Steve Bannon Mark Mitchell analysis takes center stage as the WarRoom breaks down how foreign policy, youth economic pressure, and Fourth Turning dynamics are shaping the 2025 political battlefield.
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This clip aired on WarRoom’s morning show on November 18, 2025. Transcript begins below (lightly edited for clarity; may contain minor errors).
Trump’s Foreign Policy Messaging and Domestic Fallout
STEVE BANNON (HOST): In your concept of the fourth turning and what is going on in this young generation, look at the folks in. The one thing President Trump is doing, because I say the Middle East is a side show to the main geopolitical events of the day, and that Israel situation a side show to a side show. However, he is bringing peace by putting it back on them. Today the Saudis are not going to sign, I do not think, the Abraham Accords. I think they are still going to sit there and say that is contingent upon a two state, a real acceptance of a Palestinian state. Although I put up on Getter, kind of mocking the Israel First crowd, who I think blew this thing up, that essentially what got passed in the Security Council yesterday is a two state solution.
You had all the Muslims, the Turks, the Arabs, all come together back to the United States on this Gaza plan where Qatar is going to finance it with others, and the Turks are going to provide security. In fact, the international security force was in this thing that got signed off yesterday. It means the Turks are going to manage the Saudi army, the UAE troops, Egypt’s, in a foothold in Israel. And the Israelis were not part of this negotiation, at least in the Security Council.
How does that play into polling where you have been saying, in this fourth turning, particularly this rising generation, they think their country has been sold from under them. Whether he is delivering peace or not, they are not interested. They are interested in something else. Is that too harsh?
MARK MITCHELL (GUEST): No, I think that is right. And I think if you talk to Trump, he would tell you that all this foreign stuff is also domestic policy. But I do not think people understand that case and it has not been made.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): It has not been made? You do not think it has been made?
MARK MITCHELL (GUEST): Not well enough, because there was a lot of freak out when, at the end of October going into election day, the government was shut down and he is flying around the world meeting with dignitaries. People look at Trump and say, he is interested in all these rich people overseas, but what is happening on the home front. And he is doing a lot on the home front. Stephen Miller was out there yesterday talking about Project Firewall in an attempt to reduce the number of workers here on visa. That is big stuff, but I did not even know about it. By September nobody even knows.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): Because they have not platformed and promoted it enough.
MARK MITCHELL (GUEST): Right. He was supposed to end the wars, get us out of these foreign entanglements, and focus solely on the domestic front. And I think he has done a lot of work domestically, but they are not bringing people along for the ride in my opinion.
Youth Economic Anxiety and the Fourth Turning
STEVE BANNON (HOST): You mean it is not an actions thing. This is messaging because you have to make it a big deal. The Saudis are supposedly going to talk about a six hundred-billion-dollar fund that will invest in AI, manufacturing, chip manufacturing, other things here in the United States. Do you think he is promoting that well enough?
MARK MITCHELL (GUEST): Yeah, I mean that is not what I would focus on, a deal with billionaires that might take people’s jobs. Because I polled under forty voters. With AI. I polled the under forty voters. And even ones that voted for Trump by a majority would sign on for UBI because of artificial intelligence. And that is where the conservative youth are at. They are looking down the barrel.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): When you say UBI, explain that to the audience.
MARK MITCHELL (GUEST): A universal basic income as a solution to all our problems. We have a corporatist oligarchy that has created corporate welfare that has built all of the wealth out of the American people. They have sent millions of jobs overseas. They have brought in millions of foreign workers decaying our societal fabric, all for a ten percent reduction in the cost of goods sold. That is where we are at. SNAP is corporate welfare. All of these bipartisan bailout recovery and infrastructure deals are pay for play and contracts. It is global welfare.
SNAP Corporate Welfare and Voter Distrust
STEVE BANNON (HOST): Because you are saying SNAP is not about feeding the people who need it. It is Frito Lay, Pepsi, the guys making the junk food. Walmart, the distribution system, the producer itself.
This is why when the SNAP benefits get talked about, it is not alliances of poor people knocking on doors. It is the biggest lobbyists in town because SNAP drives twenty percent of Walmart’s profitability. And it is forty percent of the operating income because they are selling ultra processed food with high margins.
MARK MITCHELL (GUEST): Just the five hundred thousand people on SNAP that was fraudulent that Brooke Rollins found. Just those people. If you took all that fraud out, that would be the equivalent of if every Walmart in the United States stopped selling milk products. So we are talking about big dollars here. And there was a Guardian article that says, well, listen, when the corporations have a problem they will go to Republican lobbyists and Republican fake pollsters to do research that I cannot replicate that shows that Republicans love the idea of people buying food stamps.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): When you see those, you think that is fake news.
MARK MITCHELL (GUEST): I found the exact opposite signal.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): People hate that they are buying junk food and getting underwritten by the government while companies make all the money.
MARK MITCHELL (GUEST): Everybody in Washington makes some fake libertarian argument. That is not how the real world works. People are angry and they do not like this money going to the corporations.
MARK MITCHELL (GUEST): So again, meeting with dignitaries is probably better for America, whatever deal he is working on. But the messaging has been all over the place. He is doing the right things. He needs to explain to the American people, this is our plan, this is where it is going, and you need to vote for Republicans to keep it.
I am worried about the future of the generic ballot polling. I have not been in the field. The number has been dropping. Rich Barris has horrifying numbers. Everybody is beating him up online because he puts out a Senate map that looks bad. It puts places like Ohio in a toss up. If Ohio goes to the Democrats, what is one of the reasons?
STEVE BANNON (HOST): I think Sherrod Brown is going to be competitive in Ohio, do you not?
MARK MITCHELL (GUEST): I am talking Vivek.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): No, that is the governor’s race.
MARK MITCHELL (GUEST): Oh yeah. The governor’s race is a toss-up. But Sherrod Brown running for Senate. It is a Republican state. Republicans should win on a MAGA platform.
Redistricting Failure and GOP Structural Weakness
STEVE BANNON (HOST): His generic ballot is Democrats plus eight. Unless we get redistricting.
Are you concerned that redistricting is failing because they are telling President Trump they are not going to do it? Is that a sign the traditional wing of the Republican Party is not coming into this midterm election?
MARK MITCHELL (GUEST): They are not in the fight. They are playing checkers when Democrats are playing chess. They started smash mouth and were not up for it. Prop 50, everybody thought, is it going to pass? Democrats needed it.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): Thirty points.
MARK MITCHELL (GUEST): It was never positive. It is something Democrats need in a Democrat stronghold.
Fine, redistrict, but it looked bad to lose this war asymmetrically over years and decades and then say this is plan A. Gerrymandering looks bad. People do not like gerrymandering. We had a seventy percent signal that said no, this is not democratic. When we asked which party is more likely to gerrymander, the answer is Republicans because they are the ones talking about it.
They created a big issue, lost on it, and made what should have been plan D into plan A. Plan A should have been legislate.
MARK MITCHELL (GUEST): Now I am looking at Steve Scalise’s map for next year. Ninety five days of legislation until the midterm elections.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): Ninety five days of events.
MARK MITCHELL (GUEST):Yes, the session. Not a lot of time.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): Not to the midterm. You are trying to get through the end of the year and into the first part of the year.
MARK MITCHELL (GUEST): No, that is next year’s calendar. Jan 1.
The Rising AI Bubble and Economic Fragility
STEVE BANNON (HOST): I have not seen that yet. The calendar I saw went to the end of the year. It was bad. And the reality is we are not going to get to a budget deal. No appropriations between now and January twentieth. It will get kicked down. Democrats will sit there because of the hit President Trump will take in the economy. You are going to miss fourth quarter numbers because of the government shutdown. Schumer and those guys do not care about the American people. They will try to shut down the government again.
MARK MITCHELL (GUEST): I have talked to people about the state of the economy. I used to follow this stuff. There is risk of exogenous shocks.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): What does that mean?
MARK MITCHELL (GUEST): Well, something could happen and all of a sudden this house of cards comes crashing down. You need events. There are objectively asset bubbles in the country right now, and people in government probably do not want those asset bubbles at risk.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): But the asset bubbles and the data centers and all that, because Wall Street has been going through a couple of days of real turbulence here. They are waiting for the NVIDIA earnings tomorrow. NVIDIA is telling people they have half a trillion dollars, five hundred billion, in orders already for advanced chips.
But people are very concerned about the cycle where somebody raises money, they buy things, and it is all tied up in. Right now, Wall Street is quite concerned whether stuff is vastly overpriced.
MARK MITCHELL (GUEST): I think there is an aspect probably, and again, I do not follow this as closely as I used to when I was in the financial industry, of momentum traders, of retail investors bidding up the hot stock, concentrating all of the wealth in our financial markets into a very limited set of actual companies. They have a lot of power over the government, by the way.
MARK MITCHELL (GUEST): And then also the housing situation. I think that is a concern to the government. We cannot endanger the housing market.
We talked about this last night. I think the median home buyer age in this country is fifty-nine years old. That is who is buying houses.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): First time home buyers are over forty for the first time. Usually in the mid to early twenties.
MARK MITCHELL (GUEST): You get out of college and your average human slaves away for eighteen years before they can buy a home. And it is like, okay, they probably already have multiple kids if they were going to. Elon Musk out there saying we have to populate the earth. We are not at replacement levels. And it is like, I am sorry, you are the richest guy on earth telling these people they have kids when they cannot even buy a house. Nobody wants that housing market touched. But the best thing that probably would have happened for the youth is a controlled detonation.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): When you said controlled detonation, walk me through. You had an insider’s view as a Grundoon for the 2008 collapse. In fact, you were one of those guys that saw it coming by the madness you saw going on. Do you think NVIDIA AI bubble is equivalent to the dot com bubble in 2000 or to the financial bubble that we went through in 2008?
MARK MITCHELL (GUEST): You know, I do not know how to objectively measure and compare, but to me it feels like the world has more guns pointed at the head of the American people because of the way we have become globally interconnected, because of the way that all these people have leverage over us, because of the fact that we have probably millions of CCP people working in the highest levels of our corporations. We have given away our technology industry to a member of our competing currency block. These things matter, and it gives people leverage over us.
And one hundred percent I think things like, for instance, our situation with rare earth behind the scenes is causing a mismatch of leverage and giving Americans the shaft in certain ways. And it is hard to know.
You know what I saw in 2000. I did not tell you this last night. When I got out of the Navy I worked for a major home builder for two weeks in the spring of 2006, and the first edge of the wave. This was one of those home builders that says we are customer first. We have a customer service team. We are going to help you pick out your faucet and your marble countertop. And I was excited to go to my first customer meeting. Like, I am going to meet all these people who are buying houses.
And I went to the first one, everybody in the sub development. And he said Tony from Long Island just pulled on ten of these units and gave up his deposit. It was all investors and they walked. And I am like, okay. Well, I left. I quit that company.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): Do you think you are going to sit there and meet Mr and Mrs Middle Class America. You have nothing but speculators.
MARK MITCHELL (GUEST) : Yeah. Now it is all Blackstone.
Follow Mark Mitchell on X @honestpollster
