by Rush Limbaugh in the Limbaugh Letter, October 2019
So energizing to pick the considerable brain of President Trump's former chief strategist, whose storied history as Breitbart executive chairman, Goldman Sachs investment banker, Naval officer, producer and director, and founder of Citizens of the American Republic befits one of the most fascinating characters on the current scene. His new film, "Claws of the Red Dragon", exposes China's telecom giant Huawei as "the greatest national security threat we have ever faced."
RUSH: Steve, how are you?
BANNON: How are you doing, Rush? I'm an avid reader of your newsletter -- I know how great it is.
RUSH: Okay, cool. Thank you. Now, I want to start with some basics, because I was asked these questions when it all happened, and I'd like to hear it from you. You were running Breitbart, promoting it, growing it. You were doing Breitbart News on Sirius Satellite, the morning show. Then the next thing anybody knew you're the CEO of the Trump campaign.
BANNON: Yes, chief strategist.
RUSH: So people wonder how that happened. When did you first meet Donald Trump?
BANNON: I met Donald Trump before he was even a candidate, back in 2010. Dave Bossie took me up to a meeting at the time Trump was thinking about running for President. We had a meeting for a couple of hours, walking through it. After that, I knew him through Breitbart. We had him on the radio show a number of times. We covered him pretty closely even before he was an announced candidate. So I knew him on and off from 2010, not a particularly deep personal relationship, as a guy that we looked at as somebody who very much had the populist, nationalist issues in mind about trade, immigration, and standing up on an America-first foreign policy. It was really a professional relationship before August 2016, when I stepped into the campaign.
RUSH: You coined a lot of those terms as they applied to Trump, such as "populism". People had a misconception of what it is. You straightened them out on "economic nationalism". And I remember you showed up with Reince Priebus at CPAC and said "deconstructing the administrative state" was one of the objectives. You changed the lexicon as those terms apply to Trump. So, how did it happen that you were asked to be CEO of the campaign? It happened in the middle of the campaign, not at the beginning.
BANNON: It was about 28 days after the GOP convention. Then-candidate Trump had gotten into that tangle with the Muslim family, the Khans. Hillary Clinton had finished the Democrat convention. The Trump campaign wasn't particularly well organized. [Paul] Manafort and others just didn't seem to grasp that the issues were about Clinton corruption, about this populist wave, this anti-establishment wave that was starting to crest. Some articles on the weekend of August 12-13, I think it was, showed that the campaign was 12 to 14 points down and heading south. A bunch of donors came to me and said, "If we talk to Trump, would you be interested in stepping in and becoming a CEO and making Kellyanne Conway the campaign manager, and bringing in people like Dave Bossie to be deputy campaign manager -- to really get a team of old-school conservatives to kind of step in and take the reins?"
So I agreed to talk to then-candidate Trump on August 13 and stepped in on the 14th. Manafort left on the 15th. I told then-candidate Trump: "Forget the polling, it doesn't matter. These polls are very fluid. The two key things to focus on are, first: right track/wrong track. Two-thirds of the country think we're on the wrong track, they don't think Obama was the agent of change. Second, and most importantly, Pat Caddell has been doing polling for years and this is the first time people feel America is losing its greatness.
Among working-class and middle-class people, 70 percent of respondents thought America was in decline. This was directly related to both our immigration strategy and, really, our trade strategy. People thought our industrial base was leaving, manufacturing jobs were leaving. Not only did working-class and middle-class people feel the country was losing its greatness, they thought the elites were comfortable with this. They were looking for a leader they could really depend on to be the voice of the voiceless, the voice of the silent majority, Rush -- which you've been talking about for 30 or 40 years.
From that time forward, that was really candidate Trump's theme, so we simplified it. We just said we're going to stop mass illegal immigration and limit legal immigration to protect our workers and get our sovereignty back, number one. Number two, bring back manufacturing jobs from China. Number three, start to get out of these pointless foreign wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Mike Pence would then focus on the evangelicals. We'd make the courts a big deal. I reached out to Reince Priebus: "You have to get the establishment on board." Remember, we're still a coalition. I'm a populist and economic nationalist, but I'm a realist, and you have to run as a coalition and the establishment has to come on board. We were able to put the coalition together.
President Trump is still the best candidate we've had since Ronald Reagan, and he's the best closer. Remember, he's a closer. Hillary Clinton was trying to close on a coalition they had never closed on before, because the Clintons always depended upon Democratic working-class folks. And, really, Trump spoke to them -- particularly in these key upper-Midwest states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin. That was really the driver of the victory, the over-300-electoral-vote victory we had. But it was a very focused campaign for the last 88 days and we were fortunate to have, I think, the single best candidate we've had since Ronald Reagan.
RUSH: And he was instinctively attuned to all those things. You and he were on the same page, you didn't have to teach him much. You just had to help him focus on it, right?
BANNON: Well, as he says, I'm his best student. [Laughter] Rush, look, you know this from doing it and from really being a voice for the silent majority for so many decades -- Trump has this instinctive relationship with working-class and middle-class people. I keep telling people you can't coach that. Look at Hillary Clinton, just as a candidate. She knows everything. She's got the degrees from Yale and all these places, but she's a stiff.
Trump has something unique. Go back to the Republican primary. We had 15 or 16 of the best candidates we've ever had. Every "vertical" in the Republican Party. From the Heritage organization, to Cato, to the Kochs, to Paul Singer, they all had their candidates: the big-state, moderate Republican governors, all the way to libertarians like Rand Paul, and everybody in between, Cruz, Bush, Rubio -- they all represent, really, the best-of-class for that vertical. And Trump went through those guys like a scythe through grass. The reason was, he spoke in a non-political vernacular. You know this from your show, that's what people respond to. That gives accessibility to these ideas.
President Trump has an intuitive grasp on the ideas and how to communicate. That's what's been lacking so far in our conservative political culture and, really, the permanent political class: this ability to communicate to a mass audience. Trump has that ability, I think, unique among politicians since Ronald Reagan.
RUSH: So after campaign CEO, you're named chief White House strategist. What does that entail?
BANNON: Essentially, it was a compromise. We decided that Reince [Priebus] was going to be the chief of staff. Obviously, Reince coming from the RNC was more the establishment wing. We knew there was going to be tremendous blowback from the grassroots and from this populist economic base that had been with Trump the entire time. So I would be, basically, Reince's wingman, but essentially, set overall direction of the policy, help President Trump as he thought through the America-first foreign policy.
And that's what we talked about at CPAC, the three basic legs of the stool. Number one was about economic growth with a populist, economic nationalist, we're-going-to-get-these-manufacturing-jobs-back mission.
Number two was about America-first national security. We're not isolationists. Trump is actually more engaged than, I think, any President -- in a smart way. We're not an empire. America is a revolutionary power, not an imperial power, and we're going to turn this whole global alliance we have into real allies, not protectorates. What has happened with the Republican establishment, and quite frankly, the foreign policy establishment, is that America became virtually an empire with all these protectorates -- whether the protectorate is NATO, the Gulf Emirates, the countries around the South China Sea or in the northwest Pacific -- and Trump wants to change that.
The last leg, and I think one of the most important, was the deconstruction of the administrative state, and that is deeper than deregulation. It is really going in deep. You see it with [Justices] Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and some of these federal judges that Mitch McConnell kept the spaces open for and the President is filling now, 180 judges. These judges are very focused on this apparatus, this state apparatus, this "fourth branch of government" that is even deeper than a permanent bureaucracy. This administrative state has its own courts, its own executive branch, its own way to draft laws in the federal registry. The goal is to start to take that apart, brick by brick. That was the third element, the three legs of the stool of what I call the Trump revolution.
RUSH: Now, how is that going? What is the status of "the swamp", or the administrative state? Meaning, the Washington establishment, the people who want to preside over America's decline, who want there to be a competing superpower, who want America to join this global apparatus? Trump has vowed to essentially wipe that out, "drain the swamp". How is that proceeding, do you think?
BANNON: Well, you see this "nullification project", against both Brexit and the Trump victory. You know, Brexit and Trump's victory are inextricably linked, if you go back to the summer and fall of 2016. You see today what's happening with Brexit, that they're hurtling towards the 31st of October [deadline] three years after this happened, three-and-a half years, with really very little progress.
With President Trump it's the same thing. Against the established order -- this is both Wall Street, the city of London, the global corporations, the permanent political class -- you're just not going to wave a magic wand and get your country back or get these jobs back from China. Every day is a struggle. I think what President Trump has done is extraordinary, but it's a game of inches right now. Every day he's getting pounded, whether it's on trade policy, whether it's national security policy.
The swamp is very powerful. And the reason is, we've allowed this apparatus, this centralized government in Washington that's inextricably linked now with Wall Street and the financiers and the global corporations, to really control our democracy. To me, that's why you're seeing populism even on the left. I think the future of this is, you're either going to have populist nationalism on the right, or populist socialism on the left -- that's with Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.
I keep telling people it's not a choice between what President Trump or Steve Bannon talk about and Paul Ryan. It's a choice between AOC, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, the radicalized Democratic Party and this populist nationalist movement that can win national elections, because you're tapping into the working class and middle class. That's the future of politics.
President Trump is fighting, but every day it is a struggle because of the lobbyists, because of the money that is out there -- and these people fight for it. Look at this trade deal. What President Trump is essentially trying to do is to re-industrialize the United States. We've allowed Wall Street, the corporations, and the permanent political class of both parties -- this is not a Republican or Democratic issue -- to de-industrialize the United States over the last 20 or 30 years to China. The "Chi-Coms", as you've been calling them now for 20 or 30 years [laughter], are very sophisticated, and they're running another Opium War against us.
As the jobs moved from Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania to east Asia, what they've been doing is flooding the zone with opioids to these workers. That's why tariffs are not just simply about taxes on goods. Tariffs are about the dignity and self-respect of our workers.
Look at the American carnage of the American manufacturing base, which President Trump talked about in his inaugural address. This is what we're talking about. America, to be a great power, has to have a manufacturing base. That's the beating heart, I think, of the Trump revolution. We're bringing these manufacturing jobs back, and his fight every day against the resistance in Washington, D.C. and Wall Street is, to me, extraordinary and very heroic.
RUSH: Bouncing off what you just said, a question I frequently get is, "Rush, why would people in Washington want to diminish the United States in favor of China or any other global entity? Why would they want America's manufacturing base to leave? Why would they want America to become weaker, both militarily and economically?" They're basically asking, "Where have the patriots gone?" What is your answer? I'm sure you get the question after you make this point.
BANNON: Because they've made a ton of money. The establishment in this country, the Wall Street establishment and the corporations, have made an incredible amount of wealth, and that wealth is now concentrated, They've used a lot of pension fund money to do it -- private equity and hedge fund money. This is all working-class people's money.
The reason is very simple. It's what I call "the party of Davos". This is not conspiracy theory, every day you can see it. In fact, let's go back to 2017. There are two speeches given the third week of January. One, President Xi goes to Davos to talk about globalization, and he's hailed as a hero. Donald Trump gives his inaugural address and talks about American carnage, but it was a reinforcement of the Westphalian system of the nation-state. These are two radically different speeches. Trump is there to say nation-states have been the basic unit of governance in the West and in the world for the last 300 years. It's a good system; as long as nations put their own interests first, things will work out. Versus the globalization project, which looks at a network effect.
What has happened is financiers in London, Wall Street, in the global corporations have created a tremendous amount of wealth for themselves by essentially de-industrializing the West -- Western Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States -- and essentially using slave labor in China.
Rush, you're one of the few people who have pointed out for many, many years now that the Chinese people are enslaved by the Chinese Communist Party. People don't realize that of China's 1.4 or 1.5 billion people, there are only 90 million Communists in China. And of those 90 million, really only a hundred thousand matter, and probably 10,000 make decisions. It's essentially a gangster organization that has enslaved the Chinese people since the end of their civil war in 1949. So the slave labor in China is essentially the manufacturing base or the labor pool for all manufacturing.
And over the last ten of 15 years, the Chinese looked to do three things with corporations, Wall Street, and the city of London. One, their "Belt and Road Initiative", a logistical chain that ties together Eurasia. Two, "Made in China 2015", an advanced manufacturing policy in order to leapfrog the West. And the last was Huawei, this 5G rollout, the backbone of all future technology. This is a visionary plan, but it was financed by Wall Street.
This is why Trump is so powerful in the way he presents things; he understands we have all the cards. The West has financed this, it's the capital markets of the West that finance it, and the technology companies in the West that either look the other way while we've had these forced technology transfers or allowed the technology to be stolen, or sold it to them.
RUSH: Are we in danger of losing this 5G innovation lead to China, to Huawei?
BANNON: Rush, it's even deeper that that, and this is part of it. The Chinese Communist Party are very sophisticated and tough guys. Remember, they were our allies. President Nixon and then President Reagan used them as essentially allies to destroy the Soviet Union, at that time our biggest threat. These are very savvy, very "tough hombres", as President Trump would say. They have been running an economic war against the West for 20 or 30 years.
The way to think about this is the war is threefold. You have information cyberwar, you have economic war, and you have kinetic or military war. The Chinese decided 25 years ago they could never defeat the West man-on-man in a kinetic war. So through information and cyber warfare and economic warfare they had to take down the West, to become really the economic hegemon for the world.
We're engaged in an economic war that they've been running on us, and we've never responded. Remember, they've tapped along Presidents of every Administration for 25 or 30 years. It's Trump that finally said: "No more; we're not going to do this. We're going to start with trade, but we're going to go to technology, and we're going to go to capital." That's why right now you're seeing this whole issue of a currency war. That's why you're seeing this engagement in the tech companies. Peter Thiel, one of the top venture capitalists, the guy who put the money up for Facebook, one of the most brilliant guys and the one guy in Silicon Valley who openly supports President Trump -- although many do support him -- has accused Google of treason for working with the Chi-Coms under the table on artificial intelligence and surveillance.
RUSH: And they censor their search engine results for the Chi-Com government.
BANNON: It is a disgrace. It's what the West allowed to enslave the Chinese people -- and this is why Hong Kong is so important: it's our capital and our technologies sold or stolen from our companies that comprise the firewall and the surveillance technology to enslave the Chinese people.
To me, the most important geopolitical issue in the first half of the 21st century is going to be the Chinese people rising up and throwing off their slave-masters. You're seeing this on the streets of Hong Kong today. Anybody who dismisses Millennials as not engaged, not knowing what they're doing, needs to look at these young kids in Hong Kong. In the middle of September, they were on the streets, 500,000 of them, with American flags.
RUSH: Right.
BANNON: They're singing the American national anthem, singing Christian hymns, getting tear gassed, beaten, shot with rubber bullets. And why is that? They are just like the patriots of 1776. They are not going to back down. The West cut a deal with the Chi-Coms back in the 1980s and 90s. The British did it. It was reaffirmed by the United States in 1992. In 1997, they committed for 50 years to let Hong Kong be ruled, essentially, by English common law: "One country, two systems." They have from the beginning taken that back. They understand that if the Chinese people get a taste of freedom, that contagion will spread to mainland China and they will not be able to rule.
Look, right now the world is half slave and half free. The slave part is what's happening in China and it's an absolute disgrace what we've allowed our institutions to do. I mean the institutions on Wall Street, our corporations, and quite frankly, the think tanks. The collaboration and the appeasement that's gone on with the Chinese Communist Party over 25 years is an absolute disgrace, and history will judge these people as being on the wrong side of it. That is why Donald Trump is such a hero.
Rush, I remember you told him: "If you ever try to moderate, the left will never give you credit." You have to stand tall, you have to stand strong on your beliefs. And I think in this economic war with China, you can see it. Any compromise he makes is not appreciated. Right? That is why I think it's so imperative for President Trump to stick to his guns, because this is a tough one. He has to be unbending in order to bring those manufacturing jobs back.
Bringing those manufacturing jobs back secures America as a great industrial power in the 21st century, and in doing that, the peace and prosperity of the West will not only survive, it will start to replicate throughout the rest of the world.
RUSH: I saw a video of you, and you were brilliant on the subject of China. I don't think enough people understand why this trade battle, the tariff battle, with China is so important and why we have to win it. Could you summarize as best you can what this trade battle is all about? Because nobody is reporting it accurately in the media.
BANNON: This can be very simple. We're trying to bring the supply chains back to the United States. In the 1950s, 60s, even the 70s, we had this tremendously robust manufacturing base with a supply chain, not just finished good, but all the parts to it were made in the United States.
I come from a blue-collar, Kennedy-Democrat family. My dad was a lineman for the phone company. My mom was a housewife. Five kids went to Catholic schools. We not just survived, but thrived off one paycheck of a working-class, blue-collar guy. That was because America had this magnificent manufacturing base, really from the 19th century with Hamilton, Jackson, and Lincoln, who were all about what they called "the American system". It had to have tariffs, because you had to protect these industries, we had to build a manufacturing base.
Remember, the trade differential is stunning. It's like $500 billion of electronic goods and other high-value manufacturing that China ships here and we buy. We basically ship to them I think $100 billion of stuff, but essentially, it's raw materials. It's agricultural products, it's natural gas, it's timber. We send very little finished product to China. The reason is now we've been turned into a tributary state.
China has been around for 4,000 years. They understand "barbarian management". They understand how to incentivize the elites of countries that are around them, to incentivize the elites to basically sell out their people. And that's what has happened here. America is now a tributary state to the Chinese Communist Party. We ship them raw goods, raw materials, technology, and capital, and they send us finished product back.
What these tariffs are in this economic war, is a way to start to focus on the manufacturing part. And you can see every day the numbers get worse in China, every day the strain as industries there are running at bigger and bigger losses. All the numbers China put out are lies, but we know that they've had the worst numbers now in 27 years. Trump's economic policies against them are cutting to the heart of this game they've been running on the United States.
We don't have a choice. If we lose the tariff part of this war, if we lose the economic part of this war, if we lose what's coming up, the currency part of this war, America will be a tributary state like India and like Japan in this kind of high-value-added manufacturing juggernaut that China runs in the middle of the Asian continent. We'll be just a market for them and a supplier of raw materials.
This is the single most important issue we're facing today. This is the reason Donald Trump is President, and this is going to be the reason his Presidency is going to be, I believe, successful. I also think this is going to frame the 2020 election, because we're down to the heart of it. Joe Biden and these phonies in the Democratic Party who talk about all the stuff they've done for the working man are the biggest hypocrites in the world. They sold out the working-class people in this country. They threw a couple of Band-Aids on OSHA regulations and some marginal stuff to unions, but essentially they did these trade deals: NAFTA, the trade deals with Japan, the trade deals with Europe, and particularly the trade deal with China, that have allowed these countries, particularly China, to suck our manufacturing base out.
That's why Trump systematically has gone through a new NAFTA. He just did this huge trade deal with Japan, that's got no real publicity, the $9 billion agricultural deal. He's doing a new deal with the EU. He's done a new deal with Korea. He's gone around the globe and gotten them all in order to then strike at the heart of the problem, which is China. And he's standing up.
People in your audience should know that if we don't win this, America is not going to survive as a leading economy. You can't build an economy, no matter what Wall Street and the cheerleaders on Wall Street tell you, off of a service economy. You have to have a manufacturing base. Trump understands that, and people -- particularly in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania -- understand it. That's why he's President of the United States and that's why this battle is so rough.
RUSH: I tell you, I don't think people realize how close we came to becoming what you just described. You go back to the eight years of Obama, what was the economic message? That America's best days are behind us. That much of what we had accomplished was illegitimate because our founding was unjust. And we had pilfered other countries. We were now a nation in decline, and we had to have responsible leadership to manage the decline. And your kids may be the first not to economically perform better than their parents. They were setting us up for this. Had Hillary Clinton won, that would have been the permanent America. And this is exactly what these globalists have been talking about. They need an America in decline to get rid of the whole concept of nation-state. So Trump is up against a coalition of powers that people can't possibly even imagine. You're right when you warn about how crucial this is at this time.
BANNON: This is at the heart of it. They are out to defeat Trump because they understand Trump gives voice to the voiceless silent majority not in the room, not in the deal. Donald Trump not only puts you in the room, he's your spokesman. What the established order does not want, they do not want the silent majority of the American people to have a voice. They want them to pay taxes, they want them to send their kids into the military, and they want them to keep their mouths shut.
The distain that they have for their lifestyle and their culture couldn't be more obvious. What they want them to do is to buy goods, be consumers, pay taxes, send your kids into the military. Other than that, they have no use for the silent majority. Trump is your spokesman and every day they're out to destroy him. Not defeat him, destroy him. Because they have to show that if you're going to be a spokesman for the silent majority, this is what your fate's going to be. And that's why it's heroic.
Is Donald Trump perfect? He'd be the first to admit he's far from a perfect human being. But a great thing about America is we've had many imperfect people who have risen up and led us in great causes. This reelection is going to be the highest-stakes election we've had in a long time, because the forces are all out there aligned against him. It's very obvious who he's fighting against.
That's why I tell people we have to rally to this cause even bigger than we did in '16. It's going to be tougher. This will be the nastiest campaign, I believe, Rush, since 1860. I think this thing is going to be personal, and it's going to be a heavyweight title fight. This is not going to be a persuasion election. This election is about mobilization.
We see how the left can mobilize. In '18 they did a terrific job in the House races. If we don't match this -- door-by-door, person-by-person -- in these communities, not in 30-second TV ads, but knocking on doors to get the vote out, we're going to lose. But if we support Trump and do the ground game and people put their shoulder to the wheel, if they take the lessons they're learning from AM talk radio from people like yourself, and say, "I'm going to apply this now in life," and get involved in the Trump campaign, we're going to win. I think we could win as big a victory as President Reagan in his second term.
RUSH: All of that, by the way, is brilliantly stated. I hope you're part of this in either a visible or stealth way, but an incredible, incredible energy and resource.
BANNON: Rush, thank you so much. You've been a great asset to the President. I know you've always given him good advice. The best advice is never told. [Laughter] You've been a great patriot.
RUSH: Well thank you. Any time there's anything you think we can do to help, just let me know.
BANNON: Yes, sir. Thank you, Rush.