Is Trump's vision for America now even harder right? | The News Agents

Tuesday night, Steve, was a Republican wipeout. Did you realize that many people hated their president? I think some of it is the lack of MAGA policies. You are kidding yourself if you think that you have not been MAGA enough. It's the ICE roundups, it's the killing of civilians, it's the stamping down on free speech. It's not like you have some MAGA man that's there. He's been far from a madman. What about the corruption? What about the graft? What about the fact he can't stop talking about his ballroom? He has certain priorities that maybe are not priorities of the MAGA movement. The MAGA movement of anyone in America, frankly. You know the Democrats are going to start investigating the Epstein files. You never declared your own link to Epstein. You never declared that you tried to help Epstein rehabilitate. You gave him immediate training. Hang on. That was all to make a documentary film. You texted Epstein, dude, is this real? Tell me it's real. Epic, epic, epic. That doesn't sound like a documentary maker. That sounds like somebody who's trying to help a pal. The News Agents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity. This is a global production. Do you think they'll impeach you again? I can't imagine it. You know, they did. Hey, look, what have I done? I've had the best two years in the history of the presidency. Indeed, so much winning, so many successes with such an astonishing story to tell that the American people gave Donald Trump the mother of all kickings. Last Tuesday. And Trump has now decided to double down. Stephen Miller is his chief of staff. We talked to the architect of MAGA, Steve Bannon. You won't like it, but you will listen. Welcome to the News Agents. The News Agents. It's John. It's Maitlis. And before we get into Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, we've got to tell you about News Agents Plus, which is coming to you now. And this is where we'll be bringing you brand new member-exclusive content, ad-free, where each week, Lewis and I will be doing a weekly question and answer, members' questions and our answers. And then we're going to have a special episode, which will be kind of moments in history. And if you heard our take on 9-11, where we discussed what it meant and the ramifications of it that still affect us today, it will be that sort of thing that we'll be doing. So you can subscribe to that on Apple, on Global Player and on YouTube. But we have to crack on with today because there is quite a lot to get through, including that interview with Steve Bannon that we did just before leaving Washington on. Thursday night, and I have to say that when I was with him, my jaw dropped because what it sounded like was a doubling down of everything that had just gone wrong for Trump in the midterm elections. And since that, many of the things he started to suggest to me have come true. Stephen Miller has been appointed Trump's chief of staff. Now, to put this in context, Stephen Miller was behind the ICE agents' immigration deportation policy. He has called Democrats domestic terrorists. He accused Alex Priddy, the man killed by police on the streets of Minnesota, of being... A would-be assassin. He is not a man who, let's say, is coming to Washington to find consensus. He's not cuddly. He's not cuddly. And I think he will be a shock to the system. For some of the new Democrats who think that with this newfound power that they are bringing to the Senate, to Congress, they will be able to work hand in glove with Republicans to bring love and peace to everyone. That is not Steve Miller's approach. Steve Miller, you know, comes to a kind of soft play area, you know, with a knife kind of thing. He is up for the offensive. He is he is on the rampage. He likes war. I think this should be allowing us to understand some of Trump's state of mind, which is everything went so wrong on Tuesday night, I'll just give them more. Well, look, what happened on last Tuesday night was that essentially Republicans saw the House burn down. They saw the Senate burn down. They saw state houses burn down. And onto those smouldering embers, along comes Stephen Miller, not with a bucket of water. But a can of petrol. Absolutely. And he is setting light to absolutely everything. That can only be the intention of Stephen Miller, given his past record, given his kind of stated beliefs, given his, you know, very pugnacious media performances where he just wants to poke people in the eye. And yesterday, Donald Trump was explaining why. I just want to know why you decided to make that decision. I wanted to make a change. All right. I think Bruce has done a very good job, great job, but I just wanted to make it seem he's been great. Action! The firing of Susie Wiles and her going over to this political job, it sounds like she's being pushed out. I'm not sure that's quite right. When she's doing this political management job, I think what that means is that she is there to make sure that Trump gets his candidate chosen for 2028, whoever that is. It's to keep control. ...of the Republican Party and the levers of power within the Republican movement so that Donald Trump can impose his will on the 2028 candidate. Yeah, look, he's reluctant to slag off Susie Wiles publicly, but clearly after a night that you have just had, an extinction-level result for Trump and the Republican Party, to keep your chief of staff the same, I guess... looks like craziness. So he moves Susie Wiles out. It's important to understand that Wiles is, I think, seen as the sort of the stable one. She didn't really get involved, but she kind of gave it a semblance of sort of normality. She wasn't particularly ideological. She was very flexible, but she was also quite close to big corporations, to the donations, to the commercial, the money side of things. Trump has clearly decided that a change has to be made. She then moves into whatever political ops is. And I think you could be right on that. Or maybe it's to do with where the fundraising goes from here on. And Steve Miller comes in, who is deeply ideological. You know, to put this in context, in 2013, so 13 years ago, Steve Miller, Steve Bannon and Jeff Sessions got together. To try and work out how they were going to re-energise the Republican base. That was the birth, if you like, of MAGA. And I remember talking to Steve Bannon about this years ago, where he said, we sat round a table, and at the time, we thought Jeff Sessions was going to be our vehicle. Jeff Sessions didn't want to do it, and they then picked Trump. So I'm putting this in your head, and a lot of what Bannon says is really kind of slightly exaggerated and... Okay, I'm going to get that out there. But it's important to understand that in his mind, he and Steve Miller were the architects of MAGA. They think that they chose Trump rather than Trump choosing them. And they, I think, did have a very, very strong role in working out how to energise this sort of rather old fashioned. Republican base and turning it into something populist and energetic and angry. And that has come from the two Steves, essentially. Yeah. I mean, it was said of Peter Mandelson that he was the Blair right before Blair. And Blair was his creation to do that. And Steve Bannon has a similar sort of degree of self-importance and kind of, you know. ego that he likes to think that he is the mastermind of all of this and I mean I think that sort of got him into trouble actually when he went into the White House in the first term as you know director of strategy and then got booted out very quickly afterwards but we're going back to Stephen Miller as the head of the White House operation as the chief of staff the Democrats have pounced on it this is Abdel Al Saeed. Stephen Miller is the new chief of staff Uh, what, what message do you think that sends, uh, to the country and to your ability to get something done with this White House? Well, the same kind of incoherent messaging that we've seen out of the Trump administration for a very long time. He says he wants to be conciliatory. He says he wants to work with us toward our end to actually deliver on the affordability, uh, mandate that the American public called for in my state and so many other states. And then he decides to hire the most most broken man to continue to run the most dysfunctional White House that we've seen. I don't know what Stephen Miller has actually contributed to our culture, our society in any real way, except for to make us more angry, to stoke the worst kind of fear and vitriol, to weaponize ICE in our streets, to take American lives. The real question is why appoint this man White House chief of staff if you want to have a productive relationship with the Congress that actually intends to deliver on the mandate that the American public has just given us. So first little hint then, I don't think Trump is looking for a productive relationship. With the Democrats in Congress, I think Stephen Miller would not have been appointed if he was deciding to find a bipartisan route through in his last two years. Just to understand a little bit more about Miller's ideology, he is the culture war czar, right? He is, as I said, the ice czar. He was the one who said mass deportation now is the way through to win Americans' hearts. He is not actually the Iran war guy. I mean, it's very interesting. He was not part of any of that planning. He was not present in any of the meetings. He was not a believer in the Iran war, but he is a big fan of one Pete Hegseth. Make of that what you will. So he has actually been something of a defender, I think, of Pete Hegseth, who otherwise would have been in the firing line for siding with Trump on the Iran war. So I think that will be an interesting area. Will he pull Trump away from further military intervention in Iran? Quite possibly. Will it become a more domestic based policy? Quite possibly. I don't want to say anything heretical now, and I think I'm probably about to. But is it just conceivable that Donald Trump has been inconsistent? I know I know it's a terrible thought and very hard to imagine, but he went on 60 Minutes last night. And talked about how maybe, maybe, their immigration policies had been too harsh. And that is what would cost them in the midterms. Which is just impossible to square with everything we've just discussed about Stephen Miller. Have a listen. You came out after the midterms. You congratulated the Democrats. You said that you were open to working with them. True. What is one thing you would like to work with a Democratic majority on? I'd love to do something on immigration. What? Because, well... Do you think immigration hurt you in the midterms? Do you think the crackdown hurt you? I think it both helped and hurt. I think I got an A-plus for closing up the border. I get very high marks for getting the bad ones out. But I get hurt because we also took people that had good jobs, that created one violation for breaking of the law, and that was that they came into the country illegally. Now, there is a large part of the country that think that they should be put out. And there's a large part of the country that think that they should be allowed to stay if they're good people working in a landscaping company or working in a hotel or doing something, right? And in some cases, paying taxes. And there's a large group of people think that they should be allowed to stay. So you think your deportation policy went too far? It was too tough. I think it might be too tough, yeah. What would happen? What does the deal look like? Trump is twin-tracking his own mind. Literally, in live time, as he did on Tuesday night, right? So he says, on the one hand, I'm going to work with Democrats. I think, you know, we can find a way through. And on the other hand, he posts a picture of a red MAGA cap with the word veto. The president has the veto over Congress. So is that helpful or not? Is there consensus or not? ICE, was it too far or should we have more Stephen Miller? A little bit too far. I mean, it's like he's hedging. In real time, right? He doesn't actually know which direction he's going in. But I will tell you this. Adam Hamilton, who was the kind of one of the unexpected surprises of Tuesday night. He's the new Democratic. Yeah, Senator, he will be the new Democratic Center for Kansas. He talks about southwest Kansas, you know, a deeply Republican part of the state where there was a 52 point swing and he puts it down to ICE policies. He said it's Americans saying what is happening in D.C. with the ICE policies, the immigration policies was not OK. ICE was not OK. If Trump is losing Kansas over that policy, then it does beg the question who he thinks actually likes it. So what is Stephen Miller's role going to be? Is he going to go further with ICE now? Is that going to be the way of winning back the presidency in 2028? I think it's a fascinating question because I think... I'm not sure I think that Donald Trump is hedging. I think Donald Trump is all over the place. I think you cannot exaggerate the scale of the defeat that the Republican Party and Donald Trump himself suffered on Tuesday night. It was astonishing. It wasn't just the pendulum that, you know, swings one way and then swings the other. Donald Trump lost in states that he could never have conceived of losing in, like Kansas, like South Carolina, like Texas, potentially Mississippi as well. And there you have a president who doesn't know what to think. It's like his confidence has been rocked. And you wonder whether Stephen Miller's role is to stiffen the backbone. Come on, Donald, don't go soft. Don't go wibbly wobbly. Stick to the ultra hardline policies, because that's what's going to deliver for America. And it could be... Utterly, utterly devastating and counterproductive for the future of the Republican Party to do so. I mean, quietly, I think the Democrats will be cheering. Yeah. The last thing they want is somebody bipartisan to come in and sort of steady the ship. Stephen Miller, as you've said, will set fire to it. And it is also possible that Miller has got Trump in possibly his most vulnerable state for about a decade and made the pitch himself. Right. Stephen Miller's long wanted this job, you know, always been after angling after the chief of staff job. Maybe he just comes in sort of quietly under the radar and says, I think you need me now. And Trump, whatever. Fine. Off you go, Susie. In you come, Stephen. I'll take whoever is is sort of, you know, going to help me out of a hole right now. Well, we've spoken a lot about Stephen Miller. Let's hear from the great man himself. And let me tell you, if it wasn't for President Trump. United States of America would not exist right now. This man saved America. So you can't be sycophantic enough. There is no amount of sycophancy that you can show Donald Trump that he would say, I'm sorry, that's just too much. Yeah. But if you thought of Stephen Miller as the kind of main pugilist in the White House now, we've got another thing coming, because actually over the weekend, Donald Trump tried to hire the UFC promoter Dana White. When that dropped, Dana White is this character who's quite often at the MAGA rallies. He quite often introduces Trump himself. And clearly, Trump didn't consult with Dana White. He's a big bruiser. And he looks like he belongs in the ring rather than being the promoter on the outside of the ring. Exactly. But I guess this is the ring now, right? Trump has always sort of wielded politics rather like a cage fight. And this is sort of, you know, the ultimate direction of travel that he says. Thank You know, Katie Zakaria didn't work out as my press secretary. What about this guy, Dana White? So he announces that he's asked Dana White to be his press secretary. And we hear nothing from Dana White for about 24, 48 hours, at which point Dana White says, no, frankly, not even conceivable. you. Of course, I'm not going to be. And Trump then has to pretend it's a joke. Are you serious about it or are you kidding around? Well, if you looked at it, you saw the assistance I put. But I posted the greatest... ...wrestlers and UFC fighters in the world, right? Like Khabib, like Justin Gaethje, who's phenomenal. And you see a lot of rough faces there. And you would have thought that people would have said, he's having a good time. I will tell you, I was only kidding. But Dana loves the idea. And there's only one Dana, he's great, I don't know. You wouldn't mess around with him so much. So, I was kidding, of course. Hang on, what was that all about? Was that a yes or a no? Well, yes, I was kidding about, but Dana loves the role. Apparently, Dana White is going to the White House today to talk to Trump. So, you know, I can't believe that you would give up your chief executive role on this very lucrative to become president. And also, because you're good at promoting fighters. Doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be good at messaging and dealing with the press unless the plan is to beat the ---- out of the press and kind of take them outside and kick them. I think another example of this doubling down came over the weekend from the attorney general, Todd Blanche. Now, we reported last week that Robert Garcia, who's going to be the Democrats. The head chief on the Oversight Committee is going to start investigating senior figures around the administration, including, we understand, Elon Musk, for his firing of federal employees, for his work on Doge and others. And Todd Blanche was trying to argue that the Department of Justice would be investigating the Democrats who were investigating the White House. So we've now got to this ridiculous sort of state of affairs where Blanche is actually proactively going to start looking into people who might be trying to find some accountability. This will also be the season, I think, where we start to hear the inside stories of how various departments have unravelled. And one former staff member at the Department of Health became a whistleblower this weekend, And went on Joe Rogan's podcast. podcast and he started to explain the priorities that RFK Jr. had at the Department of Health with the help of Susie Wiles, where it seems, according to this whistleblower's account, that Pleasing Big Tobacco is now back on the agenda. The single most prioritized issue at HHS among any health issue for James Blair, to get a better pathway for fruit-flavored vapes. Oh my God. And there's a law that says that, this is from Congress, that says before any FDA approval, you need to have a study saying that this isn't harmful to kids. He would argue that approving vapes was a core midterm issue. Approving vapes was a core midterm issue. I think we are now starting to understand why the results were the results they were. Well, I think that the results were the way they were because essentially Donald Trump promised a lot when he became elected. And you go back to the I've had the best two years. You promised that prices would go down. They've gone up. You promised no more wars. You started a war. You said that the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. It's remained closed. And on and on it has gone. And he has tried to bullshit the American people that it's all a story of success. And the American people have seen right through it. And the other thing that he promised, which sort of has happened and sort of hasn't happened, is the release of the Epstein Files, where so much has been redacted. So many millions of pages are still withheld. And one of the people who was named in the Epstein Files And up next, you'll hear Emily's interview with Steve Bannon and his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Tuesday night, Steve, was a Republican wipeout. Did you realise that that many people hated their president? I'm not sure it's just the president. I think it's also a purge of the Republican kind of neoliberal New Yorkers. I mean, it was a blowout across the country, right? I think some of that was President Trump. I think some of it is the lack of, I mean, the way we view this is the lack of really MAGA policies of really doing what we committed to do, particularly no foreign wars, this entire situation with greater Israel and the Gulf Emirates. Um, No mass deportations. I mean, if you go through the big punch list of the things that on our show we push every day. You're saying there weren't mass deportations? No, there's not, there has not been mass deportations. So he should have done more with us. Oh yeah, 100%. Do you think that's where you went wrong? I think it's one of the things that motivate our base. A lot of our base did not show up and particularly our base, if you look at base plus, the lower propensity voters, if you look at... The look at the Nick Fuentes and that part of the group that said, hey, no, we do not want you to. To support Republicans, we want you to actually go out and vote against it. I think there definitely was some of that. I mean, the New York Times was writing about, you know, joking about cyanide pills in the White House the week before the elections. Did you know this was going to be this scale? I kept arguing that we have to make sure we get the electorate we want. We knew that it was, we knew from all the data that we were getting from other people that you could have a blue tsunami, blue wave, unless you had a game day. We've gone through the early voting. We knew over that weekend what the problems were going to be. We kept hammering people that unless we have a massive turnout on election day. Which is kind of counter to how people vote today. Now, obviously, people supposedly in rural Texas, etc. But I think they showed up in normal, maybe a little above normal levels. And so the White House. But here's the thing. Remember, the White House strategy from the beginning, his political advisers, LaCivita and Blair, had this wrong from the beginning. In the beginning, and I'm talking about back in January of this year, they would have these meetings and leak out. That it was going to be about prescription drug prices, and it was going to be the big, beautiful bill tax cut. And we kept saying, that's not what drives a midterm election. Midterm elections are much more emotional than presidential cycles. And you're going to have to motivate people. And number one, you know, shortly thereafter, you've got this war that will not end. They want to continue that. You've got the situation with Greater Israel. You've got the situation in the Gulf Emirates, obviously Scott Bessent, everything he was doing in the economy We're starting to get off track. And unless you get back to the basics, and we have to get back to the basics now, you're here. I would tell people, the most intense period we're going to have is happening right now. This lame duck session, they're going to try to push legislation that they could not push before. I'm talking about an omnibus bill that has a $3 trillion deficit. They're going to try to take the debt ceiling off so there's unlimited spending. I think you're about to see in the next 48 hours laying out the biggest amnesty they've ever done, including massive increases to H-1B visas. And student visas, which are, you know, MAGA's... So they're going to reopen the country, in other words. That's what you're saying. And by the way, this is not... Remember, the Democrats, the progressive Democrats and the social Democrats don't literally show up until January 3rd and take power. I'm talking about right now in this interregnum. You're going to see the established order get back to the policies they want, which are not MAGA. This is why in the Senate... Remember, Thune hasn't done anything. I am not shocked at all. And I kept saying, if we have a shot to hold something... You probably have a higher probability of the House because they're more discrete units. On the statewide level, we never saw any enthusiasm for people going out and knocking doors and canvassing for these senators. But for your audience to understand, the wipeout is not just in the numbers. The American South, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and maybe Mississippi all have Democratic senators. And these are Progressive Democratic senators, they're not old moderate senators, and that is a shock because the Old South is still a backbone with the Intermountain West and Texas and Arizona is still the backbone of the MAGA movement. So is MAGA dead? You're one of the key architects. Absolutely not. In fact, I think you're seeing a rejuvenation even that, hey, right now we're going to have MAGA policies and we're going to fight for it. That's where we're very focused on what's happening in Texas. The mass deportation coalition is stronger than ever. We got to end this war. Yesterday on the show, I came out and I said, listen, we can't just come out and say you got to end the war. The war did it. We have to be very specific. I called for a presidential commission immediately that we have to have to get to the bottom of October 7th. If the Israelis are not going to do it. And right now with this, although the opposition party did run out, I don't think it's ever going to happen. The American people, we need the facts. We need the facts of what happened on October 7th. Who's responsible for it? We then need to know what exactly happened when President Trump ended the first phase of this war with the total obliteration of the nuclear program. Remember, people... Well, that didn't happen clearly, otherwise you wouldn't have come back, right? I'd like to know the facts. First off, President Trump was a great marketer, never really went to the country and sold the idea of exactly what is the nuclear threat, so that working class people in the country who are not... Watching the news every day, right? Understand what's going on. We didn't do that. We have to do that now because we have to extract ourselves from this situation. And we can only extract it upon facts. We have to look at the second part of the war. The second part of the war was clearly a regime change war. We have to understand how we got involved in that. What was the intelligence? Were we taking intelligence from the Mossad? Were we taking from Shin Bet? Was this American intelligence? How were those decisions made? Do you think he's going to go back? Will he attack Iran? I have strongly argued that until we get the findings of this commission, there should be no more kinetic activity. We should let Scott Bessent continue with the economic warfare. And what about Israel? What about the funding and the relationship with Israel? Does that change now? By the way, I think the $4 billion that President Trump did was as close to a gimmick as you can get. It's not the $4 billion. It's so much more than that. It's the relationship of intelligence. For your audience, what happened late last year is that we had in the NDAA, which is what we passed to kind of authorize the Defense Department to get the money, we actually had a melding of Israeli military technology and defense technology, more so than even the British, right, who have been our allies for over 100 years. We need to go back and unwind that. We need to unwind this kind of this relationship between the two intelligence services. We need to have a The arm's length relationship with Israel. That is supportive, but like other allies, exactly like we do in NATO, and you can't have this intertwining. Right now, it's very fuzzy. And the younger generation, I'm telling you, under 40 years old, they're sitting there to go, we want our sovereignty back. When decisions are made, we want to make sure that they're American citizens making those decisions, even if those decisions are made by socialists or Muslim Brotherhood. Right because you lost the young. And you told me two and a half years ago that the coalition Trump was building was young men, was black men, was Latinos. You've lost those. 18 to 29 split 66% Democrat as of Tuesday. Latinos splitting 64% Democrat. All those years that we talked about, all those years we spent in the Rio Grande Valley and in South Texas, getting Hispanic men to be part of this. Yes, because I think they sit there and they see. Number one, Hispanic men signed up for the military, particularly for Marine Corps rifle squads higher than any other population we have. They look at a war they don't really understand that's never really been explained to them, number one. Number two, that war drove additional costs. We already had embedded inflation because of the mass spending of Biden, but then Scott Bessent had a plan, and if you see what was happening in January and February, Of this year, the things we're starting to, you know, we're starting to get some traction on growth. We're starting to get some traction on inflation coming down. We're starting to get, you know, with the tariffs, which I'm very pro the tariffs and the big, beautiful bill as a forcing function to drive high value added manufacturing here. You're starting to get those, those, uh, you know, the, the, the, you can see the roots of an economic recovery. And then you go into the second phase of this war. where we already totally obliterated the nuclear problem as the president told us on national tv we go back in for a very ill-defined part of the nuclear part which people don't understand but was clearly a regime change war and took this war to the Persian people and that's what From that time, You just saw people dial out. And more than dial out, you actually saw people that were part of our coalition that actually came out and voted against the president's plan. Steve, you are kidding yourself if you think that you have not been MAGA enough in your deportation policies, in your ICE policies. If you cannot see why you're using young, losing young Latino men and women, it's staring you in the face. No, the young Latino, first off, we've done tons of polling. About American citizens that are here, okay, are not opposed to the immigration policies that we want to execute. The problem is we didn't execute them and you gave them a terrible economy. When you're in Texas and you see Hispanic men, they're driving big trucks. They're living large, and it's gotten too expensive. That's how we lost them, because of the economy, in a war that's not justified and they don't understand. But it's not just the war, is it? It's also Trump's vindictiveness. It's the ICE roundups. It's the killing of civilians. It's the stamping down on free speech. It's the revenge against his perceived enemies, the trashing of the Constitution, the threats to the newspapers, the universities, the lawyers, the campuses. It's all this stuff. That is the left's... argument that is not what Maga sees. Maga sees the lack of implementation of policies that were supposed to sort this out. He was very clear in 2024. Everybody understood it was going to be mass deportations. Everybody understood that we're going to get our hand around the legal immigration because in Texas and other places, H-1B visas are just as big a deal, or student visas are just as big a deal. It's the lack of implementation upon that. That people said, either stay at home, or some said, look, if you're going to start foreign wars, forever wars, which you adamantly said you were not going to do, and I don't understand the justification on the nuclear side. President Trump just came out the other day and said, hey, if I had to do it again, I would do it again. What my point is, well, let's go back to the do it the first time and explain to the American people, let's put out the intelligence, let's have a detailed briefing. Like, you know, even wars that I'm adamantly opposed about from the Bush administration, And we know the information was gun-decked at least they made an effort over six months or nine months if You'd wanted to do this what you should have done is taken a year to basically sell to the American people and then done it After the midterms you predicted people could people cannot underestimate Not just the war but the decision-making about the sovereignty of our country who actually made the decisions are are these meetings with Netanyahu. What was the Mossad intelligence? What actually went on? Do we have our sovereignty if you talk to the under? Particularly under 30 crowd, that's one of their number one issues. I want to talk about the Republican Party, because you predicted civil war after those midterms. We've already seen J.D. Vance trying to move away from Trump. We've seen Ted Cruz blame him for the war. Lauren DeSantis, also. So what is your take on the Republicans around Trump now? Well, what you did is you saw a purge. Of a lot of neoliberal neocons, remember, when you talk about real MAGA in the Republican Party, there's only a handful, there's only a couple of senators. Is J.D. Vance still going to be the vice president? Is he still going to be the president? Is he still going to stay in his job? I've never, you have to talk to J.D. about that, but I think given the performance in these midterms, and particularly his doubling and tripling down on Ohio and other things, it's, look, I think the issue's got to come first and we'll see who. Do you think Pete Higgins is out? I will highlight. That J.D. and his diatribe he put out did not mention the tech oligarchs in tech. Big tech and the data centers, which I fought against adamantly, and I told people this is going to be a huge issue, turned out to be a huge issue. The American people, whether you're working class that supports Democrats or you're working class or middle class that supports MAGA and Republicans, detest these oligarchs. So the oligarchs are inextricably linked with decisions that were made. about the war. Because as you know, a lot of these oligarchs are very big in the surveillance business. They're very big in the defense contracting business. So we have to sort all that out. So I think these issues are going to come up. But this is very clear. Cruz, DeSantis and J.D. have been adamant. It's the president's fault. His war, he caused it. And you're definitely but that's not the civil war. The civil war is going to be in Texas, a perfect example. The established order of kind of the Bush Republican Party is still there. You see it on Fox News every night. I mean, the hypocrisy of Sean Hannity to start tearing up late on election night because of the war. The Murdochs are the biggest proponent of neoliberal, neocon policies in this country. You see it in the Wall Street Journal, the pages of the Wall Street Journal every day. In fact, today they got a big thing from Cornyn, you know, ripping on Paxson. And Paxson was not the problem in Texas. For your audience, the single biggest issue we have to deal with immediately is the state of Texas. State of Texas is obviously the sixth biggest economy in the world. It's the railhead of the MAGA movement. And losing, and Abbott, and across the board, losing by eight points to a gubernatorial candidate that had no name recognition. And this is like in the United Kingdom. You have to have name recognition even before you run. Nobody knew who she was. Abbott and these people lost by seven or eight points. It's not Ken Paxson who did lose bigger. Right. It's Abbott's entire eight point loss because I talk to these people every day. Yeah. Nobody. Their discussion before Tuesday was, OK, if we get to four plus five, we can drag Paxton. Everybody knew Paxton was we can drag Paxton across. They were shocked. They were when they first started coming in, particularly they understood how bad the early voting was. They didn't calculate the independent voting correctly. They thought the game day vote, the actual vote itself from rural areas would bail them out. When that didn't happen, by early in the evening, they knew they were in trouble. Now, what is going to happen? They're going to turn Texas immediately into a sanctuary state. Once that happens, if you don't get Texas back, There is no Republican Party in this country. Texas is the railhead of it. In 2028 or beyond, you need those House seats and you need those electoral votes. So without Texas, you don't really have, I don't think, a viable party. And the left knows this. That's why they spend so much time there. Okay. So the top Democrat, Robert Garcia, has told Trump and Republicans to lawyer up once Democrats are in charge. You said at a conference, if we lose the midterms and 2028, some in this room are going to prison. Myself included. Now, you know the Democrats are going to start investigating the Epstein file seriously now, Steve. You've pushed for those files to be released. You never declared your own link to Epstein. You never declared that you tried to help Epstein rehabilitate. You gave him media training. Hang on. That was all to make a documentary film. All to make a documentary film. And by the way, if they want to investigate that, they're going to investigate everything. They're going to investigate. It's not just Garcia. What it is, is also Jamie Raskin. They are going to form a select committee. They've already come out. They've already said that the major thing are the corporations that work with Trump, the law firms that work with Trump, the impeachments. You tried to rebuild his image. You said, and this is from May the 4th, 2019, in the Epstein Files, push back on the lies, crush the pedo trafficking narrative, rebuild your image as a philanthropist. This was stuff you were trying to help him with. This was making a documentary. He was going to make his case, and he set up with his lawyers So the women that... That at the time they were making a deal with, the 20-some women were going to have a voice in that too. Well, when the prosecutors rejected the victim's push to throw out the 2008 plea deal, you texted Epstein that you were thrilled. You wrote, dude, is this real? Tell me it's real. Epic, epic, epic. That doesn't sound like a documentary maker. That sounds like somebody who's trying to help a pal. No, he's certainly not a pal. It was all to make this documentary that was going to show the inside of how he operated. Have you seen, I've got two and a half hours. Have you seen the two and a half hours? I've seen some of the interviews that are public. Have you seen the two and a half hours? I've read your correspondence with him in the files, Steve. You were enabling him. You were trying to whitewash his image. It's absolutely not true. Nothing public about that at all. No, absolutely no whitewashing at all. Epic, epic, epic. Why would you write that? Hang on. If you look at, have you seen the two and a half hours of that? I've seen your interviews with him. You have seen all two and a half hours? I've seen some of it. Not some of it. You've got to go, what? The two and a half hours that are already out, that'll be part of the documentary, already prove the biggest fallacy that the mainstream media yourself have gone after, that he's some big financier. He doesn't know any financing. What's evident in this documentary, he knows absolutely nothing about finance. Why were you helping him? I was getting on the inside to make this documentary. And I did. And you have no regrets about spending, what, 18 months by his side? I didn't spend 18 months by his side. We did have meetings, etc. But I'm absolutely very proud of the work that we did on this film. And you see the first two and a half hours, if you see it, you can see right there the number one fallacy. Everybody says he's a big financier, that this guy... Is like some huge financier. You understand immediately he doesn't know anything about finance. He knows zero about finance. I want to go back to Trump because I know we're out of time soon. Should the world be worried that if he is constrained at home, he is going to go off? He hasn't, by the way. When you say go off, everything he's done in his mind is very logical. He's tried to bring... You think he's done a good job? I don't, I certainly don't agree with the war in Persia, but my point is he hasn't been unconstrained. He made a decision about the nuclear weapons program. He made decisions with allies. So it's not like you have some madman that's there. He's been far from a madman. I don't agree with the policies that have taken place in the Middle East, I don't agree with this war whatsoever. What about the corruption? What about the grift? What about the fact that he can't stop talking about his ballroom and his helicopter pad and his arm? He has certain priorities that maybe are not priorities of the MAGA movement and other people. The MAGA movement? Of anyone in America, frankly. That's okay. Look, he's got his own house style, he's going to do it, but when you say a madman, you went back to national... You can't have a house style if you're dealing with other people's tax money. You went back to national security. You went back to national security. He has been far from a madman in national security. The situation in Venezuela was taken care of. He did obliterate at least 90% or 95% of the nuclear program on the first expeditionary raid. I totally don't agree with the regime change war that he got involved in. But even in that, it's been fairly constrained, right? There's been tactical bombing, right? There's been a naval blockade. There's been all types of things. that are associated with military warfare. Now I want that kinetic part to stop. I don't think it was particularly successful. It did hurt part of their military. But I think people say, oh he's going to be an unchained man-man. There's been nothing put forward to date in his actions that show that. We're going to have a very tough two years. I say this is like Fort Apache. Will you address the corruption because you know that the Democrats are explaining to That corruption in the White House is linked to the loss of money in their own pockets. Well, listen, this is what they're, this is the thing that Garcia has made. He says, corruption, I think they learned their lesson from the first time of J6 and their first time impeaching President Trump, of which we started the show about that. I think you've seen the fact that they know they have to link this to the American people. So what they said is, hey. Which is no, there's no correlation between some of the activities that people have done and affordability. Affordability came, the crisis of affordability came during the Biden administration. President Trump was getting his arms around it. And then all of a sudden you had the second phase of this war. And now we're in the thing, and within- But you're not addressing corruption. I mean, that's staring everyone in the face. I'm just interested to know your thoughts. If there are things that cabinet members or other people did inside the administration- Garcia and Jamie Raskin have already stated how they're going to do this. They actually list the corporations first. Then they say what we're going to do in the administration. They talk about impeachments. I have told people in the White House, I've said publicly many times, this is going to be like Fort Apache. So you better get ready for it and you better get ahead of it. It's going to happen, I think, even starting in some of these things are going to happen in this lame duck session. So people should. Stay tuned every day because some of the biggest things that are going to happen are going to happen here shortly. And do you think 2028 has now become much harder for Republicans to win? I think I think we have to deal with the issues of what this election said. For people thinking about 2028, you've got to take care of issues that we have today. You have to take care of Texas. You have to take care of other aspects of this immediately. If you don't take care of that, you shouldn't even worry about 2028. What's going to happen here in the next six months in this in this interregnum of the lame duck, plus what happens in the first six months with the Democrats in power. Remember, they never really made a case. for how they're going to govern. They drove this as a repudiation of Trump, right? A repudiation of Trumpism, that we can kill it all in one fell swoop. That is what we're going to have to deal with. We're going to have to turn this around. And I think anybody that's planning on 2028 has to be a player in the turning around of this, and it has to happen right now. Steve Bannon, thank you. So in the past few moments at Southwark Crown Court. The judge, Justice Joel Bennathan, has been summing up and giving his verdict and sentencing of Russell Brand. Will you stand up, please? I pass a sentence of imprisonment for nine months for count three, 18 months for count five, reduced from two years to allow for totality, and eight months for count seven. Those sentences are all concurrent to one another to further allow for totality but consecutive to the sentence for rape. The sentence I pass on count six, rape, is nine years imprisonment. So the total sentence is one of ten years six months. The few days you have already served Ten years and six months is the length of the prison sentence that judge has just handed down to Russell Brand. And that comes from crimes against four women between 2004 and 2009. Three of those were counts of sexual assault and one was a count of rape. And I think it's important that we heard the judge now, just now, go through the sequence of that assault, of that rape of a woman who clearly has not been named, will not be named. And he spelled out just how degrading and how humiliating it had been the moment that she had consented earlier. To sex with Russell Brand, had gone back to his room, gone back to his house and had sex with him. And he had then anally raped her and left her in such a state, despite her screams and her nose and her resistance, had left her in such a state where, as the judge described, the bed was soiled with feces, with semen, with blood and told her to clean it up. And the victim had described how much it had affected her ability to go out, to make friends. She had resorted to an alcohol problem. She had had very little trust in people. This was 17 years ago. And the way she described it was still compelling enough for the judge to agree that this had been a first order rape. And that is why the sentence was so long and so large. It was harrowing to listen to. I mean, there was so much detail and so much account taken of the judge methodically going through in a very calm and unemotional manner the humiliation that these women had suffered who had given evidence against Russell Brand and the bravery that they'd shown. And he also made a broader point about women's safety. Women's right to have a drink, women's right to say no. Have a listen. Whatever women wear, wherever they go, indeed, whatever they drink, they retain the right to say no. And I think it was important that when he was addressing Russell Brand, he talked about his staggering arrogance. He talked about long-lasting harm. In other words, this was not a rape that was historical. And discussed by a now reformed character, this was a man who had insisted still on showing no remorse, no contrition, no acceptance of what he had done. I think I have to quote Marina Hyde at this point, who summed it up brilliantly, the Russell Brand baptism in the Thames that we all remember so clearly. She just came out and said, I think we've just learned that religious conviction can be trumped by a rape conviction. That's what happened today. We will see you tomorrow. Bye bye. The News Agents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity. This has been a global production.