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Steve Bannon’s Address to the California Republican Party convention (Former Trump administration strategist and GOP agitator Stephen K. Bannon addressed California Republicans at their fall convention in Anaheim on Friday. Here is a transcript of his keynote address as compiled by Los Angeles Times staff.)
I just want to make sure you know that your work is not wasted. Time magazine is coming out with this new edition this week and it just posted on its website. Its lead story: “Senate Republicans finally got something done.” (audience applauds)
They should thank Steve Bannon. (audience laughs)
I know everyone isn't happy about the budget that they passed today, but if you want tax reform, we had to have that budget pass and they finally got something done. It's not about me. It's about the people in the convention today. It's about the people in Alabama. It's about the people in Wisconsin. It's about the people in Tennessee. The Republican establishment is finally getting the joke. They are going to have to step it up. (audience applauds)
The theme of my speech and our talk tonight is victory begets victory.
At 2:30 a.m. on the 9th of November 2016 (audience cheers), the Associated Press announced that Donald J. Trump was the president-elect of the United States. Eighty-five days before that, on I think it was August 14th or 15th, I took over as CEO with Kellyanne Conway as our campaign manager.
I think the numbers are roughly something like this. We were 16 points down. I think double digits down or thereabouts on every battleground state. We were 70 on the generic ballot of Republicans. You gotta be at 90. Nine out of every 10 Republicans have to vote for you for the president of the United States to win.
The campaign didn't have a lot of money, not a lot of organization. First call I made was to Reince Priebus at the RNC and got his best people — Katie Walsh, Reince, Sean Spicer, all of them came up. I got Dave Bossie, like I said Kellyanne Conway, Bill Stepien. We put together a team in 72 hours.
Victory begets victory. We don't have a problem with ideas. We have a problem of understanding how to win. It is about winning. Nothing else matters. If you want to take your state back, if you want to take your country back, you're going to have to roll your sleeves up. There is no one person — Donald Trump, Mark Meadows, Ted Cruz, Laura Ingraham, Steve Bannon. They are not going to get this done.
What's gonna get it done is each and every one of you and the people at this convention. How do we pull off the win? We pulled off the win by having the RNC and the Republican establishment put their shoulder to the wheel with the Trump campaign state by state.
We had a strategy. We knew we had to win Florida, North Carolina, Ohio and Iowa just to get to the table. I don't think a Republican in living memory has done that.
Once we got there, we had two paths to victory. The path that I was most focused on, with a couple of guys in the campaign, because we had the data analytics and micro targeting to show us what to do was break the blue wall up north — Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa. In Minnesota we lost by one point.
Now how did we do that? We did it through teamwork. We did it through a coalition.
What we had to bring together, were populists and nationalists and evangelical Christians and conservatives and establishment Republicans. We had to put our differences aside in order to win.
Since that time, some of those differences have come up. The United States Senate in particular has done, I think, a terrible job in supporting President Trump.
And let me say something about President Trump: I've had the great honor of being the CEO of the campaign and then being his chief strategist and senior council in the White House. And now, I'm proud to say, his wingman outside.
You know, Donald Trump was worth what? I don’t know, four, five, six, seven billion dollars? Had a lovely wife, a great family, loving children, he had friends. When you see Donald Trump around his friends, you know what friendship really is — real camaraderie.
He owned some of the best properties in the world. He was buying golf courses and turning those golf courses, some of them championship courses, getting them into the open championship … . Doing things that a guy that is about 70 years old would do at the culmination of one's life, right? Kinda that last sprint that you're going to have.
There was no reason for him to run for president of the United States, except one. He felt he had a duty to his country.
Hillary Clinton's campaign spent 2.2 billion dollars. I think Trump's campaign was 750 million dollars, roughly. Somewhere like that.
And all that money was not to debate issues. We didn’t have a big debate on immigration or on national security. There wasn’t a big debate on tax policy.
What they used it for was the politics of personal destruction. They tried to destroy Donald Trump, and you know why? Because Donald Trump is an existential threat to the system. That's a highfalutin, you know, Harvard word. What does that mean? It means it goes right to the heart of the beast.
Donald Trump knows all the games, he knows all the scams, he knows everything that goes down in Washington, D.C. They've tried to shake businessmen like Donald Trump down for years. The permanent political class that runs this country is one of the great dangers we face.
Everything you see on cable TV, everything you see that these guys back here, the opposition party, and good evening opposition party. (audience boos)
Nobody should say CNN sucks. This is not a Trump rally. Everything you see on cable TV, you know MSNBC or CNN or Fox, that's pro wrestling. That's in the foreground, right? That’s to divert your attention of what's really going on, OK?
There is a business model that the permanent political class have.
Seven of the nine richest counties in the United States of America surround Washington, D.C. For the first time since the invention of the Silicon ship, Washington, D.C., those seven counties have a higher per-cap income than Silicon Valley.
Silicon Valley, which by the way has led the greatest revolution in technology in man's history, and had more great inventions. Now what does Washington, D.C., have? What they've got is basically a private equity fund of every year, what four trillion dollars that they divvy up.
The consulting class, the lobbyists, the K street crowd, the donor class and the politicians the own, they have taken this country in a very, very dangerous — very, very dangerous — direction.
Donald Trump, the whole campaign, and this is why it had to be a coalition. This is why it had to be the Republican establishment, it had to be limited-government conservatives, it had to be libertarians, it had to be populists, it had to be economic nationalists, it had to be evangelical Christians.
If you have the wisdom, the strength, the tenacity to hold that coalition together, we will govern for 50 to 75 years. And it's not going to be easy. Not everybody agrees on everything, right? Grover Norquist, I don't know where Grover is here tonight. Grover, where are you, brother? Grover Norquist, one of the greatest guys on taxes around. Grover and I don't agree on everything in policy, right?
The economic nationalists don't agree with the libertarians, the libertarians don't agree with the limited government conservatives. Often times we have a lot of different opinions on foreign policy. But we agree on enough stuff that we combine together.
If we do not unite, and unite not just in campaigning but in governing, and understand we are going to have to put certain differences aside to get things done. We are going to be run out of office and you know what? We deserve to be run out of office. There is absolutely no excuses anymore.
I hate people that whine. A lot of what I hear all the time is nothing but whining. And that whining is, oh we can't do this and we can't do that. We have the House, we have the Senate, we have presidency we have the executive branch of the government. We are about to get the Supreme Court and we are about to get the judiciary system back.
There is absolutely nothing we can't do. If we do one thing, if we move with urgency. Now the resistance that comes up against that, is not the people that are outside protesting tonight. When those people finally understand what economic nationalism is about and it's not about your race, your color, your gender, your religion, your ethnicity, your sexual preference.
It's about one thing: Are you a citizen of the United States of America? Because if you are a citizen, there are certain responsibilities and obligations that come with that. But as a citizen also you should have preference for jobs and economic opportunities. Economic nationalism is not what’s going to drive us apart, it's what’s going to bind us together.
We've had a very dangerous thing come as conservatives over the last 30 or 40 years — just another thing I know everybody in this room is not going to agree with. This kind of Austrian School of economics, this kind of Ayn Rand, you know, where everything was about the economy. What was most important six weeks before the election — gotta see what the unemployment rate is, it’s GDP as everything.
We are not an economy. We are a country. We have a social fabric and a civic responsibility. By the way, I'm a free market capitalist, as most of you are, right? That’s the underpinnings of our society.
But we are a civic society, it's more than an economy. An economic nationalism, looking out for our fellow men to make sure that manufacturing jobs that we allowed go to Asia come back to the United States of America.
If you want to talk about the civic society, I don't know if y’all have read J.D. Vance's fantastic book, “Hillbilly Elegies” [sic]. J.D. is a guy who went to Yale, a Marine Corps officer, fantastic writer and a conservative. And a conservative.
But the book shows kind of the socioeconomic underpinnings of the Trump revolt, particularly in the upper Midwest. And J.D. was a guy that showed me a study that had been done by a couple of professors at MIT and Harvard. It shows you a direct correlation between the factories that got shipped to Asia, the jobs that left and the individuals behind that became addicted in this opioid crisis.
Our country is in a crisis. We have to move with urgency. The working class people in this country have responded to our message. They've responded to Donald Trump.
Donald Trump is the only person that could have beaten Hillary Clinton. He is an imperfect individual as we are all imperfect. But he was an instrument. You could say he was an instrument of god's will or not, but I will tell you it took the hand of divine providence to win on November 9 of 2016.
And that's one of the things that upset me so much about what's happened in the last six or seven months. The lack of urgency, the lack of work. You know I'm so proud of this thing right here: Mitch McConnell announced the other day that they’re going to start working five and six days a week. People in this country are working two and three jobs.
During the last hurricane, I think it was on CNN and this was not fake news. Somebody did a study, and I think I'm quoting correctly, that half of the households in this country, in our beloved country, don't have 400 dollars in cash to meet an emergency. Four hundred dollars in cash.
What would the people that fought in the American Revolution think about that? What would the people who died in Guadalcanal think about that? That we have a country that has created 5 trillion dollars of wealth on the combined stock exchanges in equity value, right? But the people that have a high school diploma have not had a raise since 1970, and that half of the families in this country can’t find 400 dollars in cash.
If we do not take care of this problem — and I'm not about redistribution of wealth — but what I am about and what we have to be about is that people do not have to compete unfairly against foreign labor, whether that foreign labor is in China or whether that is illegal alien labor that comes into the United States of America.
Victory begets victory. Look what's happened since Alabama. Let's talk about Alabama for a second. Now Alabama, I was on the opposite side of the football with the president. There were a couple of reasons for that. I think the president got some bad information. But I will tell you what: You see the power in Alabama of the evangelical Christian movement and the populist nationalist that Mo Brooks represented. When they come together, you cannot beat them. And you can't beat them with money.
The theory of the case in Alabama was very simple and it's the reason why I didn't want any big donors putting money in. We had to prove something: that the donor class and Mitch McConnell's money doesn't mean anything. We had to turn their biggest asset into their biggest liability.
They spent 32 million dollars. Thirty-two million dollars on a state like Alabama against two million from Judge Roy Moore. And you know what they did? It wasn't there to debate the great issues of our time. It wasn't there to debate immigration. It wasn't there to debate America's role in the world. Just like Hillary Clinton and the Democrats came after Donald Trump, it was the politics of personal destruction. It was against Judge Moore and it was against his wife.
And you know what they said his big crime was? That he put the Ten Commandments in a courthouse. The Ten Commandments, which is the underpinnings of the Judeo-Christian west, and reinforces man's imperfection.
Judge Moore won 55-45. Fox News put up some fake news yesterday, a poll that showed that Judge Moore tied. Just to say, ‘Hey, this revolt that Bannon and these crazies are doing against the Republican establishment are not going to turn out too well.”
Well guess what? Today's poll. By the way that was for registered voters not likely voters. The poll that came out today from the local TV station that got the primary dead spot-on, Judge Moore is up by 11 points.
The good thing about Alabama is look at what has happened since then. What we have had DAC, we had the 70-point program on DACA, including 20 deal killers and on top of a White House official — I won't say it’s Steven Miller — but a White House official came out and said there is no path to citizenship, right?
We had pulling out of UNESCO, right? We had the decertification of the Iran deal, IGRC [sic], a terrorist organization. We had stopped the illegal payments on Obamacare, the CSR payments. We had Secretary Mnuchin come out and reinforce this is going to be a middle-class tax cut, and the entrepreneurs are going to get almost the same tax cut that the big corporations are going to get, just to reinforce it.
Hell, every day since Alabama is Christmas Day. You know why? Winning matters.
You're not here to waste your time. You're not here to have moral victories. I don't want moral victories. I want victory victories. Because when you have victories you redo the judiciary for a generation. When you have victories you start to get our tax structure correct. When you get victories, you redo these crappy trade deals and start protecting American workers, American companies.
It's time in California we started to have some victories. The resistance is not the people you see outside. That’s not the resistance, right? That's actually, quite frankly, going to help Republicans. Because right now on those 23 very difficult districts that Hillary Clinton won yet Republicans have the House seats? The generic ballot? You may be 10 points down. But the resistance, our buddies outside, right? Who are good folks, they’re just misled, misinformed. They’re going to drag it so far to the left that we’re going to hold those districts, right? And Nancy Pelosi is not going to get her opportunity to impeach the president of the United States.
The resistance is this permanent political class, this combination of lobbyist and consultants and corporatists and globalists elites. And the heart of the resistance, the beating heart of it is Silicon Valley. The folks up there think that they get a special deal, right?
Put these companies in Ireland or Luxembourg or the Canary Islands where they put them so they don't have to pay taxes, right? They want all the benefits of a free society. They want all the benefits of this rules-based international order, right? This thing that we have created since World War II, this inextricably linked combination of commercial relationships, trade deals, capital markets, that we the citizens of the United States underwrite. And our sons and daughters, whether they went to West Point, the Naval Academy or just went down to boot camp in Parris Island or in San Diego — they underwrite it. We underwrite the whole thing.