Peter Hartcher || Steve Bannon, the barnstorming godfather of the MAGA movement, follows Australian affairs more closely than almost any other American politico.
He has some surprising praise for Anthony Albanese and some awkward advice for Pauline Hanson. But his confident prediction of America’s near future is shocking.
Donald Trump’s campaign strategist for his 2016 election win says: “I believe we will have a national emergency declared by late August,” ahead of the Congressional midterm elections due on November 3. “You will have enough evidence by mid-August to show that we have a massive problem” of election fraud, he tells me in an interview. Trump’s televised address to the nation on Thursday last week was the beginning of the process, he says.
The president declassified documents, which he claimed show “shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure” revealed by the 2020 election.
These had been hidden, even from him, by a “deep state” conspiracy of US intelligence services, he posited.
Trump demanded that the Congress pass a bill called the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE, Act. The bill stipulates that all voters produce a passport or birth certificate to be eligible to vote. Democrats denounce it as an effort at mass disenfranchisement. The Brennan Centre for Justice at New York University estimates that it could block 21 million Americans from the ballot box.
Under the US Constitution, it’s the states, not the federal government, that run elections. The SAVE Act would force state governments to hand voter roll information to Washington.
Trump sent his Homeland Security Secretary, Markwayne Mullin, out the following morning to issue a threat to state officials: they could face prison time unless they followed the administration’s orders to remove non-citizens from rolls.
But Bannon tells me that he doesn’t think there’s time to pass the bill. “There will be more Thursdays. You have to lay the predicate first.” The administration would find more evidence of fraud, he predicted. “They will find more things.
“We cannot have another stolen election,” he said, a reference to Trump’s fiction that Joe Biden won by fraud in 2020. Almost one in three Americans believes him.
“We are facing a national security emergency, and we will need real teeth to deal with it,” Bannon says. “You put ICE agents around polling booths to stop illegal immigrants from voting or any playing with voting machines. Maybe the National Guard; we need to clean up mail-in ballots.” Trump wants them outlawed, even though 29 per cent of Americans used mail-in ballots to vote in 2024.
Could Bannon’s vision actually materialise? “Yes,” says a Democrat strategist, Steve Elmendorf, who’s advised many of the most prominent leaders of his party over many years.
“It’s believable, but Bannon says a lot that is ‘out there’.” Nevertheless, the Democrats are taking the scenario seriously. “The Dems are aware of all the crazy and are making contingencies,” Elmendorf tells me.
Trump would be accused of an authoritarian grab for power. The documents he released last week did not stand up to scrutiny as proof that fraud influenced election outcomes.
The Republicans control both houses of Congress. Bannon had hoped against history that the Republicans could hold both chambers in November “if we maintain a maniacal focus” on the “the basics of the economy, including getting the budget deficit under control, not this massive deficit that’s pushing up interest rates”. The US annual budget deficit last year was 5.7 per cent of GDP. For comparison, Australia’s was 1 per cent.
Like many MAGA leaders, Bannon is frustrated with Trump’s war on Iran: “Because of the war, we’ve taken our eye off these issues. The longer the war goes on, the worse it gets … If we lose the House [of Representatives], the White House becomes Fort Apache,” a 1948 western which has become a byword for a state of siege against impossible odds. The House would assail Trump with subpoenas and impeachment motions for the rest of his term, says Bannon, realistically enough.
After running Trump’s 2016 campaign, Bannon served briefly in his White House and since 2019 broadcasts the daily War Room podcast, rated highly for both its number of listeners and for its volume of misinformation. He still speaks with the president.
“Iran keeps sucking us into the Middle East,” Bannon complains. “Obama told Trump, a couple of days after we won in 2016, that he’d tried to pivot to Asia but all he’d managed to do was to redeploy one Marine brigade to Darwin. Central Command [responsible for the Middle East] has such a powerful gravitational force that it doesn’t allow us to focus on the Chinese Communist Party threat.”
[CA: legit].
