Steve Bannon believed Joe Biden was set for an overwhelming victory in the upcoming election as recently as late July, according to private communications obtained by the Washington Examiner.
For over a year, before his arrest Thursday on federal fraud charges, Bannon regularly expressed concerns over demographic and economic conditions facing President Trump this November. For his old boss, that included the lack of stickiness from voters who supported Trump in 2016 in swing states, as well as the president’s relatively low approval rating.
That led Bannon, former chief political strategist in Trump’s 2016 campaign and a senior adviser for the first seven months of the administration, to be “convinced” Trump was destined to lose, according to an individual in communication with him.
In one text exchange this summer, Bannon said the race looked like a “blow out” for Biden, President Barack Obama’s two-term vice president and previously a 36-year Delaware senator. Bannon told associates they should begin planning sooner rather than later for a post-Trump GOP.
Much of Bannon’s concerns are in the context of the broader populist moment sweeping the West, according to the individual. In 2018, he briefly left for Europe to help foster burgeoning right-wing and heterodox parties such as the National Front in France and the UK Independence Party.
Domestic electoral trends have concerned Bannon, with the kind of anti-immigration and trade rhetoric central to Trump’s 2016 campaign potentially becoming too tied to the candidate himself rather than a springboard for future right-wing leaders. Bannon’s concerns can best be summarized in the following questions: Can populism survive without Trump? Or is populism as commonly understood as nothing more than a cult of personality?
A representative for Bannon did not respond to a request for comment.
“Trump has made everything about Trump. Everything that would be good to do becomes evaluated as a referendum on his personality and statements,” an individual describing Bannon’s thinking told the Washington Examiner. “The flags say ‘Trump’ not ‘America.'”
Nor is Bannon convinced the Trump campaign’s current strategy of boosting white, working-class turnout is tenable as he believes Biden has made serious inroads with the group in contrast to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 run, the individual said. Bannon went as far as disputing the premise that the GOP has much of a strategy with these voters whatsoever. Exit polling from this year’s primary showed Biden heavily winning over white people without a college degree over Bernie Sanders, a group that favored the socialist Vermont senator during the last Democratic presidential primary.
Bannon’s conclusions on the state of the race were also informed by an internal data and polling report from the Republican National Committee, which showed soft-to-negative enthusiasm for the president. For well over a year, an individual said, Bannon believes that data is an alarm bell for not just Trump, but the GOP as a whole.
Members of the Trump campaign reached a different conclusion when presented with the same data. Individuals such as Brad Parscale and Ellen Bredenkoetter, the RNC’s chief data officer, believe their sophisticated digital operation gives them an edge over the Democratic Party in terms of reaching voters. Democrats have long fretted about the RNC’s digital operation, which was developed for years at the cost of tens of millions of dollars.
The Trump campaign did not comment on the nature of Bannon’s messages.
Bannon left the White House in 2017 after eight months on the job. A controversial figure within Trump world and outside of it, the president has since attacked Bannon and said he “cried when he got fired and begged for his job.”
Despite those remarks, Bannon has remained steadfast in his public support for Trump. In October 2019, he launched the War Room podcast with two Trump allies, a program dedicated to defending the president and furthering his message.
In June, Bannon warned on War Room that Trump was risking his reelection chances by not staying on message and focusing too much on pageantry and not the issues that brought him a victory in 2016.
“He’s the president of the United States,” Bannon said. “He’s not a candidate. You act like the president of the United States, you take action like the president of the United States, you govern like you are president of the United States, you are going to be reelected.”
On Thursday, the Southern District of New York indicted Bannon and three associates for their role in defrauding hundreds of thousands of donors involved with the “We Build the Wall” organization. Bannon has pleaded not guilty.
“While repeatedly assuring donors that Brian Kolfage, the founder and public face of We Build the Wall, would not be paid a cent, the defendants secretly schemed to pass hundreds of thousands of dollars to Kolfage, which he used to fund his lavish lifestyle,” acting U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss wrote in the indictment. “We thank the USPIS for their partnership in investigating this case, and we remain dedicated to rooting out and prosecuting fraud wherever we find it.”
