The new polling is brutal, and Mark Mitchell says the under-40 conservative base isn’t confused about what they want. They want order, discipline, and a leader who fixes a system they believe is collapsing.
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MARK MITCHELL: Donald Trump Ran Heavily On Draining The Swamp And Ushering In A New Golden Age. To Make Good On Those Promises And Regain Support, He Needs To Focus On Fixing The Systems That Have Failed Us
This clip aired on WarRoom’s morning show on December 8, 2025. Transcript begins below (lightly edited for clarity; may contain minor errors).
MARK MITCHELL: Donald Trump Ran Heavily On Draining The Swamp And Ushering In A New Golden Age. To Make Good On Those Promises And Regain Support, He Needs To Focus On Fixing The Systems That Have Failed Us
STEVE BANNON (HOST): Mark Mitchell, action, action, action. It’s, you know, President, and this is the thing about the focus on international politics and national security. He put it at a great. A civilizational collapse, and we’re not going to be partied to it. We’re not going to back your play. We’re not going to pay for everything. We’re not going to pay for your defense if you can’t defend yourself, and particularly from this migrant issue or from this Islamic invasion of Europe.
But the President then pivoting, and now Scott Bessent’s, you know, looks like he’s taking a more active role. Semafor’s got a great piece about Scott taking more of an active role, not just traditionally with the Secretary as you do finance, but more even on the economic side and economic policy. You’re polling, and you’ve been kind of one of the Cassandras, you and Rich Baris, because we think you, Trafalgar, Rasmussen, you, not Scott Rasmussen, and Baris have been the best MAGA pollsters, and you’re putting up a storm warning.
And I can tell people, we’ve got a big time fight in Indiana. Don’t think we’re going to win this redistricting war. We intend to, but you can’t count on it. So these midterms are going to be absolutely brutal, and they will grind the Trump revolution to a halt if they take the House because they impeach President Trump in the first 30 minutes when they take it.
Mark Mitchell, give me the big picture here. Am I right to say I’m very positive on this younger generation, particularly young men? I think the most base generation maybe since the greatest generation and or.
MARK MITCHELL: I don’t know if I talked about this on your show, but one of the wild polling findings that we found this year with the under 40 conservatives, we asked a question whether or not, you know, AI is getting more advanced. The government is getting more, you know, gridlocked. Would you support giving control of legislative processes to an advanced AI? And 55% to 40% conservatives under 40 said, yeah, sure, why not? Let’s just give it to AI. And the liberals under 40 are like, wait, wait, no, that might not be a good idea.
So these people demand order, and they think the system has failed them. And I think what you’re seeing is there’s a lot going on. And there are a lot of Trump surrogates, in my opinion, that are doing a really good job. But in my opinion, it also doesn’t really feel like a unified front. It doesn’t feel like they’re getting the kind of air cover that they need because the Overton window is going absolutely insane right now.
I mean, you have Trump out there retruthing things about Hart–Celler, and you have this State Department document talking about, you know, migrant overthrows of Western Europe. And so I think what the kids would say is that the people in power don’t understand what time it is. And every one of these influencers that I follow, they’re like, what’s going on? Why has nobody been arrested yet? Why haven’t we denaturalized and ordered Ilhan Omar yet? Why aren’t we arresting all these people that are flaunting our various systems in our face?
STEVE BANNON (HOST): But hang on, but hang on, but hang on, but hang on. Everybody uses that phrase what time it is. I know the people that use it are also the people who turn over to the tech bros. And I can understand maybe why young people are saying so much disorder, so much invasion in the country, maybe we give it to the machine. Obviously that’s incorrect and you can’t give it to the tech bro. The oligarchs only think of themselves. And they’re the ones that came up with this, oh, what time it is.
Because what time it is for them is to turn it over to them. And if they got the young conservatives, 55 and or 40 and under thinking that, it’s incumbent upon us to then get in there and say, hey, this is why that’s not correct. And to convince them, you know, use facts, use argument. You just can’t turn it away and say, oh, because young conservatives, 55, 540, want to turn it over to a machine, I must turn it over to a machine.
If that was the case, we wouldn’t have fought for this thing 10 years ago. The whole establishment said, oh, no, this is like this. No, no, no, no, no, no. This is the whole thing. No, this is the whole thing. Young people are great. They got energy, etc. It doesn’t mean they got the greatest ideas.
I think they look at their elders and say, what you’ve done is horrible because you’ve turned the country over to Soros. You’ve turned it over to radical Democrats. You turned it over to corporatists. You don’t have capitalism in this country. And I’m screwed. I can’t get a job. I can’t form a family. I can’t marry a young woman because I can’t get, I can’t, I don’t have economic prospects. And they’re sitting there looking at my economic prospects and say, hey, no offense, you’re a nice guy, but you’re not going to be able to buy a house until you’re 40, which is now the entry age.
So it’s incumbent upon us to tell them you’re 100% correct and this is the action to correct it, sir.
MARK MITCHELL: No, I agree with you. And I’ve said all that stuff on your show. But I think, and I’m not saying that they’re going to lean into like Elon Musk and, you know, new cryptocurrencies and all that stuff. I’m just saying that they want their Franco. And I kind of think a lot of people thought Donald Trump would be that person.
And so these things that we’ve seen have, you know, drawn blood. Donald Trump’s down to a negative 12 net approval rating, which puts him on par at about three months after COVID in the middle of the George Floyd riots. And so that’s not a really good place to be. And again, maybe he can recover, but I don’t think this is the same as the first term. America is very different than it was 10 years ago.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): Hang on. Slow down. Slow down. Slow down. Don’t bury the lead. Because Jack Posobiec wrote a book that we publish at WarRoom called Unhumans. One of the central characters in this book is General Franco. Did I just hear you say, Mark Mitchell, that they’re looking for their Franco and they didn’t think, they don’t think Trump has turned out to be that? What do you mean? Explain to the audience. We got a minute here and I’m holding through the break. What do you mean about that?
Because I know Mediaite and Media Matters are going to have a total vapor lock right now when Mark Mitchell, the pollster, particularly for young MAGA, is sitting there saying, they’re looking for their Franco, sir.
MARK MITCHELL: Well, you know, you poll and then sometimes you read people’s responses, and I got a lot of DMs from disaffected MAGA people who are like, what is going on? This is not what we voted for. And one of them said, I thought Trump was going to be our Franco.
Now, I can’t get into Spanish history. But the idea is that you have like an even handed dictator essentially restore order and return the republic. And we’re looking around, and Donald Trump, in my opinion, ran very heavily on drain the swamp, reform government, usher in a golden age. Well, that means fixing the systems that have failed us, and this gets back to where you started.
The system is failing everybody. And any communication and any action that is not single threadedly attacking those two main problems is going to, unfortunately, I think, tank Donald Trump’s numbers because, you know, he lost his Democrat crossovers, then he lost his independents. He lost a lot of them with Epstein. But just now in the last two or three weeks, he’s losing Republicans now. He had a 53% Republican strong approval, lowest of his term, not where you’d want it to be.
And all of the sudden, Republican right direction gave up the 70 handle. It’s in the mid 60s now. And so he needs to recover. And I think making people like Bessent in charge of these things, like delegating these actions, but it all has to be a unified front.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): Let me just be blunt about H1Bs and for Elmo, for Elon. Dude, you said that is a hill you’re going to die on originally when I ripped your face off about this. It is not going to be reformed. It cannot be reformed. It is a scam from start to finish. It has to be abolished.
This is one of the things that young people are so, and particularly, Mark, the young people who buy into the system. Remember, to become a tech worker in modern America, you have to be like the kid getting math right and science and technology, not poetry or football, although tons of tech workers have played sports. But you have to be dedicated to understand STEM. You have to dedicate your life to do it.
Then you get into college, right? And you have to do great in high school. You have to ace the SATs. You have to do great. You have to be these engineers, computer scientists, people that are on it. Then you have to get into a college of which now all the colleges are either Chinese or South Asian.
I went to a land grant university as an undergraduate. And today in the engineering department you see that. And the graduate program is 100%. It blocks out Hispanic Americans, African Americans, white Americans, Asian Americans. Anybody called an American. You do not get into these schools. If you do not get into the schools, then you cannot get into Silicon Valley.
We have 12 million STEM tech workers in the United States that do not have work. Until we get them jobs, we are not doing our job. And here’s the thing. If H 1Bs, and I keep saying, show me a billet that they have a higher education or better job thing for better job. It does not exist.
This is all about paying one group a third of what you pay the other group with no benefits. And they live ten to a condo in Silicon Valley. And it is indentured servants. I thought we got rid of indentured servants back in the 18th century or 19th century in America. What are we doing?
Mitchell, is this one of the things that drives young people crazy? They cannot get opportunities in a post industrial high tech world because we are inviting the world here. A world who has not done anything for the United States of America, has not lifted a finger, and comes here and all they do is bitch and moan about how the U. S. citizens have given them everything, sir.
MARK MITCHELL: Yeah, 100%. The entire world is a bunch of deadbeats and the American taxpayer has been funding these people. You have Western Europe with NATO and we’re funding proxy wars. You have Africa with USAID and all the government backing. Then you have places like China where we’re offshoring all the manufacturing and that’s been brutal for the American workers.
And then you have places like India with combined offshoring and remittances taking up roughly 150 billion dollars annually of economic value. But then you have all of the people that we imported from India who are taking up even more.
What’s wild to me is that, yes, people don’t understand the H1B program. It’s popular because they don’t understand it as being abused. But if you promise the American dream and if that got you a 60% approval rating with under 40 voters and this is the biggest thing affecting them, then as the leader of the free world you have to understand that and cut these deadbeats off because this is 100% a scam.
My previous job was leading a big team inside Walmart ecommerce. And I saw it firsthand. You can bleep this out. I’m going to use a bad word, but there’s a term in Silicon Valley called enshittification. And that’s when you make a really great product, you got all your customers hooked, and then over time the business interests, the MBAs, say, well, you know what, we have to squeeze another dollar out of that. So you make the product a little bit worse. You cut corners. You don’t do as much QA.
Well, what we have now is cultural enshittification because basically we’ve taken third world engineers who, quite frankly, I’ve seen statistics, there’s a company that measures how much people lie on their coding interviews. And believe it or not, guess which group the highest mode cheaters are from. It’s definitely India.
And they come over here. They get a rubber stamp process. They come right on in through pipelines that have been built hand in hand with the government, corporate America, and big college. Big college feeds off of these people because they’re a bunch of people who are giving them billionaire talking points about how they have to defend it. But 99% of it is fraud.
And we focused on getting rid of the illegal immigrants. I think that’s a really big deal, obviously, flaunting the rule of law, flooding our country with drugs and basically Venezuelan gang members. It’s not a good thing. We should fix that.
But for every single H 1B senior developer at Apple that we send back, that’s the equivalent economically of deporting ten illegal aliens. So I don’t know why we didn’t do that yesterday.
And the idea, yes, a lot of these people are entry level, but a lot of them are making a ton of money. Silicon Valley has some of the highest real estate in the entire country. Its workforce is roughly two thirds foreign born. And where are most of those people coming from? They’re India, because Walmart had engineering buildings that were like 85, 90, 95% Indian nationals.
And so they come in on these golden pathways. They take these jobs. I think a lot of it is used for ageism because you have a bottomless well of younger third world engineers. People like me who have a family, who are a little more expensive, maybe have gotten a few raises, my health insurance is a little more expensive. It’s really easy to replace me and have me train my replacement.
And then I get in and I see Walmart had a lot of problems with ecommerce. Yeah, go ahead.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): No, this is why when you poll these kids, young people, and they say, well, maybe we turn it over to the machine or I hate capitalism. We had Mamdani there in the open. Mamdani is, as I called it, he’s in a sanctuary city. He’s daring the President of the United States. He’s daring Kristi Noem and Tom Homan to come in and basically make that part of the United States.
And he’s sitting there telling the illegal alien invaders who are essentially that, and the legal migrants we brought in under these scams, that’s what voted for him. He said, hey, I’ve got your back and Trump’s not going to do anything. If Kristi Noem comes here, I’m going to throw her out. And if Tom Homan comes here, I’m going to arrest him. He’s being as brash as possible because that’s their voting base.
What Mark Mitchell just said a second ago about the H 1B. Don’t take it from Mark Mitchell or Steve Bannon. Go to Jessica Vaughan at CIS. I think we have to break down her podcast. She had a podcast where she had a guy who worked, he was Indian, who worked at the consulate in, I think, Mumbai. Because they have 12 consulates. Sergio’s the ambassador, but they have 12 consulates.
And he said, this is a guy that did it. He said the entire thing is a scam. It’s all kickbacks. Indian companies are doing kickbacks. Guys in the consular office are getting kickbacks because the whole country is based on, wait for it, kickbacks. He said it’s just the way they do it.
And he said two thirds of the people just made up their resumes. When I say there’s not a guy filling a billet that an American couldn’t fill because education, training. Remember, two thirds coming from India. The Indians are saying they just make it up.
And this is why you have these huge complaints in Silicon Valley. They churn through it. A lot of these guys get there that can’t handle the job. They’re gone. And they bring in more.
MARK MITCHELL: Yeah. I mean, I’m generally very worried about corporate culture the way that I saw things. I was a hiring manager there. So I filtered through the stacks of resumes. And yes, there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of Indian resumes. Many of them had a follow on master.
And in my experience most domestic workers wouldn’t lie on the resume to hit that requirement. And then you find the Indian resumes getting hired. And I’m sorry. That’s just what happens in practice. And that’s how you get buildings that are 90% foreign national in engineering.
And I interacted with these people. They hire very nepotistic. Very big at finding a problem and trying to build out teams and build fiefdoms within these companies. And they’ve taken over most Fortune 500s.
I don’t know what a world of India would look like. We’d be screwed. It has to all be blown out. You have to do it.
And Mitchell, you come from, you talk about institutions that work. The British became an empire because they had an institution that’s pretty unique in human history, the Royal Navy. And I’ve gone through, and one of the reasons I wanted to go in the Navy, Nelson and the Royal Navy and the American Navy were always my heroes as a kid.
If you look at the institution of the Royal Navy, it’s unbelievable what the Royal Navy did in a very small island to essentially take over the world, the strategy behind it and the execution of it, the discipline and the systems they had to have excellence over centuries.
You came from also an institution. Not simply the United States Navy but a subset of it, the nuclear Navy and Hyman Rickover and the submarine Navy. And of course part of it is diesel boat but most of it is the nuclear Navy.
I made a film with Michael Pack. You know, the antisemite Steve Bannon. I made a film about Hyman Rickover because I saw a poll that showed one time only like 5%, 3% of the American people knew who he was. He was one of the greatest giants of the 20th century. We wouldn’t be free people today if it wasn’t for Hyman Rickover.
And he built an institution. So you can’t tell me engineers can’t. We don’t have the engineering expertise around the nuclear Navy that has never really had an accident and has kept this country safe for 60 or 70 or 80 years. It’s incredible what he accomplished.
The nuclear Navy is an institution with traditions and customs and mores and requirements and accountability that raises it to a level of one of the great institutions in the world. This is what Americans are capable of.
It’s unacceptable for us to be bringing in the third world like these Samayans into Minneapolis, into Maine, into these great parts of the country and destroying them as you’re paying for it. Just like it’s not acceptable to bring the third world in here to take our engineering jobs.
The Americans are the greatest set of engineers in the world. Hell, we went to the moon. This is why I play The Right Stuff at the end of each hour to remind people of the greatness of this country and the greatness of the people in this country and particularly the greatness of the engineers in our country and the computer scientists and the grit and determination of those people.
Remember, this is the great crime. You’re taking people that from very little kids didn’t focus in poetry and in history and English, which are all great, but don’t require that daily rigor you have to have to be a computer scientist, to be an engineer.
Think about everybody that went to college and wanted to be an engineer and you had that opening class of five hour calculus. I remember at my school a third of the engineers were gone in the first six weeks. Why. They wanted to party at the frat or they wanted to, first time away from home, go out and get drunk every night. You can’t do that when you’re an engineer.
We’ve taken those people and told them you’re not worthy. We’re going to bring in the third world which are not up to their standards. Of course this is driving people insane. And then the young people say let’s just turn it over to the algorithm. Let’s turn it over to AI.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): Going to treat you when they win. That’s what you’re going to get. You’re not going to get the happy, clappy TikTok. That’s all to suck you in. And you saw in this video we just played at the top of the show. He’s telling these illegal alien invaders how to basically give the middle finger to U. S. authorities that are trying to repel the invasion. Full stop.
Kristi, note to self. Let’s check his naturalization papers. I think you’ll be surprised. I think we could denaturalize him. Then when he’s sending back to Uganda, where he deserves to be, because he’s a Ugandan Marxist, jihadist. How’s that? And we ought to do that.
And Kristi Noem is in a fight. They’re trying to get her out. And of course, the Mediaite article had at the bottom, the last paragraph was like Glenn Youngkin is trying to get the job or trying to get some job in the administration. Glenn Youngkin, who single handedly destroyed the Republican Party for a generation in the Commonwealth, my beloved Commonwealth of Virginia.
Mark Mitchell, if you had the President and were able to just give him right now a heads up of what you think the midterms are going to be about, because I keep telling people, you don’t have the summer and the fall. I think this thing will solidify, and you’re telling me now it’s D plus 3, although didn’t I just see Rast?
MARK MITCHELL: Gave him some advice. This is going to be a mud wrestling contest, which I guess is good for Republicans because it’s not a blue wave with D plus three. But they have to understand that they could do better. They could do what they were elected to do. And in my opinion, if Donald Trump wants to do that, he shouldn’t get distracted by the shiny object, in my opinion, that is Mamdani.
I think that he should focus on actually fixing Americans’ problems, especially the younger people. And that’s basically, to step back, the government is jacked up and our capitalist economy is jacked up. And I think he needs to be very clear specifically about why. It’s because of cronyism, corporatism, regulatory capture, all of these things. And that’s not something you can fix in one year, but it’s something that you could fix over a multi year plan and lay out what it looks like and bring Americans along for the ride.
Let’s get back to some of that inspirational messaging. Don’t tell us a golden age is already here. It’s a crisis. These are the voters under 40. These are the people that Donald Trump had eating out of the palm of his hand back in March. I think he could recapture them with plan and intention and make it our new national project.
You know what was great about the Rickover Navy? Steve, they actually trained people to operate a reactor in twelve months who are history majors. And I’m old enough to remember when we had a President that said we could take coal miners and teach them to code in sixteen weeks at boot camp. So we have the capability. Let’s just acknowledge that we can put ourselves together and do this, rebuild the economy.
But unfortunately it’s going to take a little bit more of a hostile relationship with all of these oligarchs that have captured D. C. When Hyman Rickover gave those famous interviews, we did this in the film, PACT did such a great job. He many times didn’t go for people that were engineers or computer science majors or technical majors. He sometimes went for people that were English and history majors because he saw something in the person that was driven to perfection and accountability and responsibility.
And Admiral Rickover created an institution inside an institution that was extraordinary. It kept America safe since they first started that reactor in Idaho to do the experiment. You’re 100 percent correct.
STEVE BANNON (HOST): Mark Mitchell, it’s always good talking to a Naval Academy grad on a Monday morning.
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