Bannon vs. Musk? The Next Four-Year Battle with Raheem Kassam

Raheem Kassam is a British political commentator, author, and journalist. He has served as the editor-in-chief of The National Pulse and was formerly a senior advisor to Nigel Farage during his leadership of the UK Independence Party.

This interview was edited for clarity.

Ari: What about this moment after the Trump victory is unique?

Raheem: Somewhere in the last year, and you have to understand I was a Trump man back in 2015, before Steve Bannon, before Nigel Farage — I was wearing the MAGA hat everywhere and everyone was making fun of me.

Somewhere in the last year, especially after Butler, you could wear your MAGA hat anywhere in the country, maybe not on the UC Berklee Campus, but getting on airplanes, walking through Manhattan, walking through Capitol Hill, you could tell there was a sea change, a tone change, cultural shift.

People realized that not only do they not dislike these people anymore, but actually now they see the level of persecution these people faced, wearing their politics on their sleeves. I also have to remind myself we’re a long way from 2015.

I was writing about the upcoming inflection point in the UK, Nigel Farage taking over the Labour and Conservative parties. I was thinking to myself — well, we're closer to 2029 than we are to 2016. So, while it seems like it's a long way away, the next four years are going to go incredibly quickly. The first Trump administration went incredibly quickly.

Only if this administration is super focused and super dedicated will they be able to get anything done — and unfortunately, not a lot of people in the first Trump administration were. They were either inexperienced or they were swamp monsters. So everything got stymied and slowed down because of that.

Now, the folks involved are deeply immersed in the details, and they passed the learning curve. Once upon a time, anyone who would come to a conference like this would say, “I’m sure someone is taking care of this issue.” Now people say, “I don’t trust anyone to do this. I’m going to do this myself.”

Ari: It seems like Americans remember 2016 and know that it’s not going to be easy for Trump. What’s his biggest challenge ahead?

Raheem: The hardest thing is still navigating DC. The reason that Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, and Barack Obama run the tightest operations in DC and still cling to power despite being corrupt and useless is because they bother to understand the details, minutiae, and process of how you get things done in Washington.

This is why it's such a shame that Matt Gaetz didn’t become AG, because Gaetz is someone who has surrounded himself with these details — how do you get something through, what boxes do you need to tick to get bills passed?

The whole thing is a rampant bureaucracy. Don’t underestimate how powerful that apparatus is. They’ve been working on that for decades and decades.

Look at the European Union, for example. It was formalized in the '90s, but it was first conceived in 1910. It took them that long to get to a point where they were able to formalize the institution. Same thing with NATO and the United Nations.

I was talking to someone yesterday who said, “Why don’t we just take the United Nations out of New York?” Well, it’s not that easy. If it was, it would have been done long ago.

It delivers nothing for the American people and, frankly, nothing for people across the globe, but they have driven its roots so deep into the system that we are still getting to grips with how that system works.

Trump — God bless him — is not a detail-focused guy. He operates from a 50,000-foot view: here’s what I want to get done, you guys go and get it done. The problem is, if you don’t have the people who know how to get it done, you won’t get it done.

That manifests itself in the problems on Capitol Hill right now — the budget fights.

Let me ask you: How did the pay raise for members of Congress end up in that fifteen-hundred-page bill?

People think that the members put it in there to enrich themselves. No, the lobbyists and the lawyers who want all of the carve-outs for their pet projects put it in there as a bribe to get it pushed through. Why do you think Congress is pushing the bill?

It’s bribery of the highest order. I always try to tell people that you’re not going to get rid of the corruption in Washington, DC, unless you get rid of the money in Washington, DC.

Unless you put spending limits on elections, unless you get rid of PACs, unless you take every single dime out of the law-making equation. That means getting rid of Citizens United.

Now that’s the real heavy lift. That’s a ten-year lift. That won’t happen in this administration. And by the way, the real problem we face here is talking about multi-trillion and billion-dollar industries — oil and gas, pharma — they will fight against this tooth and nail.

They’ve killed people for talking about this. Think about the Boeing whistleblowers. Just saying. This is very perilous territory.

Their money in politics is the only thing that keeps them profitable. Elon Musk knows this. He’s been one of the greatest recipients of government subsidies ever.

To a certain extent — he’s a bit of a hypocrite. I tell people, listen, I like all this Elon stuff, I like the fact he helped the president, but let’s not forget, there have been people fighting for America First populism for decades. You can’t just toss the keys over to the latest billionaire.

We need as many checks and balances on this process as we need on other processes.

Ari: I’ve been fascinated by Elon’s deep foray into Trumpian politics — along with the other Silicon Valley billionaires — because of their towering influence in tandem with intentions and goals that are often at odds with the populist visionaries of MAGA. When are we going to see these two factions go head to head? Will it happen?

Raheem: Steve [Bannon] had no love lost for Elon Musk until last summer, when he put his money where his mouth is. Steve’s attitude is: look, if you’re going to do it, if you’ll be on our side and put hundreds of millions on our side, then fine, I can forgive your past transgressions because of that.

There will be a lot of issues and incidents over the next months and years where Musk will not be thinking in the same direction as Steve. Especially with China, that’s a big problem. Musk has been heavily investing in and partnering with China for a long time. And the banks that he partnered with to buy Twitter — there are going to be problematic moments.

We’re all grown-ups. We’re big boys, and we can take it. But if anyone thinks the next four years will be internal kumbaya, they’ve got another thing coming.

Ari: Tell me about the media. Amid the panic in liberal newsrooms and the flurry of conservative hires to editorial boards, where does the liberal media go next?

Raheem: The only reason they were able to peddle such narratives was that we made the mistake of giving them unparalleled access.

The Trump administration made the mistake of giving The Atlantic unprecedented access — and you think about that. It’s literally the outlet that created some of the worst hoaxes, like the suckers and losers hoaxes, and then you bring them in again and give them access. These are mistakes that must be learned from.

Ari: I’m still seeing The New York Times' Maggie Haberman publish exclusive reporting on the Trump camp. Why is she still let in?

Raheem: They had a reporter at the Daily Mail who was peddling lies about the administration, and then they put her on the plane with Trump. What are they doing? Stop keeping them in business.

The first thing we need to do — before anything else, before the border stuff, before pardoning, before J6 — is shut down the White House press briefing. Shut it completely down.

Turn it into a bar, a restaurant, a daycare, whatever you want. Push them all out into the Eisenhower Executive Office Building across the street and say, "Guess what? You have proven time and time again that you don’t respect the hallowed grounds of this room and that you don’t deserve to be here. If you show yourselves to be responsible — maybe we’ll invite you back."

There is no recompense. There is no justice in this system. When was the last time you heard an outlet get punished for peddling absurd lies like this? Okay, we had a victory against George Stephanopoulos for a few million dollars. In the grand scheme of things, that’s absolutely nothing. Nothing. People like that need to be punished and should never be employable in an industry like that again.

One of the things I will be talking about is how we get influencers to pay attention to the news reporting, the same way they do their normal influencer routine. There’s a vacuum now in responsible media reporting, and the young people right now see themselves as recognizers of information — because information is a weapon.

Ari: My view of influencers is that they’re not driven by the same passion as journalists — for better or for worse. Why, or how could they play a role in filling the void as traditional media crumbles and evolves?

Raheem: These are the people who understand information. They get how to disseminate information better than I do, and I’ve been doing this for over a decade.

They get algorithms, content styles, etc. You have to grab them and tell them, “Listen, you’re having a fun time, you’re making a lot of money, but there is a patriotic duty to disseminate this important information in a responsible, moral, and informative way.”

Because God knows The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and CNN are not interested in morality at the heart of their reporting. We do responsible reporting — we don’t do any anonymous sourcing.

Ari: It’s not just the liberal media that is going through it. What’s the future of conservative media?

Raheem: The future of conservative media is realizing that it is no longer conservative media. There is a vacuum on the playing field in the responsible media landscape, all across the Western world…

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