America's Great Divide: Steve Bannon, 2nd Interview | FRONTLINE

It's the summer of 2017. The president is going around on DACA. You recognize it. He speaks at press conferences about feeling for children. He knows the children; He himself has children. You are worried. You call Kris Kobach and you have a plan. Can you tell me about... Yes. I don't know if he would call it “hanging out” with the president. If you go back and look at President Trump, candidate Trump, citizen Trump, you know, he's always... and he sees this, I think, holistically, correctly, not just from a political perspective. And this has followed him since he was a private citizen.

So he's into anything about immigration (on the wall, on the asylum, on, you know, gaming the system), he's always had, you know, a more holistic idea or concept, I think, than someone, I would say , whether it's immigration hardliners or people who think we have to, you know, rein in our sovereignty and also protect our low-skilled workers, particularly Hispanics and African Americans. … What Kobach: Kris is, I think, considered the leading advocate in the immigration debate on our side of the game. And then it was decided that I was going to talk to certain attorneys general in the spring of 2017 about filing a lawsuit, particularly Louisiana and maybe Texas teaming up, so you go to the Fifth Circuit and you actually bring up something about DACA and you get in the judicial system to ultimately prove that it is obviously unconstitutional.

What happened is, I think the attorney general of Texas wrote a letter to Jeff Sessions and said, "This is essentially what we're going to do." Sessions, and when “nonsense” is said, the president is often thinking about his policy and receiving feedback. Remember, he's a marketer and he's trying to figure out, mentally, what the right path to take is. And like I said, if you talk to Stephen Miller or Jeff Sessions or myself, people who have been with the president, you know, even before the campaign, but who have talked to him about immigration for years (Lou Dobbs).

You would see that this is one that... I'm not saying he's ambivalent, but he's always trying to think of a more what I would call holistic solution than some of the immigration hardliners. And what Sessions did was give a pretty important speech in the fall of 2017, at the same time that all these debates were going on about the budget and the debt ceiling, and DACA was part of that, and he said that it was essentially unconstitutional, and they were going to move on. Then Kelly came out, I think in 2018, early 2018, and said we were going to phase it out, which, from a hardliner's perspective, was not what we wanted.

We wanted to be more aggressive than that. Some progressive, liberal and left-wing groups then went to court. He is in the court system today. So, frankly, I think DACA is emblematic of a lot of the ambivalence that exists across the country about certain immigration issues. Did that suit help put pressure on things? No pressure. I think what it was was a very high-profile thing - you know, people have argued for a long time that what President Obama did was unconstitutional and that this should be fixed and then addressed, and then the situation addressed once it's proven to be unconstitutional.

I think what Kobach and the attorneys general wanted to do was take this to the right level and move forward; Let's stop having all these types of disparate movements. And I think that's why the Texas attorney general took the lead, wrote a very powerful letter and really put the attorney general on notice. Jeff Sessions, obviously a hardliner on immigration, gave his speech, which I think was pretty pivotal at the time, in the fall of 2017. And I think this is one of the benefits of the Trump presidency, is that it brought ...you know, all of this had gone in different directions, and things never came to a conclusion, or at least got to the place where it could be determined, made some determination.

I think that was... I thought that was very helpful and, frankly, that's what we intended to have done from the beginning. …So let me now move on to January 9th and 11th. It's 2018. This is the White House meeting where there is a bipartisan group that came from Capitol Hill and is now meeting in the Cabinet Room. It is being broadcast on CNN. I'm curious to know where he stands right now, because it looks like in that meeting the president is about to agree to do a clean DREAM Act or DACA deal. Kevin McCarthy has to make me back off, right?

Good. So there's that. And then one day comes. And on the 11th, the president calls Durbin and Graham from the Capitol. They are on their way to the White House because they want to sign something; That's what he told them. They get there and there's a group of hardliners. Representative Goodlatte is there; Senator Cotton is there. Help me understand what has changed, what has happened in these two days. Yes. Well, once again, I think that's... it shows that... how the president is trying to think about this. Remember, Durbin and Graham don't just show up in January 2018 in the Roosevelt Room.

It's the spring of 2017. One of the reasons Kobach comes into the picture and we started talking to the attorneys general is that there is a big movement behind the scenes in the spring of 2017, led by Durbin and Graham and certain elements, certain more progressive elements in the White House, in fact, this is where General Kelly essentially jumped in a hearing and said, "Hey, you know, with respect to this DACA issue, we're way off track," and Kelly didn't. knows absolutely nothing about it. General Kelly is so upset that he says, hey, he informs the chief of staff, Reince Priebus, and others, right, maybe some of the progressive elements working with Durbin and Graham: “This can't happen again.

If you're going to start talking about DACA, you know, this is my area; This is on my vertical; I have to be aware.” So the Durbin-Graham affair is almost from the beginning of the administration. You have this, you know, and I wouldn't do it: it was sort of a moderate element of the Republican Party, the apparatus of the Republican establishment that, to me, has very open borders, almost ideologically tied to the left in a big way to the point of give some light-hearted talk about border security. But they are very inclined to agree. And I think in January you'll start to see this play out.

Kelly gets involved. There is going to be this decrease in DACA. That's what comes out of this. But those two elements... and this is the interesting thing. You call Goodlatte and Cotton, or Goodlatte in particular, hardliners; From the perspective of hardliners, they are, you know, moderates. But those are the voices you are hearing. And President Trump is... he... it's a Socratic process, you know. He's thinking about this as he goes. Remember, particularly with DACA, where he's very tough on the wall, he's very tough on asylum, you know, a lot of these things, like birthright citizenship today, about the ability to get welfare right away, public services, you You know, President Trump is extremely (has) his default position is tough.

As for DACA, that's where I would say he's ambivalent and looking for an answer that he believes is right, a solution that suits Donald Trump. And I have always respected him. And I was very open about, hey, this is... and I've always said this, and one of the reasons why I seem to take, you know, sometimes extreme positions on issues, is that this is how you can reach an agreement. If you take these extreme issues and positions and clearly identify what they are and the trade-offs, that allows people space to have internal discussion and debate. But I think January 18th will be remembered as such, and it's one of the reasons I think things have dragged on to this day.

I think progressive groups went to court right after that and we still don't have clarity on DACA. But thinking about the early immigration work that you, Sessions and Miller were involved in and that you know so well, when you look at the meeting on the 9th, are you worried? Re scared? No, I'm not freaking out, but it's... it's part of the process. You just have to... you just have to... you just have to... you just have to work the program. Someone has to get in there, you know? We have to catch Stephen. These things are going to happen.

They also occur in other topics. It's happened, it happens in national security, when people wanted to take kinetic military action and other people who are more inclined to wage economic war, this is the way, you know, this is what happens with Trump, and it's because That which I believe is a stabilizing force: it analyzes all the options and will choose the option that it believes is best and one that perhaps has been better argued and has the most support. And on DACA, yes, am I worried? You're always worried, especially when you hear that, "Hey, I want to sign; guys are coming because I want to sign something." So yes, you have to be worried.

But at that time, particularly with Stephen in the White House, and Sessions still, and even Kelly, who was never a hard-line DACA supporter, I knew that there were reasonable voices around me, and I knew that everything would be fixed. Let me ask you about “zero tolerance.” So we jump now to May. The importance of the announcement to you, to Miller, to Sessions, the message he's sending to the base, but I'm also interested in knowing when the president backs down, what is he thinking? What are you looking at and seeing? One of my concerns with this is that I think zero tolerance is the most humane thing to do, because I think it stops... if you're trying to stop the cartels from this human trafficking, you should end up... you know, a third place. sure. -party country.

You should have ended up, you know, trying to stop trafficking, human trafficking. Zero tolerance, for me, is the policy to do it. What worries me is that this requires a major messaging operation. It needs to be explained: the American people are somewhat removed from the details of what is happening on the southern border. I think they are particularly indifferent to the reality of what is happening in Central America. They are indifferent to, you know, this cauldron, right, that is on the southern border, particularly how it has not only been militarized, particularly in northern Mexico and the cartel wars of the Mexican authorities against the cartels, but also how the cartels are victorious.

You know, in many ways, northern Mexico and even some of the southern United States along the border, as people there will tell you, are like Afghanistan in the sense that it's a real war and an insurgency. So my concern at the time is that, you know, not only had people not thought three moves down, but maybe the message isn't good enough and the battlefield isn't prepared enough to do it, it's just fell. And understanding President Trump, President Trump will always respond to what he sees in the media and what... is a type of marketing. He's going to—he's going to respond.

And if this isn't shipped correctly and people don't understand what you're trying to accomplish, then I think you can get some negative reactions. And in fact, that's what happened. And I think this is due to the fact that not only the White House communications department, but also Stephen, Attorney General Sessions and a broader group, they really had to think three or four steps down to serve the people. American and to make sure that they are doing the right thing in the face of this biblical tragedy that is looming from Central America and now on the southern border of the United States.

But ultimately the president feels the deployment and type of public criticism is confusing; It is fierce; It's quite aggressive. And he has to retire. What are you...what are you feeling at that moment? Look, that's ultimately the right policy; that you're going to have to do something, and I think that something is now going to galvanize what the real problems are. One is the Mexican government. Think about where we've come in that period of time, since the president reversed himself. I think we now have a third-party agreement with Guatemala, which the Northern Triangle should have. You are on the right track to have one with Mexico, although you are not there.

We have this, you know, they will: Asylum seekers will stay in Mexico, the “Stay in Mexico” program that I know the courts are involved with. We'll have to see how that plays out. The Mexican government has also brought Mexican marines to the northern border, which has resulted in a fairly dramatic decrease in asylum seekers. We've seen a pretty dramatic decline here recently, compared to other comparable time periods. So I wasn't excited at the time. And the reason I wasn't thrilled is that I think zero tolerance is the right policy, right? You cannot simply have open and unlimited economic migration.

You have to get people through the ports of entry. You have to stick to the political, you know, the political asylum system. And so I thought at that moment that it had been mishandled. And it wasn't Trump's fault. It was the people around him who had very good intentions, they understoodpolitics, but perhaps they did not understand the dynamics of what was going to happen, not only from the means but from the execution. Let me ask you about the midterms and caravans that are covered around this time. My understanding is that Miller is really keeping a close eye on that and providing that information to the president.

Can you take us there for a while? Well, you know, the caravans started arriving from Central America. And look, I thought some things were overrated, you know, Soros is behind this or who's behind this. Look, what is happening in Central America, okay, with those economies in those countries is a tragedy of biblical proportions. Nobody fails the people of Central America. I mean, it's a horrible situation. But the solution to this, just as in Europe, the solution to North Africa is not in southern Italy. The solution to the problems, to the economic problems of Central America, is not on the southern border of the United States.

It's not in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona or California, you know; That, we have to find a solution there. And I think the caravans obviously became quite dramatic, particularly some of the media coverage. President Trump got involved. I think the 2018 midterms were totally mismanaged by the Republican Party because they didn't turn it into a full referendum. I think we would have held the House if we had the ground game that came out and turned this into a referendum on Trump's presidency. I was advocating from the beginning, I went to Fox, I was on a lot of news shows, I toured the country with a movie called Trump at War, in those battleground districts; we knew the 25 or 30 that were going to be in play—and defended Trump's overall policies, not just focusing on immigration, but focusing on China, the economy and immigration, particularly is what he's trying to accomplish.

I think that part of the caravan was overdramatized. And I also don't think we did a particularly good job of empathizing with the people who came up. Look, I'm as tough as possible on immigration, and that's protecting the sovereignty of this country, having the rule of law, and in particular protecting, because I'm a populist, protecting workers. Hispanics and African Americans of social class in these border communities and low-skilled workers. The solution cannot be on your back, and that is where it will always be unless we solve this. And that's why I think there are solutions to solve it.

I think the first is to end the cartels. That is where you have to have a zero tolerance policy. But I do think he got too involved, and what we can't do is demonize the people themselves, right? They are in horrible situations in these countries. We understand it, but we cannot get into the business of economic migrants, and that is why I think we have to have a

great

er commitment in Central America to help solve this problem. And the solution to these problems, for me, is on the southern border of Mexico and in the countries of the Central American Triangle.

Let me ask you a little bit about this, we skipped it, but, you know, at a certain point you go away and I wonder about that immigration mission. Does that go with you? Do you... you know, do you find that there's more you can do outside? As President Trump says, I am his best student. So he - look, these are central themes with Trump from the beginning. That's why he ran for president. People forget it. Look, this guy is 70 years old. He is a billionaire. He has a big family. He is buying championship golf courses around the world.

I mean, this is... you know, this is not just a life well lived; This is how you live your best life at the end of your career. Now, for him to enter this cauldron and literally have his face ripped off every day, it is true, he felt that it was a calling and a duty. A big part of that is this whole situation with mass illegal immigration. It was one of the cornerstones of the campaign, all immigration, all immigration, both mass illegal immigration and legal immigration. So no, this was central. I—look, I think when I left, and I went outside because I thought I had more—I took a year out of my life from basically August 14th to go on the campaign trail until August 14th in the administration.

I'm not a staff member and I felt like I would have a lot more impact, and I think I've had more of an impact. I mean, one of the things we're doing is we have this group that is actually building a physical wall on the southern border. Now we are expanding President Trump's program. He and the Army Corps of Engineers are building large swaths of wall, which is necessary, but there are those niches in the mountains, in the deserts, that the Army Corps can't reach or they missed and that are necessary to build. And that is why I feel that I have been more active on the issue of immigration abroad.

Now, I admit that you probably lost a little bit of the sting that I can bring to the conversations, maybe to some of the debates that happen internally. But you have someone who is still there; I mean, Stephen is. And Jeff Sessions was for a long time. Remember all the problems that President Trump had, he and Sessions, over collusion and that part of the Department of Justice. If you look at someone who is actually implementing the Trump program, Stephen Miller's internal task force, okay, who really got under the hood, inside the federal government, into the apparatus.

And that's why Stephen has retreated from the public eye, because he's actually running something that's pretty important to getting things done. Jeff Sessions did the same. I mean, when it comes to Trump's agenda on immigration, he would never have had a better attorney general than he had with Jeff Sessions. I mean, those two, from the dinner we had, those two who stayed behind, at least for a while, really began to execute the president's plan. And that's why I think we've made such enormous progress. I mean, we've made

great

strides on this whole immigration issue in recent years, many of them unannounced.

And that's because of Stephen Miller, Jeff Sessions and the people at the work level who have made this work. Yes. And the legacy that Sessions leaves in Justice, for example. I mean, the amount of work he was doing there from day one is extraordinary. Yes, I think you would say that immigration was the central organizing factor in the Department of Justice to bring everything together and help execute the president's plan. I think it has been extraordinary. And help me a little with that detail of what Stephen Miller is doing now when he leaves the public eye.

I mean, we tried to get him some

interview

s for this project and it didn't happen. But—but what is the mission? He still represents what you set out to do. Well, I think he's doing it. I think if you see... I think if you see what's going on, all the work that's being done, you know, and now you see it popping up from time to time in the public sphere, all of that work comes out of the task force. by Stephen Miller. I mean, Stephen is a very detailed political guy. You know, we hired him on the campaign as a speechwriter.

You know, the speechwriter is like his third position. Really...he was a political guy. And that's how he really - and immigration policy has been his thing for many, many, many years. You know, it's... you know, on Capitol Hill, even before he worked for Sessions. So he... and I think this task force has been very effective. It's been methodical and also gone unnoticed, which I think has also been very helpful. Help me understand what you have accomplished in this moment. Well, I think if you start, look, first of all, we've now put border security at the forefront, and where he's building the wall, there will be 500, what, 500 miles of replacement wall alone.

And remember, replacement wall, they made fun of Trump and said, "Oh, you're just replacing." Remember, the wall that was originally there, the Normandy barriers and others, were in the areas of highest crossing volume. That's why it's very important to replace the wall and I think they're actually pretty smart about doing it. Then you have this whole new wall. I mean, in the Trump administration, much of the wall will be built, plus the Border Patrol will have a greater awareness of border security. Also with ICE there has really been real execution on the issue of internal law enforcement.

And I realize that's been controversial and, of course, Democrats want to do away with ICE, they want to do away with Border Patrol, but he's done a real job... he's done an effective job. I don't think they have reached employees (employers, sorry) as they should. But I think they have done a very effective job. I think it's also started to bring up the whole of this controversy over economic asylum, which really wasn't addressed during the Obama administration. Remember, they say caged children and all that; That all started under Obama in 2014. It was Breitbart, because the Border Patrol came to us with the photographs.

It was Breitbart who broke all those stories about kids being caged in the Obama administration. We broke it, and then, you know, CNN, Huffington Post, and the BBC rushed to do it right away. And this has been going on for a while, and I think we're now seeing some resolution. I think the whole safe third achievement, of actually getting an asylum system that works, is why President Trump - we now got 29% of the Hispanic vote. I think President Trump, because of the economic policies and the implementation of him, will get, I think, 40% of the Hispanic vote in 2020 because of these policies.

So I think if you look, we now have a couple of very innovative programs on legal immigration. I don't think they are uncompromising enough, so now we really have a policy and a participatory debate. And I don't... you know, you have Durbin, you have people on the left, they have an opinion. And look, they also have political power. But now we are really immersed in a debate. For years and years and years and years and years we just let this thing go, and you go down, everyone who watches the show should go down to the border.

They should go to El Paso, they should go to the Rio Grande Valley, and they should go to some of these border towns as Americans and talk to the people in these border towns, right? And now all the towns in the country are becoming border cities due to the influence of cartels, drugs and human trafficking. But for many years we let this drift. And this is what I really admire about Trump: whether it's China, the Middle East, immigration, he's not going to let these issues slide by. He is a business man. Entrepreneurs are interested in offering solutions.

He is not a politician. All politicians talk and will let things happen. Right now we're really engaged as a nation, and I think in 2020 it will even be a centerpiece in the national debate, as it should be. You know, I think... look, we're going to... we're going to win something, we're going to lose something. You know, we lost in '18. We won in 2016. That's what a democracy is about, but at least now it's a fully engaged debate about what the issues are and what's at stake and, frankly, what direction we want it to go. the country.

How important is immigration for the year 2020? I think it'll be like 2013, going back to that dinner, where he said, "Hey, trade is number 100 and immigration is number three." I think 2020 will be determined by two things: China and trade, actually the economic war in China, which brings many elements of Iran, Saudi Arabia and all that into one; and then immigration. And it's really about globalization versus nation-state. They both boil down to: what is a nation? What is the sovereignty of the nation? What does it mean to be a citizen? What kind of treatment should you have if you are a citizen?

For me, this will be the real debate about 2020. I think it's a great debate. And I think I know that people have very different opinions on this. That's what a democracy is about. And I think Trump is the perfect candidate for us to bring up the issue. And I think you'll see it on the Democratic side, when they select someone who goes through their primary, you'll see... I think they'll become a little more radicalized; I think you already see this. But I think it's a great debate. And for me, those two will be the central elements that define the 2020 campaign.

The latest on immigration is that this movie begins with the embassy meeting. Now we're seven years later, but, you know, the moment you look back and think about everything you set out to do in that meeting, everything you dreamed of doing, what did you accomplish? As...? If we had sat there that night, because the dinner lasted five hours or more, if we had said that night that in the fall of 2019, going into '20, we would have made this, these two numbers, the centerpiece of American politics and, frankly, it changed American policy; remember, current American politics, what is to come, there will either be populist nationalism or there will be populist socialism.

But the populist movement... Well, I think it's great, right? Even on the left, I'd rather have a populist than these elites on both sides running things, which is populism. And at that time it was a word thatwas that he's not a finance guy; he is not a businessman; he is a constitutional professor. You're in a crisis and this was a real crisis, okay? You know, people like Bernanke or people, and Hank Paulson is not people who panic and say, "Oh, if we don't fix this like today, the American financial system is going to collapse." This is what they told Bush. “It will collapse in 72 hours.

The world financial system will collapse a week later and there will be global anarchy and chaos. Oh, and guess what? Goldman Sachs and General Electric are... their lawyers are in conference rooms drafting bankruptcy documents. You're going to wipe out all the pension funds, all of them... So you can contextually understand how you have to feel to get over it. But Obama was divisive because he is not a populist. Obama ran as a populist and then did an about-face. And he ruled as an establishment figure. That underlying tension in what we see today – leaving aside the cultural issues – is the division between populist nationalism and populist socialism, right?

What is the definitive solution? But at least the one thing I like is that there's a ton of what Elizabeth Warren says I like, right? Because, frankly, she's taken it from Donald Trump's playbook that at least now we're back to the question of how citizens get a fair deal, right? How do we stop worrying about the elites of this country and how the middle class is doing...? I mean, essentially, a lot of what they say on the left, particularly about the budget, except this about modern monetary theory, is just, “Hey, we had quantitative easing for the elites to bail out;

How about quantitative easing for the little guy?” And that's why I think that, although we are still

divide

d, right, and culturally we are

divide

d because I think Trump is trying to implement a system of solutions, Obama was divisive for the simple reason that he gave up everything. In his populist politics, and particularly as it related to the war, he gave up all his populist tendencies and basically became... you know, Barack Obama is a very establishment figure.