‘I’m Very Upset’: Steve Bannon Says Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill Needs Fixing in the Senate
Former Trump White House advisor turned podcaster, Steve Bannon, offered a less-than-enthusiastic assessment of President Donald Trump’s “big beautiful” budget bill on Thursday, hours after it passed the House by one vote.
Bannon has been a critic of the bill, arguing that it spends too much and adds too much to the deficit, previously saying, “the math simply doesn’t work.”
“By the way, people say, hey, with Steve, I have not changed my mind one bit on this bill. This bill could be a lot better. I’m very concerned about the deficits in the short term, but given the totality of President Trump’s program, it’s the best you’re going to get for right now. And I’m very upset,” Bannon began on his WarRoom show, adding:
I think defense spending is too much. I think that the social security taxes are not, you know, not acceptable, but it’s going to go to the Senate. Then there’s a conference and we’ve got more time to work on this. I do believe, and I stand by this, you’ve got to increase the taxes. Or not give the tax cut to the wealthy, not for right now, just can’t happen.
And I understand some of these things are not popular and they’re not popular in the White House, but that’s just the reasonable people can disagree. However, I’m the biggest proponent of pushing out the totality of the package, including the tariff revenue, including what the growth rate is.
They can be backed up because President Trump’s proved in the past that his tax cuts drive growth. We gotta get that entire package and we have to go on offense to be able to sell this, not to the media, and not even politically right now, to the global capital markets, because they don’t understand it. It’s quite evident they don’t understand it, and they get a vote.
Bannon continued by noting that Moody’s cutting the country’s credit rating is worth taking into account as it impacts how much it will cost the U.S. to service its debt. “And you should understand that when Moody’s had every possibility to do this, and they did it last Friday, that was done for a reason. That was done to chopblock us, because they should have done this during Biden’s [term],” he argued.
Fiscal hawks in the GOP have expressed their frustration with the bill throughout it working its way through the House, but in the end, most of the bill’s critics got in line behind Trump’s demands to pass the bill.
Watch the clip above via WarRoom.
