Steve Bannon Loses His Mind Over Elon Musk

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon is going for the jugular on Elon Musk.

In an interview with Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera published Wednesday, Bannon lambasted the world’s richest man as a “truly evil guy” who would be out of Trumpworld by Inauguration Day.

“I will get Elon Musk kicked out by the time [Donald Trump is] inaugurated,” Bannon told the paper. “He won’t have a blue pass with full access to the White House. He’ll be like everyone else.”

“He is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy. I made it my personal thing to take this guy down,” Bannon continued. “Before, because he put money in, I was prepared to tolerate it; I’m not prepared to tolerate it anymore.”

Bannon was himself, at one point, at the epicenter of Trump’s universe. He served as the forty-fifth president’s chief White House strategist before the former Apprentice host fired him in 2017 following a series of controversies in which Bannon openly contradicted Trump and began to encroach on the MAGA limelight. Bannon has been developing his ire against Musk since he finished a four-month stint in the clink in October for a contempt conviction.

It is currently unclear what formal role, if any, Bannon will hold in Trump’s new administration. But despite his fall from grace, Bannon has continued to posit his influence in the far-right sphere. In 2023, the political provocateur similarly assumed he’d continue to wield power under a future Trump administration, promising to slam MSNBC with “prosecutions and accountability” for reporting that Trump lost the 2020 election.

At the heart of Bannon’s rift with Musk is the Tesla CEO’s staunch defense of the H-1B visa work program, which Musk has insisted serves as a solution to a “permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent” in the U.S. Opponents of the immigration program—and Musk’s position—claim that the H-1B visa disincentivizes companies to hire American labor.

“This thing of the H-1B visas, it’s about the entire immigration system is gamed by the tech overlords, they use it to their advantage, the people are furious,” Bannon told Corriere della Sera, slamming Musk as a “techno-feudalist.”

“He will do anything to make sure that any one of his companies is protected or has a better deal or he makes more money,” Bannon said. “His aggregation of wealth, and then—through wealth—power: that’s what he’s focused on.”

Bannon also took a jab at Musk’s heritage, questioning why a white South African—whom he described as the “most racist people on earth”—would be allowed to have any role of authority on “what goes on in the United States.”

Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso wants to use the relief for those affected by the wildfires in Los Angeles County as an opportunity to reform liberal policies in California.

During an interview Sunday on CBS News, Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan pressed the Wyoming Republican on whether he thought Republicans were at all interested in helping those who had lost their homes, businesses, and belongings, despite the fact they live in a liberal state.

“Do you expect, though, that Congress and Republicans will still help these Americans in need, even if they don’t like their local politics in the party?” Brennan asked.

“I expect that there will be strings attached to money that is ultimately approved, and it has to do with being ready the next time, because this was a gross failure this time,” Barrasso replied.

Barrasso claimed that the “policies of the liberal administration” had “made these fires worse,” though did not explain what policies specifically he was talking about. It’s not entirely clear what liberal policies would have contributed to the widespread devastation, only that the fast-moving fire quickly depleted the water reserves in the Pacific Palisades.

But Barrasso has a loose grip on liberal policies anyway: He once baselessly claimed that the Green New Deal would ban livestock, marking an end to cheeseburgers and milkshakes.

Last week, MAGA Representative Warren Davidson said that he didn’t see how congressional Republicans could possibly support aid to struggling Californians without enforcing some of their own policy changes.

Ukraine is offering to send firefighters to Southern California after Donald Trump Jr. accused the Los Angeles Fire Department of donating supplies to the country during its war with Russia. 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said that the country is ready to send 150 firefighters for relief efforts after Trump Jr. complained last week on X about supplies being sent to Ukraine. 

On Sunday, Zelenskiy responded with an X post of his own, saying in a video that he “instructed Ukraine’s Minister of Internal Affairs and our diplomats to prepare for the possible participation of our rescuers in combating the wildfires in California.”

Ukraine isn’t the only country to offer its support to fight wildfires in Southern California. Canada, despite being repeatedly criticized and trolled by President-elect Donald Trump, has sent firefighters and firefighting equipment to the region. Mexico, another target of Trump, has also sent firefighters and equipment to Southern California, even as Trump searches for reasons to shut down the southern U.S. border.

It might be surprising that Southern California is receiving foreign aid. But these wildfires are among the worst in American history, and at the federal level, Republicans are reluctant to send more aid.

Republican congressmen have threatened to condition federal aid on the Democratic-run state changing its policies, perhaps forgetting that Democrats under President Biden did not make any such demand on the red states of South Carolina and Florida during Hurricanes Helene and Milton last year. Republicans have also proposed making dangerous government cuts that would severely hurt relief efforts.  

Trump and his right-wing benefactor Elon Musk are using the wildfires to score cheap political points against Democrats, specifically California Governor Gavin Newsom. The right has refused to acknowledge that climate change has anything to do with the disaster, instead coming up with racist explanations for the fire. Meanwhile, Southern California has to take aid from whoever is offering, including countries at war.

Wannabe crusader, accused sexual predator, and rampant misogynist Pete Hegseth is also a Confederate apologist.

Trump’s pick for defense secretary called the removal of Confederate names on military bases a “sham,” “garbage,” and “crap” in media engagements from 2021 to 2024, according to CNN. He continued this rhetoric in his War on Warriors book tour last year.

“We should change it back, by the way,” he said of North Carolina’s Fort Liberty—which used to be Fort Bragg—on the Everyday Warrior podcast last summer. “We should change it back. We should change it back. We should change it back, because legacy matters. My uncle served at Bragg. I served at Bragg. It breaks a generational link.” 

The fort’s namesake, Braxton Bragg, was an often-defeated Confederate civil war general who enslaved 105 Black Americans on his sugar plantation in Louisiana.

Hegseth could lobby to change Fort Liberty and other fort names back to their old Confederate ones if appointed defense secretary, although he’d need congressional support to do it. 

This is one of many reasons that Hegseth thinks the military is too “woke.” In The War on Warriors, he complains that the military is anti-white and suffering from a “long-term infection of radical left wing social justice policies.”

 Hegseth’s confirmation hearings begin on Tuesday.

Donald Trump is backtracking on his big campaign promise to end the Ukraine war in 24 hours, according to his special envoy to Ukraine. 

On Sunday, Keith Kellogg told Fox News that the Russia-Ukraine war would come to a “solvable solution in the near term.” 

“You know, I would like to set a goal on a personal level and professional level. I would say, let’s set it at 100 days and move it all the way back and figure a way we can do this in the near term to make sure that the solution is solid, it’s sustainable, and that this war ends,” Kellogg said.

A “near term” timeline is a marked difference from Trump’s bravado on the campaign trail, where he repeatedly bragged that he could end the war in a day or even sooner. Trump himself seems to realize this, telling Time magazine last month that “the Middle East is an easier problem to handle than what’s happening with Russia and Ukraine.” Vladimir Putin has also thrown cold water on Trump’s promises, ignoring the president-elect’s “warnings.”   

Trump is probably going to backtrack on many of his campaign promises, with his supporters in for a rude awakening. The question is whether anyone will call him on it—and if there will be any consequences. 

The incoming Trump administration is instituting loyalty tests for longtime bureaucrats.

Specialists at the National Security Council have been getting questioned by incoming Trump officials about who they voted for in November, who they’ve donated to, and what they’ve posted on social media, an official close to the situation told the Associated Press. These nonpolitical NSC employees were initially told they’d be asked to stay on with the new administration.  

Some of them have quit in response. This seems to be exactly what the Trump team wants.

“Everybody is going to resign at 12:01 on January 20,” Trump’s national security adviser nominee Mike Waltz told Breitbart News last week. “We’re working through our process to get everybody their clearances and through the transition process now. Our folks know who we want out in the agencies, we’re putting those requests in, and in terms of the detailees they’re all going to go back.”

Waltz continued, stating that “the folks that we’re bringing in are 100 percent aligned with the president’s agenda.”

A mass resignation of national security experts may not bode well for everyday operations at the National Security Council, especially as the new administration takes on conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East.

The Trump Organization has opened its doors for business—with foreign private companies.

In a departure from Donald Trump’s first term in office, the president-elect’s company released a new ethics agreement Friday that no longer prohibits deals with foreign companies while he is president. The Trump Organization has already reached development agreements for hotels and golf courses in Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. It’s looking to make even more with Israel, hoping to look at properties to build luxury hotels in the country when its brutal war in Gaza ends.

“The scale of corruption will be orders of magnitude greater than what we saw in the first Trump administration,” ethics professor Kathleen Clark of the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis told the Associated Press.

Anyone who wants to be in Trump’s good graces can simply give his business lavish amounts of money. Trump is telling the international business world that he can indeed be bought. The Trump family is also trying to reclaim the lease to the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., a doubly corrupt institution in which six different governments spent more than $750,000 in his first term.

Donald Trump will face virtually no legal consequences related to his hush-money sentencing, but he will have to endure some undesirable, tangentially connected ramifications as a result.

Trump received an unconditional discharge in New York Friday, stripping the possibility that he would face any fines, court-appointed supervision, or incarceration related to his criminal conviction. But while the president-elect may not be facing the music in the Empire State, Trump is reportedly at risk of losing his liquor license in New Jersey due to Friday’s proceedings.

New Jersey law prohibits the distribution of licenses to anyone convicted of a crime “involving moral turpitude.” The state’s Alcoholic Beverage Control issued a notice following Trump’s hearing that the agency “will proceed in determining whether President-elect Trump is qualified to continue to hold an interest in the licenses,” according to a statement obtained by Forbes.

Liquor licenses for two of Trump’s clubs in the Garden State expired in July while state officials weighed whether his criminal conviction would prevent him from ever renewing the beverage license again.

“The final judgment of conviction that raises the prospect of disqualifying Mr. Trump from an interest in a New Jersey liquor license due to the guilty verdict in New York will not be entered until after his sentencing,” a spokesman for the New Jersey attorney general’s office told The Hill at the time, adding that the burden of proof remains on the applicant to prove they meet the requirements for the license.

The Trump Organization pushed back on the New Jersey investigation, arguing that the conviction should be irrelevant to the clubs’ operation as Trump himself is not the holder of the liquor licenses.

Donald Trump’s incoming national security adviser, Mike Waltz, wants to get rid of all the nonpolitical appointees and career intelligence officials on the National Security Council, so that the president-elect will be surrounded by loyalists and face absolutely no accountability once he’s in the White House.

Waltz told Breitbart News Thursday that he hopes to oust career intelligence officials from the FBI, CIA, and NSA, among other agencies, from the NSC. These officials traditionally help the president make informed decisions about foreign and domestic affairs.

“Everybody is going to resign at 12:01 on January 20,” Waltz said in a phone interview with Breitbart. “We’re working through our process to get everybody their clearances and through the transition process now. Our folks know who we want out in the agencies, we’re putting those requests in, and in terms of the detailees they’re all going to go back.”

Why does Waltz want them out? Well, they aren’t all Trumpers, for one thing, so they’d be more likely to push back on the president-elect’s stupider impulses to, say, try to acquire Greenland or something. More crucially, these detailees have the tendency to report up the chain of command on the White House’s activities, a totally normal thing to do, unless you’re trying to get away with something you don’t want anyone to know about. Officials doing their jobs properly can become a huge problem when it comes time for them to testify about stuff later on.

That’s what happened with Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, who joined the National Security Council as an expert on Ukraine in 2018. The next year, he testified about an “improper” phone call Trump made to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, pressuring the foreign leader to investigate Trump’s Democratic rivals.

According to Breitbart, “Waltz told Breitbart News that he is taking very serious steps to ensure that there are no more Vindmans.”

It’s not clear how serious Waltz’s threat is, but he shared the article in a post on X Friday, captioning it “Day 1.”

Vindman responded to Waltz’s comments in an X post of his own Friday, saying that ensuring only political loyalists could serve on the NSC set a “dangerous precedent.”

“Such an approach will have a chilling effect on senior policy staff across the government. Talented professionals, wary of being dismissed for principled stances or offering objective advice, will either self-censor or forgo service altogether,” Vindman said. “This undermines the very purpose of the NSC: to provide the president with the best possible advice as well as the coordinating team to advance U.S. national security interests.

“The implications of this loyalty-above-competence model are dire. By purging the NSC of apolitical, experienced professionals, Trump and Waltz are hollowing out the institutional expertise required to navigate complex global challenges,” Vindman wrote. “This will create a policy apparatus incapable of discerning sound policies from reckless impulses—or worse, one that actively disregards legal and ethical obligations to implement Trump’s personal whims.”

House Republicans have begun devising plans to slash health care and environmental protections as wildfires engulf Los Angeles County. 

The GOP is aiming to cut $5.7 trillion from the budget over the next 10 years, and is considering cuts to important government services like welfare, climate protections, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act to get there. They then want to use that money to pay for Trump’s draconian immigration plans and tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans, according to Politico. 

These potential cuts are “not intended to serve as a proposal, but instead as a menu of potential spending reductions for members to consider,” one GOP source told Politico. But the specific policies on the list, such as Joe Biden’s beta version of the Green New Deal, electric vehicle tax credits, the  Affordable Care Act, and even food stamps, seem like cruelly ironic things to cut while the country experiences yet another horrifying climate disaster. 

“The Republican ‘menu’ cuts food and health care for low income people to put more money in the pockets of the rich,” said Aaron Fritschner, deputy chief of staff to Representative Don Beyer. “Even the item names are dystopian: $490B Medicare cut= ‘Strengthen Medicare For Seniors.’ Cutting food for low income people= ‘Ending Cradle-To-Grave Dependence.” 

The viability of these cuts remains to be seen, as Republicans have already experienced infighting over budget reconciliation. Speaker Mike Johnson has thus far agreed to $2.5 trillion in cuts.