Populism and the American Empire

Photo: Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Steve Bannon served as White House Chief Strategist in the early months of the Trump administration. He was previously the executive chairman of Breitbart News, and a former naval officer and investment banker. Since 2019, Bannon has hosted War Room, a daily broadcast highly influential within the American populist movement.

What follows is a transcript of our conversation, which took place on October 3, 2025. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

[Note: The opinions expressed by the interviewee are their own and do not necessarily represent those of the interviewer.]

Bannon’s Media Diet

CB: What’s your morning routine? I heard you’re an early riser. You read a lot of international media and that sort of thing.

SB: Yeah, I get up every day at five, and I normally allocate the first part to that. I always stick to Eastern Time, so if I’m on the West Coast, which I am now, I get up at two in the morning and go to bed at six or seven. I start with some spiritual reading or things that are not political or economic. Then, close to six, I’ll spend an hour just absorbing everything that’s going on—global markets, etc. We curate and monitor CNN, MSNBC, and the BBC. But the channel I really watch is Bloomberg, because it’s really the only 24-hour news outlet. It does an amazing job of presenting different business and political stories around the clock.

The challenge with the War Room show every day is focusing on the most important things, making sure we don’t just chase headlines but stay ahead of the audience with meaningful information. What we try to do in structuring every show is somewhat different from Fox. We’re there to give actionable information to activists. We pride ourselves on being the platform for the activist audience, the MAGA activists.

CB: What are the best international papers in your view?

SB: Well, I go to all the English papers first, because I think they’re the best papers in the world: The Times of London, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph is getting better. I read Le Figaro, the French papers that publish in English, and briefly go through the Italian and German papers. The FT, The Guardian, and The Times of London are really the three. They cover international news so well. But I’ll also look at the English pages for France, Germany, and Italy. And I do read the Italian papers, particularly the one in Rome that covers the Vatican better than anyone.

The American Empire

CB: How do you reconcile populist nationalism with the realities and burdens of imperial power?

SB: Let’s start with what the American Empire is, post–World War II. The two fetishes among our ruling class are, number one, the postwar international rules-based order. If you were to criticize that, you’ve gone against the high church of the globalists. The other way they keep control is through what they call the interagency process. Those are like two fetishes, and let’s take the first one. If you look at the wars of the 20th century, the long war from 1914 to 1989, which was the biggest tragedy in world history with 250 million casualties, it was essentially a war for the Eurasian landmass. And if you break it down, it’s Mackinder 101, it’s Mahan. It’s also Spykman about the Rimland.

If you look at the American Empire that came out of that, you have Western Europe. Then you go down to the Gulf Emirates in the Middle East, and Saudi Arabia and Israel. Then you go around to the South China Sea and kind of India, that whole area through the Straits of Malacca. And then you go up to Korea and Japan. Those four nodes became the building blocks of the postwar international rules-based order. It’s Spykman’s Rimland. Spykman came out with what was really Kennan’s containment strategy, which is, if you control the Rimland, you can control things. So our strategy reflects Spykman’s strategy but buys into the Mackinder architecture.

Now let’s break it down. In all four of those nodes, you have a couple of things. Number one, you have commerce and trade, always manifested in some sort of trade deals or trade arrangements. Number two, you have capital markets and interchange. Number three, you have cultural exchange, the shared culture. But underneath all four of those is the American security guarantee. Remember, this is why we’ve got kids on patrol in the Hindu Kush, kids on carrier battle groups in the South China Sea, while we still have 80,000 troops in Western Europe and 30,000 troops on the Korean Peninsula.

Until Trump came back, we were upside down on trade in all four, particularly for working-class people. So you have the commercial relationships that work against us, although the capital markets were for it. The American elite are doing fine on capital investment and capital markets. On the commercial side of that relationship, codified in trade deals, the American working class is getting crushed, and it’s their tax dollars paying for the trillion-dollar budget of the American Empire. And you’ve got their kids, who make up all of the combat casualties. Some of the elites’ children serve, but very few. So that’s the reason the postwar international rules-based order collapsed.

On MSNBC, you get all these globalists on every day, and they won’t admit it collapsed. They’re trained by the Acela elite, they’re from the big Ivy League colleges, or trained like I was at Harvard Business School. Remember, I went to Harvard in the mid-80s. This was high church. There was no questioning of two things: globalization and the maximization of shareholder value. Those are two things that are hammered into you every day as core religious precepts. And these people never question that.

The fundamental thing of populist nationalism is that we must focus on America First, with American interests, and we don’t want this far-flung empire. The empire is actually working against the American people. It’s time to restructure. It’s not that we’re isolationists, but we want to become noninterventionist, right?

CB: How can America abandon the empire? What’s going to secure all of these markets and natural resources?

SB: They’re not going to block access to the markets. And if they block access to markets, something else will come up. Every one of those trade deals in those four nodes was upside down. The Korean trade deal was awful, the Japanese trade deal was awful, and we’re underwriting their security. I love the Koreans. I love the Japanese, but it’s not working. This is why they’re so offended, saying, “Oh my gosh, he’s upending the world’s commercial order.” You’re damn right he is. And is it perfect? No, it’s not perfect. But you’re finally forcing these jobs to come back with kind of a blunt-force instrument.

Hemispheric Defense

CB: Should we have any U.S. forces forward deployed?

SB: Okay, let’s go to Hemispheric Defense, because this is a key question. It’s kind of what the founders understood. If you look at the Manifest Destiny crowd, they had a very specific vision. It wasn’t just as a continental power; it was taking America to be a Pacific power. The entire development of the United States going forward doesn’t end in California. The genius of the generation that followed the Civil War was that they understood the natural evolution of America as a Pacific power. Hence, the wars of the late 19th century really were about making sure that we had access to the three island chains. This was what we did with the opening of China, coming in after the Brits. The opening of Japan was about the three island chains and making sure that America had a position as a Pacific power, because they knew intuitively that’s where world growth was going to come from.

Now, what do I mean by that? In the philosophy of Hemispheric Defense, what Mahan and everybody understood from the late 19th century all the way to the end of World War II is that Mackinder got it wrong when it comes to the United States. Mackinder is absolutely correct when it comes to the Eurasian landmass. Whoever controls that heartland will control the Eurasian landmass. And whoever controls that controls the world, right? Our heartland is the vast Pacific. That vast Pacific from the three island chains back to the U.S. is bigger than the Eurasian landmass, and it’s an impenetrable barrier. That is why the three island chains are so important to us in Hemispheric Defense.

Hemispheric Defense starts from Greenland in the Arctic. The Arctic is the new Great Game, like Afghanistan was in the 19th century between the Russian Empire and the British Empire. Greenland, as a strategic asset, blocks the Russian Navy. You can track them even better than we do today with the sonar buoys and all of that. From bases in Greenland all the way down to control of the Panama Canal, it basically begins to hermetically seal and clean out the entire Caribbean of the People’s Liberation Army Navy and Russian influence. That hermetically seals the United States with the vast Pacific. Our Pacific barrier is that three island chain starting in Taiwan, coming all the way back to Polynesia and Guam. The three island chain is the forward barrier of the United States. Quite frankly, we’ve dropped the ball on Micronesia and Polynesia. We’re going to pick that back up. It’s central to our strategy. That’s why the Panama Canal, that’s why Greenland, that’s why the Arctic.

What President Trump is telling the Canadian people is that you’re like Ukraine. The Chinese already talked about this. They came 10 or 15 years ago on Canadian soil and said they’re going to take a bite out of the northern part of Canada. Canada just uses the Arctic as a barrier. It’s not a barrier anymore. It’s actually invited predators in. And so what Trump keeps saying about their sharing of defense is that not only are they going to be part of any kind of nuclear shield that we have, or Iron Dome, but just as importantly, they need assets and resources to defend their northern territories, or Russia or China are going to take a bite out of Canadian territory.

CB: What about Venezuela and South America?

SB: Let’s get to Latin America. You’re hermetically sealed, but with the Monroe Doctrine, Latin America has to be secured first. This is the whole reason for the $20 billion monetary bailout of Argentina. I’m not 100% supportive of this until Argentina is really an ally, because they deal too much with China. I am opposed to any kind of kinetic involvement in Venezuela, but clearly something has to happen with Maduro. I believe it will be negotiated or cut off with economic pressure.

The whole point is that there is a renewed focus on South America, which has not happened in the United States for a long time. Now, with Latin America secured, with President Trump’s Iron Dome and control of the vast Pacific, America can turn to an expeditionary force throughout the world. A perfect example of an expeditionary force is what happened in the 12-day war. President Trump sent a brutal and decisive blow from the air and from cruise missiles in the North Arabian Sea. Remember, half the damage was done by the 30 cruise missiles. In fact, I would argue that most of the demonstrable damage was done by 1970s technology, delivered by Navy submarines. President Trump said in his Quantico speech to the generals that the most strategic thing he talked about was sending the ballistic missile submarines off of Russia. It’s a mentality that gets us to an expeditionary force. It also allows us to start to take the American military complex and to start to make that address the new strategic realities of Hemispheric Defense.

Trump and Silicon Valley

CB: Going back to the Metropole, what does Silicon Valley want from Trump? They have lots of interests in the Chinese market and keeping it open. They have supply-chain exposure with China. What was their bargain?

SB: Let’s go to the tech bros. We have a basic, fundamental philosophical difference. And I want to go back to the third week of January of 2017. Two speeches were given that week. The first speech was at Davos by Xi. I think it’s the only time he’s been there. He’d asked to give a major address. And that address was essentially what a new world order would look like, and it was China-centric. It would basically be a network effect, what I call a series of networks. In this vision, China is the ultimate consumer market and manufacturer, but tied together in a series of logistic chains, One Belt, One Road, tying Europe and Africa and South Asia into various markets. But they would be the providers of raw materials and, in some cases like Germany, component parts, with the final manufacture to be done in China. And that network effect would essentially supersede the Westphalian system, which predicated from the nation-state. They were looking at a new world order that would have no essential nations, with this series of networks leading to some economic model that they drove. So the Westphalian system would be set aside.

President Trump gave his first inaugural address 48 hours later. Stephen Miller and I had a big hand in working with him on that address, which was, I think, the most profound proclamation of not just the Westphalian system but American nationalism that’s been given since at least Andrew Jackson. That was the biggest, most profound discussion about American nationalism, including American Carnage—but leading with that punch line, “Now comes the hour of action,” right? We allowed the progressive Democrats under Obama to set up, to allow the tech bro-ligarchs to have monopolistic power, and not use any antitrust against them. This is why Lina Khan’s name is a curse word among these people. As MAGA, we are neo-Brandeisians. I think you see it with Gail Slater at the DOJ, what’s happening at the FCC. Now, clearly, you’re under huge pressure and trying to cut deals, but the breakup of the monopolies was a very big part of this.

We are absolutely Brandeisians in saying, “Hey, the concentration of private power with state power is kind of the Chinese Communist Party’s model.” They didn’t follow us to liberal democracy, the End of History. Our elites actually copied the model that they have, and that’s going to be broken up. The tech bros, at their core, do not believe in the nation-state. They can lie about it. They can spin it. We know from their history. We know from the way they roll. They do not believe in the constraints of the nation-state. They believe in these networks of which they’re the railhead.

This is going to be such a fundamental issue in ’26 and beyond. I think in ’28 it will be one of the core issues of a national debate. It is time that we need to go in and break up these oligarchs. We need to break up these monopolies. We need to get back to entrepreneurial finance, entrepreneurial capitalism, not late-stage capitalism, where we are. The concentration of power in D.C. right now, with Big Pharma, big medicine, the Wall Street lobby, the defense industry, big tech, is crushing the American people. And these people have the best law firms. They have the best lobbyists, the best crisis communication. They try to dominate Washington. This is why you see a significant part of the Trump government trying to push back on that. It’s going to metastasize. And I’m telling you, the American people are going to reject this 100%.

CB: The voter in Michigan who you talked about has a house and a 401(k). The FAANG stocks with Tesla and Nvidia are carrying the S&P, and you’re talking about breaking them up. Wouldn’t this have a negative impact on electoral politics? What happens when everybody’s 401(k) takes a huge hit?

SB: No. I believe strongly that in breaking these up, the sum net value of the increase in entrepreneurial power in multiple companies will offset that. I don’t buy the argument that you’re going to take out the stock market. Quite frankly, I think a lot of this, like Nvidia and some of these other stocks, like Tesla, I think some of this is fantasy. It’s AI fantasy, right? This is a bubble every bit as bad as Pets.com in the 1990s. We need to get to productive, sustainable capitalism. We’ve got to stop the casino. The run-up in some of these stocks is nothing more than the casino mentality of Wall Street. But it’s going to require taking these guys on. And quite frankly, they control the media. They control Washington, D.C., with the lobbyists. It’s going to be a huge fight. But the man and woman in Michigan are going to be your biggest allies. They understand something’s deeply wrong.

Artificial intelligence is literally out of control. You have three or four companies that are driving this with no guardrails at all. Forget the intellectual property issues, I’m talking about the ability to go to artificial general intelligence with no controls at all. Artificial intelligence has to be confronted. Look, it shouldn’t be lost on anybody that follows this. China came up with Made in China 2025, which they don’t talk about anymore because they realize we outed them. It’s like One Belt, One Road. They never call it One Belt, One Road anymore. They came up with it 10 years ago, in 2015, with the concept that in one decade they would dominate 10 industries that would drive the future. Look at the top five: artificial intelligence and artificial general intelligence, robotics and regenerative robotics, quantum computing, advanced chip design, and CRISPR and/or biotechnology, right? Those are the five that together lead you to the singularity, that lead you to the point where you’re now Homo sapiens 1.5 or 2.0. This has massive social implications. You can see it right now just with the simple use of artificial intelligence in schools and training kids and cheating, but what about the ability to become an enhanced human, where you make sure the kids are enhanced because they can get into Harvard?

The people that believe, for religious or spiritual reasons, that being a Homo sapien is about remaining in God’s image and likeness will be at a distinct disadvantage in what’s becoming a dystopian modern world. That battle is going to be huge. It’s going to engulf the whole country in a national debate and conversation, and it has to happen. The tech bros think they are masters of the universe. When you talk to them in person, all of them focus on one thing: eternal life. They’re trying to break the bounds of human limitations. And for some people, that may be very inspiring. For people that come out of the Judeo-Christian West, we say that that is an exact mockery of God, and we’re getting into very dangerous territory. And we need to be rational about this. And they use China. They say, well, you don’t understand China. I say, well, hang on a second. You guys all have monopolies. And look at what happened in social media—you got outplayed by TikTok and the People’s Liberation Army.

The Wall Street Agenda

CB: How is Wall Street lobbying the administration? What are they asking for?

SB: I think Jamie Dimon and these guys, number one, want more consolidation. All of corporate America wants President Trump and MAGA to stand down on antitrust and marginalize the neo-Brandeisian movement, from Gail running antitrust over at DOJ to the FCC trying to break things up. Number one, they want little to no antitrust enforcement. Number two, I think what Wall Street’s also talking about is less banking regulation.

Right now, particularly, none of them want any kind of oversight or regulation on artificial intelligence, however they’re using it for their businesses. And it doesn’t matter if you’re going to have an AI jobs apocalypse. We already have tons of STEM graduates and employees out of work. And you’ve still got the H-1B scam, with industry sitting there saying they want no regulation at all. As far as AI goes, they want to be able to use it to eliminate jobs, to do anything they want with it, with no constraints.

I think that’s what Wall Street is principally pushing, and pushing hard. And, by the way, they’re very influential. The one thing I can tell you, the difference between this term and the first term, is that the concentration of power, under COVID and Biden’s watch, is astonishing. Big Pharma, Big Tech, Wall Street, Big Medicine, the arms industry—they’re all so powerful now, with the lobbyists, the crisis-communications firms, and the law firms, that it’s almost insurmountable to have any kind of effective antitrust program. That’s why I think it’s so heroic, what Gail and others are doing in the Trump administration.

Bannon Behind Bars

CB: What was it like for you in prison, and what did you learn about the United States during your four months behind bars?

SB: I was in a low-security prison. The low-security prisons are where most of the young drug dealers rolled up under these RICO acts of kind of mass incarceration are sitting there for 10, 15, 20 years. I mean, the sentences are just unbelievable. Guys are there for dealing drugs, and it’s because of the way that the sentence structure works. The prison system in our country is totally fucked up. This warehousing of people is not working. But I can tell you, for the Black and Hispanic working class in federal prison, principally for drug charges, there was outright derision and hatred of the Democratic Party and virtually no support for Kamala Harris.

When I was in the Navy, post-Vietnam with the all-volunteer force, it seemed like most of the enlisted people had a choice at that point between jail and the Navy. The military had a very tough time recruiting. And I saw in the enlisted men on my ship, they may have run into legal problems, and they didn’t have great educations because the education system isn’t good for them, but they’re the bedrock of the country. The guys in prison, and their families particularly, are still kind of the bedrock of this country. And their opportunities have been taken. This is what this fight is over.

Populism vs. Conservatism

CB: You don’t really describe the political spectrum in terms of conservative and liberal. You use globalist and populist. Why is that?

SB: Populism is anti-elite and wants economic policies that are beneficial to the broad range of working-class and middle-class people in this country. Let’s just go back to the Big Beautiful Bill. The Republicans reverted back to the mean. The Big Beautiful Bill, once again, is not as aggressive as it could be on tax breaks for the working class and middle class, because we still refuse to have the wealthy start to pay more and run these deficits. So populism wants to show a better piece of the action for the working class and for the middle class than for the wealthy elites in this country or the country-club elites.

Conservatism devolved into country-club Republicanism with a few social issues like abortion on the side that they would toss you a bone on every now and then. Also, conservatism, to me, means George Will with a bow tie and David Brooks with a bow tie, and being kind of esoteric, talking about the Enlightenment and not being down for a fight. Populism wants to fight. And nationalism means we put America first, and populism means we put American citizens first. That’s why they are welded together.

Remember, we are basically in a pre–civil war time and can only be pulled out if President Trump is successful at saving the country. Since the 1960s, we’ve had as many Republican presidents as Democrats. We’ve had as much control of the Senate and the House as Democrats. It got here because the RINOs are not nationalists. They’re a weaker form of globalism than the Democrats. Democrat elites and Republican elites both think the same way. So this is why the country got here. I am not a conservative. The Trump Republican Party and MAGA are where I stand, but not with the traditional Republican Party. I think it’s a group of sad-sack losers.

Like the Bourbons

CB: Historically speaking, why don’t aristocracies have a fighting instinct?

SB: Well, throughout history, because they don’t think change is coming. Remember, the French aristocracy was just as clueless as the Romanovs. Their lives are so sheltered, and their advisors are so remiss to tell them what the reality is. What did Louis XIV say? “After me, the deluge.” Right? He got it in a very deep way. You don’t see that a lot. How did Trump catch everybody by surprise in 2016? When you look back in history, it’s obvious that when you have a financial collapse, like in 2008, you always have a populist reaction to it. As sure as the turning of the Earth, you have a populist reaction to it.

Hillary Clinton was on Morning Joe the other day. She blamed it on me specifically for knowing more about the Pepes and understanding digital better than she did. She didn’t go back to the fact she abandoned the white working class who kept Clinton in power in Arkansas and saved her failed primary against Obama for a little while. She went back to, “Oh, they were better in digital. They had the Pepes, and they knew more about Facebook and Twitter.” They still don’t get it. Remember the quote—I think it was Carlyle—about the Bourbons. It’s the same with the ruling class here. Just like the Bourbons in pre-revolutionary France, they’ve learned nothing, and they forget nothing. That’s the ruling elite in this country.