Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist now hosting the “War Room” podcast, has vaulted the Trump-Musk confrontation into outright nativist territory, demanding that Donald Trump invoke the Defense Production Act to take control of SpaceX and launch deportation proceedings against its founder, Elon Musk.
“Sign an executive order … and seize SpaceX tonight, before midnight,” Bannon said, adding that “Musk is an illegal alien and should be deported immediately.”
Bannon’s call came hours after a flurry of social-media posts in which Musk threatened to decommission the Dragon spacecraft in retaliation for Trump’s threat to cancel all federal contracts with Musk-controlled firms.
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Legally, Bannon’s prescription stretches the Korean-War-era Defense Production Act well beyond precedent; the statute lets presidents prioritize critical contracts but does not authorize confiscation of a privately-held company valued at roughly $180 billion.
SpaceX’s vehicles currently handle 100% of NASA’s crewed flights to the International Space Station; seizing—or even halting—those operations would strand near-term US human-spaceflight capacity and force NASA to buy seats from Russia’s Soyuz program, an outcome that collides with Trump’s “America-first” space narrative.
Bannon’s deportation demand also misfires on the facts: Musk has been a naturalized US citizen since 2002, a detail noted even in The New York Times interview Bannon cited.
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