MAGA strategist Steve Bannon said last week during a speech at Hillsdale College

STEVE BANNON: We’ve turned our military-I go to this conference yesterday with Steve, you know, some days, you know, Trump says stuff, and the stock market goes up, and I said, I don’t give a damn what the stock market does every day. It’s a casino. That’s not investors; that’s computers trading with each other. These young kids, I don’t care about that. That’s a casino with a casino’s mentality. And what they’ve turned our beloved military into is basically rent-a-cops for the casino. That must stop. President Trump’s genius of the hemispheric defense from Greenland to the Panama Canal is a naval strategy to block the Russian submarines up in Murmansk and Archangelsk. They come through; we got them. And no Chinese navy through the Panama Canal and not turning the Caribbean into a Chinese lake, right? And use the vast Pacific, the best vast Pacific, as our heartland for strategy. This is Mackinder for us with the three-island chain. Now I respectfully submit, we don’t need $ 1 trillion for that, right? It’s time we stopped paying for the casino. We stop paying. This casino has already destroyed the heartland of this country and working-class people in this country, and the middle class of this country. Why do you think they love Trump? Trump is the first and only person, even Reagan, as great as he was, that they said, “Hey, not in the room, not in the deal, and that guy’s put me in the room; he’s putting me at the head of the table.” People who know nothing about politics, nothing about Republican orthodoxy, support Trump. That coalition is a 1932-type coalition. But we’ve got to go through some choppy water. Larry Arnn says we’re in 1860, you know what, he’s right. These crises are converging. Think about this for a second. You’ve got to cut the defense budget by $ 200 billion, now, not in 10 years, now. You then have to cut Medicaid, but Medicaid, you’ve got to be smart about it because there’s a lot of MAGA on Medicaid. You know why? There’s no good-paying manufacturing jobs in this country. You can tell. Do you think MAGA, they don’t want a handout. They don’t want government assistance. Do you think those people, as proud and tough as they are, want that? Hell no. They have to have it. Nine million of them have two jobs. There’s what, 20% of the $ 1.4 trillion credit card debt is non-performing right now. What percentage of that is MAGA? What percentage of that is working-class Americans that need that credit card to gap their expenses? These people are the same people that were in the 8th Air Force over Germany, the same people at Normandy, the same people at Tarawa, Peleliu, the same exact people. They’ve been abandoned by a political class and a commercial class that has abandoned them and abandoned their interests and put the interests of other nations and other people and other countries and money and power ahead of their interest. And Trump’s the first one to come and say, “No, we’re going to make America great again,” right? And they’ve responded to it. And Larry Arnn’s right, and this is why I say he drives Morning Joe and this crowd up a tree, and their heads blow up. We’ve had many great men and women in this country and great political leaders and people like President Reagan and others. But we’ve had three that countries don’t get in a lifetime. General Washington at the birth of this nation, the birth of the republic, both on the battlefield and then as president because of the respect people had for him. President Lincoln, and President Lincoln, if you studied it, kind of ran the deal as a warlord, right? Particularly, you know, if he had to shred the Constitution on certain things, or as he and Seward would say, the inherent powers of the executive, the way he would describe it. He would do it because he realized this country was being torn apart. It was going to be two countries, and they had a vision of what this country would be. So, the rebirth of the nation. And Trump is here at the rejuvenation and the regeneration of that nation. And we’ve got one shot, one shot. It’s going to be determined very simply: who doesn’t quit, right? They’ve got more money and more power in the media and the universities; they’ve got it all. They’ve got every institution in this country. But we’re finding out, number one, our institutions are pretty good, right? I went to Harvard, and I would take Hillsdale any day of the week because they’ve got the guts to tell the federal government, whether Trump or not, “I don’t want your money. I don’t need your money because with your money comes control.”

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