Today we unpack the darkly hilarious spot Steve Bannon did on Real Time with Bill Maher. Tariffs. Pre-emptive presidential pardons. Mass incarceration. Self-incrimination. 5th Amendment. 22nd Amendment. Celebrity presidents. How Bannon tacitly proposes to remove Presidential term limits.
Chapters
0:01 Introduction to Late Night Laughs
2:17 The Political Landscape
5:23 The War Room Dynamics
7:51 Teaching Civics in Prison
12:27 The Irony of Legal Education
17:36 Celebrity Presidents Debate
20:29 The Constitutional Convention
25:11 Closing Thoughts and Farewell
AI Generated Transcript With Timecodes
Speaker3:
[0:00] What else is he wrong about? Tariffs?
Speaker1:
[0:01] I didn't say wrong. I said we don't agree.
Speaker3:
[0:03] Oh, so he's never wrong.
Speaker1:
[0:05] No, tariffs. Has he ever wrong? Sometimes I think that... Oh, you're in trouble. The tariff policy, the tariff policy, the tariff policy has been brilliant. The tariff policy has been brilliant.
Speaker3:
[0:23] Don, I'd watch this.
Speaker1:
[0:24] And by the way...
Music:
[0:25] Music
Speaker1:
[0:27] The five countries, by the way,
Speaker0:
[0:29] Bill, From San Diego, California, Mark Whitney.
Speaker0:
[0:43] Thank you, Shadoe. This is it. Late night last night, I am the lovely, the talented Mark Whitney. Your secretary of homeland hilarity, let's just call it, right? This is late night last night. This is where you want to be. This is the only show that brings order to comedic chaos. The only one. We only have one rule, and every episode we answer the same question. One rule, one rule only. It is sacrosanct. Never explain a smart joke to an idiot. Never.
Speaker0:
[1:20] Got that? And then every episode we answer the same question. What did America laugh at last night? What did we laugh at last night? I imagine you listening to this in the morning because we publish at 5.30 a.m. Eastern Time. We unpack what happened last night or something close to last night. We don't need to be anal retentive about it, right? We don't need to do that. What did we laugh at last night? I'll tell you what we laughed at last night. We laughed at mass incarceration. We laughed at presidential pardons. We laughed at self-incrimination. We laughed, most of all, we laughed at the idea of Donald Trump's third term. And what was the vehicle that we used to laugh at? Why did I pick this? Well, I'll tell you who we have to thank for those laughs. The comedy team of Bill and Steve. Check it out.
Speaker3:
[2:14] I guess we don't agree there.
Speaker1:
[2:16] We're not supposed to agree.
Speaker3:
[2:17] But I think once you go to
Speaker1:
[2:19] The White House, it shouldn't make you soft, Bill.
Speaker3:
[2:26] You're the one who just got out of prison.
Speaker0:
[2:30] Okay. So there you have it. Two guys at the top of their game, both fighting for the last word. A couple of East Coast guys born in the 50s. I was born in 59. They were born a few years ahead of me. Irish Catholic, both Irish Catholic, again, from the East Coast, pro-Kennedy Democrats. My mom was from an O'Neill Mahoney union. She's still alive, 88, one of the original racists. uh you know she thought john f kennedy walked on water still does i haven't given her the bad news.
Speaker3:
[3:02] I want to know if you're okay personally i know you were just in prison how was it did you meet any nice guys
Speaker1:
[3:07] Since uh this show will play in danbury on saturday night on cnn i want to say hi to all the men in danbury's a lot of good men there it's a prison's very tough very dangerous because of the mass incarceration of the nine violent drug offenders. These young men that get put away for 15, 20, 25 years in a very small, over 100-year-old prison like Danbury. It can get very dangerous because drugs get in there, K2, and it's a dangerous place. But I had an amazing experience there.
Speaker0:
[3:40] Ivy League, Bannon and Marr, both Ivy League educated. Bannon got his bachelor's degree at Virginia Tech. He got his master's at Georgetown. He got his MBA at Harvard, right? So not an idiot. And then he went to Goldman Sachs. That was after he got out of the Navy. He became lieutenant. And he became radicalized in the Navy. He didn't like what he saw. That's kind of how he became Steve Bannon. And the government did it to him. Drove him nuts.
Speaker0:
[4:08] Clinton drove him. I think it was Clinton that drove him nuts. And then Bush drove him another level of nuts. And then Mara, of course, is a failed drug dealer, earned iconic comedian and political satirist, probably the best political satirist we have. I don't think there's anyone who's a close second. So here they are going at it. Right. And Mara went to Mara went to Cornell. So that's where he did his Ivy League drug dealing. And so I want to do I was thinking. If you're like me, you've never watched Steve Bannon's podcast. He's produced 5,500 episodes, and then he had a little timeout, and then got another version, but it's always been called The War Room, right? And I wanted to find a clip that I thought would be representative so you could get an idea of what his show is all about. I hadn't seen it before. So I did a search, and I hand to God, hand to God. This left right here is the first thing that came up check it out.
Speaker1:
[5:10] Mike lindell brother what he got for sell me a pillow
Speaker0:
[5:13] Any size sheet and this is your hard to find split kings california kings kings
Speaker0:
[5:19] queens 25 dollars a set this is for the war room posse mike.
Speaker1:
[5:24] Lindell i hope you're feeling better we'll have you back on
Speaker0:
[5:27] Monday so you picture the war room posse out there riding the horse they're riding the range and they're they're killing the swamp creatures right they're just beating the hell out of the swamp creatures and they get home after a long day of killing swamp creatures on their horse right and they're they're sitting around the sitting around the campfire and having a nice dinner of beans and wabbit right beans and wabbit i say that probably just beans i like to say wabbit because the funny word.
Speaker0:
[6:14] So there they are, and they come back, and they put their head down on some $25 sheets. That's what you want after a long day. Killing swamp creatures. $25 sheets. That's what I'm looking for. So why did I pick Steve Bannon? Well, he makes some prediction. He predicts that Donald Trump is going to be the president on January 20th, 2029. Watch how they stay with each other watch how each of them is both always fighting for the last word right especially Bannon he'll do this thing you'll see him do this thing with his hand and what is number one persuasion tactic that you can use just put his hand out like that very effective when you want to speak you just put your hand out like that, and 99 times out of 100 that was the other person will just stop in their tracks you'll be able to talk he does it several times he's a great talker he's like got one of the number one shows on the planet, right? So he makes these predictions, these conclusory statements that Donald Trump is going to have a third term starting January 20th, 2029, but he doesn't say how.
Speaker1:
[7:26] I wasn't in a camp. I was in a prison. There's a tranche to prisons. Medium prisons is where prison politics is. It blows. There's no prison politics. Oh, there's obviously separation and people have what they call cars. So Danbury, you're in the New York car, the Dominican car, the Puerto Rican car, the Mexican car. Can you stay with your own except the times you're in the yard and working out
Speaker1:
[7:47] or like I was a teacher over in the in the education department? I taught civics having been there for insurrection.
Speaker3:
[8:00] America, ladies and gentlemen,
Speaker0:
[8:02] That's a good joke right there. Sometimes with a joke, you got to massage the facts a little to make the joke work. The fact is he wasn't at Danbury for insurrection. He was there for contempt of Congress or refusing to testify about the events of January 6th. That's why he spent four months there, like he said. And it's so funny, right, that he is in the education department teaching civics. What's also darkly ironic about that is those prisoners at Danbury who learned civics from Steve Vannon.
Speaker0:
[8:34] Collectively know more than all of the students in the United States know about civics, which is to say they know nothing. And it's not just, when I say students, I don't just mean public school students. I mean law students. My wife got her law degree at 60 and they don't teach the Constitution in law school. It's not something they teach. They teach, read a case, they teach procedure, they teach process, right? But not the Constitution. So if you want to learn civics, You commit a major felony. You get sentenced to 15, 20, 25 years in prison. And then guys like Steve Bannon come through for a short amount of time. And you can learn what you should have learned in public school. And had you learned those things in public school, of course, you wouldn't be in prison. Yeah, I also spent February 1992 at Danbury back when it was a medieval torture chamber. That was not fun. I was there on my way to Allenwood Federal Prison Camp. And when Bannon said that he was teaching civics, it reminded me of a guy named Bob Lilly, who was at Allenwood federal prison camp when I was there. And Bob was very famous in the Boston area for being the so-called condo king. Boston Herald had him on the front page every day, Bob Lilly, condo king. And what was Bob Lilly doing? Bob Lilly was in the education department. That was his job. Worked in the education department, teaching the inmates how to buy real estate with no money down. Not even making that up. I became friends with Bob in the law library. I helped him get rid of some restitution.
Speaker0:
[10:03] You can look up Bob Lilly, Condo King Internet. He went down to Florida, picked right up where he left off. I think he got prosecuted again.
Speaker0:
[10:11] And then my story is that the Boston Globe reported in 1991, and I'm going to read the quote so I get it right, that I had come to personify the evils of rogue capitalism and banking excess that define the late 80s. So whenever I complain to my wife about something, he says, yeah, well, what about the time the Boston Globe reporter you come to personify the evils of rogue capitalism and banking excess that define the late 80s? And I'm like, yeah, okay, you win that argument. Fair enough, right? You just got that right in your hip pocket. When you have that in your hip pocket in a long-term relationship, you don't really need anything else. That's the dagger right in the heart, right? So what was my job, right? Rogue capitalism, banking excess. Well, they put me in the furniture factory, in accounting. I'm not even making that up. True story. So the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Speaker3:
[11:21] But you were there because you refused to testify to the January 6th committee, which was led by that fiery liberal Liz Cheney.
Speaker1:
[11:30] By the way, by the way, a group of people that crawled on their belly to the White House to get for the first time in our history preemptive blanket pardons for every member of the J6 committee and their staffs. That's never been because they lied and perjured themselves the entire time. And that investigation, regardless if they have pardons, there's still gonna be an investigation. And when they get called before, they can't take the Fifth Amendment.
Speaker0:
[11:53] So the other thing you heard Bennett say, you heard him talk about the January 6th committee and how the Republicans are gonna investigate the Democrats the way the Democrats investigated the Republicans, right? And he said that they've all been pardoned. They were all pardoned by Biden, which is true, right? They all got a pardon so that they don't get prosecuted. And he said, we're going to be able to, when we investigate them, they're not going to be able to take the fifth because they got a blanket presidential pardon. Well, that is almost true. They can come up with a state crime they may have committed.
Speaker0:
[12:24] They can take the fifth. And then they would get immunity for the state crime. And then they would be able to testify and not worry about criminal prosecution, not worry about that testimony being used against it. So I just wanted to tweak that comment he made. But all of this is leading up to this really funny, interesting, smart exchange between the lovely and talented Bill Maher and the, I don't know, like surly Steve Bannon. Check it out.
Speaker1:
[12:57] I didn't do it for Donald Trump. I didn't stand for the Constitution. That committee was totally rigged. And I didn't mind going to president.
Speaker3:
[13:02] I brought a copy tonight. Here it is. The Constitution Can I read a passage to you? Amendment 22, no person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice. And yet you keep talking about Trump's... Maybe you should have this.
Speaker0:
[13:24] Well, then all of a sudden, Bannon, Steve Bannon gets all mealy-mouthed, right? You saw him on his podcast there with the pillow guy, right? You saw how confident he is, and you see how sharp he is with Maher, how he's always got the answer. But then he's just like, oh, yeah, Donald Trump, definitely January 20th, 2029. Going to be the president, going to happen. Conclusory statement, definitely, definitely, absolutely going to happen. What he doesn't say is how, right? So then he gets into a little third-term backstory, right? How did this come to pass?
Speaker1:
[13:56] President Trump didn't bring up running for the third term. Myself and others brought up running for a third term. President Trump is going to run for a third term, and President Trump is going to be elected again on the afternoon of January 20th of 2029. He's going to be president of the United States.
Speaker3:
[14:12] Okay, but the thing I just read in there, it seemed like there was no wriggle room there. It seemed like it was just, you know, eight or ten words that said only two times.
Speaker1:
[14:23] We have a team of people that are working.
Speaker3:
[14:25] A team?
Speaker1:
[14:25] A team.
Speaker3:
[14:26] How can a team do something about that? I don't care if the team is 12 trillion people. The words are still the words.
Speaker1:
[14:33] Bill, every day in federal courts, right now in federal courts, there's 120 lawsuits on what President Trump's doing for his Article 2 rights on the unified executive theory. But he's chief executive, he's commander-in-chief, and he's chief magistrate and chief law enforcement officer. There's a hundred, and they're running to court every day to sue President Trump, all because the interpretation of this. The interpretation of this is open for interpretation.
Speaker3:
[14:57] How could it be open? Could I have it back? How could it? I'm sorry to be, no person. You would agree he's a person. Okay, shall be elected. He was elected to the office. that's the office of the president more than twice. Twice is once and then another time. I don't I don't see what the team is fine. OK, which is I will disagree.
Speaker0:
[15:22] So but he's all ambiguous, all ambiguous about how they're going to pull this off. And and that's that's when it hit me. OK, that's that's why I went wrong in my speech. Right. I left out the one. The one way that you're going to have a third term, and that is a constitutional convention. That is like the interpretation of this is open to interpretation. He's actually misleading Maher. It's almost like he doesn't want Maher's audience to know how they're going to do this. Well, they're going to do it with a constitutional convention, an Article V constitutional convention. Now, that is not easy to do. It's never been done before in the way that he has it in mind, although the Constitution does provide for it. The Constitution is just a contract, just a set of bylaws. We the people wrote it, right? That is legal fiction, but it's also true. Like you and I didn't legally write it, but we, the people, the people that came before us, they wrote it. And the constitution is the word of the people, not the word of God, the word of the people. It's a secular text. And it's the thing that we just sort of all agree to go by. Right. And that's why Bill Maher is so resolute. He's like, hey, this says you can't do that. And Shannon doesn't say how.
Speaker3:
[16:41] Is there any Democrat who scares you that he could be running against? Because I guess if we allow that, it could be Obama.
Speaker1:
[16:47] If you want to bring President Obama, who I think has lost his fastball, but go ahead and bring him. Okay. Okay, right now, all the governors you have, I don't think everybody else is saying it to Trump. You're going to have to run someone like a Stephen A. Smith or someone in your kind of celebrity category. That'll be the Democratic nominee that would have the best shot at President Trump. But I think he's unbeatable.
Speaker0:
[17:06] Okay, celebrity presidents. I agree 100% with Bannon that the Democrats need to run a celebrity. Like they can't run, for example, Ro Khanna Congress. They can't run a politician. They can't run Gavin Newsom. They can't run a politician. Got to run a celebrity. And it just so happens on January 24th, Ro Khanna and Stephen A. Smith, We're on Bill Maher talking about celebrity presidents right here.
Speaker1:
[17:32] You know what would be nice
Speaker0:
[17:34] In this country? I mean, just hypothetically.
Speaker1:
[17:36] Do we not do we have to have the celebrity president?
Speaker0:
[17:39] I mean, is it all about coolness? How about being cool as a president is actually about helping people? Obama connected with people and all the celebrities wanted to do concerts because they wanted to be with Obama because he was with the people. In the Harris campaign.
Speaker1:
[17:53] They went after the celebrities
Speaker0:
[17:55] To do the.
Speaker1:
[17:55] Concerts to get the people. They got it backwards.
Speaker3:
[17:58] I'm just saying.
Speaker2:
[17:59] I don't know about that. OK, let's be honest here. First of all, one could argue that Obama resonated more because the people chose him to be the Democratic nominee for the presidency of the United States of America, as opposed to somebody backdooring their way into that position. Let's just be honest about it. You had Biden. I know that you supported Biden. Obviously, you spoke about his mental acuity and all of that other stuff. But we all saw what we saw. Before the debate on June 27th, when the debate happened. And by the time that was exposed, it then waited three weeks after that before he decided to walk away. But it was too late for anybody else to get in. So Kamala Harris, who didn't resonate during the primaries in 2020, couldn't even get to Iowa, suddenly is a Democratic nominee. And then y'all go, then you roll up at the Chicago, at the convention in Chicago, and everybody's like, she's a rock star. So it was like, wait a minute, how'd that happen? How'd that happen? I don't know how that happened.
Speaker1:
[18:55] So you're looking at all of those things
Speaker2:
[18:57] And you're saying, yes, I voted for her. A lot of people voted for her. But in the end, we end up feeling like damn fools because we supported it. We fell for the okie doke, as they say. You know she didn't. If you had a primary, the likelihood is that she would not have been the Democratic nominee. And you can't say that about Trump on his side.
Speaker3:
[19:18] You can't. That's water under the brake.
Speaker0:
[19:20] You spend a couple hours a day for 30 years down at ESPN running your mouth about sports. You too can learn to talk like a lovely and talented Stephen A. Smith. But right now, I want to turn to Steve Bannon's conversation about team. What is he talking about? He says there's a team of people that are going to make sure Donald Trump gets third term on January 20th, 2029. And why was I wrong? I was wrong because I didn't say unless there's a constitutional convention. I should have said there's no way, no how Donald Trump will have a second term. Unless there's an Article V Constitution convention. The reason I didn't think of it is because it's never been done.
Speaker1:
[19:59] You talk about long odds. In 2014, when I backed President Trump, when I was running Breitbart, they called, they said I'd turn Breitbart into Trump-Pravda. Okay, the odds there, he pulled at zero. Then later in 2021, after he got back to Mar-a-Lago, when Fox abandoned him, the Murdochs abandoned him, the Republican Party abandoned him, the odds were longer then. So our group, the MAGA movement and the tip of the spear of the MAGA movement, We've had long odds before. You know what? We've come out winning twice. And we're going to come out,
Speaker1:
[20:26] we've got long odds on this. We're going to come out winning a third time. On the afternoon, the 20th of January, 2029, he's going to be president of the United States.
Speaker0:
[20:34] 27 amendments to our Constitution has never been amended in the way Steve Bannon and his team have in mind, right? So how does that happen? Well, it happens a couple of ways. There has to be a constitutional convention, right? And 34 states, two-thirds of the state legislature, need to agree on the proposed amendment. So at that point, there is an amendment proposal. And they rent a Marriott, right? And everybody goes down and there's a vote. 34 states for a proposal, 38 states to ratify.
Speaker1:
[21:17] I think he's unbeatable because the coalition, the coalition that he's built is only going to get bigger because he's bringing back American manufacturing jobs to working class people. And the Democratic Party abandoned working class people for the credentialed class that you talk about all the time. And you can't cosplay being a populist.
Speaker3:
[21:35] Yeah, you're right.
Speaker1:
[21:36] If you're not prepared to take hard things like that, like the trade deal.
Speaker3:
[21:39] I get it.
Speaker0:
[21:40] When I say Donald Trump's not going to be president for a third term, there is a non-zero chance. That he will be president for a third term.
Speaker0:
[21:49] But it's just that. And this is really tough. But this is something that certain people have been working on for many years, like 30, 40 years. And those people are the Federalist Society. Now, the Federalist Society is not some freak show. We have people who are founders of this country who are Federalist, perfectly respectable thing to be. And the Federalists are the people who actually study the Constitution while the Democrats are out there trying to figure out how to brand people a felon to make it more likely that the candidate they propped up will become president. And that literally just happened. And you saw how that worked out, right? So just to give you an idea of how mainstream the Federalist Society is. And by the way, when my wife was in law school, she joined the Federalist Society because she wanted to learn about the Constitution because one of the reasons she went to law school is she was thinking of getting into criminal law, criminal defense. And the only place you could seriously learn about the Constitution was by being in the Federalist Society. So I pulled the, here, I'll put it up. I do post-production, we'll put it up on the, this is the Harvard Federalist Society, right? Harvard has, every law school has a Federalist Society, right? Look at this guy, right? That's, yeah, that kid right there, that kid. This kid is so white, he makes me look like Richard Pryor. and.
Speaker0:
[23:19] When you look at the Harvard Federalist Society, and this is what I'm talking about when I talk about Banner's team. Now, I'm not saying this kid, Brecken Denler, who's the president of the Harvard Federalist Society, he's going to graduate from Harvard this year, this June. I'm not saying he's working on Banner's team. I'm saying he's representative of the young people who would be doing a lot of the legwork with an eye toward having this constitutional convention. And not just young people, all kinds of people, but they are Federalists. And Trump has a lot of Federalists in his administration. A lot of the legal things that you see happening, all of these executive orders are happening at the behest of attorneys who belong to the Federalist Society, who have been sitting around for the last four years writing these executive orders so they're ready to go the day Trump becomes president. But when you scroll through the list of officers on the board at the Harvard Federalist Society, right?
Speaker0:
[24:22] It's not what you think of when you think of Harvard, right? Breckin Dendler, the president, he graduated from Brigham Young. So he's from Mesa, Arizona. He went to Brigham Young. His religion is Church of the Latter-day Saints, right? And he's going to Harvard. Let me see who else we got here from places that you might not think of who are on the board of directors at the Federalist Society at Harvard. And these are all students. Yeah, this guy, Mason Laney, he graduates Harvard Law in 2026. And he's from Huntsville, Alabama. He graduates summa cum laude from Wheaton College with a degree in political science and economics. From Austin, Texas, we have Brooke Frank. She also graduates in 2026.
Speaker0:
[25:12] Right she's if she's really into studying poverty and economics and sociology it's all all mainstream stuff these are the people that are working to amend the constitution so he can have return that's it that's that's the whole thing, I'll see you later. of all the audiences i've performed for you folks are the most recent this has been late night last night a production of sis boomba llc all made possible by a grant from the first amendment to the United States Constitution and generous subscribers like you who one day decide to become a paying subscriber. I thank you in advance for that. And until next time, for the love of God, whatever you do, keep banging. And when you go home tonight, I hope you're going to lay your body down on something besides $25 cheap. We'll see you next time.
Music:
[26:16] Music
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