A Late-Night Call Between Trump and Bannon

Steve, we need to talk about Elon.

Yesterday, Elon Musk and his rabid online followers got very mad at us—mostly at Bill—because they hallucinated (that’s an AI joke, not a ketamine joke) about a nefarious connection between USAID funding and an organization Bill and Sarah run.

On the homepage, Sarah explained what really happened—the whole thing is worth a read, but here’s the most important part:

First they threaten you. Then they create conspiracy theories about you. Then they hound you with an online mob to make sure you fall in line.

That’s gonna be a no from me, dawg.

Happy Thursday.

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Steve Bannon on October 29, 2024. Photo by YUKI IWAMURA/AFP via Getty Images

The Trump-Bannon Conversation

by William Kristol

THE FOLLOWING IS AN NSA INTERCEPT PURSUANT TO SECTION 702 OF THE FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE SURVEILLANCE ACT.

CLASSIFICATION: SUPER TOP SECRET. HIGHLY SENSITIVE. CONE OF SILENCE.

DISTRIBUTION RESTRICTED TO DEEP STATE AND BULWARK LEADERSHIP ONLY.

TRANSCRIPT OF PHONE CONVERSATION BETWEEN PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP AND MR. STEPHEN K. BANNON.

CALL INITIATED BY PRESIDENT TRUMP AT 2:17AM, THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 6.

Bannon: Uh, hello?

POTUS: Steve, we’ve got a problem. Bigly.

Bannon: Mr. President, good to hear from you. It is two o’clock in the morning.

POTUS: Who gives a shit. We got someone we got to deal with.

Bannon: Yes sir! Fire that twerp Rubio. He’s not making the case for you. He’s going around looking apologetic about what you’re saying. And I just heard from Anton—thank God we stuck him in there to spy on Rubio—that all Marco talks about is how “we’ve got to figure out how to manage Trump” and that kind of BS. He’s as bad as McMaster and Bolton. But now that it’s clear the Republican Senators will go along with anything, you can replace Rubio with MTG, or at least Ric. . .

POTUS: F*** Rubio. F*** the State Department. Who cares what they do? And I kind of enjoy humiliating Lil’ Marco. I’m leaving him there for a while. He’s not the problem.

Bannon: Sir, who is the problem?

POTUS: You know him. You hate him.

Bannon: (interrupting, shouting) ELON!

POTUS: Yup, Elon.

Bannon: GREAT GREAT GREAT. You know, I warned you, sir—

POTUS: (interrupting) F*** what you warned me. I needed him in the campaign. He was useful in the transition. But now he’s hurting me. Scavino showed me some poll from those globalist wimps at the Economist. Can you believe he reads that crap? Back in November people were ok with Elon. But now only 13 percent want him to have “a lot” of influence; 25 percent say they want “a little” influence; and 46 percent want him to have “none at all.” As long as Musk is hogging the spotlight, I can’t get the numbers I deserve. All his BS overshadows my brilliant moves with Greenland and Gaza and Canada and all that other good stuff.

Bannon: Yes, sir, Musk is hurting us. You know sir, populist movements require—

POTUS: Christ, Steve. Focus on the important thing. Miller and Vought—now those guys are good aides, they come up with all these plans but they know their f***ing place. They say Elon’s talking secretly with JD and that lunatic Tucker, about “managing” me and telling the press I’m losing it and gradually edging me aside. You warned me about their plotting when I let them convince me to take JD as VP. But that worked out for the campaign. Now it’s time to make a move. I’m stuck with JD. But Elon’s gotta go.

Bannon: Great! This is the happiest day of my life since I discovered the writings of Julius Evola . . .

POTUS: No one cares about Ebola, Steve. I need you to figure out how I can get rid of Elon. He’s got money. He’s got Twitter. He’s got all those weirdo friends from Silicon Valley. This is a tricky one.

Bannon: You know sir, the best advice I ever read about how to get rid of a guy working for you who’s become a problem is in Machiavelli. You’ve heard of him, right?

POTUS: Yup. Roy Cohn used to carry that book of his around. What’s it called? The Little Prince?

Bannon: No sir, just The Prince. Anyway, it’s in chapter seven. I’ll fax you the whole chapter, it’s only a few pages. But the key part is when Cesare Borgia needs to get rid of a henchman, Ramiro d’Orco, who’d been very useful but got too big for his britches. Here, let me read you a couple of sentences—I got it right here, I always keep Machiavelli along with Evola at my bedside. In the original Italian of course. But here we go, in English:

Because he knew that past rigors had generated some hatred for Ramiro, to purge the spirits of the people and to gain them entirely to himself, he wished to show that if any cruelty had been committed, this had come not from him but from the harsh nature of his minister. And having seized this opportunity, he had him placed one morning in the piazza at Cesena in two pieces, with a piece of wood and a bloody knife beside him. The ferocity of this spectacle left the people at once satisfied and stupefied.

“Satisfatti e stupidi”! Man, that Machiavelli is pretty good, huh?

POTUS: [silence]

Bannon: Sir, are you there?

POTUS: Yeah. Just thinking.

Bannon: Now of course you couldn’t literally do what Cesare Borgia did—

POTUS: (interrupting) Why not? Wow! Where would it look best? Lafayette Square? The Ellipse? The steps of the Capitol building . . . again!

Hey, Steve, stay in touch. I got some calls to make.

[BANNON DISCONNECTED]

POTUS: White House operator! Get me Enrique Tarrio.

CALL ENDED AT 2:23AM

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Ben Stiller: 'Severance,' but Real Life

In case you missed it—

On yesterday’s Bulwark Podcast, Tim talked with Ben Stiller about avoiding politics in public and advocating for the millions of displaced people around the world. Of course, they also talk about Stiller’s brilliant series, Severance, and how various Ben Stiller characters would have voted. Check it out!

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Quick Hits

THE DICTATOR PRESIDENCY: The latest “Conversation with Bill Kristol” features NYU law professor Ryan Goodman, co-editor of Just Security. He isn’t a hair-on-fire hysteric, but he is taking a wide view of the Trump administration so far, and his conclusions are alarming:

The Trump team is claiming that just as president, he can completely override congressional statute, the first branch of government doesn’t matter.

And that he’s not just claiming that in the realm of a national emergency. He’s claiming that across different policy arenas. So just very briefly, they look at, for example, the birthright citizenship EO, the TikTok EO, and then immigration EO. And across all of them, there is this assertion that one can understand is clearly there. That as president, he can just ignore statutes. The TikTok statute on divestiture, he’s ignoring it. He’s not even making an argument that people anticipate like, “Oh, there’s this 90 day extension. Maybe he’s operating a 90 day extension.” He’s not. He’s just saying, “I, as president, can do this.” . . .

And I think that to me, it’s one of the most important themes that I assume we’ll probably get into in our conversation, which is how much the Justice Department is backing these, I would say extra-legal claims to authority. And in some of the instances, taking positions that seem to be blatantly unlawful. And that’s the bulwark of what we would hope would keep a check or a guardrail up, which is that the lawyers would not approve documents or instruments like this and would not act on them either.

But that does not seem to be the case. In fact, I think it’s one of the fire alarms that in my mind is going off, which is how the lawyers are acting.

Watch, listen to, or read the transcript of the whole thing.

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THE 12-STEP AUTHORITARIAN PLAYBOOK: While much of the political world is watching Elon Musk’s gutting of USAID with shock, others are bracing for DOGE’s next target.

And they’re planning too. In recent days, a prep sheet has been emailed around D.C. listing the 12 steps that Musk and Co. often take when trying to upend an institution. The list, compiled by Maria August Carrasco, a behavioral scientist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, was posted on her LinkedIn page. The preamble is short and to the point: “Playbook used at USAID (other agencies, take note).” And the descriptions, 0-10 (it’s unclear why Carrasco started her list at 0, but we digress) seem pretty spot-on. The big question mark is around 11: “If there are lawsuits and charges from any illegal actions that were carried out, don’t worry, you will be pardoned.”

It’s worth noting that the president’s pardon power extends only to criminal charges, not civil liability.

The Bulwark emailed Carrasco to find out if she has heard from individuals at government agencies about her list. We did not hear back.

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SAME OLD SONG AND DANCE: How many times before have we seen Trump improvise a fantastically stupid idea in public, only to have members of his administration or staff walk it back? The latest example is his plan to take over and redevelop Gaza after removing it (maybe permanently?) of Gazans. “Amid global alarm, top administration officials sought to soften elements of President Trump’s proposal to force Palestinians out of the territory and take it over,” reports the New York Times.

This may seem like a silly question, but . . . why? Why are they walking back this idea? This isn’t an administration staffed by Jim Mattis or John Kelly or John Bolton or HR McMaster. These are people Trump chose specifically for their loyalty—the Times quotes White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff.

This is supposed to be an administration that actually acts on his impulses. This is supposed to be a foreign policy whereby countries fear him because he’s unpredictable. So why contradict him? They’re not putting other countries’ concerns ahead of America, are they? Or worse: Do they think the president made a mistake?

Of course, Trump doesn’t like to be corrected, especially when he’s wrong:

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FINALLY A LITTLE LAW AND ORDER: It took a good week-plus but we finally have our first signal that anyone is going to rein in the DOGE Bros. NBC reports:

Attorneys for the Justice Department have agreed to temporarily restrict staffers associated with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing information in the Treasury Department’s payment system.

The agreement comes after a group of union members and retirees sued the Treasury Department alleging that providing DOGE access to the federal government’s massive payment and collections system—and the personal data housed in it—violated federal privacy laws.

Speed has been an important part of the DOGE strategy—maybe because Musk’s status as a “special government employee” comes with a ticking clock, or maybe because they were hoping to create facts on the ground before the courts got involved. More orders like this are hopefully to come soon. The question is whether they’re coming too late.

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