthizer and Peter Navarro and President Trump to walk away from that deal, shows you that they're not interested in actually, their only focus is a complete, totally decoupling, except from our capital and our technology. I think of that time in 2018, 2019, where that deal was being negotiated as being the first time

the Chinese Communist Party actually had to do something it didn't want to. What do you think? I think this is very important for the audience to understand. Let's go back to how this thing all began. At the fall of Tiananmen Square, when the goddess of liberty went up, and Deng Xiaoping and the faction there said, okay, we've had enough of this, right? We're going to drop the hammer. At that moment, which was six months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, because it all collapsed 50 years after essentially the US and the allies walked away from the Russian people and allowed the Bolsheviks to continue to run them and essentially turned over Lao Bai Jing, the Chinese people to the communist because that was an action done by the US State Department and other elites in the United

States. In the collapse in 50 years, the whole aspect is to get the Chinese Communist Party re-engage and economically engage. They had most favored nation and World Trade Organization by both Bush and Clinton-Hunta in the late 90s, along with the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, all the elites, all the political class joined in. They completely gamed that system. You cut to 2015 of the cyber deal cut by Obama and his great pivot to Asia in a very tough negotiation.

Not a bad deal, not perfect, but okay. The Chinese Communist Party does not live up to one element of it. Shortly thereafter, they walk away from a deal they made on Hong Kong and kind of in blood to the freedom of the Hong Kong people and a crackdown essentially make, I think, Hong Kong a slave labor camp, right? Because they've put all the distance in multi-year prison terms. It's just like being in mainland, immediately two years of intense negotiations and you're right. For the first time you see, because it deals with the seven deadly sins, the Lighthizer, Trump-Nevar deal, they have this meeting of one belt, one road in 2019.

Wan-Shi-Shan, Xi, Putin shows up. They walk through the whole kind of network effect, network systems of how they're going to be, component parts manufactured in Europe, final manufacturing assembly in China, back into the provinces, natural resources from South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. It's an entire system. They sit there and go, and predatory capitalism is just kind of kicking off with one belt, one road, which is essentially, you know The Chinese Communist Party is great at copying this they've essentially taking the British East India Company model and run it in reverse They sit there and go. Hey if we sign this deal We are now actually coupled to the economy of the West and the foreign devils will always have

The upper hand. They just walk away from it. Shortly thereafter, Xi declares a people's war. I mean, everything the Chinese Communist Party does is very methodical. The one thing they do is use negotiations in diplomacy is just stalling tactics or make the foreign devils feel better and let their media say about these big deals like Obama's cyber deal, but we're never going to live up to it.'s cyber deal, but we're never gonna live up to it. Like Hong Kong, we're never gonna live up to it,

so as soon as we wanna move, we move. Or like, remember, Kemeny there was the skinny deal. Two things happened. The military games in Wuhan in, I don't know, August to July and August, where all of a sudden people started getting sick, right, with a virus, and then later the skinny deal, and think about that, the skinny deal that was done in 2020,

they didn't love any provisions of that. We have signed, negotiated and signed major agreements with these guys, you know, over the last 25 years, including allow them into the global trading system, the most favored nation and WTO. And they renege on everything. I mean, they don't even make, it's not a renege. They have no intention of fulfilling it. That's our cash and resources going to the Chinese Communist Party for slave labor products they made that they're skimming 80% off the top.

The Chinese people, have they prospered? I kind of missed their prosperity part of this. Well, a few did. A few prospered. The CCP, which most people in the West still don't understand. I told this to a very prominent person the other day. I said, you know, at the one point, let's say 2 billion people in China, there's under 100,000 communists. He goes, no, they're all communists. I go, oh, no, they're most certainly not communists. They're Chinese. They're la baijian. They happen to be living in our dictatorship, but there's about 92,000 and only a couple thousand matter.

It's run by five factions. They're stealing or forcing our companies to give them $600 billion in intellectual property a year. Deficit on intellectual property, I think is $25 trillion. These are massive, they've sucked the lifeblood out of the industrial West as they've industrialized us. And it's not that they did it by themselves. Their partners are Wall Street, the city of London, the corporatist elite in the United Kingdom and the United States, and Silicon Valley, and two-plant political, you know,

the Tories and the Labour Party both allowed this to happen in the UK, and two-plant political. The Tories and the Labour Party both allowed this to happen in the UK, and the Republicans and Democrats are both part of the same problem. So this is a deep, deep issue, this economic war. And finally, President Trump has said, I've had enough of getting ripped off, and we're going to engage in this thing. So you're just making me think about this. In my view, part of it is because of the creation of this, it'll probably be obvious what I mean by this, but the financialization economy. Sometime, we had to make things in order to process it. Back in the 90s, we started to financialize the economy.

Right. Whenever we have this economy that a lot of people are making money just by manipulating money, those are always going to be the richest people because who has access to the kind of money, cheap money, to be able to make money? How much are the very rich people, let's call them the elites, you're using that term, culpable and responsible, how much is it the Chinese Communist Party with their Machiavellian schemes co-opt Western do-gooding? Because here's the thing. It's not do-gooding. Do-gooding has nothing to do with this. Or not do-gooding, but credulity. It's not even credulity. The Western elites, very early on, it shouldn't be lost on people that

at the very moment that you have an open revolt against the Chinese Communist Party, because people do not understand that Tiananmen is much bigger than Tiananmen Square. You had a country in a moment, right, around that lead up into the late May and early June that was in open revolt against a dictatorial system that had been imposed upon that in every major city.

Now Beijing, and right there by the Forbidden City, I mean, that is sacred ground for the CCP because they're an imperial dynasty. And what you can have is the peasant's overthrow right there. When the goddess of liberty went up, which was one of the strongest symbols in world history, that we are united to the American Revolution, we're united

kind of to the French Revolution, we are united in this quest for freedom and dignity and liberty, right? At that very moment, dangling these guys, you know, the hardliners took over and go, okay, we've had it. This is not good. This is where the world gets a system and they're going to start asking questions. This is going to be put down. And we don't care how many people we kill. In fact, we got to kill them on global TV. We're going to kill them on

global TV. But that's getting killed. We're killing that now. Where was the outrage from the West? There was no outrage. In fact, it was the exact opposite. Bush 41, who had been ambassador to China and been head of the CIA, just saying, right? What did he do? He sent General Scalcroft in 30 days to Beijing to basically tell Deng Xiaoping and these guys, you got to tone it down, right? Obviously this thing's not working. We'll help you kind of figure this out. But you've got to clean it up,

and we can't have any more tanks. And what we're gonna do is get you in the World Trade Organization and get you in the most favored nation. And we're gonna make you from a backward agricultural developing nation, we're gonna allow you to become a manufacturing power because we are gonna to work in conjunction

and ship all the jobs over here. And we're going to be partners. And that's what happened. And this is what happened in broad daylight. The cynicism of it. So the global elites don't have credulity. They had willful blindness. They knew exactly what was going on.

They were party to it. And here's the cruelest thing, is what they sold the American people on, the reason to accept this, because the American people have always had this bond with the Chinese people back from the 17th and 18th century. Right? I remember as a kid in Catholic school, you know, giving to the orphanages in China, right, to help the young Chinese. Always had a strong bond with the American people.

And as a young kid in Virginia, I always wanted to go to China from the very early ages, right, kind of the mystery of China and the beauty of China and how, you know, how magnificent it was. What you see is they took the most cynical way to sell it. They go, listen, if we give them all this stuff on economics, they'll become more liberal in politics, right? They'll become, and it's the exact opposite.

It was a bald faced lie. In fact, you could argue 30 years after that, our elites really looked around and said, hey, their system, we kind of like their system. State capitalism with authoritarian control and kind of elite merger of regulatory apparatus. And that's what the United States had come under Biden. That's what the Trump revolution is a rejection of that. But this whole system is a sham, right? Because it requires this wholesale mass theft that you just described. As we've learned, you can't innovate in a totalitarian system. You have

to steal the innovators or you have to— Both sides of the equation are a sham. Yeah. Because remember, to keep it going, we have to... All of this is just done because of federal spending. Remember, because we've shipped all the high value added jobs over, we only generate internally in our country, you know, four and a half, five trillion dollars of tax revenues, total revenues, fees, everything coming in. And with the no tariff, you know, the de minimis tariffs we have, four and a half to five trillion dollars, we spend six and a half to seven trillion dollars.

We have to finance two trillion dollars a year by essentially just printing the money and, you know, having the being able to sell those bonds, whether to the Chinese Communist Party or the Japanese insurance companies, or just buy them ourselves. If you can't sell them, to keep interest rate down, just buy them ourselves. That part of the system is unsustainable. Their part of the system is also unsustainable also. It's a total sham. The whole thing, not just the politics of it, if you actually look, and this goes back

to the decency in the, what I love, the kind of common sense hardheadedness of Lao Bai Jing, old hundred names, which is a term of endearment for the working class folks, the little guy in China. China was supposed to be able to transition because the state-owned industries and the corruption with the CCP, because folks remember, why are there so many state-owned industries? They're skimming 20% off the top.

The way they finance the party, they're the factions of the five factions, essentially, that control the Chinese Communist Party, are the wealthiest families on the planet Earth. They're far wealthier than the tech billionaires. They're far wealthier. You take all the sheiks and the royal family of Saudi Arabia or the Russian oligarchs or the Indian billionaires.

I can go to any place in the world. The Chinese Communist Party people are the richest in the world by far. They've skimmed all... with the state-owned industries is how they do the skim, right? First they do, they get their hands in everywhere. Every, every company's got to be it. But part of their thing was to make sure that, hey, we can only export these goods and bury the West for X amount of time. At some point in time we do have to transition to a more of a consumer economy. Part of these exports have to be consumed by the slave laborers themselves. We have to do it.

Well, the common sense of old hundred names is the fact of, I don't buy it. They say, hang on, they don't spend. Why don't they spend? There's no social safety net and they don't trust the government. The government not just lies to them, it steals and suppresses them every day. In fact, and this is the tragedy of the Chinese people, they did buy into the system for one thing. How has every working class and middle class family in world history gotten out of poverty?

It's to make a little money, to save a little money and to buy a piece of real estate, to buy a farm, to buy the picket, white picket fence. The American dream ain't a dollar. The American dream has always been a house with a white picket fence that you own, right? In Europe, the same way. This is always ownership of a real asset. They sold that to the Chinese people who bought in with their hard work and making no money and saving on this on the side and not consuming, I'm going to buy it.

And what did they do? The Chinese Communist Party, with the banks in the West and the financial services in the West, had the biggest scam in the world, the massive over-construction of the apartments of units. So all the construction companies, everybody backed up, Chinese Communist Party, CCP's are backing everyone. They're making more money than ever. All the banks, all the particular regional banks

are all upside down. All they got the West in there, they got the CCP in there. And guess what? The real estate assets these people bought with the little bit of money they had are now worth 50 cents on the dollar. This is the cynicism of the Chinese Communist Party. So now you have a system, both systems don't work.

We have to just create the money to buy this stuff, right, to buy this stuff and it can't continue on because we can't continue to finance it. On the other side, they can't shift to a consumer economy because number one, they've been screwed over by their leaders on the real estate side. So their real assets are now 50 cents on the dollar and they know everybody's lying to them. So there's no social security, there's no pension, there's no way, and with the one child policy, they don't have eight kids anymore back in the village that can sustain you.

They got one. And normally that's one with attitude that's in the big city somewhere and don't wanna hear from mom and dad anymore about the problems. So they're sitting there going, hey, we're gonna save 50% of our, whatever we got left, we're saving. That's the dilemma of the world economy right

now in reality. And the reason is, there's a crisis is because the elites have been concentrating wealth. This has worked out for both sides. The elites of both countries have been gaming the system on their own workers and have made a fortune. The system works for the connected and the system works for the wealthy. And what Trump stands up for is saying that I put America first as a nationalist, I'm gonna put the American citizens first. And this happens to miraculously coincide

with what the fixes have to be with China. That Lao Bai Jing will actually come first in deals that kind of balance this out in Trump's perfect trade relationships. Well, and there's this other dimension I'm just thinking of when the vice president Vance alluded to a few weeks back, where they're actually using those hard-earned savings of the 50% of people that are from the countryside. I don't like the term. The Chinese people are not peasants. No, no, I don't like the term either.

They're a lot like Jerry. They're the hardest-working, greatest folks. I see his point. Just using that terminology, I think, killed the message. Actually, that's a very good point. But I think the point holds, which is that they're using those savings to buy U.S. sovereign debt and continue to game the system. So it's like they're playing both sides from everything you to buy U.S. sovereign debt and continue to game the system. It's like they're playing both sides from everything you've told me. Okay, so the economy. Let's look at the Chinese economy. We just talked about how the housing crashed. This whole infrastructure development aspect of the economy is down massively. There's not much of a consumer economy

to speak of. There's this theft economy, of course. And then the fourth part, of course, is the export. That's what's kind of in play right now with tariffs. Yes. Well, let's make sure your audience understands something when we say tariffs. As we speak today, this is a full embargo. That's what I think you see Secretary Besson and some outreach to the CCP, and you can't blink at it, but there's some working. Right now, there is a full embargo of essentially products coming in from China into the United

States, essentially. If you talk to, we just had the truckers on the other day, there's like no trucks leaving San Pedro in the port of Los Angeles, these big West Coast ports. And we're a developing nation to the Chinese. My point is, if you see with the trade balance, what comes in on ships to San Pedro, Los Angeles Harbor, in the Bay Area, and Washington, if you see what comes in on the West Coast and gets shipped east, are consumer products, engineering products, products that have value added.

Yes, you have t-shirts and things like that, but you have a lot of value added manufacturing that comes in. If you see what goes out, soybeans, sorghum, wood, wheat, some high, some chips, some super high advanced chips, mainly what goes out, we're like a colony, we're essentially an economic colony of the Chinese Communist Party. What goes out is mainly natural resources, foodstuffs, things that have very little manufacturing high value at it, except at the super level, where you have the chips, the airplanes, don't get me wrong, we have at a super, super level, but basically, we're shipping out because the system's been set up that we're like an economic colony.

So what happens with these tariffs now? Do you agree that the export is the only piece of the economy they have left? I suppose the theft economy is still in play significantly, right? And we could discuss that. The pressure on the Chinese people, look, Besesson said it yesterday. The Wall Street Journal had a quite brilliant piece this morning, a place that does not have a lot of brilliant pieces. They actually had a quite brilliant piece about the real pressures and fissures. And the BBC had a great piece the other day about the reality of Xi. Now, here's

the dilemma is that yes, they're already that yes they're going to they're already suffering and they're gonna suffer more but the Chinese guys probably doesn't care. I mean Mao's I mean they've told him to gird for and they're trying to go ultra nationalist to say the foreign devils are trying to destroy us like they've always tried to do they're trying to make this an ultra nationalist and in some aspects even a racist thing right they're trying to do this. Because remember the Chinese came as part of not communist.

What they're just a group of gangsters. They happen to be living in the Imperial Palace. It's another Imperial dynasty, this time run by a group of armed thugs. Mao said at the height of the nuclear of the West, of some of the tensions and the Cuban Missile Crisis and other things like that in the 60s, which has the West and we study it and we talk about it and we make movies about it.

Mao said at the time, he said, hey, if the West, they hit us with nuclear weapons, he said, they had some calculated how many guys we lose. They said, I don't know, you lose 200 or 300 million. He goes, that's nothing. We'll recreate that. They didn't care. The Chinese Communist Party, and this is what the people that are in business with them will burn in the lowest pit of hell.

Very simply. 450 to 500 million forced abortions. Miles Guo told me when he first met me, he said the forced abortions have been at least a half a billion people, 80% of little girls. So the hungry ghost of the forced abortions have been at least a half a billion people, 80% of little girls. So the hungry ghost of the forced abortions. On top of that, they admit to murdering, starving, beating to death against, from the forced collectivization to the great leap forward to the cultural, to right now what's happening to the underground evangelical Christians, the underground Catholics, the Falun Gong, any religious or spiritual sect that you have,

right? The Uighurs, I don't care if you're Muslim or if you're right-wing traditional Catholic, they are fear, religion, and spirituality. The Chinese people, nothing else. They will put that down, torture it, do live organ harvesting. It's out in the open. These are not hidden things. You Fear religion and spirituality the Chinese people did nothing out that they will put that down Tortured do live organ harvesting. It's out in the open. These are not hidden things You don't have to read you don't have to have a security clearance to understand this This is all known as particularly known by the people that deal in information, which is nothing What is Wall Street the financial markets are nothing but information information markets. They have perfect information They know exactly what the Chinese Communist Party has been doing the Chinese Communist Party is Financial markets are nothing but information markets. They have perfect information. They know exactly what the Chinese Communist Party has been doing.

The Chinese Communist Party is by far with no second the most murderous dictatorship in the history of mankind. The Bolsheviks and the Nazis are there, but Mao and these guys, they killed hundreds of millions of their own countrymen. It's not like they've been some invading power that has gone and killed, oh, they have done that too in the killing fields and supporting, but they've principally taken it out on their own people. Why?

They don't care. They don't care about the Chinese people. They look at the Chinese people as disposable, as a cocktail napkin. And this is why if you're in the Wall Street, if you're in the money class, or if you're in the global corporatist class, or you're in Silicon Valley in this apartheid state, and you're in business with them and made money off them,

hey, you gotta have your nose rubbed in it, because trust me, when you leave this veil of tears and stand before your maker, you're gonna be held accountable for that. You're gonna be held accountable for the enslavement, murder, and degradation of the Chinese people. Steve, there's so many things that you said I vehemently agree with. The one thing I have to vehemently disagree with, and that is I think they absolutely are communist. And the thing is, in every communist society that exists, it actually works out the same way. It's the

gangsters that rule. So I do think it's the ideology that's driving it. But I want to bifurcate communism between the economics of communism and the cultural milieu of communism. Clearly, they are cultural Marxists, which are atheists, and they're thugs, which the Bolsheviks have been, and every communist party has been since then. I'm just saying economically, they are state capitalists, because you which the Bolsheviks have been and every Communist Party has been since then. I'm just saying economically

they are they are they are state capitalists because you can't if you believed in communism you couldn't possibly believe in the wealth disparity between Lao Bai Jing and And in the five factions and let's say the top ten thousand people in the Chinese Communist Party Let me repeat this and Ruby on these guys just did the Senate thing, or came out, and I was very disappointed at. The factions that rule Beijing and run the Chinese Communist Party, and people should know it, at each other's throats all the time, because they are inherently evil people. All they believe in, they're narcissists and nihilists that just believe in temporal power

in this life. They're the wealthiest people on earth. They make the Saudis and UAE and Qatar and these sheiks in the Gulf, they make them look like pikers. That's the whole thing. They own so much real estate in the West End of London. They own Midtown Manhattan.

One of their big scams is to get as much cash generated out and get it out of the country. They're not reinvesting. They're not reinvesting their own money back in these plants. They basically own a piece of the action on Western capital that's come in. They're gangsters, but they believe in a stark state capitalist autocracy, where they're the ones, rent seekers, taking all the value out of Lao Bai Jing. Right. Well, no, I mean, and I think the economic aspect of communism, I think it was debunked before even the Soviet Union basically took up the mantle of communism, so to speak. That's interesting. I mean, another topic to discuss. I just want to touch on this, the external revenue service.

Created in this very room. Well, I watched that episode, actually. With John Gardner. Absolutely. A guy for small manufacturing in Laguna Beach, California. That's right. Can that happen? It's happening at some level, but there seems to be a pretty big cost. There's GDP numbers. A lot of people are reporting seem to be down. Some people are saying that's a statistical artifact. I don't know. But even if it's a statistical recession...

The way to look at... The GDP number came out the other day. If you look right below that number, number came out the other day. If you look right below that number, there's, you know, it's really 3% growth, there's investment growing, etc. And that's all from really Biden's, I mean, President Trump, even the the Liberation Day happened on April 22nd, April 2nd, we're now even 29 days in this, so wouldn't have had that big impact into the quarterly number. I think the way to look at this way President Trump does, the US is the premier consumer market in the world. And here before, we would just let people have free access to it.

In fact, it's not just tariffs in the number, it's non-tariff barriers. It's currency manipulation, it's counterfeiting. I mean, these are things that the Chinese Communist Party beyond masters, currency manipulation, counterfeiting, and all the types of duties. Well, and transshipment. When I saw those tariffs first, right, that was what struck me that the highest ones were

all around the big transshipment hubs. Yes, exactly. The CCP, right? Exactly. Yeah. So what President Trump looks at the United States is as a premium market. And just like you would pay to get a skybox at a sporting event or pay a first-row ticket for a concert, he's saying there's going to be a premium to

get here, right? And that's why reciprocity he takes in the non-tariff barriers into that. He's saying, by the way, but you can get out of that. The way you can get out of that is that if you bring your manufacturing back to the United States and create high value added manufacturing jobs with massive capital investment, guess what? You can gather the tariffs. Now if you're going to continue on, there is going to be a tariff structure. Right now, even at the minimum, the average tariffs in the United States have been 2%.

Right now, the basic, the lowest thing you get in the Trump is 10, which is a 500%. I mean, it's amazing. And a lot of these are going to be 20%, 25%. So there will be the revenues generated from that will be pretty extraordinary. I happen to think that most people, most companies are going to opt to, which I think what President Trump wants, investment here in the United, that returns us to a manufacturing superpower. Because of that, we get domestic tax revenues from corporations and from people making better wages and more people making good wages.

The gambit basically is that there's nowhere else to go, so you have to come here. Either you do it in here or you pay the tariff. It's the greatest consumer market in the world. So you're going to have to, like President Trump says, he's holding the cards. Now, will some things kind of slip out, etc. But look, this guy's a master negotiator. If you think of geopolitically, or geostrategically in geoeconomics. And people, you know, I was doing a town hall last night on News Nation, the guys are screaming,

well, you know, when's it gonna, you know, the, I said, guys, this has been 50 years of rot, 50 years of selling out your country, 50 years of selling out your countrymen and selling out the workers and the middle class of this nation. The guys, 100 days into it, it's only 28 days into into from Liberation Day.

It's going to take a while. It's not going to take 10 years. But this thing, directionally, I know Trump pretty well. He ain't backing off this. Will there be things on the side? And one of the things he has to do, remember, one of the reasons I love the newspaper so much, Epoch Times, which by the way, I want to say again, is by far, there's not even a second, the best broadsheet in the country.

I can say that because I am a news consumer. First I get every printed paper you get here in Washington DC. See that. No, no, but you're an extraordinary, it's extraordinary. It's an extraordinary paper. It's put together. The writing's amazing. The investigative reporting's amazing.

Then NTD, what you do on the TV is also extraordinary, but for a media company that's really at its very early years of growth, to outshine the Wall Street Journal, to outshine the New York Times, things have been doing this for over 100 years, and it shows you the people that I think you have on online subscribers and total subscribers, I think you're number three to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, who are not only been around for over 100 years and have massive, you know, multi, they're, these things trade at 10, 20, 30, 40 billion dollars and have huge massive staffs, but also have gone out of the way to promote, I mean, hundreds of millions of dollars to promote their paywall and behind it.

And you look at Epic Times and it's not a huge effort to do it. It's basically people are attracted because of the content in a free market. It's just extraordinary what you've done. It's just for the record, it's number four by our calculations, but I hope maybe it's number three.

I don't know. Who's the third in front of you? Not the Washington Post. I thought it was Washington Post. I think you guys, I think, I'm not giving you news flashbacks. I think you guys, I think since Bezos didn't do it, I think in the fall that you guys have surpassed them, and you guys are on a growth projection like that, plus the reporting is just extraordinary.

If you look at the serious stories, and not just that, it does what a newspaper is supposed to do. It not only informs you of domestic politics and what's going on, it's one of the most serious papers in the world in allowing any individual to understand the world, right? That's been the power of really the New York Times for the leader for the progressives and really the Wall Street Journal here for the business community. It gives those people an insight to the entire world. The Epoch Times does that and it's pretty extraordinary. If you read that paper, if you go online and read it every day or read the printed edition,

it's extraordinary. But I think you look at what's going on in those editions and you see what's happening with this fight. President Trump, this is part of his core being. This is central to not just his political DNA, this is central to what I call his public persona DNA. When he started doing media in the 80s and 90s, long before he was thinking of running for office,

when he would do media, because he was such a dominant member of the social, cultural aspect of New York City in the 80s and 90s. When they would have him on and asking questions of public policies or want to do with those types of people, he really came from what I call the Lou Dobbs School of Trade Deficits and Global Trade and Political Economy, and he knew this cold.

He has talked about trade, he's talked about trade deficits, first with Japan and then with China, for 40 years. And I tell people, you didn't know this was coming? And don't think he's going to wave off. He said last night on News Nation, the first time I've heard him say it, he says, look, part of my negotiating thing is to think things through and have flexibility to be able to, you know, call an audible and do this.

There's going to be flexibility in audibles called between the United States and China as this thing gets worked out. And we're not going to get many of the readers of the Epoch Times and of course, the new federal state and the group that I represented part of, we want to take down the CCP, right? We want to, we want Lao Bai Jing to overthrow him. We have to assume that this is not, I think directionally will be fine, but there's going to be some sort of accommodation at some point to work this thing out

to the betterment of the United States of America. But never before in history, have ever two great trading entities ever engage in outright economic warfare like being engaged today? And that's why I say we're living in historic times. Now I realize that's a curse to our Chinese audience, but that's the reality of what we're living through today. I don't know if I can speak for everybody at Epoch Times and so forth, but I think the viewpoint would be more like, why don't we just stop supporting the CCP and let the Chinese people do what

would happen naturally if the CCP hadn't got its tentacles into all aspects of the global economy and had this theft economy? For your audience today, and having worked on this project now for 20-some years, if you read Josh Rogan's book, which I recommend to everybody, because Josh Rogan is probably the most sourced writer in the kind of corporate media, works for the Washington Post, he's a columnist, he wrote a book about Trump's first term called Chaos Under Heaven. It was the fight between Xi and Trump. And in there he goes through, just to set the table, an American foreign policy, national security, economic policy.

Traditionally you've had hardliners against China. You've had realists that say, hey one guy's's gonna be hardline, the other say, we've gotta be tough with these guys, we've gotta be realists that they control East Asia. Then you've had the accommodationists, which in the first term were the Gary Coens and the Steve Mnuchin, the Wall Street crowd. They just want to make as much money

and see them as a business partner. But he said, for the first time in American history, you actually had a group that was probably the group closest to Trump and closest to Trump's mindset, at least at the time. And that was these guys called the Super Hawks. And the Super Hawks question the very legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party. Remember, I virtually never say China, and I never say the Chinese people. It is the our issue is always with the Chinese Congress. And we shouldn't. We shouldn't. It's not the China or the Chinese people. Think about how

that's changed over time. So many people in this town say the CCP now. When Trump came to the scene, it was never said it was always China or the Chinese or things like that. It was huge when the select committee on the CCP was established. That was very deliberate. Yes, very deliberate. Not in China. That was huge in the behind the scenes. So you've had a sea change of being, quite frankly, blinded by the business community, the media community, and people's natural, hey, we like the Chinese. They were our allies in World War II. We've always been close to the Chinese. Sun Yat-sen came over here and really set America on fire back in what, 1911, 1915, before World War I, and I think after in the 20s, had a tremendous reception and sold bonds and people wanted to

support the development of a free China. No, but I think what's happened is a sea change from even the 15 campaign was there has to be some sort of confrontation. He identified in the book as this new group, the Super Hawks, that didn't believe in the Chinese Communist Party or the legitimate and were kind of the guy saying, hey, we should back the Lao Bai Jing to overthrow these guys, because they'll naturally happen if we cut them off, were the the the uber nationalist Steve, Stephen Miller, Peter Navarro, the China hawk, who written all these great books and things. And death by China. And Stephen K. Bannon, who is verily this anti CCP guy.

And he says, that's totally different. That has come through, you know, in the second term even more so. There are more people coming to our cause intellectually for that. Now, the reality is, given that the world's economy, you know, kind of hinges upon these two entities, you're still seeing, and particularly the business community, particularly the Republican Party is very, very vocal, and we've got ourselves into a terrible jam. We've got ourselves very dependent upon this. President Trump is a master negotiator, besant, who is no friend of the CCP, very, very big

anti-CCP hawk. I think you're going to see some amazing things. I mean, already it's amazing. I mean, hell, we're engaged finally in the economic war they've been running with us. He called them out. We have a full embargo right now. And we have all the countries of East Asia coming to our side. There's, I don't know if it's this one, or there's one of my Financial Times I have here

that says in the cover of it that Beijing has warned, Beijing has warned the East Asian countries, if you sign a deal or come to terms agreed in the architecture of a deal, and in there is anything that makes you not part of our sphere on trade, you will pay for it. You should not sign it. It's a threat. It's a warning. That's where we are today. Well, okay. So maybe in a nutshell, characterize for me the first 100 days of, I guess it's 28 days, as you said earlier, from Liberation Day. But obviously, this was in the works from the moment they got out of the blocks.

And so- Well, even from this has been four years, and this is part of your project, Print 2025 and Center for Renewing America, the five or six think tanks have been working these four years. This is why you had the days of thunder. Look, the first hundred days is a, has been, I just, in one word, it's a revolution.

President Trump in every vertical you're talking about, and particularly the main thing, which is the Chinese Communist Party, geopolitically, geostrategically, and geoeconomically, it's been magnificent. But that's one of 50 of major things they're going, I mean, he has done, if you think about it on the border, we were told by Langford and Republicans, this is not Democrats trying to sell you bill of goods, this is Republicans trying to sell you bill of goods, that we

had to have this huge bill put up tens and hundreds of billions of dollars and people forget in the bill that none of the restrictions came on until you hit two million a year illegal aliens coming across the border. The bill Langford put up that President Trump was criticized, the word, oh, you're a bunch of racists and nativists, had two million a year before penalties and sanctions and restrictions started coming. Trump closed the border by basically doing away with the architecture of executive orders of Biden to actually allow this invasion to happen and having customs and border, enforce the border and sending some troops down there.

In 60 days, the border is closed. Now we're going to build the wall and do everything we have to. The border is closed. Okay. So the number one thing he ran on has been done. Have we deported 10 million? No, that's kind of step two that's being worked through. He's trying to deport as many as possible, but they go, oh, you haven't done deportation.

I say, screw you. You just gave me a solution a year ago that was gonna have two million a year coming here every year before you even did anything about it. So I don't wanna hear your crap because this guy in 60 days closed it. As he said he was going to do, people that are watching this show

should go back and remember every lie that you were told about the border, right? All the misinformation you were told about the border, right? All the misinformation you were told about the border, everything you were told to believe about the border, were 100% lies. Okay? Trump came in and did it in 60 days. And people in South Texas, people in the Rio Grande Valley, in Southern Arizona, you can see it's a totally new feel.

It's not an invasion going on anymore. Do we have problems on the border? Certainly. Do we have a massive problem now how you deport these? Of course we do. That's all being worked through. The other thing is inflation. They said, oh, you know, inflation is at 2.3%,

interest rates are down, everything's down, cheaper, energy is the thing. So the two big things he said are all happening at the same time. And there's another 50 things on top of that or a 100 things. There's been 137 executive orders. It's the urgency, the rapidity, and the scale of what he's done.

But the most important thing of all of that, of this is breathtaking thing, is the fact you see this guy every day. It's the same guy. It's Donald Trump. It's Trump having in the Oval Office where there's bilats and they're all behind closed doors. Remember in the Iraq and Afghanistan war Bush? You never know about this.

There'll be meetings at the White House. These guys come to the White House and Trump sets them up in front of the fireplace. The cameras come on and he disintermediates the mainstream media. No longer are they, they have the microphone, he just says, cut the cameras on, here, ba, ba, ba. He starts talking, he goes on one of his riffs and then he throws up the questions. And now he's opened up to epoch times and the war room and to the ecosystem on the right. You get better questions.

Every day he's showing you what government's about. This is like FDR doing a fireside chat every day and having the whole nation in there. This has never been done in human history. No advanced industrial power has ever governed purely as a populist, purely, hey, come on in, ask me some questions. Right? What do you have to say? He doesn't shy away from questions.

It's extraordinary in the level of energy and intensity. And he's the same guy every day. It's Trump sitting there and he's going to throw out some crazy stuff because Donald Trump, half of us trolling people, right? The other half, he's throwing out ideas. It's extraordinary. It's never been done. It'll never be done again. That's why we're living in a complete historic moment right now. Let's talk about one area that I actually don't fully know what's happening in. That is this dismantling of the USAGM infrastructure, Voice of America, RFA, people have been furloughed. It's unclear to me whether they intend to

bring these things back as functioning entities doing what their mandates say, or whether this is an actual dismantling of these government... I'm one of the drivers of the deconstruction of the administrative state. You've got this fourth branch of government that's kind of taken over. It's impervious to elections. Whether you're a socialist or a progressive on the left or a right-winger, this thing's got to go because it's the permanent kind of Petrion guard that runs the country, so it's got to go. There was two ways. One way, Elon Musk came in with Doge, and that was supposed to find waste, fraud, and abuse, because you have two things.

You have of the six and a half or seven trillion dollars spent a year. The question is, is a lot of this just ripped off and just, is a lot of it fraud? Is a lot of it just waste with all these fat cats? A lot of it's just abuse. And then you have programmatically, you've got all these programs, USAID and DOE and USAID, let's use that example, and Voice of America and the global. It's not that these haven't happened. Hell, our show would do the live streams in the summer of 2023 for the single subject authorization bills, which our audience couldn't get enough of. You had at two o'clock in the morning, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Eli Crane, Lauren Boebert, all the MAGA congressmen up there arguing at the

subcommittee level in the House floor, arguing about USAID and identifying what the problems were or DOE. And guess what? It wouldn't even, they'd be voted at a subcommittee with majority rhino support. And then they were passed overwhelmingly. So the programmatic side was being attached. What Doge went in, and this is what I kept saying, when he kept saying, well, I'm gonna take two trillion out the first year and then a trillion. I said, don't give people fault that you're gonna find this fraud. I'm not so sure it's there. I'm sure there is a lot, most of it the Pentagon, which you refuse to go to. But the political class here is looking for a magic wand.

They don't want to cut anything. They want to add to USAID. They want to add to the voice of America. This is the Republicans. Hell, the Democrats are like every penny in the country that come from the government. So he went in there and it was a lot of, you know, Sturm and Drong and a lot of optics. And most of the cuts, besides all the kicking up the dust of Social Security, the first week Treasury Department's got $4.6 trillion of payments going out and nobody

knows where they go out. I go, what? I called Besson, I talked to the Secretary of Treasury, I said, yo, you're going to have to sell $12 trillion of government securities this year to finance this mess. Certainly, I hope there's not, he says it's ridiculous. It's nothing. It's just these guys don't understand the way the government system works. So here we are with Doge now, you know, Elon leaving.

He went from two trillion to one trillion to 150 billion, but it's almost all on the programmatic side. So they did put them on the programmatic side. I assume... Just very briefly, what do you mean by programmatic side? Programmatic side is basically the programs like the programs of the state department. State departments made up of hundreds of different programs that all in the appropriations bill you get the state department gets its funding, but it's programmatic underneath it.

You look at the 10,000 page appropriations bill because it's a law, it's a contract. In that contract will literally delete delineate down to like the tens of millions of dollars what's going to USAID. And inside of USAID, kind of what's been, you know, to these things in sub-Saharan Africa, this in Pakistan, this, it's not a lot of ability to even move that money around. This is what OMB immediately upon appropriations being approved, it goes to two places. It goes to OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, to manage that. I could call Russ Vodop in the first term and say, hey, look, I want to talk to you

about certain programs of American Indians right at the Department of Interior. He says, give me 15 minutes, I'll send a guy over, and they can actually talk, look on a weekly basis the amount of money programmatically to the whole, the whole budget, what has gone, what's been achieved, what they've accomplished, everything like that. It's a fairly tight management system, right? Hence, Elon didn't find a trillion dollars of fraud, he just didn't. I realize he's got fanboys who want to skip around and light their her fire. I'm a guy that's showing the money because I'm into cutting the budget of federal spending.

And if it's happening in fraud, that's got to go. And the fraudster has got to be turned over to DOJ, prosecuted, put in prison. If it's waste, and the Pentagon's wastes, I want to know that. Where's the waste? And let's get the guys in charge of waste. They should be held accountable. If it's fraud the same way, if it's abuse the same way, if it's programmatic, and this is what's going to have to happen.

We have to make tough decisions now. The programs of the Pentagon, the Pentagon's a $1 trillion budget, right? That's a $1 trillion budget. In fact, slightly over a trillion. Medicaid is, I don't know, $800 billion. The other nondiscretionary spending outside of Medicaid, I think is $500 or $600 billion. Those are all programs. Somebody here is going to have to make a tough call.

They're no easy calls. All of this goes somewhere and it all has a constituency. And the media is going to be all over it. But this is called the adult work of how you start to get this federal spending down. That's still not being done. The political class were the biggest people cheering Elon on because they wanted him to be the fairy godmother and come with a magic wand and said, I found a trillion dollars of fraud.

That would be the greatest solution in the world. It's also not going to happen, right? Because as bad as these systems are, I don't think they're that bad if they are that bad We haven't seen it yet because they haven't matched up where they say like Social Security has all these people hundred years old I said what that's it looks like that's in a different category that money doesn't go to it That's all some historic bookkeeping talk about the cash going out. We haven't seen To date it hasn't been shown where the Social Security fraud is. I'm sure there's some, I'm sure there's fraud at the IRS. I'm sure there's fraud these places.

That's what we have to see. So programmatically, the big huge battles of this summer, and this is why we're in the second hundred days, given the tip of the first, we're now getting into the zone I call the convergence of the crises. What's converging is number one, and I looked at these as three verticals, that number one about national security was ending the kinetic part of the Third World War on the Eurasian landmass, Ukraine, the Middle East, the Red Sea, and hopefully not get into a kinetic

conflict with the People's Liberation Army and Navy around Taiwan. That's number one. The other was the getting our sovereignty back of the 10 million illegal alien invaders, seal that, which he did, and start the mass deportation program because it's just not criminals. It's got to be all 10 million. They got to go because they're crushing the black and Hispanic community at the lower skill levels. The

third is this enormous existential threat of the economy and debt and everything to pay and that's tied to the commercial relationships of the Chinese Communist Party. This is so, this summer we're going to have a constitutional crisis. Constitutional crisis on the deportations, President Trump in his second Article 2 powers is saying, hey look, let me be blunt, on the unitary theory of the executive, I'm the chief executive officer of the United States by the Constitution. That means I can fire people at these agencies or at my cabinet things as I want. And I don't have to, you're gone and you're gone.

Number two, go back to the programs and go back to the appropriations and OMB. In those programs, if he deems that they're not hitting their targets or they should be reappropriated, he can impound the money. He can just sit there and go, I have the ability not to spend that.

That is gonna get, they're gonna fight that, they're fighting this, he's on the court, I think the ability not to spend that. That is gonna get, they're gonna fight that. They're fighting this. He's on the court, I think in 50 different lawsuits about that. His second power is as commander in chief of the armed forces. He's declared a national emergency at the border, a national security emergency.

He can deport these people. They don't need a deportation hearing. They don't need due process. They're here illegally. They're gonna go. And he's already at the Supreme Court on this, and this is going to force, I think, the Supreme Court sometime in June to rule on it.

And if they rule that a court has supremacy over him as commander in chief, I happen to believe that's going to be an issue. And we're going to have to sort that out at the time. But that's coming. The third is now we're into the phase of actually, Elon's gone, he's left behind. We'll figure out what these frauds were, the fraud part of it, or the abuse part. But we're stuck with still six and a half or seven trillion dollars of spending. Now we have to have a budget to get serious about defense spending, get serious about

Medicaid, get serious about these other social programs. All of the cuts are going to hurt. It just is because everybody's got a constituency, whether you're a defense contractor or part of the military and or if you're Medicaid and or if you're social programs. But while you have that gap you just can't, we can't finance two trillion dollars a year. It's not doable. The Chinese Communist Party ends up financing a part of it. It puts us more in the grip. The third one is ends up financing a part of it. It puts us more in the grip. The third one is obviously stopping these wars.

That's why this Russian rapprochement to break them away from their alliance and allegiance with the Chinese Communist Party to break off the KGB from the Russian rapprochement and this is what Wichita has been working on. The Ukraine either economic deal and peace deal is a subset of that. The situation with the nuclear power in Persia, which I am adamant that should not be bombing, it's got to be part of this deal. And the third is a situation in Gaza and the Red Sea.

So these things are hurtling towards, I think, a climax this summer. So this summer, the next hundred, the next hundred days is going to be three times more important, more, more intense, dramatic and meaningful than the first hundred days. But here's the good news for us. Our revolution shows us one thing, that if we don't quit we win. If we do, Civil War shows the same thing, It's the side that doesn't quit that eventually win. Okay, what I love about the tenacity and grit and toughness of the MAGA movement, we ain't gonna quit, we're not quitters.

We're all in on this. If we were gonna quit, you would have quit when they stole the election, you would have quit when Trump was forced back to Mar-a-Lago, you would have quit when Fox News didn't cover him live, you would have quit back in those days of January, February, March, April, May. Those first four or five, six months when he was in line in winter down in Mar-a-Lago and all the Republican Party turned against him, all the conservative media turned against

him, and all you heard about was Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley and all these clowns are never going to be president of the United States. Those were the dark days. We didn't quit then. We rallied, we had his back. We started doing the hard work of Project 2025 and these other programmatic and building these cadres that could come in and get these policies done so we could have this great 100 days.

The toughness and the ability to be resilient, to be resilient, that we have it. And you can see on the left, I don't think they quite have it. I think they've been too lazy, they're too fat, they're too whiny. They've abandoned the working class, and that's why I think we're tougher and we're more focused, and that's why we're going to win. Steve, we're going to have to finish up momentarily. But last question, just very briefly, if you had one piece of advice to give President Trump or this administration, what is that? Triple down.

Just make every day more intense than the day before. You're on the right track. You've got the right policies. You've got the right people. Obviously, today, the national security advisers are going to make changes. Directionally, you're right. You're fighting, you're on the side of the righteousness. I think we've seen this. Trump is, I can tell you, having a front row seat to this. 16 was providential. That was the hand of God. We had a plane,

we had a jet, a man, a message. We had no organization, no money. That was the American people stepping up and saying, I want this guy. This guy's different than I've heard enough of the Clintons. I've heard enough of the Bushes. I've heard enough of this crap. I want to give this guy a shot. The stealing of the 2020 election, the pandemic and the stealing of the 2020 election was also the hand of God.

At the time it didn't seem that, but if we had gone right into a second term, it had been like trench warfare. It had been like the Western front in World War II or World War I. Just two sides dug in and they kind of had Trump surrounded. God's hand worked that we would step back and put it on the burden on MAGA and the burden on his followers to make sure you had his back and did the precinct strategy and all things you had to do to make sure you were there for him. And if he committed to do it again, that we would drive to victory.

But it showed us how these Democrats are not traditional Democrats, you think. These people are neo Marxist, right? They're autocrats. They were trying to destroy people. They're using the pandemic to destroy people. They're using the government to destroy people. They ran this thing like you run, like the Stasi ran East Berlin. That was all revealed to us.

Plus, we had the time. We had the time to regroup. Trump had the time to think. We had the time to put the Project 2025 in the Center for Renewing America. We had the time to think through what we had to do with the Chinese Communist Party, what to do with these things. You had those four years of preparation. How do you think, you know, I gave this interview to PBS after I left the first time, I said,

hey, you know, flood the zone. Here is our strategy to have two or three things every day so they would bite on one and we drive. We're doing a dozen to 15 a day. What I would tell the president and his team, urgency, action, intensity, every day. When you got an enemy on the run, you keep them on the run. Never take the foot off the pedal. Don't let them retreat. Run the tables and let's break this globalist that run the Imperial Capital here in Washington, DC, because victory is at hand. We just got

to keep pounding down. Steve Bannon, thanks so much for being on the show. Thank you. Love you guys and come back. Thank you all for joining Steve Bannon and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.