An Interview with Steve Bannon

Contributed by Caleb A. Chung and Sarah L. Steele

Steve Bannon is an American political strategist, co-founder of Breitbart News, and host of the WarRoom podcast. He was the chief strategist for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and later served as White House Chief Strategist. Bannon spoke at the 2025 Conservative and Republican Student Conference, an event co-hosted by the Salient.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Source: REUTERS/Sophie Park

SALIENT: You’re a self-described populist. Yet, you just received multiple standing ovations at Harvard–an institution often thought to embody of the elite. What does that tell us about American society?

BANNON: I'm sure most of the people in that audience come from middle-class families with middle-class values. The reason we're in that room is because we had, by and large, great parents and great support networks. That's what we're trying to provide for everybody in the country–that everybody can have that opportunity. And that's kind of what populism is. Populism is the manifestation of the sovereign will of the people. It’s a focus on the common man and woman, to make sure they know that their place is just as powerful and important as anybody in the social or economic hierarchy. Once they understand how the system works and are empowered, then through individual effort and collective action, they can change anything, like they've done two, three times for President Trump. Particularly this last time, which was just insane–78 million votes, incredible.

The reason I'm critical of conservatives is that we didn't wind up in this place unless we had controlled opposition, and too much of the Republican establishment was controlled opposition. The USAID situation is a perfect example. You had real warriors for years hammering away–the Darren Beatties, the Raheem Kassams, and the Mike Benzes. You had journals going through USAID, not the development programs, but the cut-out for the CIA, these NGOs, and the suppression of conservative voices. Yet, people like Paul Ryan and these committee chairs won't even let people do due diligence. That, to me, is the epitome of the problem, and that's where I think populism, particularly President Trump's muscular version, is a game changer.

SALIENT: You saw the potential for a populist movement back with Palin, well before anyone could have conceived of what we're currently experiencing. What signs did you see that everyone missed?

BANNON: It was as simple as the 2008 financial crisis. If you study financial history, every major financial shock to the system, particularly where there isn’t accountability, leads to some sort of revolution. Our Revolution was about taxes and a financial crisis that hit the British Empire. The French Revolution came off the same thing, a crisis.

Here, the financial collapse was horrific: they lied, and none were held accountable. Goldman Sachs, where I had been a VP, was about to go bankrupt, and Hank Paulson was the Secretary of the Treasury. On Thursday, a meeting I talk about, Goldman, General Electric Capital, and AIG were in Bush’s Oval all teetering on bankruptcy–in fact, they had Sullivan and Cromwell lawyers in a conference room getting ready for bankruptcy. What they did was sign a one-line letter that made Goldman Sachs a bank holding company. And so, on Monday morning, Goldman Sachs could borrow at 2% from the Fed and lend to clients at 3.5-4%–that spread was about $5 billion a month. You saw all these other people getting crushed.

My dad had owned AT&T stock since the 1930s. Jim Cramer went on that Friday saying the market was collapsing and if you needed cash for the next three years, you had to sell your stocks. My dad sold the AT&T stock he had forever. My dad was steady Eddie–five kids, two naval officers, a granddaughter at West Point. If you lose those guys, you've lost the system. And I said, man, the system is abusive. Then I saw the bailouts, and I said we're going to have a populist revolt because the working class people in this are getting screwed. It was pretty evident something was going to happen.

SALIENT: What about the pandemic? Did it change the political calculus, or was it of less relative importance?

BANNON: In the pandemic, you had a massive drop in aggregate demand, but it wasn't so much a recession because they infused the system with $2 trillion of cash. In fact, when Trump had the election stolen from him and Biden came in, it was Larry Summers who said we don't need another Keynesian stimulus because the aggregate demand has come back. The Democrats just saw an opportunity to spend money. Nineteen Republicans–the Mitt Romney crowd and McConnell–went along with them. That led to inflation–as Milton Friedman tells us, too many dollars chasing too few goods.

Remember everything Trump had done in 2017 and 2018, the deregulation and the tax cut–even as flawed as the tax cut was because I don't think he should have given it to the upper bracket. If you look at the polling, most people just wanted to go back to the economy in 2019: low inflation, low interest rates, 3.5% growth, low unemployment, blue-collar people making higher wage increases. Trump was on a roll before the pandemic hit. Since we know our theory was right that COVID came out of the Wuhan lab–the CIA says that– you could argue that the CCP felt that Trump would be too powerful in a second term, so they concocted it and released it.

But we are paying a horrible price now for the mistakes we made about aggregate demand and for infusing the system with cash.

SALIENT: You describe yourself as a Luddite. Despite that, your team has successfully embraced technological developments, particularly for political campaigns and digital media. How do you view the balance between pushing for traditional society while still taking advantage of the tools of your enemies?

BANNON: Going back to 2016, we had what we called the Pepes, the hardcore Trump lovers who were so great on Facebook. Later, these companies freaked out, saying we allowed this guy to win using Facebook and Twitter. They were just apoplectic.

But you always have to be leading edge in the age of the algorithm. You have to figure out how the algorithm works if you want to do something cost-effectively. As tough as that is to admit, it's just reality.

My concern is that there's something deeper. You have a convergence to a singularity, and it's not just artificial intelligence. It's AGI, regenerative robotics, CRISPR, and gene splicing. It's quantum computing, advanced chip design–those five or six industries that are accelerating and converging on a spot. That spot is where you have enhanced homo sapiens.

We’re going to have horrible decisions to make as parents, as individuals: am I a homo sapien or an enhanced Homo Sapien? Silicon Valley has already told us where they're coming out. I mean, Elon Musk is the most advanced guy putting chips in people's brains. People are going to have to make a tough decision, particularly for their children in the next five or 10 years, and it's going to have tremendous societal ramifications. Just like artificial intelligence today—coming out of a place like Harvard, I tell people all the time that it's not the blue-collar jobs going away. It's the administrative and tech jobs at the entry-level. The kind of jobs that people traditionally have in their 20s are going to be gone very shortly.

I'm a Luddite in that I admire what the Luddites tried to do, but I understand that we're now in a horrible situation. The guys we turned everything over to, the oligarchs, are telling us that the Chinese Communist Party is ahead, so they need to scale and not have Lena Khan break them up. Also, they want a $500 billion bailout because if we don't do this, the CCP is going to control artificial intelligence, and then we're finished. We’ve been put in a horrible situation.

Source: REUTERS/Sophie Park

SALIENT: Is the solution to this convergence political? Or does it have to be cultural or religious?

BANNON: Culture is upstream from politics, but in this regard, you're going to need some regulatory apparatus. The problem on the cultural side is that people have lost touch with the underpinnings of the Judeo-Christian West. I think a minimum of a third of the population will say, “Fine, chip me up. If it helps my golf game, or it helps my kids get into Harvard, or it does whatever, sign me up. I want CRISPR. I want a designer baby.” If it starts at 10%, it's quick to go to 30% because people are sitting there thinking, “Hang on, I don't believe that. I'm a Catholic, or I'm a Muslim, or I'm Jewish, and I don't believe this, but my kid is not going to have opportunities.”

It's not science fiction anymore. It's upon us. You see what these oligarchs' convictions are. They're all the Green New Deal guys, but as soon as they knew they needed data centers with massive amounts of power, net carbon zero was out the window. They would burn people if needed to power these data centers. Now we're in a jam we've made–the Faustian bargain. The oligarchs control Silicon Valley. They're sitting there saying now you got to bail us out. So the question is, do we replace them? There's no competitor to Google. There's no competitor to Facebook. There's no competitor to Amazon. There's no competitor to Twitter. That's not a random thing: the Justice Department backed off and let these guys become monopolies so they could save us. And guess what? They didn't save us.

The huge fight is going to be this bailout. They're saying they need $500 million of government money, minimum. They're talking about a new Mercury Program, a new Marshall Plan. They're asking for a bailout of crypto, a $100 billion credit line from the Treasury Department to buy a million Bitcoins. They want the average person making 35,000 bucks a year and working every day to underwrite what they do. And it's not right. Everybody's looking for the little guy to bail him out.

SALIENT: Regarding traditional social values, the right seems to be doing well. The one exception is abortion. Pro-lifers have lost ballot measure after ballot measure. They're outspent 10 to 1. What are pro-lifers doing wrong?

BANNON: It’s the dog that caught the car. President Trump promised that he was going to appoint pro-life judges, but the Dobbs decision caught everyone by surprise. The right-to-life movement–of which the War Room has been such a platform–was like the left in that they were not ready. As soon as it got to them, they lost in Kansas. They lost in Ohio. These were not close. These were blowouts. They say the ballot measure wasn't worded right–well, then why didn't you word it right? I think President Trump did the right thing. The right-to-life movement just reached the point where its grassroots power was not like it used to be. If it hadn’t been for the radicalness of transgenderism–which they're insane, and it’s also a predicate to transhumanism–the social conservative Christians and Catholics wouldn't have brought anything to the party. In fact, they'd have been a drag.

It turns out transgenderism might have been the difference in the margins. We know this from the ads and work we're doing in focus groups in Virginia. Trump opened people's eyes. It’s far deeper than men's and women's sports. What's happening with surgeries and medicines and puberty blockers is insane. And the money, particularly in a city like Boston, and the money that people are making in Texas and other conservative areas where you have these great medical facilities and honored schools, is shocking. That’s really where the social conservative movement is. I keep telling people on abortion that you have got to step your ground game up.

I opposed a 16-week federal measure on abortion–let the states figure it out. If President Trump had supported a 16-week federal measure abortion, I'm not sure he'd be in the White House today. It’s that close.

SALIENT: A new media class, which includes podcasts like yours, is emerging. Is that movement here to stay, and will it become the new establishment? Or can longstanding outlets like the New York Times can redeem themselves?

BANNON: Great question. We can't whine anymore. We've blown out the mainstream media. We've got a vast audience, and that audience is growing. That being said, you can't go to sleep on your watch. I gave an interview for the New York Times the other day. That thing's gone viral, and I'm getting contacted by people who would never see the right-wing channels we go on.

One thing I will tell you is that we are banned everywhere. We're not on Spotify, we're not on YouTube, we're not on Facebook, we're not on Twitter–we're banned everywhere. Yet, we're the number two podcast in the nation every day. Why is that? People will find the content. Content will find an audience. It's not about distribution anymore. It's not even being on Twitter. That helps–if Elon reposts you, you're going to explode into stardom, and if he's suppressing you like Laura Loomer, life can get tough–but it's all about content.

Content should have urgency and no punditry. People don't like hearing people's opinions. They want news. They want to know facts, and they want to know it quickly. If you come up with news and information–we spend a lot of time on capital markets, geopolitics, and grassroots politics–if you give people what they can't get, the world's your oyster. If you're just going to do punditry and your opinions on stuff, it's tough. Ann Coulter is not what she was 10 years ago. You look at all the pundits–the Erick Ericksons, Michael Savage–these guys are smart, but people have heard it. They want other things. They want new information.

So I tell people, if you've got ideas and can give people actionable information they can't get other places, you can start a podcast. The next thing you know, you have 10,000 viewers. You have 20,000. Once you get to 50,000 downloads, you can make a pretty good living.

We're at millions right now, and it grows because it feeds on itself. We're at the very beginning of this conservative media, and no longer can we whine that mainstream media says this or liberal tears say this. Those guys are struggling. MSNBC has lost two-thirds of its audience because MSNBC lied to them. It's one thing to get it wrong. In 2020, after the election was stolen, we probably lost a third of our audience for at least a month because they were so shocked that Trump wasn't in the White House. They were traumatized. It took about 30 days for us to get back up our numbers, and after that, we exploded.

MSNBC, which is the leader, lost two-thirds of its prime-time audience. Look at election night. At the beginning, they’re telling people they were going to win—the universities, the long lines, the cities—all the way to about 10 o'clock or 11 o'clock at night. Then, they're in panic mode because not only do they know they're going to lose, but they told these people there's no way Trump's coming back.

They'll never have the power they once had because they'll never have that audience. People said, “you didn’t just make a bad decision.” It wasn't about numbers wrong on the margin. They bald-faced lied and knew Kamala was behind. And some people, I think, are just fed up. But all those people are a potential audience for conservative media. People just have to go out and do the work.