Gavin Newsom’s strategy was to say as little as possible. Steve Bannon’s strategy was to flood the zone with excrement as he is disposed to do. Is there an odder couple than Newsom and Bannon linking up for a podcast? Two people who, individually, no one ever, under any circumstances wants to hear speak. Together, they gave us nothing of value in an hour-long discussion on the governor’s podcast, “This is Gavin Newsom.”
Bannon is apparently positioning himself and the Trump administration as anti-elite populists despite being surrounded by billionaires. I suppose, to be fair, these could be really altruistic billionaires who care a lot about the plight of the peasants and not at all about using their power to enrich themselves.
According to Newsom, in one of the few moments of pushback, Trump’s tax proposal continues corporate tax cuts and tax cuts for the wealthy.
The co-founder of Breitbart then went on a confused explanation: “If you look at the growth rates, and this is predicated on growth, 2.5-3%, right? If you look at what we’re trying to do in cutting federal spending. In addition DOGE, which is waste fraud and abuse, and you look at additional revenues externally from tariffs, you can get to, and what Bessent is trying to do is take the deficit from 6.5% of GDP down to 3.5% of GDP so there’s not this out of control explosion of $2 trillion in deficits.”
Notice that none of this comes remotely close to addressing Newsom’s concern. Why address something that contradicts your position when you can just blather on aimlessly?
Bannon is a misinformation machine. When responding to Newsom’s concerns about the economic impacts of tariffs on everyday Americans, Bannon conceded that economists project, in theory, that tariffs raise prices. But, according to Bannon, in practice we don’t see tariffs raising prices, which was demonstrated by Trump’s 2018-2019 tariffs during his first term.
You can’t have it all. Trump and his followers appear to be convincing themselves that tariffs are some sort of magical economic cheat code that will reshore manufacturing and protect American jobs, all while not raising prices. This is predicated on the hope that companies whose products are targeted by tariffs eat the extra costs of importation, which is not what we saw – they passed it on to consumers. Most analyses agree that Trump’s tariffs did indeed raise prices by as much as 7% and stifled economic growth.
Perhaps the most infuriating feature of the conversation was Newsom’s brainless nodding at everything Bannon was saying, as if he were stating anything of substance. When speaking about the problems of the elites in Silicon Valley, Bannon put together this string of total and complete nonsense:
“We would allow the tech oligarchs in the age of the algorithm, the algorithmic age, to basically dominate and dominate in every one of these verticals, right, with no real anti-trust. And what we allowed them to become the most powerful people on Earth. But what proved out is that both on social media with Tik Tok, and then with DeepSeek in the AI space, that the Faustian bargain, that as a hegemon we say, ‘just give us the commanding heights. And that didn’t happen. In fact, you can kind of say it was an utter failure. That the social media is all kind of clunky. It’s very dominant right, but it’s clunky compared to Tik Tok. If you look at AI and whether DeepSeek, you think it’s a Chinese psyop or it’s a Sputnik moment. We, we clearly, we clearly don’t hear a lot of talk about net-carbon zero when this thing needs 10 times more power in the thing because it’s kind of brute force computing.”
These are the ramblings of an utter madman – it’s no surprise that Bannon’s thoughts are advised by the writings of Curtis Yarvin, another propagator of incoherence. When we realize that this is the kind of person Trump listens to, his perplexing decisions start to gain some much needed context. What is any listener supposed to get out of that? At no point was it clear what question he was answering or what his overall point was. Again, his strategy is to beat you into a coma with gibberish.
The deception that Bannon attempted to push during the podcast was that Trump is leading a populist movement – in the interest of non-elites. The truth is that Trump’s administration is packed with billionaires, most of whom have never come close to acquainting themselves with the burdens of the average American.
On the other hand, Gavin Newsom conjured illegitimate common ground with Bannon, all to continue his transparent attempt to morph himself into whatever he thinks gives him the best chances at the presidency.
Rafael Perez is a columnist for the Southern California News Group.