Welcome back to the Best & The Brightest. I’m Peter Hamby.

In tonight’s email, the second installment of my conversation with Steve Bannon, in which I asked the multi-shirted MAGA media kingpin if he’s cranky about Marco Rubio landing at State, the Musk-Trump relationship, DOGE, and whether he believes TikTok should be banned. Then, my partner Bill Cohan follows up with Marc Rowan after his visit to Mar-a-Lago, and explains what it revealed about the president-elect’s economic agenda.

But first, back to Bannon…

Steve Bannon: No. Actually, Senator Rubio wrote one of the most important reports here last year. He finally did something I thought the Senate should have done a long time ago. He identified the leaders of the C.C.P. and he did a deep analysis of how much wealth they’ve stolen from the Chinese people. Remember that to overthrow the Chinese Communist Party, which is a totally illegitimate dictatorship, it has to come from the Chinese people.

Look, [Mike] Waltz is the hardest hawk on China in the House. Senator Rubio is the hardest hawk in the Senate on China. I’m not crazy about some of his neocon positions. But in the transition, he’s been fantastic. I think Senator Rubio is going to be a great secretary of state. I’m looking forward to working with him. I’ve had some reservations, but when I rank in order all the problems in the world, number one is the Chinese Communist Party. And he’s almost as hard a hawk as I am.

Remember, initially, President Trump came out the hardest about banning TikTok. I think TikTok is a destructive apparatus of the Chinese Communist Party. President Trump has changed his idea on that. I think it’s because of guys like Jeff Yass, who’s a very influential investor and a very persuasive guy. We’re going to have to work through that. I’m still a super hawk when it comes to both Huawei and TikTok. I’m also a big hawk about even allowing any Chinese companies to have access to American capital markets. That’s all going to have to be worked through.

I like that President Trump does have some sort of balance. He’s got Rubio as his secretary of state. You have Waltz as his national security advisor. You have Peter Navarro, they’ll probably get him a job in the White House. You have Scott Bessent, who’s no accommodationist when it comes to China. So you have a number of strong voices. With President Trump as a dealmaker, he’s going to say, “Hey, look, we have to think this thing through.” I think that’s actually a positive. You don’t want to have too many of what I call “the crazies.”

Look, I’m as hard as you can get on the CCP, and I appreciate the fact that the president’s trying to leave some way to say, “We’ve got to figure out how to work with these guys, because we don’t want to get into a major shooting war, particularly around Taiwan.” I would tell your audience to focus on the conference they had down in South America, where Xi presented Biden with four red lines. Two of those red lines should not be lost on people. One was that Taiwan is a province of China and not an independent country. And if the United States stands up there, there’s going to be a problem, because that gives you the advanced chip design.

The last was the United States has got to back off any support of the democracy program over there. They just announced the imprisonment of 45 pro-democracy young people in Hong Kong. The Chinese just infused their economy with $1 trillion dollars. They’re in deep trouble. We have to work through the situation. I am all for the overthrow of that government, because I think it’s illegitimate. President Trump, I think, takes a smart and reasoned approach about, hey, we really got to figure out how to work with these guys.

Elon and I disagree on some things. But Elon deserves his place at the table. Look, he stroked a $150 million check for the ground game, which is not sexy, at the exact moment we needed it. He came in with the money and the professionals. To be brutally frank, it’s the reason we won. His money, Miriam Adelson’s money, Charlie Kirk, those guys that put the money in—they are the reason we won Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan. Those states won the presidency.

The other thing is, look at DOGE. DOGE is not sexy. DOGE is really O.M.B., it’s an advisor to that. He’s looking at very fundamental things we have to do to basically reorganize the administrative state. Elon’s doing things that are not sexy. He’s doing things that are not glamorous. I think he’s earning the respect of the president. I anticipate with DOGE, we will actually gain more and more influence over time.

Right before the election, Elon said that reining in government spending could cause some “economic hardship” for ordinary Americans. Doesn’t that sort of budget-cutting clash with the economic populism you’ve been evangelizing about for so long?

Hang on, let’s look at the flip side of that. For decades, people have talked about deficits and it’s had no impact. One of the main reasons inflation is there is that it’s so hard to run out of the system, now that we have debt at such a high level and the interest payments are so high. Remember, we have to refinance one-third of that debt every year. That’s embedded into the system. The American people are going to have more and more economic hardship, which they already have right now—the working class and the lower middle class—until we get control of federal spending and the debt. That’s what I think he’s talking about.

Is there going to be some austerity? Are there going to be bumps? Definitely. I don’t think anybody could paint just a totally rosy scenario. The alternative for the American people is catastrophic. You can’t add $1 trillion of debt every 100 days, and refuse interest payments. The American people, the working class in particular, are going to be wiped out. Remember, 80 percent of our people don’t own anything. They don’t own any real assets, they don’t own any financial assets. That’s only going to get worse, unless we address it.

This is what I like about Elon Musk. He and Vivek are talking about what we’ve been preaching on the War Room for years. They are down in the trenches with the hard part of how you actually start to turn the country around. That’s what I appreciate. I think they’re going to make a case to the American people. I quite frankly think the wealthy and the billionaire class should bear the brunt of any hardships to come. I think if we put the burden on the right people, we’ll get through this as a country and you’ll see a flourishing of the working class and the middle class, which we haven’t had in 20, 30, or 40 years.

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And now, Bill’s follow-up with Marc Rowan after his Mar-a-Lago voyage…

Marc slept on the jet and was well rested by the time that he headed to Mar-a-Lago, where he met with the two co-heads of the Trump transition team: Linda McMahon, who has been nominated to run (or dismantle) the Department of Education, and Howard Lutnick, who was a competitor for the Treasury position until an internal knife fight left him a little wounded but still Trump’s nominee for commerce secretary. Vice President-elect J.D. Vance joined remotely, from Washington, where he was doing what he could to try to salvage the A.G. nomination of Matt Gaetz.

The key, Marc explained in the meeting, was that the economy had responded positively since the election and that everything that Trump wanted to do with his agenda could happen against the “windfall” from “regulatory relaxation,” the “energy expansion,” and the general “brightening of the mood” of the country. He urged Trump to make sure to “pay attention” to inflation and interest rates because elections and mandates are won and lost largely on those two economic touchstones. It was a very easy, “relaxed” conversation. (Someone even described it as “lovely.”) And that was pretty much it. Trump thanked Marc for taking the time out of his busy schedule and told him it was a pleasure to see him again. (Steven Cheung, Trump’s incoming director of communications, shared, “President Trump has nominated high-caliber and extremely qualified individuals to serve the American people, who gave him a historic mandate to Make America Great Again.)

Eight years later, for whatever reasons, Marc was better able to make himself available. During their chat, Marc expressed his belief that there was a chance for “fundamental change,” a chance to “do everything you want to do, but do it in a smart way.” Smart tariffs. Smart deportation. “You can make this better,” Marc told him, according to someone familiar with that conversation. “I’m rooting for you.”

In Marc’s view, the election offered a stark choice. In his mind, Trump’s return to the Oval Office was an “uncertain death,” yes, but it was far preferable to the “certain death” of electing Kamala Harris—the choice between fear of change or fear of more of the status quo, and for him, the Biden-Harris status quo wasn’t working for the country. (It has worked for him personally, of course; he’s worth around $10 billion these days.)

Marc also thinks, I’m told, that there’s a real chance for Trump II to fix things for the better, that America is still a force for good in the world, and that it just requires us to think and do things differently and to be willing to take chances. He was “so happy to see Trump elected over Kamala,” according to the person familiar with Marc’s thinking.

In the end, Marc didn’t get the nod to be treasury secretary. It went, instead, to Scott Bessent, the hedge fund manager who was probably the leading candidate all along. Marc had heard from enough people between Wednesday and Friday night, when Trump made the decision, to know that he wasn’t going to be the choice. He’s okay with that. He was just thrilled to be considered, a middle-class kid from Merrick, Long Island, who made it big on Wall Street and almost got offered a big job in Washington.

In any event, it was back to business as usual this weekend at Apollo. On Sunday, Marc was driving to his office at 9 West 57th Street to meet with his two key deputies, Scott Kleinman and Jim Zelter. After all, it’s bonus time on Wall Street, and no matter how broken Marc thinks the country is, Apollo generated billions in 2024, and it falls on the three men to divvy up the spoils.

As he was leaving Mar-a-Lago last Wednesday after his meeting with Trump, he ran into Don Jr., whom he’d never met before. He also ran into Bessent. It was time to celebrate their collective good fortune. Tequila shots all around. And then it was back on the private jet to New York City for Marc and back to the business of running Apollo.