Steve Bannon, the right-wing populist and onetime adviser to President Donald Trump, urged the White House to hasten the federal spending cuts being presided over by Elon Musk.
The heated exchange was revealed in the Wall Street Journal’s profile of Bannon’s unscripted streaming show, TV broadcast and podcast “War Room.”
The newspaper reported that, prior to a recent livestream, Bannon phoned up Trump’s White House budget chief Russ Vought and bluntly told him to get Musk, whose DOGE task force has been charged with finding $2 trillion in cuts by next year, to get on with it.
“You’re his boss—tell him to go f—himself,” Bannon reportedly told Vought. “We look like idiots.”
The White House did not immediately reply to a request for comment about the reported exchange.
Musk and his dubiously qualified DOGE team of young graduates and adolescents has already been confronted with pushback from elements of the federal bureaucracy as they’ve tried to access confidential systems and participated in gutting the U.S. Agency for International Development.
It was not clear at exactly what point Bannon expressed his desire that Musk pick up the pace—the two previously feuded in December when Trump World descended into a civil war over H1-B visas between broligarch Musk and his tech allies and Bannon and his nativist, first-generation MAGA flock.
Nevertheless, his direct line to the White House is a testament to Bannon’s sustained clout in Trump World, mere months after he was released from serving a four-month sentence in prison.
It also points to why his show has become an essential stop for fixtures of the Republican right trying to reach the president’s most steadfast supporters.
The Journal reported that—even without distribution on major platforms like Spotify and YouTube—Bannon’s “War Room” has been adopted by multiple Republican lawmakers as a go-to media platform because of its notable influence with the party base.
One regular guest, House Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), has even used the program to encourage Bannon’s devout listeners to overwhelm the offices of rivals in the party with phone calls, the Journal noted.
Other repeat guests include Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) and Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO).
Multiple congressional aides told the Journal that the volume of calls, emails and social-media posts their offices receive after their bosses' “War Room” appearances surpass the traffic they see from Fox News and CNN hits.
One Senate aide told the newspaper that only late-night talk show appearances garner their offices more attention—in other words, Bannon is a MAGA Johnny Carson on the Potomac.
While the former Trump adviser lords over his nascent populist media empire—a Brookings Institute Study in 2023 identified “War Room” as being filled with more disinformation and falsehoods than any other political podcast—Bannon’s media consumption looks outside the conservative movement, the Journal reported.
He and his “War Room” staff don’t consume other right wing media, they told the paper, instead hunkering down and watching hours of MSNBC every day—Bannon praised Rachel Maddow as his favorite host on the network, adding to the Journal that he believed several MSNBC hosts offered “very smart” analyses of MAGA politics.
Bannon and his team, naturally, clip segments of the liberal network so they can rail against their opponents on air. A large TV screen with MSNBC playing on silent hangs behind him in his D.C. studio, out of view of the camera.
